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Hawkeye sort of can't believe this is happening to him. Sure, he can believe that Flagg is crazy enough to pull something like this, but the idea that other real, rational human beings would go along with it? That's unbelievable.
Well, if the world has gone madder than it already was, logic probably won't get him anywhere, but Hawkeye tries anyway.
"You're arresting me for being homosexual? On what proof? And wouldn't that just be a discharge, not an arrest? Am I entitled to a lawyer?"
Hawkeye thinks he made some good points. Flagg just squints at him, unimpressed.
"Oh, I'm going to get my proof, just you wait. You're a special case."
"Arrest now, proof later?" Hawkeye says, arch as he can despite the skitter of fear up his spine. Get proof how? What kind of proof? "I'm sure that'll hold up well in court."
"Technically, it'd be a military tribunal." Sidney Freedman enters the VIP tent like he would any other day, eyeing the standoff as though he finds it only mildly interesting. "Flagg, what exactly do you think you're doing here? We were having a very nice chat about Doctor Pierce's innocence before you gave me the slip. I would like to finish it."
Flagg bristles, drawing himself up and pointing a shaking, accusatory finger at Hawkeye. If Hawkeye weren't currenlty being restrained by two of Flagg's MP goon squad, he'd bite it.
"This man," Flagg spits, wild-eyed, "has been a subversive agent from the day I met him, and I will prove it. And you, Doctor, will learn your lesson about questioning me."
"Hey, leave Sidney out of this," Hawkeye says, but Flagg's final, hysterical order stops him in his tracks.
"Guards! I want the truth. Use whatever methods you prefer, but you will fuck it out of him. Do you understand?"
There is silence in the VIP tent. The MPS shift nervously but maintain their hold on Hawkeye's biceps. A credit to army discipline, he supposes.
Sidney clears his throat. "Surely you misspoke."
"I never misspeak." Flagg's eyes are shining with a dangerous light as he turns towards Sidney, speaking as though what he's saying is entirely reasonable. "He'll enjoy it, and you'll report that to the army. That's all the proof I need."
He's gone crazy, Hawkeye realizes. Charles betrayed him, and something that has always been a little loose inside that perpetually-cocked head finally snapped.
"Colonel, that's called rape," Sidney says. His eyes are wide and his voice gentle as if speaking to a frightened animal, but it's no use. Flagg is past fear now; past all rationality. He's rabid, and it's catching.
Sure enough, Flagg's grin is too wide, too sharp. "It's all in the service of the greater good. And I'm told men of that sort like that kind of thing. I await your concurring opinion, Doctor."
And he is gone.
Hawkeye, Sidney, and the MPs stare after him—no one, it seems, knows what to do next. Hawkeye tries to break the silence.
"You know, I've never seen him leave through a door normally before."
No one laughs.
"Gentlemen," Sidney says, addressing the two MPs. "Surely we—"
"Orders are orders," says the MP to Hawkeye's right. He sounds exquisitely uncomfortable, but his grip on Hawkeye's arm is as unforgiving as ever.
Sidney blinks hard, once, and pivots so smoothly Hawkeye could almost believe it was the direction he was always intending to go. "I certainly would never ask you to disobey orders. I was just going to suggest a method that might be more… palatable than some of the more, say, straightforward ones."
Straightforward like fucking Hawkeye, he means. Hawkeye feels a vague, nauseous twist in his stomach. He thought Sidney would get him out of this situation; now Sidney is suggesting mitigation tactics? That can't be it. Sidney can't be letting this happen without a fight.
The talktative MP shifts his weight from foot to foot, uneasy. "…what method?"
"As the Colonel said, homosexuals—or accused homsexuals," Sidney says, with a deferential nod to Hawkeye when Hawkeye makes a noise of protest. He's a bisexual, thank you very much, even if in this moment he'll swear to his last breath that he's as straight as an arrow. "Men of that sort are wired a little differently. They enjoy being penetrated by another man."
Both MPs are shifty now. Clearly neither of them are particularly enthused about the thought of doing the penetrating.
"My proposition is this." Sidney holds up a finger in illustration—and then, even more illustratively, tucks his thumb in alongside his palm and holds up a second finger. "I think we can all agree that none of us would like to implicate ourselves in the process of obtaining this information. I will perform a clinical procedure on Doctor Pierce, not too different from a prostate exam. If he orgasms, that will be our answer. If he doesn't, that'll be an answer too."
A curious mixture of relief and terror floods through Hawkeye's body, crashing against his ribcage like a wave and mingling as it ebbs into something altogether too close to excitment. Relief, primarily, because if this has to happen at least it will only be Sidney fingering him instead of anything worse. Terror, secondarily, because Hawkeye loves being fingered. There's no way he won't come from it. Sidney has just unintentionally doomed him.
"Why you and not us?" asks Hawkeye's new favorite MP. Thank god for this man's suspicious nature; maybe Sidney's plan won't fly after all.
Sidney shrugs. "I'm a doctor."
"You're a shrink."
"Psychiatrists still go to medical school." Sidney pauses, then, to Hawkeye's chagrin, goes in for the kill. "Do you know how to find the prostate?"
"Of course not! I'm not one of them." The MP bristles and draws himself up to his full height, squeezing Hawkeye's arm so hard his fingers have started to tingle. So much for being Hawkeye's savior.
"Fine," says the MP to Hawkeye's left, who hasn't said a word since he and his comrade seized Hawkeye at lunch and frog-marched him into the VIP tent. "Better you than us. But we'll be watching. No funny business or Colonel Flagg will hear about it."
Sidney beams. Hawkeye's heart sinks.
"Excellent! I'm so glad we were all on the same page." Sidney sweeps an arm towards the lone bed in the tent—ordinarily somewhere Hawkeye would love to lie down, but under the circumstances a less relaxing surface would probably be better—and gazes expectantly at the MPs. "Gentlemen? I can't do my job if you're holding him like that."
"The Colonel said," the first MP starts, audibly reluctant to object now that the buck has passed to Sidney but duty-bound to prevent Hawkeye's escape.
Sidney waves his hand dismissively. "No, no, he won't run. If he knows what's good for him."
Hawkeye directs his nastiest, pettiest thoughts at Sidney—and, for good measure, at Flagg, and Charles for antagonizing him, and at B.J. for being stuck in post-op and missing the whole goddamn thing. Although the thought of B.J. being present for this humiliation is both horrifying and somewhat less than conducive to staving off arousal the way Sidney seems to expect Hawkeye to be able to do.
"I won't run," he says, through gritted teeth. Might as well get an early start on holding back his impulses. "If this is what it takes to prove my innocence, fine. But I can guarantee even a homosexual wouldn't be able to get it up with you two ugly brutes manhandling him like this."
The insinuation that anyone might get it up while the MPs were touching him, were they more attractive, is enough to make them let go. Hawkeye shakes out his arms and circles his right wrist, wincing as his joints pop and the feeling begins to return to his hand.
"You jack off with a grip like that? You must be made of steel," he says to the talkative MP, whose face goes abrubtly dark with disgust and affront. Hawkeye's big mouth is going to get him re-arrested long before his telltale dick can.
"Don't antagonize the nice MPs, Hawkeye," Sidney says lightly. He pats the bed in invitation, face devoid of any emotion, but Hawkeye knows he's amused. "The quicker we get this over with the sooner I can play the poker game I came here for."
That's exactly what Hawkeye is afraid of. He wouldn't call himself a quickshot, exactly, although Trapper used to delight in making him come as fast as possible and teasing him about it afterwards, but there's a reason Hawkeye never went a week of med school without at least one dick in his ass: he loves getting fucked. It's the surest way to make him come, and come fast. And Sidney, god damn him, knows this.
It had come out late one drunken night after a poker game, when Trapper spoke a little too loosely about Hawkeye's stamina, a little too familiarly for two men who hadn't known each other all that long. Sidney had guessed it, and Hawkeye hadn't lied. He'd had his suspicions even then that Sidney might be like him and Trapper, and Sidney's less-than-clinical interest in the mechanics of why getting fucked made Hawkeye go off like a bottle rocket was the death-knell of any plausible deniability between them.
So Sidney knows that Hawkeye can't hold it together with fingers in his ass, and he suggested this scheme anyway. If Hawkeye somehow manages to escape Flagg's court-martial, Sidney is number two on his list of revenge targets.
"The hell do you think you're doing?" he mutters as he approaches the bed and sits gingerly beside Sidney, awaiting further instruction. He doesn't want it to look like he has any sort of familiarity with bending over for another man.
"I was improvising," Sidney mutters back, eyebrows raised. "I saved you quite a bit of trouble."
"I'm about to get right back into it, which you know damn well."
"No you won't." Sidney is calm and unruffled as he pushes at Hawkeye's shoulder, urging him to turn, and guides him to kneel on the bed facing the wall. It's too vulnerable, too exposed, but it's probably better that the MPs can't see his face. "Because you're not going to come."
"Famous last words," Hawkeye grumbles, before Sidney's hand finds the back of his head and he is unceremoniously shoved face-first into the mattress.
"I think that's enough out of you for now," Sidney says cheerfully, loud enough to carry. The MPs don't bother to hide their derisive snickers.
It was a smart move. Hawkeye can bite his lip all he wants, but the sheets will muffle his whimpers better than he could on his own. It's still irritating as hell. He adds a bullet point to his revenge list.
Sidney's hands are gentle and warm as he places them on Hawkeye's hips for a brief, cautioning moment, and Hawkeye suppresses a shiver. In a way, he supposes, this is still an assault, and he ought to be more upset about that than he is. But it's Sidney. This may not be the way he had hoped Sidney would get him out of this, but it's at least a chance, and he knows Sidney would never do anything to hurt him. Even if Flagg barged in the door right now and held a gun to his head, Sidney would be careful with Hawkeye.
Sidney eases Hawkeye's fatigues and boxers over his ass, stopping at the tops of his thighs. "Remember what I said, Hawkeye. We're keeping you out of trouble here."
Don't come, Hawkeye translates. He's not usually one for dominance games in the bedroom, but maybe just this once it would be in his best interests to play along.
Any warm fuzzy feelings or early stirrings of arousal he might have been feeling dissipate when Sidney steps away with a thoughtful noise to rummage through the bedside table, leaving Hawkeye's bare ass exposed to the view of the sniggering MPs. It's much harder to pretend that he's alone with Sidney, doing this of his own volition, when he can feel their eyes boring into his back.
"Hang on," says the second, cannier MP. "How're we supposed to know if he enjoys it if we can't see anything?"
"Do you want to see anything?" says the squeamish MP.
"Gentlemen, calm down," Sidney says, before the second MP can form his spluttered indignation into words. He returns to his place at Hawkeye's hip, and the familiar sound of a tub of lube being unscrewed tells Hawkeye he found what he was looking for. God bless whoever set up the VIP tent last. "I think we all know what an orgasm looks like, even from a distance. If you don't trust my judgment, you can inspect the sheets later."
Like a virgin queen on her wedding night, Hawkeye thinks hysterically. He keeps his face pressed to the mattress and wills himself not to shiver when Sidney's hand returns to cover his hip, a warning of what's to come.
Sidney's finger is cold. Hawkeye jolts, shying away from the temperature shock and pressing his face deeper into the mattress to muffle his startled yelp. The bastard didn't even have the decency to warm it up first? Another bullet point.
"Now," Sidney is saying, voice oddly distant—he has turned away to address the MPs, Hawkeye realizes. "What you may not know is that prolonged stimulation of the prostate can cause involuntary erections, even in heterosexual men. I, for one, remember my teeange years well enough to know that erections often have little to do with actual desire."
The MPs are making vague, awkward noises of assent, but Hawkeye finds it difficult to concentrate on something so distant when Sidney is right behind him, circling his cold fingertip gently over Hawkeye's hole as he talks. The speech is a distraction tactic as well as a pre-emptive excuse, Hawkeye realizes, to allow Hawkeye a few moments of adjustment before Sidney breaches him.
"So what we're looking for here is not an erection, but an orgasm." Sidney pushes more insistently and rubs the pad of his finger back and forth across Hawkeye's hole, and Hawkeye relaxes instinctively into the press of it until he feels Sidney's finger slip a centimeter or two inside. Sidney's breath hitches for a moment before he resumes. "But I'm sorry to tell you, gentlemen, we're all wasting our time here. I know Hawkeye Pierce, and I know he won't come from this."
Hawkeye doesn't dare make a sound. He couldn't say what that sound would be, were he to voice it, but no doubt it would damn him quicker than anything else might. He aches for Sidney to press in further, to fill the yawning emptiness inside him, to put those clever hands to use the way Hawkeye has not-so-subtly fantasized about each time they sit across from each other at the poker table.
He's getting hard.
Sidney told the MPs that would happen, but not yet, and Hawkeye would hate for all of Sidney's quick thinking to go to waste just because Hawkeye got too excited about a fingertip. He lifts his head from the mattress to growl, "stop stalling and get on with it," and shoves his hips back against Sidney's hand.
"Don't sound like it's such a chore," Sidney says, mild and unruffled as ever. It's infuriating, but it's also really hot. "I'd say this is the least worst alternative, all things considered."
Hawkeye barely manages to grit out, "I've never hated you more than right now," before suddenly that isn't true anymore because Sidney is working his pointer finger properly in to Hawkeye's hole, sure and practiced. In spite of everything—the situation and the unwanted onlookers and the looming threat of imprisonment if Hawkeye enjoys it too much—it feels fantastic.
"Fuck," he says, reedy with relief, and hopes it sounds like dismay.
"How long is this going to take?" says the squeamish MP, shifting his weight uneasily.
Sidney draws his finger out and thrusts back in again slowly, avoiding Hawkeye's prostate but unable to do much about the rest of the sensations radiating out from his hole into the rest of his body. "As long as you fellows think is necessary. It's your judgement call; I could go all day if need be."
Hawkeye wants to weep. He grits his teeth and holds all of his muscles as tense as he can, willing himself to be still even as his skin prickles with the need to shudder at the maddeningly slow drag of Sidney's finger in and out of his hole. It's not nearly enough to be satisfying, but it's more than enough to drive him crazy with want. His cock is straining, aching to be touched, and he feels just as empty as he did with nothing in him now that Sidney has loosened him up. He could take another finger easily, or three, or—
He muffles a groan into the mattress and tries to sound aggrieved when he speaks. "I don't want to do this all day. Stop fucking around, Sidney; the quicker they're convinced the quicker we can be done. Put your back into it already."
Sidney snorts. He knows exactly what Hawkeye is doing. But he can't argue without giving up the game, so he smears more lube over Hawkeye's hole and does as he's asked, adding his middle finger on the next thrust and firming the pace of his hand. It's almost enough to be a proper tease.
Then he starts talking again.
"As you can see, gentlemen, stimulating the prostate can cause an erection, but Captain Pierce here is still coherent and kicking. A true homosexual would be much farther gone."
He thrusts in hard as if for emphasis, and Hawkeye grunts at the slight pain of Sidney's knuckles digging into his asscheek. That was probably the intent.
Thank god these MPs don't know a thing about the prostate, Hawkeye thinks—and thank god Sidney does, or he wouldn't be able to skirt around it as deftly as he is. Small mercies. Hawkeye can hold it together so long as Sidney keeps fucking him as mechanically as he has been; he can't make any promises beyond that.
"Has this cleared things up?" Sidney says. His tone is entirely conversational and not at all breathless, and Hawkeye briefly wonders how Sidney isn't hard. Iron control, he supposes. "Or do you need more proof?"
The squeamish MP speaks before his wilier companion can contradict him. "I've seen enough. More than I ever wanted to see."
"But," the other MP says anyway, "how can we really—"
"Attention all personnel! Wounded incoming! Surgeons to the OR, orderlies and nurses to the choppers!"
Hawkeye has never been more grateful to hear a P.A. announcement in his life.
"Well, gentlemen, I believe that's our time. Unless you'd like to reconvene after surgery, this is all the proof you're going to get. Take it or leave it," Sidney says. He slides his fingers free and, in a momentary lapse of concentration, drags the pads of his fingertips exuisitely over Hawkeye's prostate as he does.
Hawkeye really does try not to make a sound. But the burst of pleasure, after so much teasing and build-up, is too much, and as his hips jolt forward and his mouth opens on a startled cry—
Sidney pinches the thin skin of his right testicle hard. Whatever sound Hawkeye was about to make transforms instantly into a yelp of pain.
"Fuck, you—I'm going to kill you for this, Sidney," he says. He is trembling with the effort of holding his hips still, his hole loose and sticky with lube, and he is about to go perform surgery for god knows how many hours. He'd almost rather be in prison.
"That can be arranged. After surgery," Sidney says mildly. To the MPs, he explains, "the extraction process can be unpleasant, for those not accustomed to it. As Captain Pierce clearly is not."
Hawkeye can't bring himself to look around and see whether the MPs have bought it. He accepts Sidney's hand up from the bed and re-fastens his pants still facing the wall, and only once he has tucked his erection beneath his waistband as discreetly as he can does he finally turn.
Both men look rather ill. Even so, the suspicious MP opens his mouth yet again—no doubt to make Haweye's day even worse—before the crackle of the P.A. cuts him off once more.
"Attention all personnel! Incoming wounded! Captain Pierce, please report to OR immediately. Major Freedman, if you're still in camp, we'll need you too. There's a lot of them this time."
"That's our cue," Sidney says, and with an uncompromising grip on Hawkeye's elbow he walks them both briskly past the MPs and out of the VIP tent.
Once outside, he quickens his pace to walk just a half-step ahead, doing his best to shield Hawkeye's obvious erection from the rest of the camp. It's a kind gesture, though it trends a bit towards too little, too late in Hawkeye's opinion. His humiliation is already total; what's scandalizing a few nurses compared to that?
Sidney stops before the doors to OR, looking Hawkeye over with a contemplative air. "Well done. That should keep us out of the woods."
"Flagg won't be satisfied," Hawkeye says.
"I'll deal with him. The important thing was getting out of the immediate situation; I can handle the rest. You just go in there and save lives." Sidney hesitates, then, as he releases Hawkeye's elbow and trails his hand down Hawkeye's forearm before letting go entirely, flashes him a private, knowing smile. "I knew you'd behave if I told you to. You did very good for me. Maybe as a reward I'll show you how prostate stimulation can cause an orgasm without ejaculation."
And he walks into the OR, leaving Hawkeye behind him, gaping in furious disbelief and harder than ever.