Disclaimer: I do not own the characters from MASH (namely, Charles Winchester and Margaret Houlihan) but the other characters are mine, mine, mine!


Chapter 1 - Silence

Whether it was from the travel, the new richness and complexity of edible food, or some lingering intestinal parasite from Korea, he could not be sure of the exact cause of his current digestive malady. All he knew was that so far, the majority of his time back at his family estate in Boston was spent clenching his teeth as he quickly shuffled between his bedroom and bathroom, with any respite between the short trips spent flipping anxiously through his medical texts awaiting the next demanding abdominal cramp.

Honoria wasn't so worried about her brother's constant bowel movements—he was a doctor; he knew what to do about those—but rather, the lack of music that accompanied his self-imposed exile. Was this not her big brother Charles Emerson Winchester III who had returned from Korea little more than a week ago, a man who lived and breathed for Mozart and Tchaikovsky and Beethoven? Were it not for his medical career, this was a man who would have been thrilled to be a conductor, even a pro bono one, standing with a baton in hand in front of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, his wide smile hidden from the audience. What had happened to her beloved brother?

After several days of enduring the lack of music, the lack of any discernable sound from his room, Honoria Winchester had enough.

"Ch-Charles," she stuttered through the closed door of his bedroom. "D-do you want me to fetch your ph-phonograph for you? You m-might recall that f-father just p-purchased you a v-very g—"

"So kind of you to ask," he interrupted, his eyes shut as he sat up in bed, "but no, thank you."

Silence followed his statement. She blinked indignantly behind the door, surprised at his curtness. This was not the brother she knew.

"Wh-what happened to you?" she said, her voice barely louder than a whisper, shoulder leaning heavily on the door. "You always loved m-music."

"Not anymore," he spat, enunciating each syllable, his stomach lurching. He shut his eyes and swallowed, despising everything. The irony of the current situation was not lost on him—he was in the throes of the very same digestive ailment that had first brought him to encounter the five Chinese musicians. And yet, here he was, alive and recuperating in his mansion, wholly intact save for his intestinal mucosa, and what was left of the musicians' mortal forms had been unceremoniously strewn across the Korean brush. Those men would have no dignified burial; perhaps their families would never learn what had happened to them. All that was recognizably left of them in the world was the haunting last notes from their musical instruments as they departed the 4077th.

Honoria's reply cut through his melancholic thoughts.

"Oh, Charles, s-surely you j-jest—"

"I do not," he interrupted, stubbornly crossing his arms as he glared at the door. He wanted to be left alone, with his private bathroom and his queen-sized bed and his library of books. His stomach and bowels had afforded him that time for more than a week now. He could not speak of this aloud, for it would surely break him.

"Did s-something… happen?" she then asked. "It was not two m-months ago that you wrote to me about M-Mozart—d-do you recall?"

It was true that he had done so, and yet, less than two months later, just the thought of music—of Mozart, in particular—gave him such heartache, such tangible pain, that he could scarcely remember to breathe.

The faces of those Chinese POWs filled his senses. He opened his eyes again, taking in the sight of his expansive bedroom to try to erase what had formed in his mind's eye. The fatally injured POW that had been delivered back to the M.A.S.H., the flautist, seemed to materialize in front of him in this very room, on his very bed, the brown shirt soaked with blood, the chest cavity only half-present, the formerly smiling face pale and waxy, the deft musician hands gray and still.

Charles blinked the image away, his mind now filled with the haunting strains of Mozart's Clarinet Quintet in A major echoing off of the Korean landscape as the five musicians disappeared from view one final time. He clutched his stomach again, yearning for the acceptable agony of his digestive malady as a welcome interruption to this unbearable mental anguish.

"Please, Honoria," he murmured, his voice thick with emotion, "I am not ready to speak of it."