M*A*S*H 4077 By Taylor Froelich and Sammi Simonar

Day 8: M*A*S*H Compound, Post-Op, 2000 Hours

Day 8: M*A*S*H Compound, Post-Op, 2000 Hours

She sat down on the edge of Dalli's cot. Dalli was staring at the ceiling but then scribbled something down on a pad of paper someone had left lying around. Dalli tore it out and handed it to Jess without a word.

Surprised, Jess looked down at the note and read her cousin's scratchy handwriting.

"If you help me get out of here, I'll talk to you again," she had written.

"But why do you want to get out of here?" Jess asked, confused.

An irritated look crossed Dalli's face and she held a finger up to her lips to warn her cousin to be quiet, pointing at B.J. who was milling around post-op because he had the night shift.

"What?" Jess whispered, and Dalli rolled her eyes and jammed a finger at the pad of paper.

Jess sighed but obliged, scrawling in her neat loopy handwriting, "Why do you want to get out of here?"

"Seriously? If you know me you know I hate hospitals," Dalli wrote, heavy on the underline on hate.

"Well yeah, but-" Jess objected, and Dalli shushed her, pointing forcefully at the paper again.

"But you're still hurt and where would we go?" she wrote.

"I'm not hurt that bad, and why does it matter where we go? We're orphans, Jess. We had no one but each other," Dalli wrote.

"But we're not. Hawkeye told me that he told you that we're his nieces. We can stay here and he can take care of us," Jess wrote quickly, arguing her point.

"I don't need someone to take care of me!" Dalli scrawled, her letters large, spindly, and angry.

B.J. was coming over by them, and with a scowl on her face, Dalli stuffed the pad of paper and the pencil under her pillow, laying down and pretending to be falling asleep.

Jess got up to leave, but B.J. stopped to talk to her. Jess knew by the scowl her cousin had given her that if she said a word about their written conversation, Dalli would never speak, in writing or verbally, to her ever again.

"Everything okay?" B.J. asked Jess.

"Yeah, Dalli's just tired," Jess lied quietly.

"Okay," B.J. replied as he went to go check on the other patients.

Jess glanced at her 'sleeping' cousin before she left post-op.