Chapter Text
Peggy lets her hair down as soon as the door shuts behind her. Stepping out of her heels, she sighs aloud at the sensation of cool wood against the aching balls of her feet. The couch invites her to lay down and brace her feet on top of one of the arms to relieve pressure on her back. It hikes up her skirt to an indecent degree, but her (handsome, ludicrous, witty, mostly homosexual and absolutely not interested in her) roommate won’t care. She can hear him pottering around in the kitchen, chopping something and running water. “Hi, honey, I’m home,” she calls.
Hawkeye pops his head out of the kitchen. “Tough day?”
“Nah, my back just hurts. I would have preferred to not move around all my desks to do my own sweeping for parent night, but budget cuts come for us all.”
He makes a sympathetic sound. “I’m making carbonara; do you want some?”
“Absolutely. Do you want help?”
“Nope, that’s okay.”
“Don’t amputate anything! Unlike you, I don’t know how to fix it!” It's a lame joke, but she says it just to make him laugh, and he does Hawkeye’s unbridled laugh is a thing of joy.
He wakes her from her doze with the scent of cheese and garlic and a warm hand to the crown of her head. “Dinner is served, Ms. Hayden. Do you ever get used to that, by the way?”
She grins. “Shockingly, yes, because if you don’t assert yourself right away, they’ll run all over you. That’s also why I wear heels. All the boys are taller—and most of the girls.”
Hawkeye frowns at her. “You’ll ruin your back.”
“You know I have that stool up by the lectern. I perch on it whenever possible.” She wisely does not mention how much her back hurts right at that moment. “This is delicious, by the way,” she gestures to the carbonara with her fork.
Hawkeye preens. “I’m practicing on you.” Peggy arches an eyebrow in response. “I have a dinner date,” he grins.
Peggy smiles gamely. “With whom?”
“A resident I met at that citywide conference. He’s in cardio-thoracic—I know, I swore off chest-cutters, don’t look at me like that. And he’s at St. Mary’s.”
“Ah, a good Catholic boy,” she teases. “Francis will be so proud.”
Hawkeye tilts his head back in a laugh. “Yes, I’ll rush to tell our dear chaplain that I’m but at least if it works out, Trapper can have all the nurses he wants.”
Peggy nods sagely. “Is this your way of telling me there’ll be a sock on the door tomorrow?”
Hawkeye’s eyes widen. “No! Absolutely not. You know I’d never do that to you. I’m going to his place.”
She instantly feels bad for even suggesting it. Hawkeye's always unfailingly courteous of the fact that they share a small, thin-walled apartment. He never brought dates around unless it was really serious. She could count on two hands the number of times she’d met Carlye. When she’d pressed him on it once, letting him know that it was truly fine if he wanted to use the apartment for romantic purposes, he’d just shrugged and said he’d once had a roommate who made him feel as though he couldn’t live there, and he didn’t want to do that to her.
She smiles gratefully. “Well, tomorrow is parent night, so it’ll be nice to get to have a long soak in the tub...”
He nods sympathetically. “You’ll have earned it.”
She hopes it won’t be the case, but past history didn't make things look promising. The parents she most needed to see were the ones who wouldn’t come, and the ones she’d rather swallow a sword than talk to were the ones who camped in her room for the entire two hours. She shrugs. “Part and parcel, my friend. If entertaining parents for two hours a semester lets me do this, then I’ll take it.”
Hawkeye just shakes his head in admiration. “I still can’t believe that of all things, you gave up real estate for high school math. I hated just being a high schooler. I can’t imagine having to be around them every day.”
Peggy chuckles. “They’re oddly charming, especially when you know that there’s a light at the end of their angsty teenaged tunnels and you’re excited for who they’ll turn out to be.”
“Do you ever tell them about the light at the end of the tunnel?”
“And lose my cred as the cool teacher?” she asks with mock horror, standing to collect their dishes. She walks into the kitchen and sighs a breath of relief. Hawkeye's been experimenting with cooking things that only involved one pan, which meant significantly less washing up. She doesn't mind doing the washing up when he cooks, and he does the same for her. Her back just really aches from rearranging her classroom furniture twice. She fills the sink with hot water and starts humming absently.
“Hey,” Hawk hollers from the living room. “Can I ask you a weird favor? It might even help you out, in a weird way.”
“Sure, probably,” she calls back, scrubbing out a coffee mug with rings like rock strata.
“Tomorrow morning I’m assisting on a spinal surgery. I know textbook-wise what I’m doing, but it would help if I could actually see what I’m going to be doing, or at least where it is, and the patient is about your size. Look, can I borrow your back?”
Peggy grins reluctantly. Better now than when he was still in residency. She had spent the better part of two years covered in marker stains. But still...her stomach flutters at the thought of Hawkeye’s strong, slender fingers tracing her spine, and she shivers, then pulls a face at the scummy water. Coveting her only-incidentally-heterosexual roommate is pathetic, and as Margaret has kindly pointed out to her, it's only holding back her (non-existent) love life. She says yes anyway, only because Hawk threw in the offer of a backrub. The voice of her conscience telling her she's a self-defeating idiot sounds disturbingly like Margaret.
This is how Peggy finds herself on her stomach on top of her bed, t-shirt rucked up to her bra, with Hawkeye lightly perched over her thighs. “College athlete, female, aged 19, 5’1 and 125 pounds, presenting with spondylolisthesis and slight spinal stenosis at the T12/L1 vertebrae,” Hawkeye mutters to himself quietly. She tunes him out and tries not to tense as his cold thumbs prod her lower back. “Vertical incision here and here...laminae here and here...trim, fuse base...” Peggy’s mind goes pleasantly blank. She’s peripherally absorbed a lot and knows more about medicine than the average person, but can’t follow technicalities. Hawk’s low drone is white noise. He might poke at her for five minutes or five hours for all the difference it makes to her.
Eventually he sits back on her thighs. “Okay, so,” he says brightly, rubbing at the tight cords of muscle knotted in her shoulders. “What happened is that our patient plays rugby. Lovely girl. Actually, if not for the age, I’d think it was you. Let’s just say I wouldn’t want to take this girl in a fight, assuming I fought people.”
Peggy wants to laugh, but Hawk’s hands are working such magic that she's too worried it would come out as a moan.
Hawk mercifully prattles on. “Sometimes in contact sports the vertebrae will compensate for all that knocking around by actually slipping into each other in a downward direction. So one of her vertebrae is angled inward and down, toward her toes, pushing on the one below it. It’s causing her pain. It’s also making her feet go numb. So what we can do is shave off a bit of her vertebrae.”
“Won’t--” Peggy swallows to get rid of her dry mouth as Hawk digs his thumbs expertly into a knot under her scapula. “Won’t that make her back weaker?”
“Very astute question, but no. You’d be amazed at how little strength has to do with the spine. Think of the spine like...like a peanut.”
“A peanut?”
“Yes, and don’t tense your back,” he says tartly. “A peanut. With the shell on. So the shell all around the peanut is the muscle. It’s what makes the peanut strong.”
“So where’s the spine?”
“You know how when you crack the peanut, sometimes there’s some dried membrane-y stuff on the peanut, like a second shell? That’s the spine.”
“Oh,” Peggy says soberly. Maybe she’ll give up heels after all, especially coupled with the fact that Hawkeye is digging the heel of his palm into an especially stubborn knot in a way that's far more pain than pleasure.
“So what we do is shave just a little of the vertebrae. It gives the spinal cord more room, and it also stops the bones from slipping into each other because there’s nothing for them to slip into. We can also fuse the bones together, but it has a lengthy recovery and a lot of side effects,” Hawkeye says in the familiar, almost cheerful tone he uses for narrating medical procedures. Peggy hums in reply.
Hawkeye’s clever hands work near the base of her spine, where she carries a lot of stress, and she sighs in relief. She can feel her muscles relaxing under the warm pressure. He moves into long, slow strokes up and down her spine, settling the muscles with the right amount of pressure. “Well, Ms. Hayden, I think your back will stand up to another day of scrutiny,” he says with an air of satisfaction, and she groans aloud at the terrible pun. “You should stretch more, in my medical opinion,” he chides gently.
“I’m just lucky to have a Hawkeye,” she says sleepily, warm and sated with relaxation.
He laughs above her—not his goose-honk laugh, but something softer and gentler. “I’m luckier that you put up with me, Pegs.” His thumbs come to rest in the two dimples on her lower back, his fingers trailing close to her butt. Her sense of pleasant relaxation evaporates and she fights very hard not to tense. His hands—then the slight weight of him—are gone so quickly that she feels their absence like a negative imprint. The bed dips as he clambered off. “Sorry,” he says quickly. “I just remembered there was something I have to take care of for tomorrow. Night, Peg.” The door clicks behind him.
Peggy rolls slowly over onto her stomach, bewildered, with faint arousal simmering in her veins. What the hell had that been about?