Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

When things are really bad, Hawkeye imagines what his dad looks like writing his latest letter. It’s the kind of comfortable fantasy that he can slip into when he’s too tired to think, after two straight days of surgery; or when he’s doing something he’d rather not give his undivided attention to, like sawing the leg off a kid who looks like he’s fresh out of grade school. He pictures his dad bent over the kitchen table in Maine, trying to remember Radar’s name so he can ask how the guinea pigs are doing. Or pulling out a pen at the bar, the other patrons being met with the familiar: “Who wants to say hi to Hawkeye?”
Hawkeye can’t tell if it helps him escape, or if it just makes it harder to come back to reality. He keeps doing it, regardless of what the answer is.
The only times it doesn’t work, the only times reality is completely inescapable, is when BJ is around.
Hawkeye did his best, he really did, for a long time before he gave up. When they’re operating in the dark, trying not to flinch when the shells dropped because sudden moves can mean another lost patient, he really tries to think of home, but BJ’s voice takes precedent over everything else. When he’s laying on a table in the mess tent, because the walk from surgery to the Swamp is too long, he’ll close his eyes and try to remember what Dad’s handwriting looks like, but then there’s BJ with a cup of coffee and a smile.
Hawkeye likes BJ. he doesn’t like how they came to know each other. He doesn’t like how goddamn present BJ makes him. And he especially doesn’t like how, in the dark with nothing to distract him, he thinks he might be in love.
Trapper knew- he’d seen right through all the fail-safes that Hawkeye put up, he’d gotten the truth out of him in the first month. Well, takes one to know one, he’d said, whispering over a sleeping patient in post-op. It was honestly surprising that Trapper was the only one who’d ever known. Despite all the precautions he takes, all the comments and the hookups in the supply room where he pretends he’s with anyone else, there’s a lot he can’t hide. And there’s always the possibility that everyone did figure it out, and does know, and just isn’t saying anything. That even BJ knows, knows that Hawkeye loses sleep every night because that’s the only time he can look at him without being scared of discovery. That BJ knows and chooses not to say anything. The problem is that, in that scenario, Hawkeye can’t tell if the silence is out of understanding or anger.
At any rate, he thinks he might be dying. There’s this great expanse of secret in front of him, getting wider by the second, and he’s trying not to fall in, because he knows that once he does he won’t stop falling. But he’s about to step off the ledge on purpose just on the off chance that it’ll make BJ look at him for a little longer. So one day he drinks his weight in homemade gin and stumbles out of officer’s territory, hoping to god he doesn’t talk too loud.

Klinger answers his door with his hair in curlers. “Poker doesn’t start for another two hours. You here to work out how we’re gonna cheat?”
“No, no. I need to tell you something. Or I need to tell someone something and I guess you’re the someone. Close the door.” Hawkeye starts pacing the length of the tent, maneuvering around the dress form and clothing racks. “Klinger, do you ever feel like you’re dying? No symptoms or anything, just- just a feeling.”
“I can’t say that I do.”
“Oh. Well, at any rate, I’m gay.”
“What?”
“Gay, Klinger. Queer. A raging homosexual. A fairy. My favorite book in high school English was Dorian Gray. Shit.” He falls onto Klinger’s cot and stares up at the nylons hanging above it. “Don’t tell anyone.”
“Sir, that’s… perfect.”
“Huh?”
“You’ve got your ticket out!”
“No. I mean… no. I don’t even want to know what my dad would say if I came home on a Section Eight. Plus, there’s…”
“The wounded.”
“Right.”
“Sir, I mean- why are you telling me? You’re not-”
“No. No offense, you’re just not my type of gal.”
“I get it. Too butch.”
Hawkeye almost laughs. “‘Cuz I had to tell someone. No one knows. I’m going insane. I think I’m dying.”
“You said that. Doesn’t BJ know?”
“No.”
“Oh.” Klinger stands by the cot, looking down at him, for a few excruciating moments. “Oh.”
“What?”
“You love him.”
“No I don’t. I do not. No. I don’t.”
Klinger smiles.
“I don’t- know. I have post-op.” He runs a hand through his hair and stands up.
“Sir.”
“What?”
“I won’t tell anyone. Honest.”
“Thanks.”
“Sober up a little before you do any surgery, though.”
Hawkeye grins and leans against the doorframe. “I’d rather not.”
The second he’s sober he starts feeling tired. He knows that’s not how it’s supposed to work, that alcohol is a depressant and the less you have the more awake you’re supposed to feel. Of course he knows that, he’s a doctor. But he’d rather feel artificially tired in the happy, high-flying way he feels right now than tired in the all-consuming way that he feels when the war starts really getting to him. And since that’s all the war does, get to him, cut right through all the safeguards he has, the patients in post-op are just going to have to deal with a doctor who can’t walk in a straight line.
And maybe, after he’s done, he’ll get some sleep.

Chapter Text

Hawkeye changes the bandages around the head of an unconscious soldier. He checks the white count of another. He doesn’t think about what he’s doing; he thinks about the view from the roof back home, where he’d sit against the chimney every night between years of high school, looking out at the water and the trees. He wonders if anyone’s found the bottle of whiskey he hid up there yet. He thinks about his dad addressing the envelope, counting out the miles in postage.
Then there’s a hand on his shoulder, and suddenly he can’t think about anything else.
“You okay there? You’ve been staring at that clipboard for a while.”
Hawkeye blinks a few times. “It’s riveting stuff. I think nurse Kellye is the next Dostoyevsky.”
“You know if you only read every fifth letter, it’s some pretty good smut.”
“I’ll keep that in mind. Care to accompany me five feet to the left?”
They walk between the patients together, falling into their usual patterns. Talking fast and hardly saying anything. BJ always a few paces behind him, unavoidable but comforting. People usually position themselves around Hawkeye like they think he’s going to collapse, and they’re going to need to catch him. He spends most of his time trying not to prove them right. He picks up a clipboard. His hands are shaking. Lately, the shake whenever he’s not in surgery. He assumes that it’s small enough that nobody notices, but he can’t be sure.
The good thing is, with BJ behind him, it’s hard to stare. It’s impossible to go anywhere except where he is, it’s also impossible to watch the way every expression BJ makes grows across his face, eyes last, and think about whether his noticing, and his interest in noticing, meant anything.
“Oh, hey, Sidney radioed, he can’t make it for the game tonight.”
“That flake, he owes me twelve bucks from the last game.”
“Maybe he’ll give you a free session.”
“Sure, but then he’d owe me eleven dollars.”
Talking fast and hardly saying anything. Hawkeye tries his best to strip everything he says of subtext. Not just with BJ. It’s constant. He’s tired. Maybe he’s going to die of exhaustion. That’s why he told Klinger, and why he ended up glad that Trapper found out. It meant that, even in a group, there’s some small corner of Hawkeye that didn’t have to try so goddamn hard.
They walk out of post-op, toward the mess tent. For a moment, it’s a relief; closeness is always harder when the walls are waiting to shrink around him. Then BJ swings around to walk next to him. Hawkeye wonders what it’s like, not tracking proximity, not looking for the exits. Having hands that don’t shake.
“I was thinking we could cement Frank’s shoes to the ground,” BJ is saying. “There’s some that came in with the latest supply shipment, Radar told me.”
“Good idea. Rendering him immobile could save the lives of thousands.” He puts his hands in his pockets for safekeeping. “We could do it tonight, but he’ll be at Margaret’s tent.”
“Tricky.”
“No, we just need to find a way to get him to go barefoot.”
“Got any ideas?”
“Lemme get back to the Swamp and think.”
“Can’t you think outside?”
“Beej, you know I can’t think sober.”
BJ laughs and takes a step closer. Hawkeye tracks the space between them. He’s tired.

Poker goes the same way it always goes. Hawkeye loses three dollars, then wins seven, then loses five. Radar ducks out early for some bedtime filing, but by that time everyone else is so drunk that they barely notice one man’s gone. Frank calls for a ban on gambling so he can get some sleep, and he’s met with a barrage of the nearest throwable objects.
Outside, it’s as quiet as it can be in the middle of a war. Hawkeye shuffles the cards and deals them around the table and wonders if there used to be crickets in Korea. There’s crickets in Maine. Fireflies, too. He used to catch jars full of both of them. He’s thinking about what they looked like, buzzing around behind the glass, when BJ leans his head against his shoulder and makes it impossible to think about anything.
“Do me a favor and deal me a full house. At least.” His words are slurring together, and he’s saying them so close to Hawkeye. Like it’s a secret. Hawkeye hates secrets, he’s sick and tired of them, but the idea that he might be entrusted with this one makes it hard to breathe.
“I’ll see what I can do,” he whispers.
“Get me a flush and I’ll give you the best time of your life. Dinner, dancing, a nice hotel, the works.”
Hawkeye picks up his cards. “Captain, I’m a married woman. And you’re cheating.” He pushes BJ’s head away and pulls his cards to his chest. He measures the new distance between them; enough to make it through the night. God, he’s tired of measuring. All he wants is for BJ to lean in further, or for him to be able to lean back. He knows exactly what the other soldier smells like: soap and sweat and whatever the opposite of dried blood is. He knows exactly what he looks like in profile, all smile and soft hair and height. But he can’t show any of it. All he can do is increase the distance between the two of them and hope for the best.
Across the table, Klinger raises an eyebrow, lifting his shoulders in a tiny I-told-you-so shrug. Hawkeye shakes his head. He’s not in love with BJ. And even if he is, what’s he going to do about it?

Everyone else is asleep. Everyone also made a point of saying goodnight to Hawkeye, and telling him that he should also be on his way to bed. It’s been like that for a while; one too many sleep-deprived rampages for anyone’s comfort, he assumes. When Trapper left he passed the torch onto the entire camp. He appreciates the effort. He ignores it, but he appreciates it all the same. Sometime past three in the morning, he takes the first deep breath he’s taken all day. All yesterday, more accurately. How anyone with regular circadian rhythms finds the time to take a moment for themselves, he’ll never know.
Watching someone sleep is the creepiest trick in the book. Hawkeye knows that, and yet here he is, staring across the tent, timing his breathing with the slow rise and fall of BJ’s chest. In a few hours he’ll have to be up, waiting for the sound of choppers, changing bandages, standing to the side while Father Mulcahy reads the last rites. Hawkeye thinks the guy must have them memorized by now, but he takes out the book every time. Maybe he can’t stand the idea that he doesn’t need to look at the words anymore; Hawkeye knows that he couldn’t.
All of a sudden the canvas walls are closing in. Even watching BJ isn’t helping. With a groan, he reaches for his bathrobe. He’s halfway to post-op before he’s awake enough to realize what he’s doing: checking on his patients. It’s not going to help him sleep at all, but it’ll help something, to know that everyone’s okay and no one’s dying, or if someone is dying that he’s doing something in time.
The ward is quiet. Almost everyone is asleep; even Donovan is slumped over on her desk. The lights are off, everyone who needs pain meds to sleep got them hours ago. The only sound Hawkeye can hear is distant artillery and the whispering of two soldiers in the corner. They’ve moved their cots closer together. He smiles and starts flipping through clipboards. What he wouldn’t give to be like that-- dying to get closer to another person. Taking out all the space between them, like something would creep in if there was even an inch left. He hasn’t felt that way since high school, and even that dissolved the second they both went to college, in the opportunity to reinvent themselves and the haste to keep their secrets. It’s not secrets that Hawkeye hates; it’s the necessity of them.
As he moves to change the IV of a sleeping patient, he notices the soldiers in the corner have moved their beds closer so they can hold hands. One of their hands is connected to an IV; the other one is missing a few fingers, puckered scars from an operation a few months old. He recognizes that from surgery earlier that day; the kid had come in with a couple pounds of shrapnel in his chest. Love like that, with hands like those, in a time like this; he doesn’t think he could stand it. Or, he thinks he might be standing it now, and he doesn’t think he can handle watching people half his age go through the same thing.
The two soldiers notice him noticing, and quickly separate. Hawkeye plasters a smile on his face as fast as he can; the warmest one he’s got. “Don’t stop on my account,” he whispers. “It’s hard to find a decent guy in the middle of a war zone.”
Their hands slide slowly together again. “You too, doc?” one of them asks.
“Me, too, what? I dunno what you’re talking about.” He winks. He moves onto another clipboard. He smiles again. He wishes he could just go to sleep.

Chapter Text

twelve years ago

When they stack all of their boxes and suitcases on top of each other, and lean them up against the door so no one can get it, it’s taller than both of them. Maybe even taller than when Hawkeye is sitting on Orin’s shoulders, but neither of them bother testing the theory. Instead, they sit back on Hawkeye’s bed and admire their work, legs entangled, arms around each others’ shoulders. It’s the last day they’ve got; Orin’s taking the redeye to school in six hours, and in six more Hawkeye’s off on a different plane, in a different direction, to a different college. It’s their last day in the same place.
Neither of them move for a while. They listen to summer rage on outside: fire hydrants opening, and birds, and lawn mowers. Two years ago, when they first started seeing each other, one of them sneaking through the others’ window every night, skipping class to hide on the roof of the gym, they were always scared to let the conversation stop. Scared that, if they were silent for even a second, the reality of what they were doing would sink in, and they’d run in opposite directions and never talk again. Eventually, though, they’d caught up with each other, and there was nothing left to talk about. Hawkeye had never known another person so well. And because they knew each other, there was nothing to run away from. So now it’s okay, when they stay quiet.
Orin leans down and starts rummaging around under the bed. “Is it still here?”
“Nah, I had to move it. Closet, top shelf.”
“Fitting.” He untangles himself and crosses the room, standing on his toes to reach a beat-up shoebox, tied closed with fishing line. His shirt rides up. Hawkeye watches.
“So are we splitting it, or what?” Orin maneuvers himself back into the knot the two of them were in.
“I don’t know. Which stuff do you want?” He slides the fishing line off and opens the box. It’s filled to the brim with notes they’d slipped into each others’ pockets, and pictures, and magazine clippings. He picks up the first thing he sees: a drawing Orin did of him, slumped over the desk in the corner of his room.
“Here’s item one. Graphite on algebra. Do I have a bid?”
Orin reaches in and pulls out a stack of photos, paper-clipped together. “Lucy took these,” he says quietly, and flips through them.They were all taken within thirty seconds of each other. Orin sitting stretched out on Lucy’s bed, Hawkeye’s head in his lap. The two of them laughing at something, blurry, since neither of them can sit still for very long. Orin smiling at something behind the camera, and Hawkeye leaning up, propped on his elbows. Hawkeye kissing Orin. Orin leaning in.
“We can’t just divvy this stuff up, can we?”
“No, I guess not.”
“How about I get her on weekends and Christmas?”
Orin slides the clip back onto the photos. “Can I take it first?”
Hawkeye grins. “Of course.”
They spend the rest of the evening like that, together, flipping through the last two years of their lives. In love. That’s what they’re calling it for tonight, anyway. Love. Tomorrow it’ll have to be something completely different.

Chapter Text

There’s something about mornings after nights where he hasn’t slept that Hawkeye enjoys. Maybe it’s the satisfaction; despite everything in and around him screaming for a few hours’ rest, he won. He made it through the whole night. And now all he needs to make it through the whole day is about ten gallons of coffee.
Mulcahy catches him outside the mess tent. “Hawkeye, did you get any sleep last night? Nurse Donovan says you were in post-op pretty late, and you’re up pretty early, by your standards at least.”
“Don’t you worry, Father. I get my twenty minutes a night just like the doctor ordered.” Hawkeye smiles and hurries inside, hoping his reply felt like enough of a joke to hold back any more concern. He finds BJ, sitting at the usual end of their usual table, nursing the usual hangover. He hates that there’s a routine in all of this, that somehow they’ve all settled into the war well enough to have regular tables and bedtimes. Even when their entire lives are spent waiting for a spontaneous rush of casualties, they still fall into a rhythm. Maybe it’s better than the alternative, but that just makes Hawkeye hate the fact that they have to choose.
BJ slides a cup of coffee towards him. “Where were you this morning?”
He can’t say he was standing in the shower for two hours, drenched in cold water, staring into space, praying to absolutely nobody that no one would die today, just like he finds a way to do every morning. “...Mass.”
“It’s Thursday.”
“Thursday Mass, then. This tastes even worse than usual, did they make it with tar?”
“I think it might just be tar.”
“Better than nothing.” He drinks the entire cup without breathing. It tastes terrible, and he’s almost grateful for it, because it means something else to wake him up.
“Finally your days of shotgunning come in handy for something,” BJ says with a grin.
“And my dad said there was no reason for me to join a fraternity.”
Before either of them can come up with another line of banter, Radar has appeared. Neither of them have ever actually seen Radar approaching them; one second they’re alone, and the next there’s this nineteen-year-old kid in front of them, usually up to his ears in papers, reminding them that half the people they operate on barely have high school diplomas. Hawkeye has never wanted someone he likes so much out of his life so badly. Every day he thinks about setting up a scheme to get the kid a discharge. The only problem is that Radar would never go for it; he’s too damn loyal.
“Excuse me sirs, your mail’s here.”
“Ooh, got anything that looks official? I applied to med school, I’ve been hoping for an acceptance letter.”
“Sorry, captain Hunnicutt, just a few letters from home.”
“Anything from Erin?” Hawkeye leans over onto BJ’s shoulder. He keeps track of how long he’s there.
“Yeah, the one addressed in crayon.”
“Wow, she’s got a stamp on it and everything.”
“Hawkeye, there’s one for you, too. From your dad.”
He takes the envelope and stares at it, thinking about his dad addressing it and cringing a little at the distance the address meant, and taking it to the post office on his way to work, giving the woman behind the counter the smile of a regular customer. Then he opens it.
“Oh, I should warn you, it’s not good news, sir,” Radar says sheepishly.

Dear Ben,
I hope this note finds you well. I always do, but I am hoping especially hard on this occasion, because it’s not going to leave you as well as it found you. The beginnings of the war’s less fortunate side effects are starting to come back to us. Lucy came by yesterday and told me that your friend Orin’s been killed in action. You two were close, I know, and it’s taken me a while to decide whether it was better for you to hear it over there, where you have enough death on your plate, or when you get back home, when you’ll no doubt have had your fill. I think you deserve to know around the same time as everyone else, though. He died on the table in a MASH- I had to triple-check with Lucy to make sure it wasn’t yours, that you didn’t have to be the first to find out.
There are some things that Orin left to you. I’m going to collect them tomorrow. I’m sorry about all of this, Ben.

Hawkeye stops reading after that. He’s got the picture.
“What is it, Hawk?”
He’d almost forgotten he wasn’t alone. He shoves the letter back in the envelope. “Old, uh, friend of mine died. I knew him in high school. Last time I saw him he was getting on a plane to go to basic.”
“Shit.”
“You said it.”
Lying is coming more easily to him the longer he stays in a war zone. The last time he’d seen Orin was actually the night before he’d left for basic. Hawkeye was home for a few weeks, and he’d been up late trying to edit the paper he was supposed to have had ready for a medical journal a week before. Orin must have seen his light was on, because somewhere past midnight the guy snuck in through his window. Just like old times. He went straight for the closet, rummaging around in the piles of clothes and shoes and discarded med school textbooks until he found the shoebox.
“What, it can’t wait until morning?” Hawkeye had said, even though he knew that it couldn’t, and he knew exactly why. Maybe they weren’t in love anymore-- maybe they hadn’t ever been, really-- but once you know everything about somebody it doesn’t really matter how much they change.
“I need it for collateral. I’ll give it back when I come back. I promise I’ll give it back.” He’d thrown a leg over the windowsill, but Hawkeye had stopped him, pulling him into the last real hug he can remember giving. Even when his number had come up, and he was flying out of the country, he’d avoided anything more personal than a handshake. But he’d stood there with his arms around Orin’s waist and his head buried in his shoulder for what felt like hours. Really it was a minute at most.
“Take care of it,” he’d said, and Orin had nodded, and then that was it. He watched him run across the lawn and hop the fence, just like old times, but that was it.
Every time he gets a letter from home, he’s almost upset about it. Because it means that no one’s forgotten about him, so everyone’s still worried about him. People get news from the front and they think about him. Friends die in combat and people have to make sure he knows, that he’s doing alright. It’s not fair to them. It’s not fair to him, either, when he really thinks about it; why would anyone think he has time to grieve? He can barely spare a few minutes to think about how fucked up his immediate surroundings are.
“Hawk, are you alright?”
He looks down. He’s crumpled the letter into a ball, and his knuckles are white around it. “Huh? Yeah, I’m fine. Just peachy. Never better.”
BJ stares at him with trademark concern until he’s forced to meet his eyes. “Look, Potter says we’re not due for any more casualties. Let’s go to Rosie’s. I’ll buy.”
“Pierce!” Donovan bursts into the mess tent. “One of your patients lost his pulse. You better come.”
He’s halfway out the door before she’s finished talking. “Hold that thought, Beej.” He’s made it to post-op before he even realizes what Donovan’s said. And he’s in the middle of chest compressions, his hand cracking through some high schoolers’ ribs, listening to Margaret tell him how she still can’t find a pulse, when he realizes the ribs he’s breaking are attached, through blood vessels and nerves and tendons, to a hand with a few missing fingers.
“Still nothing,” Margaret says. Is she shouting? It sounds like she’s shouting.
“Doc, is he gonna be alright?” It’s the soldier in the next bed over. He sounds like he might be crying. Hawkeye would be crying, if the guy he loves was dying three feet away from him. He should be crying, but he doesn’t have any time. There’s a kid underneath him who isn’t going to make it. He can always tell whether they’re gonna pull through, the second he sees them lying there. It’s something about the way they’re lying there; the goners look heavier. It doesn’t matter; he tries anyway. He’ll break every sternum in Korea, he’ll replace all the blood in someone’s body a hundred times over. Even when it doesn’t work.
Even after it doesn’t work. He keeps going with compressions even after Margaret tells him to call it-- he keeps going until she and Father Mulcahy tear him away from the kid’s chest. He sits there, kneeling over him, staring at a dead face and waiting for its eyes to open, until the corpsman tell him that he’s got to get out of the way, they’ve got to move the body out. Even then, they have to tell him a couple times. If it were up to him he wouldn’t stop working. Not until there was nothing left to work on. But it’s never up to him. It’s never fucking up to him. He doesn’t even get to decide when he’s allowed to sleep, who is he kidding thinking he has any say in whether or not someone dies?
They push him out of post-op. It’s for the best. They can’t clear the bed with him in the way, and the other patients shouldn’t see the kind of person he actually is. The kind of person who can’t lose anything. Eventually, he reminds himself, he’s going to have to get used to it. This sure as hell won’t be the last time he spends two days straight in surgery, sewing guts back together that shouldn’t have been ripped apart in the first place, losing patients before they’d even made it off the ambulance. But he hates losing.
BJ finds him standing in the middle of the compound, staring at the bottom of the flagpole. He doesn’t say anything, just stands there, as close as he can get without any contact. Hawkeye appreciates the gesture, but he’s tired enough without it.
“You gonna buy me a drink, soldier?” He hates when his voice breaks in the middle of something that’s supposed to be funny. No one’s supposed to know how hard it is for him to keep the fun coming, to keep thinking of comebacks. The only person who was allowed to was Trap, and he left without saying goodbye. Maybe because he hadn’t wanted Hawkeye to turn his leaving into another joke. No one would blame him. Hawkeye’s not the guy people go to for a heart-to-heart, or love, or a real goodbye. He’s there for the practical jokes and the flirting and he’s always gone in the morning, before anyone’s had time to wake up. It gets dicey when anyone brings feelings into the mix, because when he takes away all the fun, the only feeling Hawkeye really has is exhaustion, and the only thing he really wants to do about it is crawl into a hole, preferably six feet deep, and sleep it off.

Chapter Text

They’ve been drinking since it was light outside, and by now it’s almost sunrise. On empty stomachs, too, because even thinking about eating makes Hawkeye sicker than any amount of gin would. If he’s being honest, he doesn’t even like being drunk that much. It makes it too easy to admit he feels anything other than a vague nonchelance about everything around him, and too hard to count the distances between him and other people. But it beats thinking. Especially after today, when the only things he has to think about are the faces of a bus full of dead soldiers and the fact that the home he’s trying so hard to go back to is a little less like the home he left. So, fuck it. He leans his head against BJ’s chest. Well, he doesn’t so much lean as completely fall into him. Takes out all the space between them. BJ doesn’t pull away. If anything, he does the opposite; his hand falls onto Hawkeye’s back; he’s drowning in it, the light and the gin and the smell of sweat and soap.
“‘S nice.”
“How drunk are you?”
Hawkeye tries to feel for his glass without moving away from BJ. “Almost drunk enough.”
BJ laughs. “I’ll drink to that.”
Suddenly Hawkeye is more tired than he’s ever been, which is saying a hell of a lot. He’s tired of counting the inches between him and every other person. He’s tired of staring at the canvas ceiling waiting for everyone else to fall asleep. He’s tired of thinking. More than anything, he’s tired of waiting. So he stops waiting. He pulls away just long enough to down what’s left in his glass, and then he closes the space between them.
He doesn’t know how long it lasts, the kiss, his lips on BJ’s, but he knows it feels like three straight days of sleep and real sheets and the total opposite of blood. It’s not quite as nice as he thought it would be, mostly because BJ isn’t kissing back, but it clicks something into place within him. Maybe a new gear starts turning, or a bone pops back into a socket. Whatever it is, he thinks maybe he could get used to the way it feels, if he were allowed to, if he had the time and space. He pulls away as soon as he’s lucid enough to realize what he’s doing.
They sit in silence. He doesn’t meet BJ’s eyes.
“Hawk.” He says it in a tone Hawkeye has never heard before. It’s like the faraway voice he gets when he talks about California, only closer. But probably that’s just Hawkeye’s imagination. Probably it’s just anger, deeper anger than he’s seen before.
“Yeah.”
“...I can’t.”
“Right.”
“Hawk-“
He’s already stumbling towards the door, barely able to keep himself upright. “I’m sorry. I’m really sorry.”
“Hawkeye-“
He’s out. No more closeness. Forever, probably. Because now BJ’s going to tell Potter, and he’ll get a discharge, and he’ll be on his way home, only he can’t go home anymore. He tries to picture Main Street in Crabapple Cove and all he comes up with are images of a big homecoming parade, and he’s the only one who came home to attend it.
He manages to get to the edge of the compound and stares up at the sky, no idea how he got there. Usually he looks up and he thinks about how it’s the same everywhere— same atmosphere— and it’s comforting. Now it feels like just another way for everyone to watch him. And he’s so, so tired.
Something in him collapses-- a pyramid of pressure and guilt and surgical techniques gives way to impending relief. There’s always been something for him to look over at when he needs a break from all the dust and blood: BJ, or the thought of his hometown, or his patients, or, hell, even Orin. All of that was just killed off in the span of twenty-four hours. Now there’s nothing to do but sleep. He laughs, once, and spins on his heel, almost running to the supply room.

Hawkeye leans against the shelf, looking at the boxes scattered around him. Drunk, in the dark, it took him a while to find what he was looking for. Frank’s gonna have a fit when he sees the state of the room, he thinks, and he laughs again. In his hand there’s a glass bottle of sleeping pills. He’s not one for math, and he doesn’t know exactly how drunk he is, so he figures he’ll just take them one by one until he’s scared to take any more. He cracks the lid and looks around the room. All the boxes of supplies for patching people together. All the green canvas. Beyond that, all the people.
He’s spent the entire war trying to stay awake. Sometimes he’s operating with his eyes closed. Sometimes he walks laps around the compound for a whole day because he knows that the second he stops moving he’ll fall asleep, and he has to keep his guard up. The second he lets it down is when he loses a patient or a friend, or the shelling starts a little too close to home. It’s taken him two years, but as he cracks open the bottle of pills, he realizes he’s had it backwards the whole time. He should’ve been looking for ways to get to sleep and stay asleep. He should’ve glued his eyelids shut on the flight to Korea. He swallows the first couple pills; he should’ve done this ages ago.

Back in the World Wars, Colonel Potter was only ever woken up for emergencies. Since he joined the 4077, however, usually if someone needed him after lights-out it was for something petty; to settle an argument, or help with a practical joke, or unlock his liquor cabinet. Still, there’s always the possibility. That’s all being in the army is. Remembering all the possibilities.
The knock on his door is persistent, if a little weak. He assumes it’s either Frank or a nurse; Radar and the others wouldn’t wait for him to answer, they’d come right in and shake him awake. He takes his sweet time getting out of bed, thinking maybe the knocker will give up, but by the time he’s at the door it’s still as present as ever. A little weaker, though. He heaves a sigh and pulls it open.
“Hawkeye? You don’t look so good, son.” Hes leaning on the doorframe, and it looks like he’s struggling to breathe.
The surgeon’s words are barely distinguishable from each other. “Don’ feelsogood either.”
“What happened?” Potter looks out onto the compound. None of the guards are in sight. The night is dead quiet, except for Hawkeye’s labored breathing.
“Well, drunk.”
“I can see that.”
“But- an’ also- took these...” he holds his hand out. It’s shaking. There’s a small, half-empty bottle in his palm, and Potter takes it, flipping it over to see the label. Emergency. Not only that, an emergency he should’ve seen coming from a mile away, especially today, after he lost a patient and a friend, and how he couldn’t seem to stand still unless there was a shot glass in his hand. But just because it’s predictable doesn’t make it any less stupid. Out of all the messes he’s gotten himself into, this one has to be the worst. There’s no time to think about that in the middle of an emergency, though; Hawkeye falls, half onto him and half onto the ground, and Potter makes a note to be mad later. Scratch mad-- furious. So long as there’s a person left to be furious at.
He doesn’t hear himself calling for help, but he barely has time to lay Hawkeye out and check his pulse (irregular, but it’ll hold for now) before he’s surrounded by corpsmen and nurses. He also doesn’t know what he says to them-- and maybe he doesn’t say anything, maybe everyone just knows what to do at this point-- but a few seconds later Klinger and Igor are lifting the barely-conscious surgeon onto a litter, and Margaret is in his ear telling him that BJ is too drunk and Frank’s going to have to help instead.
“His BAC is too high for standard procedure. We’re gonna have to pump his stomach.”
“What happened, sir?”
Potter holds up the bottle in his hand. “Sleeping pills. Go get Frank and tell him to start scrubbing, post-haste. I’ll be along in a minute.” He stops just long enough to watch Margaret’s reaction. She doesn’t have one. Probably saving it for later, just like him. “I’m just going to tell Radar to call Sidney Freedman. I’ll be right there.”
“Sir, what do I tell everyone?”
Potter shrugs. “The truth, I suppose. No use keeping a secret.”
He’s barely finished his sentence when the sound of choppers cuts above the commotion. He settles in for a long, sleepless night.

Chapter Text

Hawkeye opens his eyes, then lets them drift closed again. For a few minutes that’s the only thing he can do. There’s pressure on the back of his hand, and burning in his throat, and something in his stomach that’s telling him maybe it’ll be better if nobody knows he’s awake.
He’s in the Swamp; he can tell that much by hazy patches of junk around him. Also, even though it’s not home by a long shot, it’s where he goes back to every night, so there’s something about the air and the blanket he’s under that seem like they’re molded around him. Outside, there’s footsteps rushing back and forth, and jeep tires on the dirt road just beyond the tent door. It sounds busy-- it sounds like casualties. Why hasn’t anyone woken him up if there’s wounded? He has to go help.
The second he tries to get up, though, he’s pulled straight back down, partially by a sudden pair of hands on his shoulders and partially by a wave of nausea that’s less of a wave and more of a tsunami. So he’s sick, then. That would also explain all his other symptoms, and the pressure in his hand, which he assumes is connected to the blurry shape above him that he assumes is an IV.
“Sorry, sir, Colonel Potter says I’m not supposed to let you out of bed on account of you aren’t allowed.”
“Like hell I’m not allowed. I can still help with triage and post-op. Gimme my robe.”
“Sir, I’m not supposed to. Sidney said we can’t leave you unsupervised.”
Hawkeye blinks. His vision’s clearing a little, but his voice is still coming out hoarse and he feels like his brain has been replaced with cotton. “Why would Sidney care about my having a sore throat?”
“D’you not remember?”
He looks over at the still, and past it at BJ’s cot. He remembers losing one more connection to reality and one more patient within the span of an hour. He remembers kissing BJ, and stumbling out the door, and looking at the sky almost hoping a shell would drop on him, right there. And then…
“Oh. Right, yeah. That.”
Radar stares at his hands and speaks quietly. “You had everyone real worried, Hawkeye.”
“Shit. I’m sorry.”
Is he sorry? Is he mad it didn’t work? He tries to dust things off and reorganize his thoughts. One one hand, he’s still in Korea. Everyone around him is still dead or dying. On the other hand, maybe he won’t be in Korea for very much longer. Now he’s got discharge written all over him. But that means going home and spending every night thinking about all the kids getting sent home in boxes because he wasn’t there to take the shrapnel out of their chests; it means losing sleep. There’s another point: for all intents and purposes, he got what he wanted. Maybe he’s not dead, and maybe now his best friend hates him, and everyone knows that he’s got one foot in the operating room and the other in a padded cell, but he got to kiss BJ. And he got a good night’s sleep. Sort of.
“How long was I out for?” he asks.
“Well, you woke up a little bit when they was moving you to the Swamp, but Colonel Potter found you right when the casualties started coming, and they’ve been in surgery for almost twenty hours.”
Twenty hours. Hawkeye fights to keep a smile off his face. Even with the thought of his friends short a doctor and with one too many patients, the idea of twenty solid hours of unconsciousness makes him almost giddy. The thought that, for once, the world went by and he didn’t have to notice any of it. Almost a whole day where he wasn’t worried about anyone’s pulse-- not even his own. He’s never been one to repeat the same scheme twice, but maybe if he did a little math he could pull it off again, the next time it all gets to be too much.
Except then, he looks out the window, watches the nurses run back and forth and looks at the litters lined up outside pre-op. And suddenly it wouldn’t have mattered if he’d been asleep for a year. The exhaustion starts at his fingertips and spreads, like a net made out of 4-0 silk, so tightly woven he can barely see through it, so heavy he couldn’t get out of it if he wanted to.
“Hey Radar?”
“Yes sir?”
“I think I’m just gonna go back to sleep.”

It’s dark when he opens his eyes again. Dark and quiet. Nothing but the sound of the still churning away and pacing footsteps a few feet away from him. He spends a few minutes watching Colonel Potter walk the length of the Swamp in his bloodstained scrubs. There’s got to be something he can say to break the silence, to lighten the mood, to make everyone stop worrying about him. He thinks for longer than he’s ever thought about a one-liner, and he comes up empty.
“Hi,” he says quietly.
Potter pulls an about-face to look at him. “Oh good, you’re awake.” He picks a book up off the floor and throws it full force at Hawkeye’s head.
“Hey, watch it! If you’re trying to kill me you’re gonna have to get in line.”
“If I hear one more goddamned joke out of you, captain, I’ll upgrade to bullets. I’ll let you kill yourself slowly any way you want. I don’t protest when you’re drinking your way through your liver, or stay up for five days straight. If I did I’d be a hypocrite. But I’m sure as hell not gonna sit back and let you take the easy way out. We had patients, and we were short a surgeon. Not only that, we were short an operating table, on account of we had to put you on it and pump our medical supplies out of your stomach. You wanna die? Decided that the war’s not comfortable enough and you’d rather be in hell? Fine. Blow your goddamned brains out. But do it on your own time, in your own bed. There’s too many people need you here. All those kids in post-op needed you. Hunnicutt needed you. You know where he is right now? He’s talking to Sidney, cuz he thinks your little stunt is his fault. And Radar won’t sleep, cuz he’s scared you’re gonna try something else. So you wanna die, fine. But do it on your own time. And try to do it a little further away from all the people who care about you.”
They stare at each other, Potter red in the face, Hawkeye trying so hard to keep from crying that he thinks he might have an aneurism. What the hell is he supposed to say to that? And does BJ really think it’s his fault? That’s the stupidest thought he’s ever had; of course he thinks it’s his fault. The man blames himself for almost everything, and the last thing he did with Hawkeye was reject him. As far as rejections go, it was one of the better ones (“better” in that he didn’t end up stranded in an alley in Tokyo with his ribs kicked in, which was how getting rejected usually went for him), but BJ doesn’t know that. Really, BJ doesn’t know all that much. He’s barely seen Hawkeye’s bad side, the side that would slit someone’s throat and not even flinch if it meant the end of the war. A suicide attempt is probably a surprise to him. With the information he has, and the context of that night, of course BJ would blame himself.
And then there’s the patients. The one lousy reason he has to keep living and he ignores it for a couple hours of sleep. He pictures the OR, casualty after casualty carried through the doors, and he wasn’t there. Not even for the chest cases. Even when he was so tired he had to slam his leg against the corner of the operating table just to keep himself awake, even when he was so hungover the sound of footsteps in the dust felt like being shot point-blank, he’s never missed a batch of wounded. He’s never not been in surgery. When he can’t be good at anything else-- friendships or falling in love or not wanting to die-- he’s good at his job. Now, it looks like he’s just not good at anything.
At least he’s going home. If Sidney doesn’t sign the discharge, eventually BJ will start feeling better and then he’ll be out on a Section Eight. It’s only a matter of time.
“I’m sorry,” he says finally.
Potter nods and sits on the edge of the cot, all the anger dissolved, all the fire put out. Now he just looks worried. And hurt. Hawkeye would give anything to go back to being shouted at.
“Why’d you do it, son?”
He shrugs. “I was tired. That’s it. Just… tired.”
“This is some way to get a little R&R.”
“I’m sorry, I wish I had a better answer.”
“Well…” Potter pulls him into a hug he can’t find the strength to return. “Christ, Pierce, I thought you were gonna die.”
“That makes two of us,” he says into the colonel’s shoulder.

BJ sits on his cot, tapping his fingers together. Then he gets up and pours a drink from the still. He re-ties his bootlaces three different times. He sits in the chair by Hawkeye’s bed, then stands up and walks in a circle around the stove, then sits back down. It’s all done in excruciating silence.
“Hey, you look almost as bad as me,” Hawkeye says, forcing a smile. Someone’s gotta do it. Otherwise they’re just gonna sit there until one of them starts crying, or yelling, or both. “I think the bags under your eyes are even worse than mine, and I get mistaken for a raccoon at least twice a day.”
“Hawk, for once, no jokes. You almost died.”
“Oh, that’s what that was.” He catches himself and sighs. “Sorry. No jokes. It wasn’t your fault. Potter told me you think it was. It wasn’t.”
“I should’ve stopped you. I knew you were gonna do something stupid, but I didn’t think you wanted me there when you did it, and… I should’ve stopped you.”
“You did. A little.”
“What?”
He hadn’t planned this far into the conversation. He was hoping that maybe BJ would’ve stormed out by now, his conscience cleared, on his way to rid the US Army of one more deviant. But BJ hasn’t left yet. In fact, he’s looking at Hawkeye the same way he usually does when he’s worried. So now they both have to keep talking.
“I never told you about the night before I left for basic,” Hawkeye says.
“No, you didn’t.”
“That wasn’t a question. I never told anybody. And you can’t tell Potter or Sidney, because then they’ll really be worried. I waited until the absolute last day I could, before I had to report, and that night I went out and laid down in the middle of the highway, ‘cuz I thought, I’ll end up the same if I go to war, might as well do it now, on my own terms. Only it was two o’ clock in the morning on a Wednesday, in rural Maine, and I wasn’t anywhere near any main stretches, so there weren’t any cars to run me over. I was probably there for half an hour. And then my dad showed up. He didn’t say anything, he just waited for me to get in his car, and then he drove out to a busier part of the road. I mean, it wasn’t that much busier, but I wouldn’t’ve had to wait very long. And then he told me to get out and do it. He said he wouldn’t stop me, as long as I did it in front of him. Because he said that if I could do it with someone I cared about watching, then that meant dying was really my number one priority, so it was probably for the best. But I mean, obviously, I couldn’t do it then. I couldn’t even get out of the car. We sat there for a few hours, and then he drove me home and I got my stuff and I went to the airport. And now I’m here.”
“Your dad is some guy.”
“I wasn’t gonna go to Potter. I wasn’t gonna go to anyone. I had it all planned out, because Frank always checks the supply room first thing in the morning, and I thought it’d be kinda like one last joke if he was the one who found me, you know. But then I thought, what if you got there first, like maybe you needed something or you had the same idea, about Frank always being the first one in there. And then I thought about what if you were there right then. And then I couldn’t do it anymore. So I went to Potter. And now I’m here.”
“I really don’t know what to say here.”
“Look, Beej, there’s really not a lot keeping me alive out here. I’m a mess, look at me. One bad letter from home and I OD in front of my CO. I really don’t got a lot going for me. But one of the things I’ve got is you. So it really, really wasn’t your fault.”
BJ puts his hand on top of Hawkeye’s. “Okay.”
“And I’m sorry I kissed you.”
“It’s okay. I wouldn’t’ve minded if I didn’t love Peg so much.”
He finally gets up the courage to look BJ in the eyes. There’s nothing in them that he doesn’t recognize-- that he doesn’t recognize as friendly. And also, is he smiling? Is he looking at their hands and smiling? “So you’re not gonna report me or anything?”
“What, and send my best friend back to the States, to live in luxury while I bust my ass by myself halfway across the world? I’m not an idiot, Hawk.”
“I guess not. Moron, yes, but not an idiot.”
BJ’s fingers tighten around Hawkeye’s hand, and for a second both their smiles fade. “Don’t do it again.”
Hawkeye nods. He’s worried if he says anything, it’ll turn out to be a lie.

Chapter Text

“Do you know who Williamina Fleming was? She worked at Oxford, with this whole group of women, and they’re the ones who classified… basically every star we know about. In the whole galaxy-- the whole space. They figured out where they were, and how hot they were, and all that stuff. These women, you know, they all just showed up to work every morning, and looked at these, these charts that were full of little, uh, star diagrams. They looked at the charts, just… space on a piece of paper, and they figured out where all the stars were and what they looked like. Isn’t that something? Space on a piece of paper. Like, like medical charts. That’s just a person on a piece of paper. Well, a person’s body. And how much of a person is a body, anyway? I bet your charts are more of a person than mine. We should compare sometime.”
“Pierce, you still haven’t answered my question. What were you doing before you went to the supply room?”
“I told you, I was out in the compound. Looking at the stars.”
“It was pretty late, why weren’t you asleep?”
“Now, Sidney, we both know I’m a grade-A insomniac. I’m the Sandman’s worst enemy. I’m neither healthy, wealthy, nor wise.”
“So you just couldn’t sleep.”
“... Right.”
“Some people would say that’s probably a sign that there was something else going on.”
“What kind of something? You mean like a war?”
“Sure, like a war.”
“Well, the war’s gonna keep going whether I’m dead, or home, or alive, or here.”
“Is that why you tried to kill yourself?”
“No. I wouldn’t even call it trying to kill myself. I wasn’t thinking about dying, really. Just… I don’t get a lot of sleep, you know. Never have, really, but there’s a big difference between staying up cramming for an anatomy midterm and staying up because the canvas bedroom you share with two other guys is in danger of being blown up. And it… it gets to you, you know? It has to get to you, too, seeing patient after patient come through, with the exact same wounds, exact same symptoms, and you can’t stop them coming. Every second you’re conscious, there’s a war on. So you can imagine what it’s like when you’re conscious more than everyone else around you.”
“You really just wanted to sleep.”
“Honest.”
“You’re a doctor. You didn’t think half a bottle of benzodiazepines was a little excessive?”
“I was drunk. Calculating a dosage wasn’t really my first priority. Besides, if I was really trying to die, don’t you think I would’ve taken the whole bottle?”
“Do you wish that you had?”
“No. I wish I hadn’t taken any. I missed about a hundred fifty casualties-- forty chest cases. I asked Margaret.”
“This might sound like a stupid question, but do you want to go home?”
“Of course I do.”
“Okay.”
“Wait, but- but not like this. If I feel this rotten after missing one OR session, I don’t even want to know what I’d feel like sitting behind a desk in some big-city thoracic department for the rest of the war. I mean, those guys in post-op needed me more than I needed a nap.”
“Well, that makes what I’m about to say a little easier. I’m afraid I’m not signing any discharge papers this time.”
“What?”
“I would under… under other circumstances. But this MASH needs a surgeon more than Maine needs an insomniac. And, maybe I’m wrong, but I believe you. I’m going to give you a prescription for a slightly less worrisome dose of benzodiazepines, and I’m going to go back to my nice little hospital full of battle fatigue.”
“Are you sure? What if, I don’t know, what if I really go crazy?”
“I’ll call in a couple weeks to make sure everything’s still okay. With your aversion to death, and all these friends you seem to have made around here, you can make it a couple weeks. I promise.”

Chapter Text

The missed OR time, the burning in his throat that’s still noticeable a week later, and the combined efforts of BJ, Radar, and Colonel Potter to keep him away from sharp objects and his own thoughts were more than enough to make Hawkeye regret his recent brush with death. But on top of all those things, everyone’s always looking at him. Not just when he’s doing something stupid, or trying to be the center of attention; they’re looking at him when he’s not doing anything. He can feel corpsmen glance through the mesh walls of the Swamp on their way to the officer’s club. When he’s checking on his patients, the back of his neck burns with the feeling of being watched by whichever nurse is on duty. Igor’s eyes follow him all over the mess tent. It’s fine when the attention is on his own terms, when he’s doing something to earn it. But now, he’s on even higher alert than normal. There’s even less margin for error, even fewer spaces where he can let himself slip up and steal a glance at BJ, or let the smile fall off his face.
“It’s bad enough I’m not allowed in the showers alone anymore,” he tells Klinger as he picks his way through lunch, “but now I got eyes on me, all the time. Is this how spies feel? Because lately I’ve been thinking maybe we should go easier on them. Spies, I mean.”
“I’d think you’d be happy about the shower thing. Especially with BJ.”
“First of all, there’s nothing going on with BJ. Second, and this may come as a surprise, an ice-cold shower ten feet away from a tent full of high schoolers with patched-together bowels isn’t exactly a romantic situation.”
Klinger shrugs and takes a sip of coffee. “I’m just saying. Silver linings.”
“Well, if it isn’t the two biggest military disgraces in Korea.” Frank sits down on the other end of the table.
“Skip the flattery, Major, just tell us what you want.” Klinger throws Hawkeye a glance that’s half annoyed, half assuring. It says, I’ll handle this one. It’s the first look anyone’s given him in a week that doesn’t make him want to bury himself alive.
“What I want is for the two of you to be court-martialed!” Frank sneers. “Look at yourselves. Disgusting. Dressing like that, pretending to be crazy so you can go home. Suicide is the coward’s way out, you know. I’ve never seen such disrespect for this man’s army. And guess what? It’s not even working! You’re both still here.”
“Well, someday our act will make it big, and we’ll get out of this town.”
“And you. You coward. Thought you could just drift off to sleep and forget all about your responsibility to your country, didn’t you?”
Hawkeye smiles through clenched teeth. “Frank, do you know what my only regret is?”
“What?”
“That it wasn’t a murder-suicide. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a few star-spangled banners to burn. Care to join me?” He holds out his arm. Klinger takes it.
“Always a gentleman.”
They almost make it out; they’re almost to the door when hears Frank, talking with a satisfied little smirk.
“Fairies. Both of them.”
Klinger hears it too; his grip on Hawkeye’s arm tightens, and he makes both of them walk a little bit faster out of the mess tent.
Obviously Hawkeye knows it doesn’t mean anything. Frank isn’t anything more than a minor nuisance, and he throws accusations and threats of a dishonorable discharge at anything that moves in a way he doesn’t like. The fact that it doesn’t mean anything doesn’t make it any easier to breathe, though. Especially now that everyone’s watching him all the time. Half the camp was in the tent, which means that half the camp heard what Frank said, and saw his reaction to it. How had he reacted? He didn’t know.
Once they’re in the relative privacy of the Swamp, with BJ off trying to patch a phone call through to Mill Valley, he looks at Klinger. He’s smoothing out the pleats on his skirt, his jaw set.
“Hey, can I ask you something?”
The corpsman shrugs. “Shoot.”
“I mean, you must get that kind of shit a lot. Maybe even more than I do.”
‘Getting called a fairy by Frank?”
“Getting called anything by anyone.”
“Yeah, I guess. Mostly from disappointed guys at Rosie’s. But usually they buy me a drink before they’re disappointed, so it’s not all bad.”
“What’s it- I don’t know, what’s it feel like? ‘Cuz it’s not true. I mean, you’re not gay.”
“I guess a little scared. Name-calling can turn into punching pretty quick. You probably know that, though.”
Hawkeye nods.
“What about you?”
“The same, I guess. Except I can’t tell myself they’re wrong.”
“Neither can I, really.”
“What do you mean?”
Klinger glances around like he’s scared if he moves he’ll break something. “Dressing like this isn’t gonna get me out of the army. It hasn’t worked for two years, it’s not gonna start working now.”
“But you like it.”
“But I like it.”
“You should. God knows you’ve got the legs for it,”
“You know something, sir?” Klinger grins. “I sure am glad you’re not dead.”

Hawkeye stares at the envelope on the bed in front of him. Radar had brought the mail in an hour ago, with the assurance that he hadn’t read any of it but he did make sure there was nothing in captain Pierce’s letter that he wasn’t supposed to have, but he didn’t read it, honest. BJ’s already worked his way through two letters and half a box of cookies from Peg. But Hawkeye can’t even pick up the latest message from Crabapple Cove. Something about the handwriting on the envelope is different. It’s still unmistakably Daniel Pierce, but there’s something in the way the i’s are dotted and the 4’s were written that makes Hawkeye uneasy. He has to do it eventually, though. Rip the bandage off. He swallows the rest of his martini and slices the letter open.
A few clipped-together photos fall out before the letter. Hawkeye knows exactly what they are, at least well enough to turn so Frank and BJ can’t see them. He flips through them a few times, his stomach growing colder and colder, his hands getting shakier and shakier. There’s five pictures: Orin sitting stretched out on Lucy’s bed, Hawkeye’s head in his lap. The two of them laughing at something, blurry, since neither of them could sit still for very long. Orin smiling at something behind the camera, and Hawkeye leaning up, propped on his elbows. Hawkeye kissing Orin. Orin leaning in. All the irrefutable evidence he’d spent the better part of his life trying to cover up. His life is full of irrefutable evidence-- he’s thirty years old and a bachelor, he dances around questions of love and sex and girls at home better than any prima ballerina could, every loose floorboard and hidden coat pocket is stuffed with pictures and love letters-- and someone’s finally discovered some of it. He’s always known it would happen. He’s just spent all this time hoping, praying, that the someone wouldn’t be his dad. Sure, maybe he hates losing, but he can deal with it. God knows he’s had to. He can make it through losing anything, anybody, except one person. And Hawkeye knows before he even takes the letter out of the envelope that he’s about to lose him.

Dear Ben,
I wish that this letter, this discovery, was more of a surprise to the both of us. But given how carefully you have worked to keep all of this from me, I’m sure you already know what I’m going to say, and truth be told I have been worried that I would have to say it for a long time now. I had my suspicions about you and Orin. I had those same suspicions about you and all the friends you brought home for winter break in med school, and about you and your tent mates over there in Korea. I have had my suspicions, but I always assumed that your sense of right and wrong would eventually win, and prove those suspicions wrong. If it wasn’t a matter of morality, I hoped that at least you would feel some sense of responsibility to me.
It takes quite a lot, as you know, for anything to come between us. I can count on my fingers the times we’ve had a serious conflict, and on one hand the times I’ve really been disappointed in you. So you can understand what this means, what a blow it is to me to have to add one more to the totals. But there are some things I cannot abide. People have told me that I let you get away with too much. We would laugh at those people together. Now, I am looking at the way you’ve been behaving and wondering if they were right.
At any rate lines must be drawn. For the sake of the family name. For the sake of right and wrong. And, whether or not you see it now, for your sake. Here are the lines I am drawing: grow up. I’m not asking you to stop thinking and feeling the way you do (I would if I thought it was at all possible to change your mind on any issue), only that you stop acting on those thoughts and feelings. Some might see this as an overreaction-- this correspondence between you and Orin is from years ago-- but I know you. I see what parts of you have changed since then, and what parts haven’t. I know you haven’t changed in this regard. I am telling you that you must. Until you do, I can’t in good conscience let you into my house. I also won’t spend my money on postage. I suggest you don’t, either, until you have honestly changed for the better.
Daniel Pierce

“Fuck.” It hurts worse than the time he did ten hours of surgery with a fractured wrist because he couldn’t tell anyone it had been fractured behind a bar in Tokyo after he’d asked to see wrong Marine’s hotel room. It hurts worse than being left in the middle of a war without a note. It hurts worse than waking up alive every morning. He hadn’t even signed it ‘Dad.’ Nothing. No sign that he was anything more than a disappointed colleague. That’s what’s different about the handwriting: it’s completely sterile, emotionless. Hawkeye can’t help but picture it, fall back into a fantasy gone sour; his dad sitting at the kitchen table, glancing between an open shoe box and a blank pad of paper for a whole evening before finally deciding that there’s no point wasting any more time on someone he can’t even love anymore. No point staring at pictures of a man he’ll never look in the eyes again. And then he starts writing. The first draft comes off too angry, so he throws it out. The second one sounds like he’s asking for forgiveness, or an apology, or maybe both. He keeps writing and rewriting until there isn’t anything but the bare minimum: I know it, and I hate it. Goodbye.
Hawkeye knows it’s all his fault. Not just the letter, although he was the one stupid enough to keep all the pictures, when he should’ve burned them. Everything is his fault. It’s always his idea. He’s the one who slid his hand into Orin’s back pocket whenever the hallway felt empty enough. He asked all those boys in med school to come home with him, so he could show them the way the icicles look during a Crabapple Cove sunset. Nobody ever asks him for a drink. People don’t fall in love with him; he falls in love with them, and eventually they give up and say it back when he asks them to. The second he stops pushing so hard, he’ll be exactly the kind of son his father can tolerate having. As much as he hates to admit it, it would almost be easy to find a nurse or a USO girl and do everything he’s supposed to. He could buy her a ring with poker winnings and the two of them would show up on his dad’s doorstep and everything would be okay again, the past would be carefully forgotten. They’d have a kid together and send it to school on the money he’d make removing gall bladders. He could get through it. He can get through losing almost anything.
“Hawk, are you alright? It’s been a little too long since I saw you blink.”
He turns and looks at BJ, who’s all big blue eyes and five o’ clock shadow. Every thought about a nuclear family disappears in a mushroom cloud of what Hawkeye refuses to call love. It can’t be love, it has to be something else. He’ll figure out what it is eventually.
“Yeah, I’m fine. Just, uh, thinking about home.”
“I’m sorry you didn’t get your psycho discharge. If you really want I can get you that Section Eight.”
He means it as a joke. He says it with a smile, but for the first time since the war started, Hawkeye’s fear wins over his sense of humor.
“Please don’t.”
“I... okay. I’m sorry. Do you wanna know what Erin told Peg at dinner last week?”
“No. I mean-- sorry, I just gotta… I gotta go talk to Klinger about something.”

They’re in the supply room. Klinger takes inventory, walking between the shelves, careful not to step on the hem of his evening gown with his combat boots. Hawkeye sits with his back against a box of penicillin, drinking a bottle of scotch Klinger had produced from seemingly nowhere. It’s the exact place he was sitting when he tried to kill himself.
“At least it’s original. How many other guys over here are getting Dear Son letters?” he forces a laugh. “You can’t tell anyone about this,” he says, gesturing to the bottle and the red rings around his eyes. “They’ll think I’m gonna try to kick my own bucket again.”
“Are you?”
He stares at the case of sleeping pills directly across from him. “No.”
“You sure? I’d be thinking about it, if I had your dad, and he’d just… you know.”
“Cut the fag branch off the family tree, yeah. You know how mad he must be? Our tree only has two branches. Now it’s just a stick. He’d rather be a stick than--”
“Don’t think about it. Drink, and if you’re not seeing double, tell me how many boxes of gloves we’ve got over there.”
He squints, bleary-eyed, at the stack of boxes above him. “What would your family do?”
Klinger shrugs. “First off I don’t think they’d believe me. I got at least five cousins who got out of World War Two by getting themselves caught in the wrong bar.”
“What if they got a box full of pictures of you kissing guys, and love letters?”
He doesn’t respond for a few moments; the room goes quiet except for the scratching of his pen. “I guess they’d probably do the same thing your dad did. I don’t know if that’s what you wanted to hear.”
“Yeah, neither do I. There’s twenty boxes of gloves here.” He takes another drink of scotch and another glance at the pills across from him. Suddenly, he’s tired as hell. Exhausted.

The next morning he’s perched on the filing cabinet in Potter’s office, watching the colonel do laps around his desk. He feels like he’s been sent to the principal’s office. Or maybe the guidance counselor.
“Sidney asked me to check in on you. Ask whether the meds are working.”
“Yeah, they’re fine.” What is he supposed to say? That he spent all last night staring at the ceiling, wondering how many tries it would take to guess the combination to the medicine cabinet? That he hadn’t been lying when he’d told Sidney that death wasn’t on the table, but now that he didn’t have anyone to go home to, the idea was looking more and more enticing? “Slept like a baby.”
“Good. Listen, son…” Potter pours himself a drink. “This might be the worst decision I’ve made in my whole time in the army, but I don’t have any other choice. You’ve got to go down to battalion aid.”
“Can’t you send BJ?”
“They need two surgeons, and I can’t send Frank, because he left an hour ago for two days R&R. I really don’t like putting you back in the game so soon.”
Hawkeye shrugs. “I’ll be alright.” Really he’s fighting to keep from smiling. The front was too loud and too bloody for thinking, and a break from the constant thoughts of his father’s letter and whether it was possible to hang himself from a tent ceiling is just what the doctor ordered. He needs to drown it out. And, if all else fails, the front is the perfect place to get away from BJ and get himself shot.
“I’m not so sure you will be, but I don’t see what else I can do. The jeep leaves in twenty minutes.”
“I’ll go pack my swimsuit.”
Walking out of Potter’s office, Hawkeye feels a wave of something that’s so foreign to him lately that he doesn’t recognize it until he’s speeding toward the front. Relief. He’s finally getting out of his head, one way or another.

Chapter Text

Hawkeye pulls what has to be his hundredth tourniquet of the day tight around a solider’s leg, and takes what has to be his thousandth glance out at the war a hundred feet in front of him. It’s a short walk. Probably, if he’s obvious enough, he’ll get shot before he made it half the distance. There’s a lot of risk in the plan; for one thing, BJ is here, and there’s no way that Potter didn’t give him some kind of order to watch out for sudden movements, to keep an eye on the way he’s handling sharp objects. Also, if he’s even a little alive, they’ll take him back to the 4077, and this is the one time he wishes their survival rate was lower. But it’s so poetic: spending the past two years sewing up gunshot and shrapnel wounds only to die from them, spending his whole life avoiding the war and then being consumed by it. Had he already been consumed by it? A shell drops, and he curls over his patient. Feels the dust on his back.
When it’s safe to come up for air, the patient’s dead. Figures. He lines the body up with the others, trying his best not to look at its eyes too much (trying his best not to think about what his own eyes are going to look like, as soon as he gets the chance). By the time he gets back, there’s already another kid laid out for him. He can’t be older than sixteen. If it were any other time, Hawkeye would be able to detach from it all. Go back to Crabapple Cove. But for one thing, there’s nothing there for him anymore. His dad’s writing desk is vacant. Probably everyone he knows has erased his name from their Christmas card lists. And for another, BJ is working, ten feet away, so even if there was a fantasy to run to, he wouldn’t be able to reach it. Trapper had been the same way: inescapable. But somehow that had been different. He’d seemed to understand, and tried his best to come up with alternative ways to disconnect. Hawkeye likes BJ (is in love with BJ, probably), but the guy doesn’t know. He doesn’t even know that Hawkeye’s about to kill himself.
Engines roar behind him. Ambulances, and a jeep with their replacements.
“Alright,” the medic shouts from his station. “Finish up the men you’ve got, and you’re done. Thanks for the help, guys.”
“Anytime,” BJ says.
Hawkeye ties off his last set of stitches. BJ is still working. Everyone’s still working, and there’s a war going on, so no one will notice. He pulls off his scrubs and scrubs his hands in the nearest bowl of alcohol; he’s fine with dying covered in his own blood, just not someone else’s. He takes off his helmet. Then he starts walking towards the sound of gunshots.
He’s just past the relative safety of the med station when someone notices. “Hawk. Hawkeye!”
He gives BJ a salute-- the joking kind, he saves the real ones for Radar-- over his shoulder, and then he’s running.
A bullet whizzes past his ear. And then another one. There’s so much white noise in his head, he doesn’t even know if he’s been hit; he doesn’t even notice that someone’s pinned him to the ground until he realizes he’s fighting to get back up. He feels his elbow connect with a ribcage. BJ is stronger than him, though, he always has been. A bomb drops a few feet away from them, and somewhere through the white noise he feels himself being pulled away.

When his head finally clears he’s in the passenger seat of a jeep, halfway back to camp. Someone’s wrapped a blanket around his shoulders, and despite the fact that he resents it, because he’s not in shock and he doesn’t need to be babied and he should be dead anyway, he thinks that he’s probably never going to take it off. He suspects that whoever gave it to him is also the person who tied one of his hands to the bars under the seat.
“What’s with the restraints?” he asks. He doesn’t like the way his voice sounds. Too distant.
BJ stares straight ahead. “I had to make sure you couldn’t jump out of the jeep.”
“Oh.”
Suddenly he slams on the breaks and pulls over. Across the street, a shell is dropped, scattering dust everywhere. “What the fuck, Hawkeye?”
Hawkeye doesn’t say anything. Another bomb goes off further down the road.
“Can you just untie me please?”
“So you can run out and start begging the snipers to get you? So you can go jump in front of the next tank that comes our way? No!”
“No, I-I promise I won’t, just can you untie me?”
Finally, BJ turns and looks at him. There’s tear tracks through the dirt on his face. Slowly, he undoes the knot around Hawkeye’s wrist. He doesn’t pull his hand away, though. Instead, he laces their fingers together and keeps them there until they pull into camp, until they walk into Colonel Potter’s office. Hawkeye can’t tell if it’s for comfort or just a softer version of the rope. And he doesn’t know which one he needs more.

It’s an awful room to be in. All of them would rather be in OR, with the worst, most doomed casualties they’ve ever seen, than sitting where they’re currently sitting. It’s dead silent. Hawkeye sits perched on top of a filing cabinet, the blanket still pulled tight around him. BJ stands next to him, a hand on his shoulder. And Potter sits in front of them, elbows on the desk, head in his hands.
Hawkeye has never met a silence he couldn’t break before. His entire life, there’s always been a joke to break the tension, a story to keep the conversation going, a spur-of-the-moment idea to get him and everyone else in the room out of their heads for a minute. Now, there’s nothing. Absolutely nothing. He’s considering saying something about the weather, just to get Potter to yell at him for trying to make light of the situation, just so that someone would talk. But he can’t do that to either of the men with him. Not after everything else he’s done to them lately.
The worst part, he thinks, staring at the streak of dried blood on the hem of his blanket, is that no one who’s been watching him get worse will get to see him get better. If he gets better, if he doesn’t jump of the first American bridge he crosses, if his plane isn’t shot down on his way out of Seoul. He’s getting shipped out at rock bottom, and that’s all anyone’s going to remember. It’s standard procedure: you patch them up, you throw them back out, and you hope that they don’t pick at their stitches and that it doesn’t scar too bad and that they don’t render all your work useless and die the second they step back into the front. But you don’t know. He wants his friends to know. He wants them to see him better. Or, more selfishly, he wants them to see him dead. Either way, he wants them to see the end of all of this.
“Sir,” he starts. His voice still sounds funny. “I still have-”
“Captain, we already gave you a chance.”
“I can still help. You still need help.”
“The second I put a scalpel back in your hand, you’re going to use it to slit your wrists.”
He slams his hand against the wall. It feels good to feel something. “If none of you are going to let me fucking die, you can at least let me be useful!”
The grip on his shoulders tightens. He refuses to meet anyone’s eyes. The silence comes back and hangs around for a few more minutes. Finally he has to try, even though it’s futile.
“You can put me in a straightjacket, I’ll operate with my feet. I’m sure we can find a way to make it sanitary. And if that doesn’t-”
“Hawk, jesus, knock it off.” BJ lets go of him and walks to the other side of the office. There’s patches of cold on Hawkeye’s shoulders where his hands used to be.
“Radar!”
The office door swings open. “Yes sir?”
“Get Sidney on the phone, tell him we need him back here. And bring me the forms for a psycho discharge.”
Hawkeye can feel the kid’s eyes widen behind his back. “Did Klinger finally do it?”
“They’re, ah, not for Klinger.”
“Radar.” He hopes his voice doesn’t sound different to anyone but him. There’s no reason to scare anyone more than he already has. He leans around the filing cabinet so that they can see each other. “You’re a good kid. If you turn out anything like me I’ll have a fit.”
“Oh. Right. Yeah. I’ll go get the papers.”
The office door swings closed.

They’re keeping him in post-op, since someone’s always around to keep an eye on him. The fact that they have to keep him anywhere is enough to drive Hawkeye really crazy, but at least it won’t be for long. Potter is in the corner right now, telling Margaret that I-Corps already found another surgeon. Everything is replaceable. Everybody. He wonders how long it’s going to take for everyone to forget about him. Obviously he doesn’t think he’ll be completely erased from anybody’s memory, but eventually BJ will get used to seeing someone else in his cot, and when someone falls victim to a practical joke he won’t be the first suspect. His presence will fade. Henry’s did; all that’s left of him is a couple stories and a lingering sadness and fear that hangs over every conversation about going home. When people go into the C.O’s office, now they expect to see Potter. Trapper is just a name to half the people here. Hawkeye’s seen it often enough to know exactly what will happen; his absence will be felt, and then it won’t be. He’ll be here, he’ll be gone, and then he won’t be anywhere at all.
And maybe that’s a good thing. Maybe he’ll be replaced with someone better, someone less of a disaster, someone who can sleep and doesn’t break down every couple months and doesn’t fall in love with his happily married best friend and has never tried to kill himself.
Ultimately, everyone here is probably better off without him. Especially BJ. Everytime Hawkeye looks at the guy, he can’t help but feel like he’s laying some kind of elaborate trap. Like he’s luring BJ in with cheap jokes and homemade gin and a couple minutes’ escape from the war, and once they really care about each other, Hawkeye’s going to pull the trigger. He doesn’t even know what the trigger is. He’s going to pull it, though. And then neither of them will be able to escape. So it’s better that he’s leaving now.
Also, now that he’s leaving all his friends, and he can’t talk to his father, no one will have to be there when it gets bad again. It’s like how cats run off so that no one has to watch them die. Once Hawkeye is back in the States, and alone, he can scratch out a life for himself until he doesn’t want it anymore, and then he’ll buy some rope or prescribe himself some painkillers, and no one will notice or care until his apartment starts to smell.
He knows it’ll happen; he knows the way his will to live comes and goes in waves. This isn’t even the first time it’s happened since he arrived in Korea. A month before he left Trapper had tried to talk him back from the edge of the minefield, and when talking didn’t work he’d wrapped his arms around Hawkeye’s chest and dragged him back, practically thrown him back into the Swamp. He didn’t tell Henry, but he stayed close for the next week, and whenever they got close enough to the edge of camp for Hawkeye to make a run for it, he’d come up with a way to steer him somewhere else. And it goes back to before anyone was thinking about war, back to when Orin stayed up with him for three days straight to make sure he didn’t do anything stupid and when his friend in med school found him standing on the roof of their fifteen-story dormitory, just a little too close to the edge.
It comes and goes. It’s here now, somehow; he looks at Margaret walking between the patients and he’s filled with an overwhelming relief that running into enemy fire hadn’t worked out the way he’d planned it. But he knows that relief is going to fade into regret. It’ll probably be a matter of weeks when he gets home. If he keeps riding the wave he’s on, he probably won’t even make it off the airplane.
But he has to do that, at least. If there’s one thing he hates it’s unfinished business. The last thing he wants to be is a ghost, and the most satisfying part of surgery is the sutures. So he’s got to make sure his loose ends are tied off. Once he’s stateside, he’ll visit Trapper, get the last rites he missed out on. He’ll put some flowers on Henry’s grave. He’ll go back to Crabapple Cove, find a way to pay his respects to all the trees and sidewalks and tucked-away bodies of water. Then, he’ll sit back and wait for the inescapable urge to walk off a bridge or into traffic.
Until then, he has to figure out how to say goodbye to BJ.

“I thought you told me you were going to be okay, Pierce.”
“Things change.”
“Wow, no jokes.”
“Yeah, they’re not going over so well anymore. I think maybe I need some new material.”
“Well, you’ll have plenty of that in the States.”
“I guess I will.”
“Aren’t you glad to be heading home?”
“Not while there’s people who need me here. And I’m not going home. I’m going to go see Trapper.”
“Don’t you want to see your-”
“No.”
“All right.”
“Hey, wait a minute. I never said I was gonna be okay. That was all you. You promised.”
“And I’m sorry about that. I just meant you said you didn’t want to die anymore.”
“Oh. Well. Things change.”
“Can you make me a promise? I want you to get help. Real help, not just telling everyone you’re fine until you believe it. I got a list of places you can go.”
“Sidney, I don’t make promises I can’t keep.”
“Promise me. I don’t wanna see a guy like you lose to a war, Korea or otherwise.”
“I-”
“Promise me.”
“... I promise.”

The way Hawkeye packs his things is much less glamorous than the way he unpacked them. Despite what it looks like, he put a lot of thought into where each picture was nailed to the tent posts, where he stacked his books and magazines. Everything had been carefully arranged so he always had something to distract him from the war, no matter where he looked. But now all that matters is seeing how much he can fit into his duffel bag.
If it were up to him, he wouldn’t pack anything. Half his stuff is a reminder of home, and half of it is a reminder of Korea, and since he doesn’t want to remember either place it seems counterintuitive to take any of it with him. Plus, he’s not going to live long enough to find a place to put all of it once he’s back in the States. BJ had offered to help, though, and he figures it’s as good an excuse as any to be around him, to be close to him, to start saying goodbye. Plus he has to make room for the new surgeon.
“Potter says I-Corps found someone good, which I find hard to believe, but I guess we’ll find out tomorrow.”
Hawkeye crumples up his Hawaiian shirt and shoves it in his bag. “Is he taking over as chief surgeon, too?”
“No, Potter asked me to do that. Don’t tell Frank, though. I wanna keep it a secret for as long as possible.”
“You know what would be funny? If the new guy and Frank became best friends, and they ganged up on you, and then you were the new Frank. God, I’d pay to see that.”
“I think the idea of that just gave me an ulcer,” BJ says. He’s sorting through Hawkeye’s magazines. “Are you sure you don’t want any of these?”
“Yeah, positive. Give all the nudist ones to Radar, and you can keep the medical journals. I guess burn the Crabapple Cove papers, or wrap fish in them, or something.”
BJ shrugs. “You’re sure travelling light, considering almost everything in the Swamp is yours. Whatever happened to ‘take only memories, leave only footprints’?”
“I’m leaving my memories and taking my footprints. Just to switch things up.”
“You taking that blanket, too? They were using it to cover up a dead guy, you know.”
He stretches his arms out, letting the blanket fall over them like wings. “Poetic.”
BJ sighs, and stands up, and pulls Hawkeye in so that they’re standing less than half a foot apart. His hands are on Hawkeye’s shoulders again, warm and heavy and real. It would be so easy to close the rest of the gap between them. If he had just a little less hindsight, he’d do it.
“Are you gonna be okay?” BJ asks in a low voice.
Hawkeye shrugs under his hands, plasters a smile across his face. “Oh, you know me.”
“I’d sure like to. I wish you’d let me, sometime.”
“Maybe after the war. I’m gonna miss you.”
“I’m gonna miss you, too.”
“Beej, I, uh…” He's gonna say it. Is he gonna say it?
BJ cups his hands around Hawkeye’s face and presses their foreheads together. “I know. And sometimes, you’re there, and I…” he pulls away before Hawkeye has time to catch his breath. “I can’t, though.”
“You’ve got Peg.”
“I love her. And there’s you, but, I don’t know, it’s different. I’m always gonna choose her. You know that.”
It’s a good thing, Hawkeye thinks, that he’s incapable of feeling anything other than numb and a little relieved. Otherwise he’d be breaking. He steps back and shoves his hands in his pockets. “Of all the hospitals in all the wars in all world, you walk into mine.”
The Swamp door slams open with a rustle of satin. “Captain, your chopper awaits. And may I just say, a curse upon your family for getting out before me.”
“Okay, Klinger.” He closes his duffel bag.
“Klinger, give us a second.”
The Swamp door slams closed. BJ cuts out the space between them again. “I wanted to give you a proper goodbye.”
Before Hawkeye can think of a comeback BJ is kissing him. Three straight days of sleep and the total opposite of blood. He duffel bag drops to the floor. Soap and sweat and day-old gin. They put their arms around each other. Real mattresses and hot showers and socks in every color except green. And then it’s over. He picks up his bag again and leaves.

Chapter Text

Three blocks. The bus ride was almost as bad as the plane ride, in that it was hot and there were too many people and all of them were looking at him because he looks terrible, carrying a bloodstained blanket around and running on the four hours of sleep he got three days ago. He’d barely made it out of the airport alive; there were too many people, too many potential casualties. On top of that, a few people noticed the uniform and the dirt on his face and thanked him for his service. It took everything in him not to lift them up by the shirt collars and shout:
“Do you know how many kids died on my table? Can’t you see I left early? Don’t thank me. Or, if you have to, don’t do it like this. Go end the war or something.”
He hadn’t said any of that, though. He’d smiled and nodded and gotten out of the airport as quickly as he could.
And now he’s back home. Sort of. It hasn’t really sunk in that he’s never going to really be home, that he’s not going to walk through the kitchen door of his house in Crabapple Cove and sit at the table by the window while his dad makes coffee. He keeps reminding himself to think about it when he gets a chance, and to do it stone-cold sober. Right now, he has more important things on his mind. Like the fact that he’s back in the suburbs, and Trapper’s suburbs at that.
Two blocks. He’d barely had to say anything over the pay phone in the airport; it was like Trapper had been expecting him. He’d used the quarters he’d been keeping in his pocket since the day he left Maine. His dad had given them to him, said the only way he’d let Hawkeye leave is if he promised the first thing he’d do when he got back to America would be to call him. He’d listened to them clink to the bottom of the machine and told himself, yet again, to stop making promises to anyone.
Hawkeye blinks a few times and looks around at all the manicured lawns. The mailboxes. The evenly spaced cracks in the sidewalk. The storm drains in the street. His skin shrinks a couple sizes and his teeth glue themselves together. He’s never going to get used to it again, is he? He’s going to feel nervous around houses and yards and neighborhoods for the rest of his life. It’s because everything is taking the space it’s in for granted. He’s lived in a portable tent next to an equally portable hospital, surrounded by houses that were built to be destroyed in the next shelling and weeds that came up from the ground with helmets on, for the last two years. After all of that, something about the lace curtains he can see through the windows and the neat rows of flowers he passes seems irredeemably wrong. What are the people in those houses going to do when they have to bug out? His grip tightens on his duffel bag.
One block. And then there’s Trapper to think about. Ever since the other surgeon left Korea, all that Hawkeye has let himself feel is a dim sense of nostalgia, like how he misses the way his house smelled. He doesn’t know what would come rushing out if he really let loose, but he’s sure as hell about to find out.
Maybe this was a bad idea. It probably is. It’s necessary, though. He needs to cross all his ts and dot all his is, being of sound mind and body, before he gets the urge to run into traffic. He’s not even sure if it’s even faded completely since his stunt at the aid station, which brings up yet another problem: what does he even tell Trapper? The truth? They’d always told each other the truth before, about everything. Sure, they’d had problems-- one of them was always talking the other down from some kind of ledge, with wildly varying degrees of success-- but lying had never been one of their issues. Hawkeye had lied to BJ all the time. He’d made up stories after he’d used up all his good ones, he’d cover up his exhaustion with a smile whenever he could, he’d let BJ believe all the comments he made about the nurses. It would probably be just as easy to lie to Trapper, especially now that there’s a layer of resentment, the tiniest need for revenge in the back of Hawkeye’s mind.
He checks the address written on his hand. Looks up at the front door, set back behind a front porch littered with kids’ toys, looks at the car parked in the driveway. Then he looks back at his hand and notices there’s still blood around his fingernails. He can’t do this. He can’t bring the war home to anyone, but especially not to Trapper and his kids. If he can’t even walk through a neighborhood without almost throwing up, how does he think he’s going to react to a doorbell, a guest room, a whole life that isn’t just passing the time between casualties?
Before he can even answer the question, the door is opening.

It’s taken a lot for Trapper John McIntyre to come home from Korea. For almost a year, he’s spent his shifts at the hospital reminding himself that he has time to do an operation right, that there’s not a line of other wounded soldiers lined up outside the door. For almost a year, he hasn’t been able to hear the sound of airplanes overhead without instinctively ducking for cover. He’s had to relearn how to sleep through the night again, and actually taste food while he’s eating it. He’s stopped getting drunk on weekdays, for the most part. He sees his kids twice a week and kicks himself for not writing more, and then he kicks himself harder for not writing the 4077 at all since he got stateside. For the most part, he’s been trying to forget it. If he doesn’t, he thinks he’ll go insane. But he saves one memory-- he keeps a picture in his wallet. It’s of Hawkeye in Tokyo, drunk out of his mind, the shirt of his dress uniform halfway unbuttoned, grinning straight at the camera. He keeps it partly to remind him that he abandoned the closest friend he’s ever had in the middle of a war zone, and partly to remind him that someday, Hawk would come home, and they’d see each other again, and Trapper would finally get to say all the things he should’ve said before he left. He also keeps it as just a plain reminder of Hawkeye, of the way he looked that night, of his blue eyes and terrible posture and lopsided grin, and the way he made Trapper feel like maybe it wasn’t so bad that there was a war on, that it wasn’t so awful that neither of them could tell anyone else who they were.
But it’s going to be pretty hard to reconcile the man in the photo and the man standing at the end of his walkway. Because Hawkeye looks like shit. Trapper’s seen him after forty-eight hours of surgery, and so scared he couldn’t move, and so angry he couldn’t talk, and even then he looked better than this. He’s picking at his fingernails, and he’s so engrossed in it that he barely looks up when Trapper steps out onto the porch.
“What, are you waiting for an invitation, you vampire?”
Hawkeye glances up, looking almost startled, like he doesn’t know how he got there, or like he didn’t think he would actually be let in. But it only takes him a couple seconds to glue a cocky grin on his face. There’s something missing from it, and Trapper chalks it up to resentment. The guy could pull out a gun and shoot him point-blank and the only thing Trapper would see wrong with it is that he knows how much Hawkeye hates guns.
“I’m just being polite, Igor,” he says in a Bela Lugosi impression that feels a little rusty.
“Come here.”
They meet each other in the middle of the walkway, surrounded by grass and flowers that Trapper has to try too hard to keep alive. Hawkeye falls into him in a way he isn’t used to, his chin on his shoulder and his arms wrapped tightly around his chest. It’s unexpected, but it sure as hell isn’t unpleasant.
Hawkeye is a hard person to be in love with, sometimes. He’ll pretend he’s anyone but himself, just to throw people off his scent. He’s angry first, and every other emotion second, but he’s so carefully detached from everything that you don’t even realize it until it’s you that he’s angry at. To make it even harder, they’d met in the middle of a war, and Trapper was married, and had a job working for people who would fire him the second they found out about his personal life. But now that they’re together again, now that he’s back in his arms, it’s hard to remember any arguments against love. They pull apart, and Hawkeye grin fade into a tired smile. They walk towards the front door.
God, does Trapper know how to pick ‘em.

Hawkeye thought that he would be angrier. He thought that the second he saw Trap’s face, all the clutter in his head would part like the Red Sea to make room for the sting of rejection he’d been suppressing for, shit, over a year now. He thought he’d walk straight up and punch the guy in the face before he could even think about it. But all he feels, looking at Trapper standing on his porch surrounded by his neighborhood, is numbness. The pleasant kind, the kind that you only notice because it takes the place of something inescapably painful.
The house is nothing like he thought it would look like. BJ had described his house in painstaking detail, and Hawkeye had let him, because he knew that it was more about keeping his own memory than spreading it to other people. But Trapper had never talked about home aside from canned jokes about his wife and bits of the letters his daughters sent, so Hawkeye had let his imagination run wild. It was the second-best fantasy he’d had. He’d pictured something bigger, first of all. He hadn’t expected flower boxes under the front windows, and he’d expected those windows to be smaller. He thought things would be messier.
“What, are you waiting for an invitation, you vampire?”
He’s been standing there for too long. And, since he hasn’t decided whether Trapper gets to know the truth or not, since he doesn’t know if it’s become easier to lie to him, he has to make it seem like he’s okay.
“I’m just being polite, Igor.”
“Come here.”
They meet each other in the middle of the walkway, and Hawkeye doesn’t get how much he’s missed him, how much he’s needed someone who actually knows him, until he realizes he’s leaning on Trapper with practically his full weight. It’s nice. He wishes it had happened earlier-- that this was how he’d gotten to say goodbye, or that Trap had been there the past two weeks-- but he can’t say he’s mad that it’s happening now. They pull away, and he feels the jokes fall away, unprompted this time. He smiles a little. Trapper throws an arm around his shoulders and they walk into the house.

Trapper’s house is small, but it’s the exact kind of comfortable that Hawkeye is worried he’ll never be able to settle into. His daughters’ school pictures hang on the living room wall. There’s a couch with a few too many throw pillows and a coffee table crowded with children’s books and medical journals. Something’s in the oven. Music cuts quietly through the static of the radio next to the fireplace. Down the hallway, there’s a door cracked, and Hawkeye can see two twin beds with purple sheets. There’s a whole life here-- a life he shouldn’t be intruding on, with his blood-covered boots and his psycho discharge. He should’ve just gone back to Maine, back to his own house, and dealt with the consequences. He could probably handle whatever wrath Daniel Pierce was sitting on, and even if he couldn’t, he could always just die.
“Are you okay sleeping on the couch?”
He blinks a few times, and it’s enough to pull him out of his thoughts and throw him headlong into his usual persona. “I’d rather bunk with you, if your wife doesn’t mind.”
“She’s living on the other side of town.”
“Trouble in paradise?”
“We got divorced, Hawk.”
“Oh.”
Something passes between them. An acknowledgement of how far apart they’ve grown, maybe, or a realization that they were never as close as they thought they were. Hawkeye knows Trapper’s likes and dislikes, his fears, and the way he falls in love, like the back of his hand, but that comes with being stuck with someone. He’s realizing that he barely knew anything about Trapper’s real life (especially compared to BJ, who was barely able to talk about anything else). More than that, he’s realizing that he wants to. All at once he wants to know the name of every street Trapper’s ever lived on, and in return he wants to tell him every locker combination he can remember. But he can’t, because he can only stay until he gets back on his feet, and works up the courage to use those feet to walk off a high-rise.
“I’m guessing I know why,” Hawkeye says, gingerly putting his duffel bag in a corner of the living room. They’re standing in the middle of it, neither of them sure how far apart they should sit from each other.
“One of her friends saw me leaving a bar with a guy.”
“And you’ve still got your job?”
“She didn’t tell anyone. Not even her lawyer.”
“What, does Louise have some secrets of her own?”
Trapper laughs, and the sound comes out so easy that Hawkeye can almost relax. “I don’t know. The girls come over every weekend, though. You’ll get to meet them if you stay an extra night.”
Hawkeye gives him a noncommittal nod and looks around. His eyes land on a newspaper, neatly folded on the seat of the armchair by the fire, and something about it pushes him over the edge. He wants to go home. He just went through hell and he wants to go home, why is that too much to ask? He wants to not be scared of being comfortable, to stop tracking the distances between him and other people, to be able to fall asleep and stay asleep and not make himself stay half-awake listening for choppers. Jesus, he wants the ash trees in his backyard, and mattress with the bad spring in the corner, and his dad’s laugh that always managed to reassure him that things are still funny, that he’ll always have him to fall back on. It doesn’t feel like he’s asking a lot. But somehow it’s all impossible. His dad probably changed the locks on the doors. The only home he ever had got ripped away from him in a letter, and he’s not going to live long enough to find another one. He’s sure of that. He’s not even particularly mad about it. But all of a sudden he’s wishing he had something to leave behind.
Trapper puts a hand on his arm. It’s so uncharacteristically gentle that Hawkeye doesn’t even think to pull away. “Everything alright? I know I’m no master conversationalist, but I’d hoped I was more interesting than the furniture.”
“Sorry.” He needs to pull himself together.
“I get it. I get it.” He squeezes his arm and lets go. “Sit down, I’ll get us some drinks.”
Hawkeye can’t even find it in him to crack a joke at that. All he can say is “Thank you.”

Chapter Text

It’s nice to be getting drunk on something that doesn’t taste like lighter fluid. And, as long as he avoids looking at that newspaper and the framed photographs on the bookshelves and all the other signs of life, he’s finally starting to relax a little. He and Trapper have fallen back into their old dynamic, playing double solitaire and swapping jokes and stories. He’d been legally dead for a couple days. Margaret’s getting married, and not to Frank. Klinger was going to light himself on fire until Radar replaced the water in his fuel can with real gasoline. Someone had come in and exorcised the operating room.
“Sounds like fun,” Trapper says, flipping over a card. “Almost a shame that you got all your points. You could’ve written a book or something.”
Hawkeye freezes. It’s almost too easy. The lie is all set up for him, laid out nice and neat for him to pick up and run with. If he was talking to any other person, he’d do it. But they know each other too well. Hawkeye owes Trapper the truth, no matter how ugly it was, and even if he didn’t Trapper’s always been able to tell when he’s lying. And this is one of the times where he wouldn’t let it slide. “Yeah, uh, I didn’t exactly get my orders.”
“What do you mean?”
Is it too late for him to back out? It’s probably too late. He gives it a shot anyway. “I’m AWOL. If anyone asks, my name is Harry Truman-- no relation-- and I-”
“Hawk.”
“How come people keep doing that to me? Everyone thinks they can just say my name like that and all of a sudden I’ll stop being a rat bastard. It’s gonna take a lot more than that for me to de-rat myself.”
“Hawkeye.”
“Fine, christ, I’ll de-rat myself.” He sighs and downs the rest of his scotch. “I got a psycho discharge.”
Trapper flips another card. “Took too much of Sidney Freedman’s money in poker?” he asks in a measured voice.
“He owed me twelve dollars. And he had a pretty good excuse to ship me stateside, seeing as I, uh, tried to kill myself and everything.”
Something about the silence that follows is much more manageable than it had been in Potter’s office a few days ago. Maybe it’s because this silence wasn’t so angry at him. Or because this was more of a beginning than it was an end. He couldn’t tell. At any rate, waiting it out takes a lot less effort.
“‘M sorry.” Trapper’s voice is soft, which isn’t something Hawkeye is used to. He could get used to it, though. In Korea, they both responded to vulnerability by getting louder, harsher. But maybe this is just what Trap’s like outside of a war zone. Softer. It’s nice. “D’you want another drink?”
“Yeah, thanks.”
He gets up and rummages around in the kitchen for a few minutes. Hawkeye ventures a look around him, and he notices a picture, frameless, propped up against an encyclopedia set. It’s a snapshot from Henry’s farewell dinner. Before he can decide whether to smile or start crying, Trapper is back with a second bottle of scotch. “So what- I mean- did you- I mean, someone stopped you, obviously.”
“Yeah, well, the first time I went to Potter, and everyone decided I was fine after that, and then a week later BJ had to stop me. And now I’m here.”
“Shit.”
“He tied me to a jeep.”
“There’s not gonna be a ‘third time’s a charm’ situation, is there?”
“No. I don’t think so, anyway.”
Hawkeye looks back at the picture of them and Henry, and suddenly there’s tears in his eyes. He thinks they might have been there for a while, and he just forgot to notice them. “‘S a good photo,” he says, and then he really loses it.

It’s properly dark by the time he stops crying. All the lights in the houses across the street have gone off; a few times, between the tears, he’d looked up and noticed the people in the houses eating dinner, or listening to the radio, and he’d hoped they couldn’t see him. But now he didn’t have to worry about that. They’re on the couch, his head on Trapper’s lap, his fingers running up and down the chain of his dog tags. He really thought he’d feel better. Usually, when he breaks down like this, something comes out of it. It ends with him having some kind of epiphany or revelation, or making an important decision about how to live his life post-collapse. But that didn’t happen. He doesn’t feel any less shitty about the way he left his friends in Korea, or any less guilty about all the wounded he’ll never fix up, or any less heartbroken over the letter from his dad. It’s all still there. The only difference is that now, he’s dragged Trapper into the whole mess with him. It’s good that he’s leaving tomorrow, that all of this is temporary. Because right now, with Trapper’s hand running casually through his hair, it’s so, so tempting to make it permanent. If it weren’t for the fact that he’s going to be dead by next September, or for BJ Hunnicutt and his shit-eating grin still hanging around somewhere in Hawkeye’s chest cavity, it would be irresistibly easy to unpack his duffel bag here and never leave. He’d make coffee every morning and they’d take the bus to work together, and then they’d come home and he’d make dinner. It’s tempting, but it’s not sustainable. And besides, Trapper wouldn’t go for it. No one would. Everyone can tell just by looking at him that he makes shitty coffee and he’s never cooked a meal without burning something beyond repair.
He doesn’t feel better. The only improvement between being here and alive and being in Korea and almost dead is that when he’s tired he can sleep it off.
Trapper takes his hand away, and Hawkeye shivers a little. “Hey, I gotta be up in five hours, I’m gonna go to bed. You’re… I’m glad you’re here. You’re gonna be alright, I think.”
He stands up and replaces his lap with a pillow. He’s gentler than Hawkeye’s ever seen him. The two of them spent so much of the war angry-- at the brass, at the Pentagon, at each other-- that it had barely occurred to him that anger was more a part of the war than it was a part of either of their personalities.
Trapper is halfway out of the room before Hawkeye realizes he’s not gonna make it through the night without him. Sleep? Here, in this room full of things he shouldn’t be allowed to touch, fresh out of the worst two years of his life, his knees still a little scraped from when he tried to run into enemy fire? With nothing but himself and his stupid fucking thoughts? He’s capable of a lot-- working in a MASH had taught him that much-- but he can’t spend the rest of the night alone.
“Trap?”
“Mmm.”
“Can you, uh, d’you mind staying?”
Hawkeye watches in the darkness as a smile breaks across the other man’s face. “Of course.”
He comes back and they settle in for the night, both of them sprawled across the couch, no space between them whatsoever. Hawkeye lets his head fall into Trapper’s chest and closes his eyes. Maybe, if he wakes up early enough, he’ll make the two of them coffee. In the meantime, he’ll sleep.

Chapter Text

Hawkeye wakes up, warm and dimly aware of someone gently shaking his shoulder. Beneath his head, someone’s chest rises and falls. BJ’s? Did he fall asleep on a patient in post-op? It wouldn’t be the first time he’s done either of those things. But when he opens his eyes he’s staring at a real ceiling, the kind where you can pick out shapes in the drywall treatment, like clouds. And before he can figure out if he’s really, finally home, Trapper’s voice is in his ear, soft and crumpled with sleep at the edges, and it all comes back to him,
“Not that I’m not having a good time or anything, but I’m gonna be late for work.”
“Right, sorry,” Hawkeye grunts, sitting up enough for Trapper to untangle himself and get up from the couch. “Thank you, by the way. For staying.”
Trapper shrugs. “It beat sleeping alone. D’you want breakfast or anything? I make a mean plain toast.”
Barely twelve hours and they’re already sleeping without any space between them, eating breakfast together. If he doesn’t get out soon, they’ll have made a life together, in this house. The worst part is that he would like it. He’d fucking love it, until he remembered that he was better off dead. And Trapper would love it too, maybe, until he realized that Hawkeye wasn’t built to be loved. Until Hawkeye was gone. He pulls away from the lingering hand Trapper’s left on his shoulder. “As delicious as that sounds, I think I’m just gonna go back to sleep. I got a long flight tonight.”
“Aw, you’re not staying?”
Hawkeye shrugs and lays back down.
“I guess you should go see your dad. The guy’s probably gone crazy, missing you so much.”
“Yeah, I gotta get back before he finishes weaving that shroud and has to choose a new son.”
If he can tell it’s a lie, Trapper thankfully chooses to ignore it, and walks into the kitchen. He emerges a few minutes later with two cups of coffee. “One for the road.”
They drink it mostly in silence. Hawkeye savors all of it: the smell and taste of coffee that isn’t glorified tar, the solid walls around him, the sound of cars driving down the road outside. The presence of someone who wasn’t forced to be here. The possibility of conversations about something other than injuries. Maybe he shouldn’t leave. He has to leave. Well, he has to sleep. He puts the cup down and closes his eyes.
“Hold on a second, Van Winkle. When am I gonna see ya again?”
“Oh, they’ll have me home by Christmas, honey. Don’t you worry.”
“I mean it, Hawk.”
He’s sick of questions he doesn’t know how to answer. The last two weeks have been full of them, and he just knows that they’re all he’s going to get if he actually goes back to Crabapple Cove. “I don’t know. But I’ll see you again, okay? You’re not getting rid of me.”
“Promise?”
Goddamnit. “Promise. And I’m sorry for pooping my own welcome home party.”
“Who gives a shit? You needed it. Get some sleep.”
“Don’t have to tell me twice.”
He closes his eyes again, and is slipping out of consciousness before he even realized he was coming to the edge of the cliff. Just before he crashes at the bottom, he hears Trapper say goodbye on his way out the door.
“I’m glad you made it back, Hawk.”

There’s exactly enough change in his hand for a twenty-minute call to Maine. That’s assuming Daniel Pierce, MD, actually takes the call, and doesn’t hang up as soon as he hears his (ex) son’s voice. At his feet, there’s a duffel bag, packed for either an eight hour flight or an aimless hitchhike to Illinois. He’s decided that if he’s not allowed home he’ll go see Henry. The coins fall through the pay phone slot with a couple hollow thuds, and he talks to the operator in a voice wound so tight he thinks something in his throat might snap. His fingernails are breaking the skin inside his clenched fist. His leg bounces on the floor of the phone booth. That feeling is back again: that completely unfounded feeling that he’s going to drop dead at any second. Is his dad’s voice going to sound like his handwriting-- completely unfeeling? Is he gonna lose out on the one thing that’s been keeping him going through this lousy goddamn war?
Hawkeye knows he can’t go back to his house, that eventually he’s going to forget the color of his childhood bedroom’s walls and that’ll be the end of it. But if he can’t even walk down his favorite streets, look in the windows of the tiny general store, or scuff the toe of his boot over the spot where he’d carved his initials into the sidewalk back when it was new, or look at all the trees that lined the neighborhoods, all bright red and dull gold, or walk down to the Cove and watch the kids run out of the water, freezing cold, and the whales in the distance, if he couldn’t do that, he didn’t even know if he’d make to Illinois.
The real problem is that he’s terrified of going home. Even if he ignores the fact that his father is there, slowly turning his hometown against him, he’s had a growing suspicion that his expectations are too high.
The phone rings a few times. He knows his father's home, because it’s six pm in Maine, and every night by six he’s home and knitting by the window while he waits for the dinner in the oven to finish cooking. Hawkeye knows, because he spent more than half his life with the guy, doing his homework at the kitchen counter or playing Texas hold ‘em or peeling carrots over the sink. And that whole time, whenever the phone rang, Daniel Pierce answered it. So now, if he doesn’t, Hawkeye’s going to know that he broke the habit on the off chance that he was going to have to talk to his son.
That’s why it’s almost a relief when he picks up on the second to last ring. Almost.
“Pierce.”
“Yeah, same here.” Hawkeye bangs his hand against the pay phone to stop it from shaking. “Hi, d- uh, hi. It’s me.”
“Benjamin. Hi.”
“Hi. Okay, greetings are out of the way.”
“Did you get my letter?” His voice is careful. It’s only like that when he’s angry.
“Yeah, a few days ago.”
“Are you calling to apologize? To tell me you’ve changed?”
He’s gonna die. He’s going to die. His heart’s gonna fail, right here, right now. “Um, not exactly. I just… I’m back in the states, and I thought you might want to know. I’m, uh, I’m in California right now, but I was planning on coming up to Maine for a couple nights. I’ll stay in the inn, don’t worry. I just thought maybe you should know. That I’m back. I’m back.”
There’s a few seconds of empty static through the phone. Then: “So you’re still a faggot.”
Hawkeye’s a thoracic surgeon; he should know what this twisting feeling in his chest is, so tight he can’t breathe. The phone booth is too small, but as soon as he leaves it he’ll be in the real world, and that’s too big. Everything in his head shuts down except the pilot light, the basic functions. Breathe in. Breathe out. Answer the man on the other end of the phone call, the man who used to be his family. “Dad, I-”
“You’re an adult, you can make your own decisions. You have the freedom to go anywhere, even places you’re not welcome. Come back if you’d like. Stay at the inn.”
“Right. Well, I’m back.”
“Congratulations.”
The line goes dead.
He slides down the glass wall of the booth until he’s sitting on the floor, a tangle of long legs and phone book pages. God, he’s so sick of crying. He’s had enough of whatever’s going on in his chest and his head. After two years of doing everything in his power to stop feeling-- stop feeling like shit, specifically, stop feeling like he was about to die-- he thought he would’ve gotten good at it by now. But somehow he’d never picked up the habit. He’d picked up plenty of other habits; he can’t go three hours without a drink, he regularly loses half his paycheck in poker, and he works those forty-eight hour shifts on purpose, not because he just has that much of a savior complex (even though he does), but because when he’s sewing people back together, he doesn’t have time to think about anything else.
Where the hell is he going to go? Illinois, maybe, but then what? He’s a good doctor, he can get a job anywhere with a hospital or a small-town clinic. And he has enough saved up to rent an apartment until he hangs himself from its bedroom ceiling. That’s not the problem. The problem is that he’s never going to be able to build himself another home. The only reason he’s close with anyone is because he’s gotten close to people exclusively in places with limited options: a tiny town in rural Maine, or a college campus, or a post in Korea where the nearest city was forty-five miles away. Wherever he goes now, people will have the whole world to choose over him, and that’s exactly what’ll happen.
Even when the options are limited, people still find something to put before him. He can’t blame them. BJ has a wife and kids, of course he’s not going to leave that behind. Daniel Pierce has the closest thing to the American dream, a steady job and a decent-sized house in a town straight out of a Norman Rockwell painting, there’s no real reason for him to drop all that for Hawkeye. It makes sense. It’s the logical conclusion.
But he still doesn’t know where he’s gonna go.

A knock on the phone booth door pulls him abruptly out of his thoughts and into his body. His legs are burning from the awkward position he’s sitting in, and he’s shivering in the autumn evening. He rubs his eyes and pulls himself up, assuming someone else needs to make a phone call. He’s in the process of wondering who they’re calling, and what the other person will say, and whether the next call made on this phone will cause the same crisis he’s currently having, when he realizes that he’s face-to-face with Trapper, staring at him through a wall of fogged-over glass.
“Either the airline has made some budget cuts, or you’ve missed your flight.”
“What time is it?”
Trapper opens the booth door. “Five-thirty. I just got home from my shift.”
“Shit.” Hawkeye placed the call at three. He’s losing time. That’s a sign of going crazy. He’s really cracking up, isn’t he? It’s finally coming to a head.
“You alright?”
“Yeah, it’s just…” Everything’s so fucking hard. He needs something easy. Something like hearing Trapper’s voice every morning, or a real shower in a real bathroom, or food that he doesn’t have to eat with his nose plugged. He can’t let it last forever, he knows, but at this point, he doesn’t have any other options. He falls forward, leaning his forehead against Trapper’s chest. “Can I stay here a couple more nights?”
“Stay as long as you like. ‘S a good thing I got enough takeout for two people.”
“Genius.”
“They offered me a career as a psychic, but I was so surprised about it that they took it back.”
Hawkeye laughs against the fabric of Trapper’s shirt. It’s so, so easy.

Chapter Text

The first thing Hawkeye does once he’s back inside Trapper’s house is take a three-hour long shower. He doesn’t even let himself feel bad about the fact that he runs through his friend’s entire hot water tank in the first forty-five minutes. This is the first moment in two years he’s had all to himself, and he’s going to make it last. Not only that, he’s going to scrub until every speck of Korean dust on him is halfway out to sea, somewhere in the labyrinth of the San Francisco sewer system. It was a beautiful place; he wishes he hadn’t participated in ruining it. He scrubs until the fine layer of grease in his hair is gone, until the dirt that settled into the cracks of his skin that he never had time to wash off is gone, until the blood under his fingernails is gone. And then he just stands there for a while, cold water rushing over him, staring at the shower tile. The grout is chipped in some places; growing mold in others. He closes his eyes and listens to the running water echo off the solid walls, and hit the solid floor beneath him. If he never sees canvas again it’ll be too soon.
He’s about to open his eyes when he hears something else. Helicopter blades, somewhere overhead and far too close for comfort. Underneath them, the sound of running through dust, and shouting. A crackling “incoming wounded!” over the loudspeaker.
So which parts were a dream? How long has he been asleep, thinking up a new life for himself that would take him out of the war? He thinks that maybe he’ll open his eyes and the poker game will only be a couple hours old, and those two queer kids will still be back in post-op, and all the almost-dying will have just been a fantasy to get him through the night. Everything his dad said will just be a nightmare. Or maybe he’ll wake up in the Swamp, his stomach fresh out of sleeping pills, ready for a round of lectures and psychoanalysis that’ll pass in a few days of unpleasant deja vu. It doesn’t really matter. He still has to wake up. There’s still wounded piling up outside, and half of them are still gonna die on his table. He clenches his teeth and prepares for the disappointment of a lifetime: waking up in a war after a two-week dream about leaving it.
And then all of it’s gone. The choppers, the sounds of the hospital rushing to get ready, everything. He puts his hand out and it connects with something solid. He opens his eyes and he’s staring at the shower wall. Slowly, he turns the water off and climbs out. Obviously he knows the signs of combat fatigue, the same as every member of the 4077, through a combination of training and firsthand experience. He’s talked soldiers out of flashbacks, and seen kids wired so tight that he had to warn them three different times before touching them. And that’s just him; half of his conversations with Sidney are about the psychiatrist’s patients. He knows what it looks like. He just assumed he was never close enough to the front lines to have it.
There’s a knock at the door, and the noise sends him straight into fight-or-flight mode. Every attempt he makes to calm down, to take a deep breath or remind himself of his surroundings, fails, and the fact that he can’t get a hold of himself just makes him all the more nervous.
“Everything alright in there? Food’s cold,” Trapper says.
“Yeah- yeah, it’s okay. I’ll be, uh, I’ll be out in a second.” The tone of his voice, coupled with the lack of any kind of humor, means that his cover is blown. Struggling to get his heart rate down, Hawkeye pulls on his t-shirt and the pair of non-army-issue pants Trapper gave him (they barely fit, but if he spends one more second in uniform he’ll explode) and opens the door. “Hi.”
Trapper gives him a once-over. “So it wasn’t just the green washing you out. You really do look like shit.”
He can’t even bring himself to laugh. All he can do is push past the other surgeon and stumble down the hallway in the direction of the kitchen. He needs… what? A drink? More sleep? To take Sidney’s advice and check himself in somewhere until he figures his shit out? It’s probably some combination of the three, but it’s been so long since he had the time to pay attention to what he needs, so long since he really needed anything except to be out of danger, that even if he could sort it out he’s not sure if he’d be able to take care of himself. And there’s no way in hell he’s asking anyone else for something. People don’t help him; he helps them, and he’ll say it’s out of altruism and the Hippocratic Oath but it’s really because of an overblown savior complex.
Trapper follows him down the hallway, which would be nice if there wasn’t someone following him down the hallway. The walls are already closing in; the footsteps approaching behind him don’t help. And he’s gotta catch his breath, he can’t breathe, it’s bad enough that his heart’s gonna fail at any moment. Now all the oxygen in him is getting replaced with adrenaline.
“Hey, I was just kidding. I think you’re as pretty as ever.”
“I just- it’s- can you- can you just stop, stop moving for a second?” He presses one hand flat against the countertop. It’s solid. This, at least, is solid. For a second, his lungs almost expand to their full capacity. “Just gimme a second.”
Trapper stops on the other side of the doorway, leaving enough room between him and it for Hawkeye to escape back down the hall. There’s no reason for that to make Hawkeye feel any better, but there’s also no reason for him to be freaking out in the first place, so he takes what he can get and focuses on remembering how to breathe.
“You’re okay,” Trapper says. “It’s safe.”
“Yeah.”
“You’re safe.”
Hawkeye nods.
“You made it out, Hawk. It’s alright.”
Trapper’s voice and the reality of the countertop win. The adrenaline fades into shakiness, and he takes a couple breaths. He’s okay. It’s safe. It’s alright.
After a couple minutes, Trapper takes a cautious step forward. Hawkeye nods in approval, and he crosses the threshold into the kitchen.
“Any idea what that was?”
“Oh, that was just my impression of a man losing his mind.” He starts pacing. “I’ve got enough going on, you know? I got a goddamn psycho discharge, the last thing I need is more psycho. It’s just… I’m crazy. My brain was the third casualty of war, right behind truth and high-schoolers who thought their country gave a shit about them.”
“It just takes a while to readjust.”
“I finally leave Korea, and it follows me home. Can’t even take a shower in peace.”
“Take it from a guy that the war followed home. It gets easier.”
They stare at each other. Hawkeye’s not going to believe him, but it’s nice to hear anyway.

Trapper watches Hawkeye pick at his food. Not for the first time, he wonders if the skipped meals and slow eating are a product of the war or a sign of a bigger problem. Not for the first time, he reminds himself that even if they had the kind of relationship where he could ask, Hawkeye wouldn’t accept any help. He never has. Every single time, Trapper’s had to force it down his throat. The worst part is, he’ll keep doing it, every single time, regardless of the consequences. When he’d drugged him to get him to sleep, Hawkeye hadn’t talked to him for a week. That week after he’d pulled him off of the edge of the minefield, when he followed him around to make sure he’d be there if it happened again, Hawkeye took every opportunity to complain and insult him. Trapper hadn’t even cared; he’d just been grateful his best friend was alive enough to bully him. That’s the problem with being helplessly in love with someone.
He can’t really figure out why he didn’t say goodbye. It wasn’t for lack of opportunity; he could’ve gotten a later flight, or finished any of the twenty different letters he’d started and torn up after the first few lines. He could’ve painted it in huge letters on the side of the Swamp: “Goodbye. I love you.” He hadn’t, though. And now, looking at the way Hawkeye’s hands won’t stay still, like the second he lets them someone’s gonna grab them and pull him back into the war, he thinks that maybe he’ll never get the chance. That if he says anything now, it’ll be overshadowed by the great looming fact that he left him to live out another year in that war alone. He’s scared of apologizing, because an apology means admitting he did it on purpose. He’s scared of giving reassurance, because he knows it’ll be harder for Hawkeye than it was for him, and he doesn’t want to make empty promises. He’s scared of showing affection, because he knows that Hawkeye will reject it on the grounds that he thinks he’s unloveable. They’re stuck. Both of them want to get closer, but they’ve rigged it so that if one of them tries, the other gets pulled further away somehow. Really the only way to fix it is to walk away. But that’s the problem with being helplessly in love with someone.
Trapper thinks about the picture in his wallet, the one of Hawkeye in Tokyo. The person in that picture isn’t real, he knows. They were both trying so hard to forget who they were, so that the war wouldn’t drive them insane, and most of the time they succeeded. There had only been a couple moments where they were both themselves at the same time, and they’d been so brief that Trapper can’t really remember them. All he wants is for those moments to outnumber the ones where they’re pretending. Even if one of those moments is right now, watching Hawkeye struggle to concentrate on the Chinese food in front of him. Even if it means figuring out why he never said goodbye.

Chapter Text

With the unspoken agreement that Hawkeye isn’t moving out any time soon, their days fall into a kind of rhythm; a rhythm that would be comforting if Hawkeye wasn’t on edge waiting for it to be interrupted by casualties and if Trapper wasn’t going crazy trying to figure out what he wants and whether he should say anything once he does. They make breakfast together. Trapper has eggs and Hawkeye has coffee that is sometimes accompanied by toast and usually accompanied by a shot of whatever’s at the front of the liquor cabinet. The few times he’s confronted about this, he assures Trapper that he eats while he’s at work, and neither of them are ever awake enough to continue the conversation. They sit at the kitchen table to eat, swapping sections of the newspaper and talking just enough to keep the house from falling into silence. Then, Trapper leaves for work, slamming the door behind him, and Hawkeye is alone.
He thinks it’s good for him, to finally have some privacy. Sure, the fact that he’s got no one but his thoughts keeping him company is a recipe for disaster, but so far he’s managed to make it nine hours every day without hanging himself from the light fixture in the dining room, and he calls that success. He reads a lot. He meets up with friends from med school sometimes, and deflects questions about marriage and war with expert skill. He’s better at it than he is at surgery, at this point. He takes the bus into the city and wanders around, looking at all the people, the kids on field trips and the women running errands and the men taking business lunches. It was easy to forget how isolated he was, in Korea. It was equally as easy to forget that people are different when they’re not running from bombs or filled up with shrapnel. Typically, they’re happier. It’s nice to be around happy people, even if it’s just another piece of evidence that he’s never gonna make it. Another goal he’s never gonna reach.
At lunchtime, he stares into Trapper’s fridge and cabinets and tries his best to find anything appetizing. It’s not that he doesn’t like anything, it’s that ever since he got back the only way he can eat is if he doesn’t think about it. Just the thought of making food for himself, and eating it alone, usually sends his breakfast careening up his throat. He doesn’t have a good explanation for it— Sidney probably would, but the guy is a day and a half ahead (behind?) of him and a couple of psychiatric buzzwords aren’t going to change the fact that his stomach and tastebuds are trying to starve him to death. Maybe they’re trying to make it easier for him to pick a method to die by. At any rate, he has to eat. It’s medically necessary. So he makes another piece of toast.
Then he drafts a letter to his father. He never makes it beyond the first paragraph, but he keeps trying, anyway. It’s always something different. Sometimes it’s just a recounting of recent events, an attempt to keep up the casualness of the letters he sent from Korea. Sometimes it’s unchecked anger. Sometimes it’s an apology, and a promise to try his best with the next girl he meets. But he can’t stop himself from picturing the man flipping through the mail and seeing the name on the return address and throwing the envelope in the trash, unopened.
By the time Trapper gets home, Hawkeye’s usually in the middle of cleaning something. Part of it is because of guilt, that he’s taken over Trapper’s couch and free time, but most of it is that he’s finally back in a space with dishes to wash and bathrooms to clean, a space where he doesn’t have to sterilize everything and when he mops the floors, the water in the bucket doesn’t end up bloody. They eat dinner together— usually takeout— and Hawkeye can get through almost all of it without choking, because the radio’s on and Trapper is recounting his day at the hospital, so he almost doesn’t notice the fact that he’s eating.

On Fridays, after school, Kathy and Becky get dropped off by their mom and don’t leave until Saturday night. They take to Hawkeye immediately. He’s not good with kids by any stretch, but all he really has to do is go along with what they say, and eventually the three of them get along so well that sometimes Trapper agrees to stay a couple hours late at the hospital.
Tonight, when Trapper gets home, Hawkeye’s sitting in a blanket fort that he spent the last two hours constructing. He hasn’t been thinking about whether or not he wants to be alive for hours. There’s a paper crown on his head that Kathy made him. There’s pasta cooking on the stove. It’s good, and he’s almost convinced that it isn’t a dream, that he’s not going to wake up to the sound of ambulance wheels outside his door.
Here, the front door opens and shuts. The girls jump up and run towards it, greeting Trapper with the kind of chatter that Hawkeye’s been fielding all evening, unsure of where the energy to keep up with it is coming from.
“We built a fort!”
“‘N uncle Hawkeye’s the king!”
Trapper bursts out laughing and lets them drag him into the living room. He laughs even harder when he sees the fort, and Hawkeye lounging inside of it, trying to look as kingly as possible.
“I see you guys have been having fun.”
“What, you’re not bowing? That’s treason. Guards, execute him!”
The girls shake their heads and laugh. Hawkeye makes a show of rolling his eyes and climbing out of the fort. “It’s impossible to find good staff these days.”
Trapper is grinning from ear to ear. “You better keep that crown on, Your Majesty.”
“One more word from you and I’m gonna start charging you for childcare.”
“One more word from you and I’m gonna start charging rent.”
“You make some good points.”
The dinner conversation is so distracting that Hawkeye eats everything on his plate and goes back for seconds. It’s the one meal out of the week where he doesn’t spend the whole time fighting an uphill battle with nausea, so he tries his best to take advantage of it. Becky talks them through her whole week at school, and he thinks that he can’t be dreaming, because he couldn’t make this shit up if he tried. After dinner, he cleans up the kitchen while Trapper puts his kids to bed, and he thinks that he can’t be dreaming, because he can feel the water on his hands as he rinses the dishes and he can hear Trap reading Stuart Little from down the hallway. He’s not really sure how he got here, but it has to be. It really has to be, because if it isn’t this is usually the moment where things start to venture into nightmare territory, where blood starts dripping from the ceiling or a bomb blows the kitchen windows in.
None of that happens, though. Instead, he finishes cleaning and pours two glasses of brandy. He puts on a Peggy Lee record and sits on the couch. Outside, it’s October. The wind is blowing leaves toward the ground. No one is dying. It’s nearly enough to make him think about a future for himself. For a split second, he wants Friday evening after Friday evening, October after October; a house somewhere close to the water, back in Maine. A family, maybe, somewhere down the line. But he manages to stop himself before he gets too far, remind himself that it’s all off-limits. That this feeling is all too temporary, and in a few weeks he’s going to be right back where he started. That even if that part wasn’t true, and a future was a possibility, no one will ever want to be part of that future with him. He could fall harder, and try harder, than anyone ever has, but no matter who the other person was, they’d get sick of him eventually. They’d run out of patience, or realize that two-thirds of his personality is a lie and the remaining one-third is the worst part, or they’d catch a glimpse of what he’s like on the bad days and decide to cut their losses, quit while they’re ahead. He won’t blame them. He doesn’t blame BJ, or any of the men before he got drafted. It’s just the facts of his life: it’s going to be short, and it’s going to be lonely, and both those things are going to be completely his fault.

Trapper comes back and turns down the record player. “They’re asleep,” he says with a half-smile, sitting down a little closer to Hawkeye than necessary. “Thanks for your help.”
“It’s easier than babysitting Frank Burns.”
“Hey, you don’t get to pretend like you were the mature one over there. If anything, he was babysitting you.”
Their laughter fades into a not-entirely-comfortable silence. It’s charged with something, but Hawkeye can’t place what. He drums his fingers against his knee. The blanket fort is still set up in the corner, its floor strewn with pillows and toys.
Suddenly, Trapper is on his feet, holding out a hand. “Let’s dance.”
“No thanks, I came here with the prom queen.”
“Come on, soldier, live a little.”
Hawkeye isn’t really sure what’s going on, but he’s tipsy enough and desperate enough to get out of his head that he doesn’t care. He shrugs and stands up, making a show of curtseying before he slips one hand into Trappers and places the other on his shoulder. Trapper’s hand rests in the middle of his back, warm and a little heavy. There’s enough space between them to keep Hawkeye’s ribs from shrinking around his lungs.
A new song starts, and they’re swaying to the beat, a little out of practice, trying their best to avoid the furniture as they move around the room. Time slows down a little, and it feels like all the extra noises from the street outside and the dishwasher and even the static from the speakers cuts out. All that’s left is the music and the sound of his own breathing mixed with Trapper’s and the slight pressure of their hands on each other. Trapper closes his eyes. Hawkeye stops paying attention to how far apart they are from each other, and before he’s even aware of it they’re closer than they’ve ever been, his arm wrapped completely around Trap’s shoulders, their hips brushing against each other, Trap’s hand sliding down his spine and resting just above his waistband. He lifts his head up, his chin gracing Trapper’s jaw, and in response Trap opens his eyes and looks at him, looks right at him, and the air between them is soft and warm, it tastes like brandy and something sweet. They’re so close to each other, there’s hardly any space left between them, all Hawkeye would have to do to close the gap is lean in a little further and-
“Wait.” Hawkeye pulls away, lifting the hand off his back and shoving his own hands in his pockets. “No, I can’t do this. You’re, you know, I mean, shit, you’re great.” He takes a few more steps backwards, almost falling over the coffee table. “You’re amazing, really. I don’t know how you do it. But I can’t. Do this.”
“Is it Hunnicutt?”
“It’s- no.” He realizes with a jolt that he hasn’t thought about BJ since he got here. “It’s just I promised my bishop back home that I’d wait until marriage.”
“I thought you were Jewish.”
“My rabbi, then. Look, I don’t know why. There’s a lot of shit I don’t know. Why do your kids like me? Why does every kind of food look about as appetizing as mess tent surplus that’s been run over by a truck? What the hell am I gonna do with the rest of my life, and how am I gonna get there when all I’ve got is two dollars and the beginnings of a nervous disorder? Why’d my dad stop answering his phone? Well, okay, I know the last one, but the rest of them? Search me.”
“I get it.”
“You’re the best friend a guy could ask for, Trap. And if I could give you more than that, I would. But-”
“You can’t.”
Hawkeye shakes his head.
“Okay.”
“Do you wanna sit back down, or-”
“I think I’ll just go to bed. Sorry.”
“Me too.”

Hawkeye’s hands are shaking as he takes his sheets and blankets out and puts them on the couch. Whatever had just happened, he can’t let it happen again. Otherwise, Trapper’s going to start being the guy he thinks about when he thinks about the future. If that happens, he’ll end up losing Trapper. He doesn’t think he could handle that. Especially not now, when he’s the person whose couch he’s sleeping on and the only person who knows how to talk him down from the edge. This is what happens when he lets himself climb into the space between him and other people: everyone gets hurt.
He promises himself that he’ll remember to keep his distance from here on out, and turns his attention to BJ for the first time in a month. BJ, who he clearly isn’t as in love with as he thought, who he thought would be haunting him from the other side of the international date line, but somehow isn’t. Hawkeye thinks that he’s just had other things to focus on, that with everything he’s been dealing with, heartbreak is the least of his problems. But even now, when he’s really thinking about it, his heart doesn’t feel all that broken. So maybe it had just been the circumstances: the war, the secrecy, the fact that BJ was so much the picture of what people are supposed to be, with his wife and his new house and his smile straight out of a magazine ad. But didn’t that mean that Hawkeye was so bad at being in love that he couldn’t even distinguish whether that love was real or not? He’s never been good at feelings of any kind, but he’s always banked on the idea that, if everything else failed, he’d at least know for sure when he was in love. Now, he can’t even trust that.
It’s not like it matters. He’s quitting human connection cold-turkey after tonight.
Before he falls asleep and seals the deal, though, he allows himself one last thought of a hand sliding down his back, and brandy-scented air.

Chapter Text

Halloween in Crabapple Cove hadn’t been much of an affair. There weren’t that many houses to begin with, and enough of them were inhabited by antisocial retired fishermen that at least half those houses were locked and lightless. Up until he got to old, and gave it up in favor of getting plastered and finding a boy to hook up with under the docks, Hawkeye could trick-or-treat through the whole town in less than an hour. He’d spend the rest of the night eating all the candy with his dad. Every year, he’d get sick off it, and every year, his dad would let him stay home from school the next day.
He tries not to think about that tonight. Not while he’s helping Kathy and Becky put in their vampire teeth, and not while he sits on the front porch with Trapper, a bowl of candy in his lap. It’s a good night. It’s coming on the tail end of a good day. He can’t afford to ruin it thinking about places he can’t go home to. He knows how it looks, the newcomer sitting a little too close to a recently-divorced man, only a short bus ride from downtown San Francisco, but as usual he doesn’t care enough to lie. Between watching the neighborhood kids running around, the war nothing but a vague mention in the letter their dads and brothers sent them, and the October breeze that carries a little bit of harbor and almost smells like Maine, Hawkeye feels like maybe his heart is moving back up from the pit of his stomach. Maybe his skin is crawling back into place. He eats more than half the chocolate, and he doesn’t feel sick.
At one point, a neighbor lingers on the porch while her kids run to the next house, catching up with Trapper. Her laughter is measured enough, though, and the smile she directs at Hawkeye just wide enough, that it’s obvious what she’s really there for. Hawkeye recognizes the look, and the tone, better than he’d recognize his own sutures. He’s skirted his way around enough questions from classmates and bosses and boyfriends’ families to see one coming from a mile away. He knows how he looks. He knows how all of it looks: sitting just a little too close to a recently-divorced man with his knitting supplies at his feet, a few minutes’ bus ride from downtown San Francisco. And, as always, he’s tempted to lean into it, to keep pushing until the other person asks him outright, or tells him what they think. But, as always, he can’t do it. Especially not to Trapper, who would end up as collateral damage and probably have to move to a new neighborhood. He works something about a wife back home into the conversation, slips his left hand into his pocket in case she’s still suspicious, and does his best to look like the kind of person who has a wife and a home. Trapper shoots him a grateful look as the neighbor walks away. When he gets up and asks Hawkeye if he wants another beer, his hand lingers on his shoulder for a few seconds more than it should. They talk the whole evening; talking fast, and hardly saying anything, except for an undercurrent in all their words, cutting through every punchline. Neither of them can say they’re not enjoying themselves.

Later, sometime closer to midnight than anyone intended, they tuck the girls into bed and end up playing cribbage on the porch, squinting to see the suits in the streetlight. It’s cold, but the chance to be outside without having to know a password or duck under sniper fire is too good to pass up. Trapper watches Hawkeye, who’s wearing a sweater under his bathrobe and is halfway through a story about his senior prom and the boy he met up with behind the gym, licking his finger before he deals the cards.
In his head, Trapper says: Are you mad I didn’t say goodbye? If I said it now, would it change anything? Does it matter now that you’re here and you sleep a room and a half away from me and we eat together every day? What really made you stop, the night we were dancing?
Really, he says: “I wish you’d’ve dressed up.”
Hawkeye makes a noncommittal noise, places two of his cards aside. “What would I have even been?”
“Pippi Longstocking.”
“You know I don’t look good in stripes.”
“Okay, so Snow White.”
“Her, I could manage.”
“You two look alike.”
“That’s what I’ve always said.” He’s smiling in the lopsided way he does when he’s not paying attention. Trapper drinks it in; he can count on one hand the times he’s seen Hawkeye Pierce stop trying, even for a second. He’s always on alert, checking over his shoulder. Sometimes it looks like he’s calculating how many inches of space there are between himself and every other person. And Trapper doesn’t blame him. But it’s nice to see his pulse slow down a little.
Maybe the stunt with the dancing had been a bad idea. He can’t tell; they’re both well-versed in the art of pretending something never happened, and usually it’s a good thing, but now it’s making him lose his mind. It’s not that he doesn’t mind waiting for Hawkeye to figure things out. He’s been waiting more than two years; what’s a few more? But he needs to know whether waiting is an option. If he’s allowed to keep the hall light on for when he comes home, or if he never should’ve turned it on in the first place. If he should frame the picture in his wallet or throw it out. Whether or not he should keep the car running. Maybe all he did was confuse things. He doesn’t care, though. He’s stupid that way. He’ll keep his foot in the door even when it keeps getting slammed on him, all in the name of the half-formed idea that eventually, the two of them can really leave the war behind. Because that’s what it all comes down to. It’s all about this idea that if he leans into Hawkeye hard enough, and if Hawkeye leans back, then the army and the prying neighbors and their own screwed-up heads will fade into the background.
In his head, he says: If I woke up to your hands in my hair every morning, I think that I’d stop hating mornings. If we could do this every night I think I’d understand why people like settling down. I have this stupid fucking notion that you’re going to be happy someday, and I’d like to help you get there.
Really, he says: “I’m glad you’re feeling better, Hawk.”
He pauses mid-deal, blinking at the cards in his hand, and then laughs it off. The smile’s gone. “Don’t get your hopes up.”
“The hell does that mean?”
“I just mean that even if it’s been a while since my last lapse in sanity, I’ve still got a pretty short expected lifespan. I barely made it in Korea, and that was with everyone looking out for me. Jury’s out on how long I’ll make it here.”
“You got me.”
“Trap, I’m not putting that on you.”
He glances at his cards. A pair and two fifteens. Lucky. “I got nothing else going on.”
“Sure.”
“Just… can you promise something?”
Hawkeye shrugs.
In his head, Trapper says: Stay. I know I’m a hypocrite, but stay. Stay in my house, or in San Francisco, or if you can’t do any of it just stay among the living for a couple more years.
Really, he says: “I don’t care when you move out. But come back next Halloween.”
Usually he can tell exactly when Hawkeye is lying. It’s easier than it seems. His whole posture changes, and he cracks more jokes. But for once, Trapper can’t for the life of him tell if he’s telling the truth.
“I promise.”
“And if you could eat something between now and then, that’d be great, too.”

It rains for the next two weeks straight. Hawkeye curls up in an armchair with book after book, killing time. When Kathy and Becky get cabin fever he takes them to the movies. When it’s lunchtime he eats as much as he can stomach; it usually isn’t more than a few bites, but hey, he’s trying, isn’t he? Even if he’s only trying so that Trapper worries about him less, and he only cares about that because he doesn’t want Trapper to be too torn up when his best friend doesn’t make it to thirty-five. When a plane whines overhead, he closes his eyes and clenches his fists, fends off the approaching sound of jeep wheels, the lingering smell of antiseptic. It’s always over after a few minutes. He can deal with anything, for a few minutes.
As much as he can, he keeps some amount of distance between him and Trapper. In the hours that he spends alone, he looks for job openings in hospitals outside of California. He calls his friends in Chicago and asks if they know any cheap places to rent, tells them that it doesn’t have to be nice, he’s spent the last two years in a tent they’d dubbed the Swamp. If he was a different kind of person he’d stay here forever. But he’s stuck with who he is, and who he is creates collateral damage. Minimizing that damage is the only thing he can do. That’s why he doesn’t love Trapper.
There is one thing, though: he made a promise. Even with all the ones he’s broken, he made a new one.
In the hours that he spends alone, Hawkeye keeps ending up in the middle of a room, unsure of how he got there, unsure of the color of the walls. Sinking. The quickest solution is never more than ten feet away. There’s a razor by the sink, or Trap’s car keys on the coffee table. He could guess the combination to the gun safe in five tries or less. But he’ll stare at the nearest way out until he blinks first, and then he wanders into another room.
He’ll move out as soon as he can. And then, he’ll make it to next October, even if it kills him.

Chapter Text

He’s in OR alone. Maybe there were people helping him when he started, but he thinks they must all be dead now, killed off by whatever force is keeping the casualties pouring in. He can’t tell who’s bringing them, but no one’s taking them out again, so every time he loses a patient he has to just push the body off the table onto the floor and wait for another one to appear. He can’t remember the last time he saved someone.
The room is full of bodies, and his is the only one still warm. There’s nothing he can do but work, cutting open chests and stomachs with shaking hands. His hands have never shook during surgery before. Blood, lots of it, has somehow soaked through his gloves. It’s splattered up his arms. It’s everywhere.
The bodies keep coming. He can’t really call them patients at this point, because they keep dying earlier and earlier in the procedures. He’s barely had time to put the last few under. The ones he’s pushed out of the way are stacked higher than his knees now. Most of them are still dripping blood, still full of shrapnel. What is he going to say to the families?
Bodies keep piling up. He should be one of them. The anaesthesiologist dropped dead ages ago, so the patient on the table screams a few times before his eyes finally go blank. He slides the eyelids closed and shoulders him off the table, where he lands with a dull thud on top of someone else. Hawkeye’s pockets are heavy with dog tags.
The next kid on his table is wearing a Halloween mask. He pulls out a bone saw and starts hacking, but he’s not fast enough, as usual. His scrubs are completely red now, soaking through the clothes he has underneath and into his skin.
Suddenly, a chopper blade cuts too close to the roof of the building, tears off most of the roof on its way down. It’s pouring down rain, and after a few seconds the whole room smells like wet canvas and hair. Hawkeye climbs under the table for shelter. The bodies stack up around him, trapping him there, but keeping him dry, at least. He peels off his gloves and burns his copy of the Last of the Mohicans for heat and light. It’s almost peaceful, almost quiet. He leans against the metal leg of the table and wipes a blood-covered sleeve across his forehead.
The walls of corpses start dripping blood. And water starts flowing under them. He doesn’t really worry until the fire goes out, and he realizes the space he’s carved out for himself is going to flood. He tries the walls, but they don’t budge. They’re trying to keep him in, to get their revenge. He can’t blame them, but at this rate he’s gonna drown. The water and blood are up to his waist. Then his chest. Then his shoulders, and he’s slamming his head against the table, trying to lose consciousness, so at least when he dies he does it in his sleep, but the water and his instincts win, and by the time it’s up to his neck he gives up and takes the deepest breath of his life. A few seconds later he’s drowning, he’s falling past all the plants that live in the swimming hole and he can’t catch his breath, the stacks of dead soldiers won’t let him out and he can’t catch his breath, he’s drowning, he’s drowning, he’s—

Pinned under Trapper John McIntyre on the living room floor. He grabs one fistful of carpet and another of Trap’s bathrobe collar; they stay like that until Hawkeye gets the water out of his lungs, remembers where he is. The second he lets go, Trapper backs up, like he can sense the claustrophobia setting in.
“You okay?”
Hawkeye gives him a shaky thumbs-up as he fights his dinner back down into his stomach.
“It was just a dream. Freud, remember?”
“Yeah. Five foot eight, fucked his mother.” There’s still water in his lungs, blood on his skin. “I’m alright. I just need…” to make his rounds through post-op? To kill himself? To finish writing the letters to all the soldiers he killed, and keeps killing in his absence? What?
“I just need a drink.”

Chapter Text

“Some dream.”
They sit on the counter, on either side of the kitchen sink. There’s a bottle of vodka between them that Trapper had been saving for a special occasion. He’d brought it out two hours ago with a pair of shot glasses, though, and the unceremonious decree of “hell, it’s special enough now.”
Hawkeye throws another shot back. “Yeah, some dream. I hate drowning. ‘M never gonna die that way.”
“Well, how d’you know?”
“‘Cuz I’m gonna pick. An’ I’m not gonna pick drowning, y’know?”
“Hawk, you’re not gonna pick.” Trapper’s hand falls onto his shoulder, heavy and warm.
“Don’t worry, I’m gonna fix it so you won’t miss me. It’ll be fine.”
“The hell are you gonna do that?”
He shrugs, then winks.
“You’re gonna be kinda lonely, if you do.”
“‘S alright, though.” Hawkeye pours another shot. He spills a lot of it on the kitchen counter, and watches it settle into the grout between the tiles. “Some people jus’ aren’t s’posed to be loved. ‘S always jus’ me, who’s doing it. Not the other person. But it’s alright. I think it’s a good thing, ‘cuz no one’s gonna miss me, y’know?”
Both of them get angry in the same way. It starts quiet and stays quiet. So when Trapper pulls his hand away, quiet, when his voice gets low and tight, Hawkeye listens.
“Don’t you dare say that. Not to me.”
He takes the shot and starts pouring another. “What d’you mean, to you?”
Trapper slams his hand against the counter with a dull thud. “How’d you make it through med school with that big, thick skull of yours? I’m in love with you, Hawk.”
The walls shake. Then they start closing in. “What?”
“You heard me.”
He’s lying. He’s got to be. And if he’s not, it’s still not really him talking. It’s all the snares and nets that Hawkeye sets up, the way he pulls people close to him and then ties them there, but he never meant to get anyone really stuck. People aren’t supposed to be in love with him. It’s genetically impossible. He’s a one-night stand and a grade-school crush and a joke that’ll happily let people run away when things get too scary. And they will, they always do. People aren’t supposed to put up with him— they’re not supposed to want to, anyway, and isn’t that what love is? He’s got to get out of here, he’s got to leave without saying goodbye, cut all the strings he threaded between himself and Trapper, cut the guy loose. He jumps off the counter and staggers toward the shrinking door, but Trapper catches him, spins him around so they’re facing each other. He’s everywhere; he’s inescapable.
“Hawkeye.”
“Hey, I don’t think your kitchen was this small five minutes ago.”
“I love you.”
“I’m sorry. I’m really sorry. I’m s-”
He kisses him. It’s messy, it tastes mostly like whiskey. Hawkeye’s hands find Trapper’s chest, and he’s about to push him away, but something stops him. It doesn’t feel like the opposite of blood, because that’s what’s keeping them alive and warm and standing in the kitchen. It’s more like the opposite of anaesthesia. He closes his eyes, and his hands travel up, around Trapper’s face and into his hair. Trap’s hands move down, one settling on Hawkeye’s waist and the other slipping into his back pocket. They lean in at the same time, and suddenly Hawkeye has never seen a war zone or a shrapnel wound. He’s drunk and hungover and stone-cold sober all at the same time. And then it’s over.
“I’ve wanted to do that since you got off the chopper in Korea,” Trapper whispers.
“Mmm.” He wraps his hands around Trapper’s neck. The kitchen walls have retreated, but there’s still too much tying the two of them together. He’s still too much to love, and besides, he doesn’t even know if he can reciprocate. Sure, they fit together in a way Hawkeye didn’t know was possible, and yeah, the only thing he wants to do right now is kiss him again. But it’s probably only because no one’s ever beat him to the punch before. He’s only standing there because Trapper said he loves him, and Trapper only said that because he did such a good job of tricking him into believing that he’s a loveable person. It’s two-way Stockholm Syndrome.
“What are you thinking?”
“Trap, you don’t want this.”
“Yes I do. And so do you, I can tell.”
Is there anything about him that he doesn’t know? Hawkeye untangles himself and backs into the kitchen doorway. “I… I have to be right, all the time. At any expense.”
“I know.”
“I’m a raging alcoholic, and probably a workaholic, too.”
“Aren’t we all.”
“The only food I know how to cook is French toast, and- and even then I always burn it.”
“So I’ll make dinner.”
“I’m probably gonna get up and leave in the middle of the night, a few years down the line.”
“Now you’re just making shit up.”
“Okay. Okay, you want something that isn’t made up? Every couple months I get it through my head that the world is better off without me, and if we do this, you’re gonna be the one stuck convincing me otherwise. And eventually you’re gonna fail.”
“Hawkeye. I love you. ‘N I know you don’t get it, on account of you can’t stand yourself and I never said goodbye. I could stand you forever, though, I think. And don’t say shit, because I know what I’m signing up for. It doesn’t change my answer. I know you can’t sleep, and you’re competitive as shit, and you never shut up ‘cuz you’re scared of what you’re head’s gonna do when you stop talking, how the hell wouldn’t I know that? I know it all, and I just happen to think you’re worth staying up every night and letting you win at checkers. And I talk too much, too, so that part’s not gonna take any effort, anyway. I love you.”
“I don’t brush my teeth. It’s disgusting.”
“It’s gonna be you. French toast or not.”
Hawkeye closes his eyes. “Say goodbye.”
“What, now? Why?”
“‘Cuz I need to know if it’s gonna be you, too.”
“Goodbye.”
He opens his eyes. “You’re sure about this?”
“Have been for two years.”
He’s never seen someone else’s blood. He’s never heard a gunshot. He’s never though about how he’d look hanging from a ceiling. He’s in love, definitely. “Kiss me again.”

Chapter Text

“Y’know something?”
“Hm.”
“You’re a lot better when you don’t have to worry about knocking over the penicillin supply.”
They’re lying in bed, and Hawkeye’s tracing circles on Trapper’s stomach.
“I think I was pretty good then, too.”
Hawkeye makes a noncommittal noise and kisses him. He imagines a series of photographs: the two of them sitting stretched out on Trapper’s bed, Hawkeye’s head on his chest. The two of them laughing at something, blurry, since neither of them can sit still for very long. Trapper smiling at something behind the camera, and Hawkeye leaning up, propped on his elbows. Hawkeye kissing Trapper. Trapper leaning in.
Of all the things he thought he’d be feeling, a little over a month into his civilian life, Hawkeye would’ve never guessed uncertainty about the future. Because when he left the 4077, he was sure he didn’t have one. But now, with the promise of next October looming on the horizon, and this very messy thing, fine, he’ll call it love, laying next to him, there were a lot of variables to consider. He didn’t know if it had always been Trap, because he’s spent a long time loving people he was certain wouldn’t ever love him back; BJ, and a string of boys in med school, the Marine who’d kicked him unconscious the last time he’d gone to Tokyo. Maybe that was all just to distract him, to keep him out of firing range of anything real, or maybe this is just the latest and greatest in a string of very real things. And where is he going to live? And what’s he going to do? The idea of setting foot in a hospital turns the edges of his vision gray. Navigating Trapper’s neighbors sounds like a nightmare. If it were possible for the two of them to never leave, to lay here under the covers until it’s safe to come out, Hawkeye would just settle in and call it a night. He thinks, if they never had to move, the feeling in his chest might never come back; he might never want to die again.
He doesn’t want to want to die. Probably he’s going to, over and over again, for the rest of his life. But he doesn’t want it. That, at least, is new. And at least somewhat a side effect of being curled up in bed with Trapper. There’s a part of him that’s thinking maybe he should take Sidney’s advice, spend a couple weeks in a padded room or an hour a week on someone else’s couch. He doesn’t really think it would help, but he also doesn’t think it could hurt. For the first time, it’s not just about the possibility of taking someone down with him; he doesn’t want to go down, period.
At any rate, he’s got to call the 4077. Most of them probably think he’s dead, that he jumped in front of the first speeding train he saw. For the first time since he left Korea, he lets himself think about the war, about all the hearts he’s not piecing back together and all the legs he’s not ripping off.
“What’re you thinking about, baby?” Trapper asks. Nobody’s called Hawkeye any pet names before, except as a joke. He thinks he could get used to it.
“It’s just— we left a lot of people behind.”
“In Korea?”
“Mm.”
“It’s alright. There are plenty of people who can teach Radar how to shave.”
“‘S not what I meant.”
“Those kids are in good hands. And you didn’t leave them, you just left the war. Take it from an expert on leaving people.”
Hawkeye props himself up so he can study Trapper’s face. “Is that what happened?”
“Whaddya mean?”
“I mean, did you leave me? Or did you just leave?”
Trapper’s eyes search the space behind Hawkeye, and he heaves a sigh. “I don’t know. I got my orders.”
“Yeah yeah.”
“But I should’ve said goodbye.”
He falls back onto Trap’s chest. “What would you have said?”
“What, in the note?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay, uh, dear Hawkeye.”
“Mm. Good start.” He closes his eyes and listens to the words through the gray matter between awake and asleep.
“Dear Hawk,
I’m sorry it’s taken me so long to tell you this, but I hate rushing into things. I know it sure doesn’t seem like it. On the outside I’m a walking shotgun wedding. But you of all people know how important a good cover-up is, the, uh, the value of a good facade. I guess that means I’m also sorry I didn’t let my guard down in front of you more often. And now I don’t know if I’ll ever get to make it up to you. I hope I get to, though, some day. Hope to god.
I love you. Maybe that’s just because you’re the only guy in the unit I can talk to without wanting to bash my skull in, or because you’re the only thing here that isn’t ugly. Maybe the only reason I love you is because I don’t have any other options. I don’t think I want other options, though. If I had them, I think I’d still choose you. All this is a shitty thing to say right when I’m leaving town. There was never a right time to do it, though. We’d finally get a moment to ourselves, and then the choppers would come. We’d be sitting in the dark in the Swamp, and I’d almost get up the courage to tell you, but then you’d launch into a story from home or your plan for the latest scheme and suddenly everything was so perfect that I thought anything I could say would ruin it all.
Someday, we’ll get a moment to ourselves. We’ll be sitting in the dark, and I’ll finally get you to shut up for a second. Until then, hang in there. Don’t do anything stupid.
Goodbye. Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye.
Signed, Trapper.
Hey, you’re asleep. You weren’t even listening.”
“Yes I was.”
“I’m over here pouring my heart out and you’re napping!”
“I was listening.”
Hawkeye feels him take another deep breath. “What do you want, baby?”
“Hmm.”
“With this. This, I don’t know. What do you want?”
He can’t make out if he’s talking in his sleep or not. Either way, he must be dreaming. “I wanna go home.”

Chapter Text

“I’m glad to hear you’re doing better, son.”
“Me too. Hey, now that I’m out of the army, can I call you Sherm?”
“Wish you wouldn’t.”
“Whatever you say, Sherm.”
“So where are you headed, now that you’re out of the woods?”
“Trapper and I are moving back to Maine. I’ve got it on good authority that the one doctor in Crabapple Cove is getting close to retiring age.”
“I suppose you do. Well, everyone over here misses you. That’s not to say we wish you were here. But we miss you.”
“Yeah, I miss everyone, too. How’s my replacement?”
“Spends most of his time trying to get back to his nice post in Tokyo. Takes an hour just to scrub in. He’s no Hawkeye Pierce.”
“For one of those you’re gonna have to cross the international date line, I’m afraid.”
“I know it’s selfish, but I wish like hell that the war hadn’t gotten to you so hard.”
“Oh, it’s not the war, it’s the humidity.”
“Pierce.”
“I know. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t apologize, son. It gets to all of us in some way or another.”
“Think of me every time you do an appendectomy.”
“You’re a damn good doctor and a damn good man. I hope you know that.”
“Trap certainly thinks so.”
“Well, I’m glad he’s around to remind you.”
“So am I.”

Chapter Text

They walk home from the clinic every night. Hawkeye keeps his hands in his pockets— there are some things he’s still working up to— but he lets Trapper throw an arm around his shoulders when they’re mostly alone. They take the longest possible route home. As they walk, Hawkeye leans in and points to all the different landmarks: his initials in the sidewalk from when he was twelve, the tree he had his first kiss under, the road he crashed his first car on. Trapper hangs onto every word. The streetlights come on around them, and when they look through the windows of the houses they pass they can see all the families having dinner.
He tells a lot of jokes. Not like the kind he used to tell. Real ones, that make him laugh as hard as everyone around him. He tells them kind of quietly, leaning into Trap’s shoulder as they round another corner, like it’s part joke and part reminder: “we’re together and alone, and there isn’t any space between us.”
Trapper knows he never knew Hawkeye the way he is now, so there’s no way he could’ve missed it. But seeing Hawkeye happy like this, somehow he’s coming home to something. And he’s glad as hell to be back.
Their house is small and blue, and the shelves are crowded with two lives’ worth of books and all the photographs they could find of the 4077. Every night, Trapper unlocks the door, and the two of them take off their shoes and kiss, long and deep, like they’ve got all the time in the world. Hawkeye makes dinner, usually, spends the entire time warning about his cooking abilities, about how it’s going to be burnt to a crisp. It’s always good. At least, it’s always edible. They eat and laugh until their stomachs hurt, and then they turn the radio on and dance. They keep the curtains closed— there are some things they know from experience it’s better to hide— and they step on each other’s feet a lot. But they dance.
Almost every night, these days, they sleep until morning, a tangle of limbs and the smell of shampoo, a real mattress underneath them. It won’t ever be perfect; there are still nights where one of them wakes up shaking, covered in blood or dust that takes a while to fade back into memory. But it’s okay. There’s a pair of arms around them the whole time, and a voice telling them they’re safe. So it’s okay.

On Friday nights, they close up the clinic and walk the opposite direction from their house, up the front steps of Daniel Pierce, MD. This part took a while. At first Hawkeye came alone. At first, he didn’t even go inside, just stood on the porch until he was sure no one was coming to the door. And then, when he was finally allowed in, the visits never lasted long, and they always ended in screaming. It was slow. Sometimes it was so slow that Hawkeye thought giving up might be better for everyone, and Trapper was inclined to agree with him. But they had time to wait. And now, once a week, the three of them eat dinner together. Daniel asks Trapper about his football days and teases Hawkeye about his quickly-graying hair. And they revel in it: at the time they have together, at the life they’ve come to have.

Hawkeye still gets tired sometimes; the heavy white web of exhaustion doesn’t stop looming right behind him. Sometimes he wakes up and just the idea of the effort it would take to get out of bed scares him half to death. He can always pull it together long enough for a shift at the clinic, but sometimes he lays down on the kitchen floor the minute they get home, and he doesn’t get up until the next morning. Sometimes Trapper hides all the knives and empties the medicine cabinet and sits up all night while Hawkeye talks to Sidney on the phone. Sometimes it comes to a head, standing on opposite sides of the bedroom shouting at each other.
But Hawkeye makes it through another October.
And even when he thinks about dying, even when it feels close and easy and tangible, he’s still standing on firmer ground than he ever stood on before. Even when the sensation in his chest comes back, and the world looks a whole lot better without him in it, there’s enough in the life he’s living, between the Maine coastline and the clinic and Friday nights and Trapper, to overpower any death he might be interested in.
So he’s okay. That’s what he tells Klinger when the war ends, and they’re sitting in a Toledo bar together. That’s what he tells Potter when he calls, and Radar when he writes. That’s what he tells BJ when he shows up at Hawkeye’s doorstep one day, looking a little more worn-in than the last time they saw each other, and greets Hawkeye with a handshake that quickly turns into the longest hug either of them ever had. After a while, after he says it enough, “I’m okay, really,” everyone believes him.
“Peacetime’s a good look on you,” Klinger says.
“Wish I could say the same about your civvies,” Hawkeye replies, gesturing at the other man’s suit. “This is a nice place, you could’ve at least put on some heels.”

Every night, Hawkeye and Trapper take out all the space between each other, arms around waist, legs woven together, hands through hair and tracing cheekbones and chins. It’s quiet, and they can hear the ocean. They have both stopped waiting for the sound of ambulance wheels, stopped hearing chopper blades. By the time they remember to be grateful for the quiet, that they haven’t always had it, they’re both mostly asleep.
“Goodbye,” Trapper will murmur into Hawkeye’s hair.
“Goodbye,” Hawkeye will return, and he’ll sink into the sheets and the Crabapple Cove air coming in through the window.
He falls asleep that way. And in the morning, he wakes up.