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Sometimes, when Hawkeye is falling asleep, he’ll look at BJ. He’ll look at his face in the moonlight, thin lips and messy eyebrows and smile lines around his eyes. Hair getting more and more grey by the day. Five o’clock shadow underneath his chin, mustache just a little too long.
Sometimes, when Hawkeye is falling asleep, he’ll look at BJ, and think about walking up and getting into his cot. He’ll think about smoothing his thumb along BJ’s smile lines and pressing his hand against his chest and sticking his cold feet underneath BJ’s big ones.
Sometimes, when Hawkeye is falling asleep, he thinks about the tender feeling inside his chest when he looks at BJ. The one that feels like it’s pulling apart his seams through his fingertips. Squeezing his chest so hard it drips feeling onto the ground, his emotions pooling on the dirty bedroom floor. The one that pinches on the corners of his eyes. The one that makes him ache.
And then he turns around and flattens down his pillow and makes himself go to sleep.
If he thinks about it too long, he worries, he might name it. It might stick.
It creeps in anyways, this feeling, in the daylight, as well. He was stupid to think it wouldn’t. It wasn’t like his feelings for Trapper stuck to one place, either.
But BJ is different.
God, is BJ different.
It feels — prickly, whenever they get close to it. Hawkeye feels crazy — crazier than normal, he supposes — at first; feels like he’s inventing it all. And then he goes rapidly back and forth between obviously, of course, this cannot just be me or else it wouln’t be like this and obviously, of course, it has to just be me, because what else can it be.
And he goes on, like that. Breaking his own heart about a million times a week because he hasn’t figured out how to keep it where it belongs.
“You’re jealous? That’s what this is about?”
They’re stranded, about a mile from camp — not far, but. Still not ideal.
They’d been on their way to Gimpo on official business to drop off some important paperwork, and on unofficial business to see Hawkeye’s most recent lady friend, one who’d stuck around a bit longer than usual. Jane, her name was, and Hawkeye and her had become fast friends when she’d been assigned to their unit for a couple weeks as a traveling nurse. And then they’d become a little more than friends, and then she’d left, and now Hawkeye finally got the chance to see someone more than once in this godforsaken place. And now they were stranded, and BJ was standing on the other side of the engine, grinning.
Quite the difference from the quietly seething mess he’d been privy to all morning.
“I’m not jealous,” BJ says dismissively, laughably, turning away from Hawkeye to mess with the engine. His grey t-shirt — the one that Hawkeye had to remind himself to not think about too much, but that was hard, because he had a lot of those sorts of reminders in his head, and they got a little hard to follow, sometimes — catches against the bumper, and BJ swears.
“You are! You’re jealous!” Hawkeye is grinning, and he’s not entirely sure why; this shouldn’t feel good, right? Or maybe— maybe it should, and he feels bad? “Beej, I know you — your good, your bad, and especially your ugly. And this, right here, is the ugly at its finest.” He points at BJ with the stick he’d found on the ground to tinker with the engine with. “You are jealous.”
“Well, so — so what if I am? I’m used to getting all of you, and this — this plain-Jane nurse walks in and takes away all your attention and I have no one to scheme with for days at a time while you go out and scheme with her instead.”
“Beej, if that’s what this is about — her schemes mean nothing compared to yours. Promise. Scout’s honor.” He holds up three fingers.
“God, I can’t believe myself,” BJ says, swatting the air. “I was jealous of Trapper too, and I never even knew the guy. He didn’t even take anything of you from me.”
“Well, how do you think I feel? Peg gets half your attention all the time. I can’t — I can’t compete with that, not even close.”
“You don’t have to compete with Peg. You’re not — she’s there, and you’re here.”
“So? So? You’re still only fifty-percent here seventy-five percent of the time. And I don’t say anything.”
“Well, maybe you should.”
“Well, here I am, then. Saying something. I don’t want to take you away from your precious Mill Valley and your precious life away from here, but sometimes” — somehow, he’s done it again: stumbled into enemy territory without even trying. He hates himself. He can’t stop. “Sometimes, I wish — God, I wish — you’d care about me just half as much as you care about that.”
“You ninny, of course I do! Who do you think is keeping me sane, here? Who do you think is keeping me alive? Who do you think I think about more, these days? Why do you think I’m all in a panic about this, this whole — Jane thing? Why do you think I’m in a panic about — God, Hawk, I don’t think I’ve ever —”
“Well, then it wouldn’t hurt you to show it, sometimes.”
“What do you think this is?”
“What?”
“Getting jealous! Getting angry! I don’t get angry for just anyone, Pierce, just people I really, really, really —” his voice cracks — “care about.” He shuts the engine.
Hawkeye looks up to realize how close they’re standing. How close they’re getting to the list he builds in his head every other night of things they can’t talk about.
“What do you want from me, Beej? Of course I care about you, too, the most I’ve ever cared about someone in my life. Apart from my family, but that’s —”
“Oh, so it’s alright for you to love your family more than me, but not for me to love my family more than I love you?”
“That’s — it’s —”
“Different. I know.” Hunnicut sighs. He waits a second, then — “How, though?”
“How what?”
“How’s it different?”
BJ looks like he’s daring him. Hawkeye stares up at him, heart racing. God, what if he just — “You want me to spell it out, Beej? You really want me to say it?”
“Maybe I do.”
“You want me to say exactly why it’s different?”
It’s all unfair. All of it. And Hawkeye’s so sick of it all, the nonexistent jealousy and the glimpses of what could be and the way that they never really talk about what’s there, always, just under the surface, and Hawkeye wants to scream and yell and punch someone, and — and —
“Yeah,” says BJ, daring him, “God, Hawkeye, can’t you just —”
Hawkeye kisses him.
Well, first: Hawkeye grabs his arm, pulls. Grabs the back of his head. Pulls more. Kisses him. Puts one hand on BJ’s chin, another on his waist. Knocks against him. It’s uncoordinated and messy and damn near violent. He knows he’s doing it wrong. He knows it’s not going to work. He knows, he knows, he knows. He tries not to care that this is the end.
“There,” says Hawkeye. “I care about you like that.” He practically spits the words out. “And I don’t — I know you know. I know you don’t — I — Beej, I —”
“Hawkeye,” BJ says, so softly, and Hawk realizes BJ’s hands are still on his waist, “I —”
“Keep it to yourself,” Hawkeye says, and then he walks away.
BJ doesn’t need to see this next part.
+++
He’s thought about it, plenty of times. He’s thought about how it could happen; in a different time, in a different place. In an alternate universe where it would all be fine.
But here, now — there is only this: Hawkeye walking along a dusty road in the only place he can imagine these days, so far away from anything he cares about that he finds it almost impossible to picture. So far away from anything he cares about except BJ. And now he’s gone and torn that relationship to shreds.
There is only this: the sound of Hawkeye’s army-regulation boots against the dirt as they tamp it down in time to his heart. In time to a single word beating in his head: Unfair. One-two one-two, one-two. Left-right left-right left-right. Un-fair, un-fair, un-fair.
Hawkeye’s never jealous. He never lets himself be. The same way Margaret is never overwhelmed, the way BJ is never angry, the way Radar is never lonely, the way Klinger is never ashamed.
Hawkeye’s never jealous, especially of BJ and Peg, because if he’s jealous, it means that he wants something, and if he wants something, it means — it means —
He never lets himself finish that sentence.
So that’s why it’s not fair. It’s not fair that BJ gets to be jealous, gets to rage in his face, gets to let his temper flare up the way it does when he bottles it up for too long, when Hawkeye has to smash the jealousy down.
Not even that. Not even smash it down, because to smash it down would be to recognize that it exists, which it doesn’t. Or, it does, but transformed: he’s allowed to be jealous of Peg’s cookies, of souvenirs from home, of more than one person waiting for him in a cute little house that he owns. If he lets himself go a little, he’s allowed to be jealous of BJ having someone he loves that much, but even that feels a little bit too close to — something. Something that means something.
He never needed anything back. He just needed to let it be known. He just needed to say it. BJ Hunnicut had saved him, too, again and again, and he’d never loved anyone like that, and he didn’t care if the feeling was returned, because there was an alternate universe, too, where BJ didn’t exist, or existed far away from him his whole life, or took one look at him and scoffed, and — and — this was better, he figured, than nothing.
And at least he knew, now. At least they both did.
Better than nothing.
The walk back to camp doesn’t take long.
BJ doesn’t follow him.
Hawkeye ran through an airport, practically, for Trapper. Got into a Jeep and drove recklessly halfway across the countryside for him. Didn’t even think about it; he would’ve walked, if he’d needed to. Ran. Stolen a motorcycle. Learned how to ride a horse for him. Hawkeye chased after him, wildly and recklessly and without thinking, and for nothing. For not even a letter since he’d gotten back home.
Not even a real goodbye.
Just barely a kiss.
(He doesn’t even want to think of all the things he’d do for BJ).
Hawkeye spends twenty minutes in the shower, a good fifteen minutes more than he’s allowed. Brushes his teeth twice, just for something to do.
It’s not like BJ tasted of anything in particular; remnants of mint, sweat, dust. Mouth. The same things most mouths tasted like. The same things that Billy’s mouth had tasted like right before he threw him off the boat. The same things that his college girlfriend Ruth’s mouth had tasted like; the same things that her roommate Michael’s mouth had tasted like one evening when she was out of town, two weeks before he’d moved back home for the summer and four weeks before she broke up with him. The same things he always had imagined Trapper’s mouth to taste like.
Like unspeakable thoughts and poetry and goodbyes. Like a hint of booze. Like burning bridges. Like reading into things where there isn’t anything there to read into.
BJ’s mouth wasn’t anything special.
So why, then, is he brushing his teeth one more time?
He’s not supposed to be home (God, when has the 4077th become home?) so he doesn’t have any assignments to keep him busy; he pesters Margaret in the OR for an hour and then starts a conversation with Mulcahey that peters out after five minutes because he’s far too good at sniffing out when someone is avoiding talking about something.
Hawkeye feels fifteen again. Feels ten. Feels eight years old, running around the house because he can’t sit still, too riled up from being with Billy, stomach somehow in knots and loose around his ankles at the same time.
At ten, he stopped running quite as much, but felt just the same. He somehow sought avoidance out and rejected it at the same time; loved it and hated it. Wanted to talk about anything but losing his mother; wanted to talk about nothing but his mother.
At fifteen, he didn’t know what to do with any part of him. Felt like he was going to be discovered at any moment as a fraud. Afraid that at any moment he would have to admit that he wasn’t as funny as he tried to be, afraid that he would be forced to stop talking for thirty seconds and reckon with himself.
Now, he still feels like talking around and around in circles.
He’s always done that when he feels helpless.
BJ gets in late the next day. He hands Hawkeye a bottle of wine, starts to say something, stops.
Hawkeye doesn’t talk to him back.
Or, he talks to him constantly; asks him how his time in Gimpo was, chatters on about Margaret’s inability to cheer a patient up the same way BJ can, talks his ear off about how Klinger was pretending to have time-traveled from a past life as a cowboy and rode Sophie without permission and Potter threw a fit.
He goes on like that, starting and stopping sentences every time he tries to hold a conversation, trying not to get too close to BJ.
“Showers are broken again,” he says when he runs into BJ at lunch; “have you been in yet?”
BJ shoots him a look, the same one he does every time Hawkeye starts talking about nothing again.
“Thought you might have already. I wasn’t sure, though. I mean, if I were you, I’d want to get clean as soon as possible; getting off from a trip like that always makes me feel so dirty. Dirty in the bad way, although I guess that depends on the nature of the trip,” he says, elbowing no one. He can feel himself rambling; can’t seem to shove a sock in his monologue in time to stop it. “How was yours, anyways? See anyone you like? Not in that way, of course. You’d never — Did you end up seeing Jane? Not that I care, because, well — How did you get there, in the end? Did you ever manage to get the engine back together? Well, not like I’d know how to do that. You know, it’s always so interesting watching people do that, because I just sit there and look pretty like I’m some sort of arm candy while the big strong man gets to — not that I’ve thought about — you know, I should really learn how to fix Jeeps.”
BJ looks at him again, a mixture of confusion, hurt, and worry in his face, along with something else Hawkeye can’t place.
“Hawkeye, I —”
“You know, I just realized — I should, uh, get going,” Hawkeye says, standing up so abruptly he spills beans on BJ.
He pretends he doesn’t see BJ looking at him as he walks away.
Hawkeye sits restlessly in his bunk that night, heat sticking to him in patches, knitting and unraveling and knitting and unraveling and knitting and unraveling almost absentmindedly.
He’s always worn his heart on his sleeve.
Maybe that’s why he never finishes a sweater: too scared someone here will finally see it.
Margaret finds him, eventually. He knew she would. It’s easy, here, for people to tell when something’s wrong with him in an obvious way: when he builds statues out of tongue depressors and blows them up. When he blows himself up in Radar’s direction. When he instigates a two-hour-long food fight in the middle of the mess tent.
She’s the only one who can tell when something’s wrong in a quieter way. It’s almost psychic, at this point; his sentences go two beats per second over their usual speed and next thing he knows she’s at his side giving him some tough-love speech. Even BJ can’t quite do that.
He’s usually the problem, though. A little too close to home.
He’s not particularly surprised when he looks up from his knit-two-purl-two pattern to find Margaret standing next to him, arms crossed, nurse’s scrubs still on, face unreadable for now. He figures if he were to zoom out, if he were, say, a camera on the opposite side of the tent, she would look for all the world like the angel on his shoulder.
“Oh, it’s you,” he says, going back to his knitting.
“Frank left me too, you know.”
He frowns. “What does that have to do with anything, Margaret?”
“I woke up one morning and he was gone. Transferred Stateside without so much as a ‘goodbye, Hotlips.’ Without a ‘thank you for all you’ve done for me, Margaret.’ Without even a lousy kiss on the lips. Didn’t tell me a thing.”
Hawkeye pats the seat next to him. She sits.
“I thought for a long time that it meant he didn’t care about me. And you know what? I was wrong. Not about him caring about me — there are plenty of people who’ve not cared about me and kept in contact with me anyways. But the real thing that told me that he didn’t care about me wasn’t the no-contact thing. It was that he left without even thinking about contacting me.”
Hawkeye opens his mouth. She talks over him.
(It’s almost comforting).
“He didn’t even try. It was his actions that showed me he didn’t really love me long before he even got assigned Stateside. Oh, sure, he cared about dating me, about my companionship, about what I gave him. But he didn’t care about me. He didn’t love me. He talked all the time about how he loved me, and he never even tried to tell me goodbye.”
“I’m sorry, Margaret,” Hawkeye says. The sincerity comes easy; Margaret doesn’t share often, and when she does, Hawkeye always genuinely feels for her.
“Yeah, yeah. I got over his stupid little Ferret Face eventually. And then came Donald, who also left me, but pretended he hadn’t for months. And meanwhile, my whole childhood — my whole life — I’ve had one or two girls who wanted so desperately to be near me — who I also cared about, who I also wanted to be near — who weren’t allowed to be near me. War is — war hurts. War tears you away from the people you care about, the people you want to care about.”
Hawkeye nods. Lets the sentiment sit for a beat or two. “Trapper —”
“Trapper tried. Trapper cared while he was here. Most likely, Trapper cared a little too much, if you know what I mean. That’s all he could do.”
“And BJ?” Hawkeye says, daring to look up at her.
“BJ hasn’t even left yet,” she says, raising her voice, an incredulous look on her face. “You can’t — you can’t keep walking around acting like BJ’s already left you for his little family back in San Francisco when he’s still here. People leave us all the time. You can’t think about it until it happens, or else it’ll happen every time you think about it.”
Hawkeye sighs. “I just —”
“Do you know how lucky you are? To have someone who cares about you like he does? To have someone see you like that? To have that sort of companionship? I’ve found that a couple times in my life, too, but I’ve gotten to be around them maybe half as long as you. Screw Donald. Screw Frank. That’s not real. That’s grasping for companionship and normalcy where you can. True companionship — I’ve had maybe a handful of weeks since college with Helen, a few moments with Lorraine. The nurses here are — friends, sure, by now, but nothing more. Hawkeye, you —” She stops herself. Shakes her head. Hawkeye watches as her anger dissipates and softens. She takes a deep breath, pats his thigh.
“I know, Margaret.”
She gives him a look that he can’t quite read, then moves her attention down towards his hands. “What are you knitting?”
Hawkeye sighs, looking at the half-knitted project in his hands. “I dunno. I mostly just do it to have something to do with my hands. You know.” He stretches the bottom out to look at it better. “Or at least, I started out that way. But now I think I should actually make something for once.” He folds up the project, sets it down. “If I’m not careful this could turn into your infamous scarf-sweater-blanket.”
Margaret swats him lovingly. “A hat, maybe?” she suggests, eyeing it with the same studious manner she looks at everything with. “Well, obviously not like this, but I’ve got some circular needles you could borrow.”
“You know, I never would have pegged you as the knitting type,” Hawkeye says, turning his body to face her.
“And what kind of type is that?” Margaret says, raising an eyebrow and crossing her arms.
Hawkeye shrugs. “I think — I think a year ago I would have said that I didn’t think you had that sort of femininity in you. But now I think it’s because you stitch people together so well one way that it’s hard to think of you stitching something else together in a different way.”
“I could say the same about you,” she counters.
Hawkeye smiles at her. “Guess we’re not so different.”
“Guess so,” she says. She’s got that warmth in her eyes that Hawk’s come to notice and love. “There’s more to us than meets the eye. You and I — we —” she uncrosses her arms, puts her hands on her knees. “We don’t fit into the boxes others put us in. You know, I’m not sure I even like knitting much,” she says, laughing to herself a little. “Or at least, I don’t like knitting the way — other girls always seemed to like knitting. Do you know what I mean?”
She’s looking at him, really looking at him, as if she knows something true about him, and Hawkeye feels a jolt of that feeling he’s always felt with Margaret. That knowing familiarity. That feeling that he’s not alone, the kinship of someone who relates to him the way she does. The fact that there’s someone who has come to love him despite seeing him at his absolute worst, and knows the same goes for her. It makes him feel more like a person, to know that there’s someone who’s on the other side of his coin.
He smiles back at her. “You know, I think I do.”
She pats him on the shoulder, then stands up to leave. “You’ll be fine, Hawkeye. Love — companionship — is hard to come by here. You’ve gotten lucky. Your companion isn’t — hasn’t been torn away from you a million times over.”
Hawkeye looks at the bed across the tent. “I know.”
“You’ll be fine,” she repeats. “I’ll see you later?”
“I love you too, Margaret,” he says, grinning up at her.
She rolls her eyes, smiling, before walking out the door.
Hawkeye is reminded, again, that he was wrong, before. There’s more he cares about than just BJ here.
There’s one person who sees his heart even before he knits it a sleeve for it to go on.
“Hawkeye.”
When he wakes up the next morning, BJ is sitting on the edge of his bunk, shaking him awake.
“There’s eggs this morning.”
“Mph,” Hawkeye says, before he can register that it’s BJ, who he’s in the middle of a tense — something — with.
“Eggs,” BJ repeats, and Hawkeye still doesn’t understand. “There’s eggs.”
“Yeah, Beej, I heard you the first time,” he says, pulling the covers above his head. “There’s always eggs. A real continental breakfast we’ve got here in Korea. You’ve got two slices of charcoal, water with a splash of orange juice, and your choice of eggs: imitating a brick or more like coffee than the coffee itself.”
“Hawk-eye,” BJ says, drawing his name out, and Hawk can tell before he opens his eyes that BJ is smiling, mustache all atremble. “These are neither.”
“Oh, pardon me,” Hawkeye says, turning over so that he’s on his back directly under BJ’s bafflingly excited gaze. His stomach does a little flip. “There’s always the third option of crumbling apart if you look at it the wrong way. Real beach resort sort of thing.”
BJ shakes his head. “Hawk. These are — wait for it — real eggs.”
Hawkeye sits up, tension with BJ all but forgotten. “Real eggs?”
“Real. Eggs.” BJ says.
“Hah!” Hawkeye says, grinning and jumping out of bed. “Real eggs!” He grabs onto BJ’s waist and pulls him up. “Geez, I’m so excited I could —” He bites his tongue.
“Could what? Kiss me?” BJ says with a grin that mirrors Hawkeye’s.
“Beej, I —”
BJ plants one big hand on the back of Hawkeye’s head and pulls him closer. He gives him one lingering look before leaning in.
Hawkeye’s chest explodes as BJ kisses him.
Bj moves his hand onto Hawkeye’s cheek and cups it before moving his head back. “Well?” he says, still looking at Hawkeye.
Hawkeye drops his hands from BJ’s waist, mood suddenly soured.
“That’s not how it works.”
“What?” BJ looks at him, an incredulous look on his face.
“You can’t just erase the — what happened, before — by doing — that,” Hawkeye says, stepping back. That’s not how it works. It’s not — it’s not — you can’t just make me stop feeling embarrassed about that by doing it back.”
“Hawkeye, I —”
“Ha ha, very funny. Kiss the poor idiot who made a — a fool of himself, the other day, by admitting something to you in private, something that you pulled out of me, by the way, and — and — just right right the wrongs! It’s like — okay, it’s like when someone walks in on you naked so you have to let them walk in on you naked so that it’s even. Maybe that’ll make him feel normal around you again.”
“Hawkeye, I really —”
“I bet there’s not even real eggs. I bet you made that up just to get me on your good side again. I bet — god, I know you don’t feel the same way about me, but you didn’t have to do it like that, you could have just waited a couple days and pretended it never happened. I’d get over it eventually.” Hawkeye’s pacing around the room, now, and he watches it happening and can’t do anything to stop it.
“What, you think I’d just forget that my best friend kissed me?”
“Well —okay, or — or — or no, I guess not, but we could have pretended —”
“What, like we’ve been doing? Like when I catch you staring at me at night? Like when I catch myself staring at you? Oh, great, let’s keep pretending that everything is hunky-dory, and then I’ll go back to my little home in Mill Valley and live a perfectly fine life with my perfectly fine wife and my perfectly fine house and never think about anything here again.”
“You said it, not me,” Hawkeye says, sitting on his bunk and sliding his shoes out from under it.
“Fine.”
“Great.”
“Perfect,” BJ spits at him, sitting down on the bed.
Hawkeye sifts through the mess on his bed and digs out a robe, half-puts it on, starts lacing up his other boot.
“For the record,” Hawkeye says, after a minute, “I never asked to be your savior.”
“What?”
“What you said. About how I saved you. I didn’t — why can’t I just be someone you care about? I save people all day long, and half the nights, too. I don’t want to also have your blood on my hands if I — if I mess up.”
BJ’s quiet for a long second. “Hawkeye, I didn’t — I didn’t mean it like that. Your presence is what is saving me. Our connection is what is saving me. The mere fact of you — the idea that I have someone who I can fight with and pull pranks on and let my true self out of its little closet for — that I have someone who I can say ‘I love you’ to without actually saying it — that’s what’s saving me, I guess. That I care about you so deeply is just a bonus. You don’t have to do anything.”
Hawkeye swallows, ties his shoe “Right, okay.”
“I mean it, Hawk.”
“Okay.”
“You know,” BJ says, handing him his other shoe. “I think we’re kind of stupid.”
“Yeah?”
“And by ‘we’ I mean you.”
“BJ —”
“Just know,” he says, lifting Hawkeye’s chin up, “that I’m doing this because I want to,” he says, and kisses Hawkeye again.
It’s still BJ, and he’s still Hawkeye, and the whole thing’s still a bit clumsy, and BJ is still all hands, and there are still too many unsaid words locked up behind their mouths, and Hawkeye is still a wound-up ball of emotion that can’t quite get out in the ways he wants to.
But — kissing BJ still feels somehow like coming home.
He doesn’t want it to ever end.
“Beej,” he says, when it inevitably does. “Beej, I —”
“Me too,” he says, squeezing Hawkeye’s hand. “Me too. Did that convince you enough?”
Hawkeye looks at him, face eager and wide and wrapped so completely in Hawkeye’s own heart, and feels that string between them tug once more. “You might have to do it one more time.”
BJ’s just leaning in when Klinger barges through the door. “Hey! Guys! Real eggs, didn’t you hear?”
Hawkeye busies himself with his other boot to keep his bright red face away from Klinger’s prying eyes.
“Yeah, we’re just about getting ready,” BJ tells him, smiling his most jovial, neutral smile.
“Geez, you two better hurry, or else word’ll get around that there’s something fishy going on between you. I mean, who cares about spending time with another person more than real eggs?”
BJ turns to him and gives him a look, and Hawkeye watches him look back at Klinger with an expression that he recognizes from the time BJ threatened an officer that he would break every bone in his body if they didn’t get whatever they’d been promised.
“Klinger, you better get going before you get scrambled, too,” Hawkeye says, before BJ can do anything about his too-perky smile.
“Going, sirs. Gotta get in before it’s all gone!”
Once Klinger’s gone, BJ turns back to him. “Now, where were we?”
“Sorry, didn’t you hear the woman?” Hawkeye says with a teasing smile. “They might think there’s something fishy going on between us if I spend more time with you than with the real eggs. In fact, I might also think that,” he says, standing up.
“Hawk-eye,” BJ says, and Hawkeye would know blind what his face is doing.
“Nuh-uh. We don’t want to start any rumors, here.” He extends an arm towards BJ, pulling him up. “They might think I care about you. Blech,” he says, shoving BJ out the door.
BJ pouts at him from over his shoulder. “What, am I not worthy of you, your highness?”
“No, but if you let me go first in line for real eggs, you just might get one step closer.”
“Oh, anything for you, my liege,” BJ says, bowing mid-walk.
“Good, glad that’s settled,” Hawkeye says, smiling at BJ as he falls back so that he’s next to Hawkeye.
“Oh, that was settled a long time ago,” BJ says, smiling softly back. “A long, long time ago.”