Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The first time it happened, BJ thought he was dreaming. One second he was curled up on his cot in the Swamp, eyes closed, feigning sleep convincingly until he actually fell asleep (much of life at the 4077th was pretending, desperately, until the act became true), and the next he was squinting in the sun at the Kimpo airport, fresh-faced, in uniform, again . 

There was dream Hawkeye, looking the same way he had in real life: distracted, irritated, sad. Maybe BJ hadn’t picked up on the sad part back then, just that Hawkeye was looking for someone, and that someone wasn’t BJ.

“Rudyard Kipling,” BJ supplied, when Hawkeye gave him the opening. It was better to play along, he thought, when a dream felt this real. Deviating from the prescribed path could launch his subconscious into a worse memory. This memory wasn’t so bad, and BJ remembered most of the details of his first day in Korea. It was the day he’d met Hawkeye, after all, and who could forget a day like that.

Hawkeye looked at him, and then looked away, and then looked back, amused, surprised, as if he was just now taking in the look of BJ. It would be silly to say that that was when it all began. It would be silly to say that BJ knew, before he even really knew Hawk, that he would be important to him in a way few others were. (Maybe Hawkeye was important in a way nobody else was, but that was a risky thought to entertain, in a dream.)

BJ could feel the nervousness and adrenaline and desire to impress squirming around in his stomach. It was odd. It was like he really was there again. He felt the way he had and he said the things he’d said and when he threw up in the dirt, hot sun beating down, mud soaking through his pants, gunfire sharp overhead, he could taste the bile.

Hawkeye helped him up. His hand was warm and strong. Hawkeye had good hands, good surgeon’s hands. BJ had noticed, even back then. He got a sort of woozy, light-headed feeling again, when Hawkeye’s hands were on him; it was like the past and present were merging, momentarily, though it was a dream. It was as if your own ghost could pass through you. 

There was Radar, sipping his grape nehi, while a fight broke out at Rosie’s. There was Hawkeye, calmly relaying the details of life at the 4077th, with his usual Hawkeye embellishments, that BJ hadn’t noticed the first time around but could recognize now: the flashy hand gestures, the quick-witted jokes, the effortless swallowing of frankly heinous booze, that heavy-lidded thing he did with his eyes where they got to look very blue and oddly, very come hither . 

“I think I’ve had too much to drink,” BJ muttered, after Hawkeye had doubled over, cackling, at something or other BJ said. 

He was a lightweight before he got to Korea, if the startlingly vivid details of the dream were to be believed. He didn’t quite remember it like that, but maybe he’d spent so long pickling his own liver in the Swamp that he’d lost perspective on the number of drinks it took to get reasonable, well-adjusted, men of his approximate build sloshed. 

“The 4077th is better with booze tinted glasses,” Hawkeye said, grinning, slurring his words just a little. 

BJ remembered that. He remembered Hawk’s hands on his shoulders and then grazing his waist. He remembered the first time he’d heard Hawkeye’s laugh, and how it had shocked him out of the numbness he’d felt all over since he’d boarded the plane. He’d shut something off in his brain when he’d said goodbye to Peg and Erin at the airport. Peg had hugged him tight enough to bruise, her tears making a damp spot on the uniform she’d neatly pressed. Erin had been wailing. BJ’s hearing got a little fuzzy. He squared his shoulders and tucked away his fear. It was sharp in his ribs, tight and compact like a knot, but he’d feel it later. He’d feel it alone, at night, with his hands balled in a blanket, and his mouth pressed to a pillowcase so no one could hear him. Or he wouldn’t feel it at all. He’d do the work and he’d stay out of trouble and he’d save all the extra feeling for home. He’d hold his breath for the duration. He could do it. He had enormous lung capacity. 

Or at least he thought he did, until Hawk laughed so loudly and maniacally that he nearly choked on his own sound. Then, all of a sudden BJ felt like all the air was knocked out of him, like the knot in his chest was unraveling, just a little. 

“Sirs, uh, Hawkeye, they’re expecting Captain Hunnicutt…we should—”

“Alright, alright, Radar we’re going,” Hawkeye said, rising unsteadily from his seat, grinning again, with his eyes on BJ like he was his new plaything, or at least a distraction from Trapper’s departure. 

BJ had been happy to be that, in the beginning. He liked that he was filling a space that needed filling, not just at the unit, but for Hawkeye, whose heels BJ was on like a well‐trained dog. It didn’t yet feel confining to be in Trapper John’s shadow; at first it had been a welcome shield.

The jeep ride was longer and bumpier than BJ remembered. He was leaning sideways, away from Hawkeye, though their boots were brushing together. He got facefuls of dust. He mourned the loss of his hat, and the way a few hours in Korea had already ruined Peg’s handiwork on his uniform. He felt wild and unkempt and dizzy. He tumbled out of the jeep, hearing Hawkeye cackle as BJ sagged sideways into Margaret, and hearing himself laugh too. There was something absurd and distant about listening to his own laugh. It was like time dissolved. He’d laughed differently back then, BJ realized. He didn’t laugh with his full chest before he met Hawkeye. Before Hawkeye, BJ had always been holding something back.

That night, BJ sobered up and showered and unpacked his things. His brain didn’t gloss over the details like it normally did when he was dreaming. He shivered under the cold water in his shower stall. He looked the way he had back then. He was evenly tanned and lean with a healthy color to his cheeks. He wasn’t yet coated in the layer of grime that seemed to settle over everyone who had been at the MASH for long enough to forget what real showers felt like, with proper water pressure and doors that closed and water that didn’t go murky brown or have an off smell that stuck in your nostrils. The grime was all over him now, at his scalp and under his fingernails and in the calloused soles of his feet. He’d spent enough hours in the OR sweating through his shirt, or getting blood crusted in his arm hair, that the grime felt like it would never scrub off completely.

But here, he didn’t have any of his bumps or bruises or scars: the purplish bruising of the toe he’d stubbed on Hawk’s trunk yesterday morning, the nick on his jaw from a blunt razor, the stitches he’d gotten when Frank shot him. It was odd, like he was being remade. 

When night fell, and BJ lay down on his cot, there was that same awkward, anticipatory silence. It was the first night he’d slept across from Hawkeye. It was the first night he’d occupied the space that Trapper had left. BJ could hear the sounds of the camp settling, and Frank snoring. His eyes wouldn’t close, so he stared at the top of the tent and listened for Hawkeye’s breathing, and the rustle of sheets when he shifted. It felt so real. It felt like the first time. His heart was pounding the same way. His whole body ached for home. It was a pain that radiated, hot and itchy like a sunburn. He’d forgotten. Mill Valley felt so distant now.

Suddenly he felt panicked and crazy. Dreams weren’t like this. Dreams didn’t rake the hot coals of the past so aggressively. Nostalgia, fantasy, booze tinted glasses were one thing, but this was another. 

“It feels so real, Hawk,” BJ mumbled. 

“BJ?” Hawkeye said. BJ could see him lift his head. His hair stood up, making a funny shadow on the wall. “Did you say something? Are you dreaming?”

“I can’t tell. This feels just like the day we met,” BJ said. 

“The day we— oh ,” Hawkeye’s voice got thin and vulnerable. “Oh, BJ, it’s all going to be okay. Trust me. You know me, don’t you? You know I wouldn’t lie?” 

“Yes,” BJ said. He wanted to sit up but he felt rooted to his cot. 

“Just close your eyes, and breathe. It feels a little like the drop on a roller coaster. Have you been on a roller coaster?” Hawkeye said.

“What does? What feels like a roller coaster?” BJ said. He bit down on his bottom lip, hard. He felt a little faint, and like some force above him was pushing down. 

“Looping back around,” Hawkeye said. 

BJ closed his eyes, and it happened just as Hawkeye described.

BJ woke up in the Swamp with a splitting headache. He blinked, and he shifted, and he reached up to scrub a hand over his face. His mustache was there and the crease between his eyebrows and his cut from shaving. 

He was so happy to know where he was and to see Hawkeye (as he was, unshaven, hair silvery, drooling on his pillow) that he tucked away the afterimages of the presumed dream and followed Hawk to the mess tent. 

And then he forgot about it. It was easy to, when they were swept up into 15 hours straight in the OR, and BJ’s feet hurt too much to think about anything other than bowel resections and making sure he picked every bit of shrapnel out of every kid on his table. And later, after sleeping a couple dream free hours, and later still, at the Officer’s Club, three or four drinks in, he wasn’t quite sure.

“Do you want another one of those? I’m buying,” Hawkeye said, leaning his elbows on the table. He sipped his drink and squinted down at his pitiful solitaire game. 

“Aren’t you tired?” BJ said. He’d only come out because Hawk dragged him. 

“Don’t you want another drink?” Hawkeye said, smiling goofily, leaning closer into BJ’s space. 

BJ considered. “Yes,” he said. “Are you trying to get me drunk, Hawk?”

“I don’t have the time to be tired. There’s never enough time, or maybe too much depending on how you look at it,” Hawkeye said, brain evidently a few paces behind.

BJ frowned. “You’re thinking about Private Jenkins, aren’t you?” he muttered. 

The poor kid’s leg was a lost cause by the time he got to the 4077th, but it was Hawkeye, so he couldn’t let it go, and he took it on himself as a personal failing. BJ could see it in the way he was nursing his drink, flipping cards all over the place, and leaning back and forth in his chair, hooking his foot around one of the table’s legs and bumping his knee against BJ’s. 

“He’s not going to get a good night’s sleep. Why should I?” Hawkeye said. 

BJ braced his hands on the table. He wondered if Hawkeye punished himself like this before the war, or if it was a new development brought on by the inhumanity of their circumstances. There was a pressurized sort of faith everyone had in him to perform in the OR, when the way to proceed was by no means clear. He could imagine a younger Hawkeye, maybe in med school, maybe before, pushing himself to stay up another hour studying something he’d failed. He could imagine him as a child, walking the long way home in the rain because he didn’t want to trouble his father for a ride he didn’t feel he deserved. 

BJ had seen Hawkeye break under the lofty standards he had for himself enough times to know the symptomology: sharp crescents of Hawkeye’s nails dug into his palms, sleepless and ruminative nights, the offer of drinks so he had an audience when the drama of his suffering found the proper stage. Tonight the stage was this corner of the Officer’s Club, and the chair Hawkeye was leaning back in, precariously, as BJ rose to get them more drinks. 

“I’ll get this round,” he said.

“I offered ,” Hawkeye said, drawing out the syllables. 

“You buy me drinks all the time. You don’t need to, you know? I’ll keep you company, regardless,” BJ said. 

Hawkeye scoffed, still rocking on the legs of his chair. Something vulnerable flashed across his face, at being read so easily, BJ thought. 

“It’s an expensive habit,” Hawkeye said.

“What is?” BJ said.

“Buying your drinks. It didn’t used to be,” Hawkeye said. He tilted forward, looking up at him through dark eyelashes. 

BJ crossed his arms. He was grateful, all of a sudden, for the O Club’s noise: the tinny sound of the piano, the thumps and bangs of the pinball machine, the clatter of glasses, and raucous card games. 

“What do you mean?” BJ said.

Hawkeye put his hands behind his head, casually, and leaned back some more. BJ was certain, for a second, that he’d fall. 

“I mean you used to be a lightweight,” Hawkeye said.

“You remember that?” BJ said. He could taste the dream liquor on the tip of his tongue, sharper, harsher, because he hadn’t quite grown accustomed to it. At home he only had the odd beer. His father drank, and he’d never liked it.

“Yes,” Hawkeye said. “Why wouldn’t I?”

You know me, don’t you? You know I wouldn’t lie?

“Because it was forever ago. It feels like forever ago,” BJ said. He was caught, pulled in one direction by the bar, and in the other by the odd look on Hawk’s face.

“Does it?” Hawkeye said, eyebrows rising.

 BJ had been making the usual joke, about how time stretched and sagged and tangled at the 4077th, about how they’d been doing the same thing for an eternity now, with no end in sight. But, Hawkeye was looking at him as if BJ had grown another head. 

“I’m getting the drinks,” BJ managed. Hawkeye nodded at him and BJ turned to the bar. 

When he returned, BJ set down the glasses and reached for the back of Hawkeye’s chair, to steady him so he didn’t knock himself over. 

He scooped up the drink BJ had set in front of him and took a long sip. BJ watched the bob of his Adam’s apple.

He smiled, wide, blue eyes glazed and fond, and tipped his glass in BJ’s direction. “Thank you, by the way,” he said. “You’re sweet.”

BJ felt a little flushed, the way he always did when Hawkeye got a touch too drunk, and consequently complimentary. 

“I buy you drinks all the time,” BJ said.

Hawkeye hummed. “Yes, but tonight you have impeccable timing,” he said.

“Timing,” BJ repeated. He took a sip of his own drink.

Hawkeye splayed his hands out over the forgotten solitaire game. He pushed the cards together in a big pile and then scooped them up, tapping the cards’ edges until they came together in a neat stack.

“I’m just lucky you took pity on me the day we met. I’m grateful it was you who came to get me, not Radar all by his lonesome, or…I don’t know, Frank,” BJ said. 

It was an abridged version of the story, one that omitted Trapper. BJ was lucky that Hawkeye had been the one to meet him. He thought of dream Hawkeye’s warmth and his hands on BJ’s forehead and back. He thought of Hawk’s exaggerated performance of himself, and of a normalcy that had been demolished moments before BJ’s plane had touched the ground. 

“Pity’s the wrong word,” Hawkeye said, brow furrowing. 

BJ laughed. “What’s the right word, Hawk?” he said.

He shook his head, aggressively. “I don’t know. But not pity,” he said. 

BJ snorted. He sat back in his chair and tried to match the quick pace at which Hawkeye was finishing his drink. 

“Do you ever wish you could go back in time?” Hawkeye said. He hunched forward so he and BJ were nearly nose to nose.

A strange feeling prickled up the back of his neck.

“There was nothing else you could do for Jenkins,” BJ said. 

“I know, Beej. I know,” Hawk said, unconvincingly. “That’s not why I’m asking.”

“Why are you asking?” BJ said.

“You didn’t even answer the question,” Hawkeye said. 

Hawk narrowed his eyes at him and BJ bristled. Usually he could get away with all manner of evasive, conversational maneuvers. That day, in the dream, he’d been all smiles and nods and jokes he thought Hawkeye might like. He’d been determined to keep his head down, or at the very least attach himself to someone who knew how to avoid getting killed. He’d picked Hawkeye with very little evidence. He hadn’t had much of a choice, he thought. The second Hawkeye had put out his hand and pulled him up, it was all over. BJ could only bluff for so long.

“I don’t see the point in entertaining a hypothetical like that,” BJ said.

Hawkeye barked out a laugh. “I thought you had an imagination,” he said.

“I’m using it all to pretend the stuff they serve in the mess is edible,” BJ said.

“Do you want to hear my answer?” Hawkeye said.

BJ rolled his eyes. “I have a feeling you want to tell me,” he said.

“I do. I wish I could go back and save people and fix messes and say smarter things. I’d stop the war, you know? If I could go back in time I’d find a way,” he said. 

“Lofty aspirations,” BJ said.

Hawkeye shrugged. “Part of me thinks I’d just make everything worse,” he said. “I’d get my grubby little fingerprints all over the past. Hell, maybe some fluids. It’s a risky business, I imagine.”

“Hmm,” BJ said. He was having trouble imagining Hawkeye making the past worse. 

“I suppose you’d rather go forward,” Hawkeye said. 

He pushed his hair out of his face and BJ watched the motion. He’d cataloged the changes in Hawkeye too, since the day they’d met. The dream had wormed its way back into BJ’s brain. Hawkeye had looked younger. It was hard to tell now. The changes were so gradual that he wouldn’t have noticed otherwise. 

He would rather go forward, and so would Hawkeye, no matter what he said.

“You know I had the strangest dream last night,” BJ said. 

“What about?” Hawkeye said, eyelids heavy, smile lascivious.

BJ’s nose wrinkled. “Not like that. It was about going back, doing it over, like you said, ” he said, voice hushed. The feeling was spreading. He had goosebumps all over. 

“Tell me about it,” Hawkeye said. 

“Well it was…it was like my first day in Korea,” BJ said, stumbling over his words. 

“All fun and games?” Hawkeye said. 

“Beat for beat, Hawk. It was eerie, and it felt like I was actually there. Everything up until the end. We were going to bed and I said something about how real the dream felt. It was one of those lucid moments, I guess. And then you…you said something about how it was like uh, well, like a—”

“Like a drop on a roller coaster,” Hawkeye said. 

BJ wondered if perhaps it was all happening again. Maybe he was dreaming. Maybe he’d never woken up. 

“Have I told you this story already?” BJ said.

“No,” Hawkeye said. He met his eyes, seriously. “But that’s what I said, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” BJ said. 

Hawkeye pulled a little notebook out of his pocket while BJ stared at him, slack jawed. 

“I-I-I—wrote it down, see? The day you said it, in case you didn’t remember. I wasn’t sure when days would start to loop back around for you. It took a while before it started happening to me. It was around the time that Tommy Gillis died on my operating table,” Hawkeye said. His gaze was intense. BJ’s head was spinning. 

“Is this some sort of prank?” BJ said, blushing shamefully. 

Hawkeye flipped through the pages of the notebook in his hands and then passed it to BJ. It was dated the day he’d arrived at the MASH:

BJ thinks he’s dreaming. Got kicked back to his first day. I talked him through it. Told him it feels like a drop on a roller coaster. I don’t know if it’s just wishful thinking, or if I said the right thing. I’m sure he won’t remember tomorrow, but if and when he does I think I ought to have some sort of record. It’s strange, knowing that all day he thought he was dreaming, and that to him we weren’t strangers. 

“I’m not sure I understand,” BJ said. 

Hawkeye chewed on his lip. “Welcome to the club,” he said.

The details came out in pieces. Hawkeye led him back to the Swamp, poured him a drink from the still, and then sat down across from him, knee to knee, to outline what was clear.

“People already think I’m crazy,” Hawkeye said, in a way that made BJ vaguely nauseous. “So I’d never say anything if you didn’t first. But you had the strangest look on your face when you woke up this morning. I looked over and it seemed like you had a truly egregious hangover despite not drinking a thing last night, and I thought , well really I hoped that it had started happening to you too, and that you remembered.”

“What exactly is happening?” BJ said, under his breath. Hawkeye was usually a pace or two ahead of him, but now it seemed like he was speaking in code. 

“I’m trying to be discreet, Beej,” Hawkeye said, as if reading BJ’s thoughts. 

“Well, I feel like my brain’s been turned to powdered eggs,” BJ said. 

He leaned his elbows on his knees and put his face in his hands. His headache was coming back, pulsing through his temples and making his vision go blurry at the edges. It was like jet lag and a hangover and an ear infection all merged into some confusing cocktail of human suffering. Hawkeye put his hand on BJ’s back, between his shoulder blades, and rubbed in slow circles.

“The week after Tommy died I had a dream where I was back in the day he came to camp the first time. It wasn’t like any other dream I’ve had. There weren’t any nonsensical tangents or flights of fantasy. It was just that day , exactly as it had been the first time. And I saw him and I tried to warn him, Beej. I said I knew something bad was going to happen. I said that I’d seen it and that he had to listen to me now because I wouldn’t be able to save him later,” Hawkeye said. He drew in a slow, shaky breath. 

“What happened?” BJ said, eyes closed, pinching the bridge of his nose to try to get the pain to recede. 

“Nobody was listening. I got worked up, because it felt so real. Trap and Henry got concerned, so they stuck me in a bed in post op and sedated me. I woke up in the Swamp. It was the same day all over again. It happened six more times before I gave up and played along. As soon as I did, I woke up where I was supposed to be…in a manner of speaking. Which is to say, the Swamp a week after Tommy died,” Hawkeye said. 

“So what? So, an exceedingly long and strange dream,” BJ said. He lifted his head, fractionally, and blinked at Hawkeye.

Hawkeye was quiet for a beat. 

“You feel really rough, don’t you?” he said. 

“Like someone beat my head in,” BJ said. 

“And you think that’s what? Symptomatic of a bad nightmare?” Hawkeye said. 

“It’s not less plausible than whatever it is you’re trying to tell me,” BJ said. 

“Would you listen to me?” Hawkeye said. He pushed his journal into BJ’s hands. “I’ve been making notes. It’s all very scientific, Beej. I’m a man of science.”

“It sounds like you’re a man of pseudoscience, Hawk,” BJ said. 

Hawkeye reached out and took BJ by both wrists. His grip was tight. 

“Look, I’ve waited a long time for this. I thought maybe it was some desperate bit of imagination.. I thought it was exhaustion or stress and that whole theory worked for a while until it didn’t. Half the time I hardly know what year it is,” Hawkeye said. “You’ve gotta listen to me.”

He hadn’t let go. He was holding on like he expected BJ to twist out of his grasp. 

“I’m listening,” BJ said. 

Hawkeye’s grip relaxed, fractionally. 

“You remember last month we were going to get leave together but then we got that wave of wounded and they couldn’t spare us?” Hawkeye said. 

“I remember,” BJ said. 

“Well I went back to that day ten times, and it happened just like that every time but the last. The last time I kept waiting for the choppers. I was all dressed and ready, you know? I hardly bothered packing because I’d been through the whole thing so many times that I was getting sick of it. Like physically sick, Beej, being stuck in a loop does that. I could hardly keep food down. I got so nauseous. And then the choppers didn’t come. And you got so pissed at me for not packing, but you still dragged me to the jeep and took me to Tokyo,” Hawkeye said. 

“I don’t remember…we never…I—”

“I needed to see if I could take something back,” Hawkeye said. He released BJ’s wrists and jumped up. He crossed the room to his trunk and rummaged in it, briefly, before producing a strip of photos. “So I made you take these with me.”

Hawkeye handed the photos over. There they were, sure enough, sitting side by side in a Tokyo photo booth. BJ was smiling wide, and Hawkeye was leaning against him, looking world weary and green. He looked at the back. The date matched Hawkeye’s story, and was written in BJ’s handwriting. He traced the smudging ink lines. It was unmistakable.

“And you’re sure I wasn’t drunk? You weren’t drunk? We could’ve blacked out a whole day,” BJ said. 

“Usually the past doesn’t diverge like that. It’s like you said. Every beat of the day we met was the same, until the end,” Hawkeye said.

BJ looked up from the photos. He looked like himself, hair a little wild, smile soft and fond, looking at Hawkeye the way he always looked at him. He racked his brain for some thread of memory. He and Hawkeye hadn’t gone to Tokyo. They’d been swept up into triage. He remembered the disappointment of unpacking his bag: all the fresh laundry gone to waste, the money he’d tucked away for souvenirs, the aching longing for a clean, soft bed at the end of the night, and Hawkeye, he’d been excited to be somewhere else with Hawkeye. He collected memories of them in places that weren’t the 4077th like they were rare coins. He would’ve remembered going to Tokyo with Hawkeye.

“And when you woke up…” BJ said. His mouth had gone very dry.

“I was back in the present,” Hawkeye said, grinning wildly. “I taped the photos to my chest. I wasn’t taking any chances.”

BJ traced the frayed edges of the photos. He wondered how many times Hawk had looked at them. There was a crease down the middle, after the third photo. He imagined Hawkeye clutching his chest in the morning, making sure they were still there. He imagined the photos warmed from his frantic body heat.

“This is about as scientific as I can get, Beej,” Hawkeye said. And BJ could see the exhaustion overtake his whole form. He set the photos down on the table between them and sat up straight. 

“Are we the only ones?” BJ said.

“As far as I know,” Hawkeye said. “Though my memory’s a little spotty.”

Hawkeye stood. He leaned over and put his hands on BJ’s shoulders. He squeezed in a way that immediately relieved the tension that had built up in BJ’s muscles. BJ melted into the touch.

“Don’t,” he muttered, heated, and overwhelmed. Hawkeye released him, and BJ missed the contact immediately. 

“Get some sleep. I’ll cover for you in the morning,” Hawkeye said. He poured himself the last of the still’s gin and knocked it back. BJ watched him: his pale throat, his calloused hand, his mussed hair, and the way his eyelashes caught the light. 

“Can I ask you something?” BJ said.

“By all means,” Hawkeye said, voice rough, hand on his hip. 

“What else did we do in Tokyo?” BJ said. 

Chapter Text

“It can happen a couple different ways,” Hawkeye said, chewing on a piece of toast, talking with his mouth full while BJ sipped cold coffee. “Sometimes I remember a day the way it happened the first time, the way everyone else does, and sometimes my brain gets scrambled and I only remember the last loop. Or the other way around, I guess. Sometimes it’s the other way around.”

“Sometimes the new version replaces the old?” BJ said. 

“Right, like, I don’t remember a version of the day we met where you didn’t think you were dreaming,” Hawkeye said. “I assume that’s not true for you.”

BJ nodded.

“There isn’t much consistent logic. I think it’s the war. I think all the suffering opened up a void. It’s like the timeline got ripped up in a bunch of pieces and then rearranged,” he said. 

Hawkeye reached for BJ’s toast and ripped it into bits, which he rearranged until the way they fit together was incomprehensible and the table was covered in crumbs.

“But the pieces aren’t connected by much, you know? And they’re prone to breaking further. So we’ve got all these little fractures, and new events filling in gaps. So at the end of the day, I really couldn’t tell you what’s happened since I got here. I’ve got pieces of it, but, you know, they’re crumbly,” he said. He put one of the toast pieces in his mouth. 

“I was going to eat that,” BJ said. 

“You can still eat it,” Hawkeye said, gesturing to the toast crumbs strewn across the table. “The past is still digestible this way. That’s my point.”

“I see your point,” BJ said. He leaned in close, knocking his elbows with Hawkeye’s. “So if someone reminisces about something you don’t remember, you just play along like you do?” 

Hawkeye’s eyebrow arched. “Yes. I thought that would be the easy part for you, the acting?” he said. 

BJ hummed. He smiled his agreeable, half‐smile, the one he put on when he wasn’t sure if Hawk was joking with him or at his expense.

“How often does it happen?” BJ said.

Hawkeye swept the rest of the breadcrumbs into his hand and dumped them onto BJ’s tray. 

“Oh, I don’t know. It used to happen a lot,” Hawkeye said, voice low and gentle. “I’d get stuck somewhere every other week. They threw me a party when I was named chief surgeon. I think I’ve been to that party twenty times. I used to ask Trap what day it was every morning.”

Hawkeye got a fond and faraway look on his face and BJ felt a stab of jealousy between his ribs. Maybe, a voice in the back of BJ’s head told him, Hawkeye wished he was somewhere in the past right now, somewhere where Trapper was and BJ wasn’t.

“Now it’s only every once in a while,” Hawkeye said. “It’s usually when I have a really bad day. That’s how it happened the first time too, like a do-over, but I can’t really fix anything.”

BJ nodded. Whenever Tommy’s name came up in Hawk’s old stories there was an apprehensive crack to his voice, like even the syllables of his name were painful to get out.

“But it might not be the same for you,” Hawkeye said. He sipped his coffee. He met BJ’s eyes.

The week BJ got sent back to the past, Hawk had removed Colonel Lacy’s perfectly healthy appendix. There was something awful and thrilling about fighting with Hawkeye. Maybe it was because Hawk was always so certain he was right. Maybe it was the righteous intensity that lit behind his eyes and reddened his skin and turned their easy physicality into something sharper and tightly wound. It occurred to BJ that before he met Hawkeye he’d been content to go with the flow, maybe that was why he burned hot, like coals when he was angry with him. Hawkeye had shown him all the things that were worth getting really riled up about.

“I’ve got a running theory that looping time is why I’m going gray. I’ve been here twice as long as the rest of you, if you add it all up,” Hawkeye said.

“Have you been adding?” BJ said. He felt compelled, as he often did, to reach out and grab some part of him: his hands or his forearms or his bony shoulders, and see how neatly they could fold into each other. It was an impulse BJ quieted, because sometimes it scared him. 

“I get afraid sometimes, that when we go home I might wake up back here,” Hawkeye said.

BJ swallowed, thickly. He tried to imagine laying in bed beside Peg, her soft hair pressed to his collarbone, their legs tangled together the way they always got—she ran cold, and they usually woke up pretzeled together—and then waking up in the Swamp, or at the front somewhere, under fire. He shivered. He didn’t know what to say to that.

And then there was the tell tale whir of helicopters, and a voice overhead calling everyone to the OR. And BJ didn’t have to say anything, just watch Hawkeye’s steady hands at the table beside him.

When they were through, and Hawkeye was conked out on his bed, BJ put on his pink henley and a reasonably clean pair of pants, and trekked to Margaret’s tent in the dark. 

“I think I have something of yours,” he said, when she opened the door. A warm crescent of light poured from behind her. 

He held up a letter, addressed to her, and she reached for it, reading the name and return address. She clutched the envelope to her chest.

“Where did you get this?” she said.

BJ ducked his head. “Peg was making Erin pancakes when she wrote her last letter. She got some syrup on the envelope. I’m afraid your letter got stuck to the back of mine,” he said.

Margaret’s face flushed. “Did you read it?” she said.

“Of course not,” he said. He’d only read the name Lorraine Anderson above the return address. 

“Well, thank you,” she said, and started to close the door.

“Do you have a minute? Can I come in?” BJ said.

She leaned in the doorway, arms crossed, hair loose and falling in gentle waves over her shoulders. She frowned, and he wondered how he looked to her. Maybe he had the same wild and distant look that Hawkeye had, compounded with his exhaustion. Maybe he was reminding her of all the other men who’d shown up at her door, wanting something from her.

“It won’t take long,” he said. And her expression softened.

“Alright,” she said.

He sat down in her desk chair and she sat across from him, on her bed. He opened his mouth and tried to make words come out.

“Are you and Pierce fighting again?” she said, before he could put his words together in an acceptable order.

“No…we’re, we weren’t, that’s not what I wanted to talk about,” he said.

She raised an eyebrow. “But you do want to talk about Pierce,” she said.

BJ scrubbed his hands over his face. “Does he seem strange to you?” he said. 

“Not more so than usual,” Margaret said. 

“That’s what I’m getting at, really. What is usual? What was he like before I got here?” BJ said. 

“Before you got here,” she repeated. Her face twisted up in an expression BJ couldn’t quite place. “I don’t know. It seems like a different time. McIntyre looked after him. They were attached at the hip, naturally, like the two of you are, but Trapper could mellow him out when it seemed like Pierce was going off the rails.”

“Off the rails how?” BJ said. He braced his hands on his knees and dug his fingernails into his skin.

Margaret sighed. “He used to forget what day it was, get disoriented, or belligerent. It was stress, really. It doesn’t happen anymore,” she said.

“Because he’s so stress free now,” BJ deadpanned.

“Are you worried about him?” Margaret said.

She leaned forward. He followed her gaze to his knees, where his nails were digging in. She reached out and touched his left wrist, lightly. 

He wondered what Margaret Houlihan would do if she was sent back in time, if the looping would be as alarming to her as it was to him, not just in the way it warped any scientific notion he had about the linear progression from past to present and future, but in the way old feelings were called up, startlingly, in ways he didn’t remember. He wondered if she’d spend whole days examining herself, and how she must look to others. 

BJ was ashamed at how fixated he’d become on his past self, in his brief visit to the past. While Hawkeye had been driven by urges to save people and fix things, all BJ could think about was how silly he’d looked, scared shitless, slipping in the mud, and trying to keep up with Hawkeye’s smart banter. He felt absurdly vain. 

Of course Hawkeye would be the one cursed with whatever this was. He was the one who’d take it seriously, who’d make notes and show BJ the way. Of course he’d wake up in delirium and longing, and find comfort in Trapper John’s big brown eyes and broad shoulders (of which BJ had heard entirely too much about.) Of course BJ was an inadequate substitute for all that Trapper could provide. He’d known that the day they’d met. 

“I always worry,” BJ said. It was a symptom of caring for Hawk the way he did. 

“I think distractions help. I used to think it was silly, the way the two of them carried on with one scheme or another, but the longer I’m here the more I think it’s necessary. Maybe we’re all here just to keep each other sane,” Margaret said.

She looked up at him. There was something vulnerable in her eyes, and suddenly BJ felt guilty for intruding, for unintentionally pilfering her letter, for expecting her to have some key to understanding Hawkeye, like he was some great and challenging riddle.

“That stance is a little lacking in your usual military fervor, Major. I thought we were here for the greater good?” he said.

She rolled her eyes. “Well, just between friends,” she muttered.

Is that what we are? It happened almost by accident. 

“Were you expecting that letter? I’m sorry I couldn’t get it to you sooner,” BJ said. 

Margaret’s face flushed. “Lorraine has a way of keeping me sane, too. I know I don’t need to tell you how easily a letter can lift your spirits,” she said.

Peg had written about an afternoon she and Erin had spent in the park, and how Erin (in a big hat and little blue sundress Peg’s mother had sewn, face and arms greasy with sunscreen, smiling wide) had become fascinated with the ducks in the pond, waving and babbling excitedly, and then becoming quiet with wonder when a few of them took flight into the blue, cloudless sky. There was a day he could live over and over for an eternity. He imagined himself in Peg’s stories. He’d be there holding her hand, and charming Erin with his ability to imitate her fascinating ducks. 

“No,” BJ said. “You don’t.”

“Sometimes I wish she was here, permanently, so we could be attached at the hip the way the two of you are,” she said.

BJ’s first thought was that nothing at the 4077th was permanent. His second was that it embarrassed him when people pointed out the ways in which he and Hawkeye were attached. It was true that they went everywhere together. It was true that they’d developed a way of finishing each other’s thoughts and sensing each other’s moods and unconsciously adopting each other’s mannerisms. It was true that they shared clothes and drinks and, lately, secrets. It was true that if Hawk was gone, BJ wasn’t sure what exactly he’d do. He imagined the landscape graying further in his mind’s eye, and the numbness returning, full‐force. 

It was a little frightening to be linked in such a way. It was desperate and necessary and unavoidable. Separation would have to be performed with surgical precision, as if they were really, physically, attached at the hip.

Of course he couldn’t say any of this, certainly not to Hawkeye and certainly not to Margaret. 

She studied his expression. He could feel her eyes. He felt, as he often did when he was alone with Margaret, that there were several unsaid things hovering in the space between them. They were both very private people. They were both very cautious with their feelings. They both had experience fashioning themselves into what people wanted and expected.

“I can imagine it has its challenges, being attached like that,” Margaret said.

BJ cleared his throat. “And I can imagine it’s challenging to be so close and so far away,” he said.

He remembered Margaret and Lorraine's easy companionship. Margaret smiled brighter when she was around. She produced hitherto untold stories about her college years, about all the fun and reckless things she’d done. It was as if watching a mask she put on fall away, before his eyes. It was an impressive display, because Margaret was so rigid and skillful in her masking.

He stood, abruptly.

“Thank you, Margaret. I’m sorry for keeping you,” he said. He wiped his sweaty palms on his pants.

He turned to the door, overwhelmed, and in need of fresh air.

“BJ?” Margaret said. 

He turned back around to look at her.

“Yes?”

“Anytime you need to uh…I mean if you ever want to, well, talk, my door is open,” she said.

He nodded, because it was all he could manage, and then stepped out into the cool, night air. The stars were bright overhead, constant and ever changing.

“Feel like you just stepped into a time machine?” Hawkeye said. And BJ nearly choked on his drink. 

He was talking about the planes flying low. BJ could hear them, and feel the vibrations through the floor. He watched the liquid stir in the glass in front of him. He’d been through this day enough times to memorize the major beats, and the particulars, when he was feeling observant and not vaguely nauseous. 

“Hawkeye,” Radar said, elbowing Hawkeye in the ribs. “The colonel.”

BJ blinked at him, sitting there with captain’s bars affixed to his hat. Radar was at once sitting beside him, nervous, jumpy, glasses smudged, and back home in Iowa, going through bills at the kitchen table, or tending to the animals. Seeing him again was like seeing a ghost, though Radar had only been absent from the 4077th for a matter of days.

“Relax, drink your grape nehi Corporal Captain,” Hawkeye said. He met BJ’s eyes, amused, and BJ found he could hardly look at him.

He knew why he’d been sent back to his first day in Korea this time. It was because he’d hit Hawkeye. When this Hawkeye, who hardly knew him, looked his way all BJ could see was the cut on his cheekbone and the bruise that bloomed beneath his eye. He could hear the glass of the still shattering. It was louder in his brain than shelling. 

He’d liked to have done that day over, and erase any memory Hawk had of what really happened. It wouldn’t happen that way. Even if he could go back, BJ knew he’d find a way to ruin things, and Hawkeye would find a way to remember what he’d done.

This Hawkeye was smiling at him, and then ushering him into their stolen jeep. This Hawkeye was sitting across from him at Rosie’s, talking over the fight that BJ didn’t have the good sense to pretend to be surprised by. 

He looked down at his hands. He hadn’t wanted to think of himself as someone who could let his anger get away from him. He hadn’t wanted to think he was the sort of person who could hurt someone like that. He hadn’t wanted to think he was someone who could hurt Hawkeye. 

Radar stepped away for another grape nehi. BJ only had a few moments before he’d be back, and then carting them to the 4077th. 

“Hawkeye, can I tell you something?” BJ said.

He leaned close in a way that caught Hawkeye off guard. He could tell by the way his shoulders tightened. All of Hawk’s tension came through in his back and shoulder blades. 

“Sure you can, BJ,” Hawkeye said, like he was still testing out BJ’s name in his mouth. 

“I’ve been here before,” BJ said. 

“Rosie’s?”

“This day, Hawk. You’re not the only one who loops back around,” BJ said. 

Hawkeye looked around the bar and then back at BJ. 

“Who told you about looping back around?” he said, voice so quiet BJ hardly registered it as Hawkeye’s voice. 

Part of him hated ending up here, over and over, because Hawk didn’t know him here. There was always a moment or two of distrust, until they found their footing. Another part of him was thrilled at the opportunity to examine Hawkeye’s every move, to find some new bit of truth in everything he said that first day. And if BJ could lose himself enough he could turn them into strangers again, strangers who had yet to hurt each other. 

“You did,” BJ said. “Or, I guess, you will.”

Hawkeye grinned. “Well isn’t that interesting, BJ ,” Hawkeye said, and the syllables of BJ’s name were already warmer on Hawk’s tongue.

“I’m not sure I’m allowed to tell you this,” BJ said. He looked over his shoulder. Radar seemed to be arguing with Rosie over the terms of the tab. 

“On whose authority? Mine?” Hawkeye said. BJ met his eyes. They were bright and interested, which only served to make BJ feel worse.

“I don’t know, Hawk,” BJ said. He sipped his drink. They were supposed to come out of here drunk and laughing. He had yet to diverge from the path this significantly. He wasn’t sure what would happen.

Hawkeye’s eyes narrowed. There was a smile twitching on the edges of his mouth, but his hands were fidgeting incessantly. 

“Who are we, to each other?” Hawkeye muttered. 

“You’re the best friend I ever had,” BJ said.

“Am I?” Hawkeye said. He tilted his head to one side, as if the thought was physically heavy in his brain and had thrown his skull off balance.

BJ swallowed his guilt and his shame and his jealousy and figured, what the hell? If he couldn’t say what he wanted to say to his Hawkeye he might as well tell this one. 

“Yes,” BJ said, emboldened by liquor. “And the feeling’s mutual if you can believe it. I know you can’t right now, seeing as I’m just some guy standing in front of a big, Trapper John shaped hole.”

“What do you know about Trapper?” Hawkeye said, voice level. He leaned back in his chair and looked BJ over, as if he was a schoolboy, called on to give the wrong answers. BJ rubbed some of the dried mud off his cheek.

“A lot of things,” BJ said. 

He didn’t want to overplay his hand. He had the idea that there were some things about Hawkeye and Trapper’s relationship that he didn’t know. Hawk got quiet, on occasion, when someone else brought his name up. He thought about what Margaret said. 

“I know he helped you make sense of things, over here. I know you two were a package deal, a matching set,” BJ said. He tried to make his face do normal, casual things. When he felt like he was failing he took another sip of his drink.

Hawkeye laughed. “Then how come he’s on his way home and I’m here? It’s pretty hard to be a matching set when there’s an ocean between you,” he said.

“Touché,” BJ said.

Hawkeye rubbed his hand over his jaw and BJ watched him: his rough knuckles, the sharp lines of his face, the tan lines at his collar and shirtsleeves. The future stretched out in front of him, all of a sudden. Trapper never wrote to Hawkeye. BJ remembered the first weeks, when Hawkeye would leap up the second he saw Radar in the door with the mail. He remembered how Hawkeye’s face would fall, a little more each time when there was nothing from Trapper. He remembered the way he’d snapped back, quick, like a rubber band, before anyone could ask him what was wrong. He remembered how after a while, Hawkeye hardly expected mail, apart from the odd letter from his father, magazine, and paper from back home. 

BJ cleared his throat. “I’m sorry, you know, that you missed him,” he said.

Hawkeye shook his head. “It’s nothing you should be sorry for,” he said.

“I owe you a couple apologies,” BJ said. He reached out, hand brushing Hawkeye’s wrist. Hawkeye’s eyes fell to the table.

I’m sorry I can’t be him. I’m sorry I can’t give you what you need. I’m sorry that all I do is break things .

“Is that why you’re back here? Did something happen?” Hawkeye said. His eyes hadn’t left their hands, so BJ moved closer. He traced his fingers. 

“Yes,” BJ said. “I’m sorry.”

Hawkeye looked at him, startled, maybe, by BJ’s directness or sincerity. BJ wondered, momentarily, if it would be better to sever things right here, to keep his distance before their proximity became dangerous.

“I’m not as good a friend as I’d like to be,” BJ said. “And you deserve…well, you deserve the world, Hawk.”

Hawkeye ducked his head. BJ caught him blushing: red over the bridge of his nose and his cheekbones and over to the tops of his ears.

“Well, I’m sure it’ll be alright,” he said, voice raw and scratchy. “I’m sure I’ll forgive you. I’m the forgiving type. I bet you know that already.”

BJ thought about Hawk’s face, blurry, frowning, partially obscured by his helmet, when Colonel Potter sent him in to collect BJ off the floor. He thought about Hawkeye’s hand on his forehead, and the way he held him, tight, and secure, like he was holding all the broken pieces of BJ in place. He remembered pressing his face into Hawk’s shoulder, getting his snot and tears all over him, shaking hard, slurring nonsensically. He’d clung to Hawkeye, but he’d been sure he’d turn away. He’d been sure that the second Hawkeye saw him for what he really was he’d never want to speak to him again. He’d never touch him. 

Trapper wouldn’t hit Hawkeye. Trapper wouldn’t fall apart beside him. Trapper was there to distract and soothe and prop Hawk up. Trapper never worried about whether or not Hawkeye needed him, because it was indisputable. Their names were always spoken in the same breath. They kept each other sane. Lately, BJ felt like he was going off the rails, maybe they both were.

“Can I buy you another drink?” BJ said. 

Later, in the Swamp, when the whole camp was dark and still, and BJ’s head was aching from the booze and the past, he heard the shuffle of Hawkeye settling into his cot, of him tossing and turning, and then the bed creaking. He heard Hawk’s footsteps, and then felt his hand grazing BJ’s arm, giving him goosebumps.

BJ shifted, and Hawkeye lay down beside him. His heart was pounding. He was nearing the point when things started over, the end of his first day in Korea. 

“BJ?” Hawkeye mumbled, voice so close to how he usually said BJ’s name that it was startling. He lay stone still, arms at his sides, warm everywhere their bodies touched.

“Yeah?”

Hawkeye tilted his head to the side, so his mouth was at BJ’s ear.

“Tomorrow, you won’t remember any of this,” Hawkeye said.

“Right, well, in my tomorrow, neither will you. Or maybe you will, I’m a little fuzzy on that bit,” BJ said. 

“Does it get easier? You know. You’ve been through it. You could tell me how I get from here to there. Sometimes I’m not sure I’ll get there. I think maybe I keep going back because I can’t go forward. Trap always…” he trailed off. BJ could feel Hawk’s hair, soft, on the side of his neck.

“What did Trap do?” BJ said.

“He kept my feet on the ground,” Hawkeye said.

“I can do that,” BJ mumbled, though he wasn’t at all sure. 

Peg used to tease him about his white knight act when they first started going out. He was always guiding her over uneven concrete, warning her for unexpected steps, when it was dark, and she was wearing high heels. When they went out dancing his eyes were always scanning the corners of rooms, making sure no one had their eyes on her for too long. When it came to Hawk, BJ was usually the unsteady one. He was the one doing the leaning. 

Keeping Hawkeye’s feet on the ground would require BJ to know where the ground was. 

Hawkeye drew closer, and then his mouth was pressed to the underside of BJ’s jaw. He kissed his neck and then his throat, and then Hawk’s hand was at BJ’s hip. BJ felt a little dizzy. He wasn’t sure if it was the shock of Hawkeye’s lips on him, or the lightheaded sensation of the loop about to begin again.

“Hawk,” BJ managed. He looked up at the top of the tent and for a second he was sure he could see stars. 

“Yes?” Hawkeye said. His teeth brushed BJ’s skin. BJ wondered for a moment if he might leave a mark.

“We don’t do this,” BJ said. “You and I.”

Hawkeye froze, and then rolled away, so he was on his side, back to BJ’s shoulder.

“Did you and Trapper—?”

“I thought you knew all about Trapper,” Hawkeye said. 

BJ turned and looked at the back of Hawkeye, at the hair raised on the back of his neck, at the dark, flyaway strands at his nape, before he started going gray. His shoulders were tight and bunched nearly to his shoulders. BJ wondered if this was how Hawk had felt the first time around. Back then he’d seen Hawk’s confidence and the security he’d provided. It was clear, before they’d even set foot in the camp, that Hawkeye was the center of it all. He hadn’t figured he was lonely. He hadn’t figured he’d reach for the first body in his path, though he probably should have.

BJ burned. Trapper kept Hawkeye’s feet on the ground. Trapper provided comfort and distraction and Hawk’s mouth was probably all over him, leaving marks. He wondered if Hawkeye hoped to loop back around to moments like that, where he and Trapper were pressed against each other in the narrow bed where BJ lay now. He wondered if the mattress smelled like him. He wondered if Hawk was closing his eyes, and imagining Trapper in the place of him. And who could blame him? Who was BJ but an interloping stranger?

“Maybe you’re a liar,” Hawkeye said. “Maybe I’m going crazy and someone sent you here to mess with me.” His tone was light and dreamy, with something sharp beneath it. He curled in on himself like a frightened animal. 

“You thought you were the only one,” BJ said. His hands were shaking. There was fire beneath his skin, and the beginnings of that roller coaster feeling. He turned and wrapped his arms around Hawkeye’s chest.

Hawkeye writhed and squirmed against him for a moment, until BJ fit their bodies together. He tucked his chin against Hawkeye’s shoulder. He balled his hands into Hawkeye’s shirt, and felt for his quick heartbeat. Hawkeye’s breath came fast and then slower. BJ hooked one ankle around Hawkeye’s, so they were entwined from head to foot. 

“Who are you?” Hawkeye said, voice distant and breathy. BJ imagined Hawkeye’s mouth on him again, guiltily.

“Someone who cares,” BJ muttered. 

Hawkeye laughed so hard he shook both of them. He threw his head back, so BJ got a face full of his hair. He cackled until it broke into a sob, and BJ kept his arms around him, like he could keep them both in place, even as the current of time was pulling him under.

“Tomorrow you won’t remember this,” Hawkeye repeated. 

BJ nodded.

“What am I supposed to do with that?” Hawkeye said. “How many times do I have to start over before I get to go home?”

“I don’t know, Hawk,” BJ said.

He listened for the wind through the trees. He felt Hawkeye shift against him, and the way his bones and muscles moved under his skin. He thought he could catalog the changes in Hawkeye’s body, too, if he was stuck here long enough. 

“I’m sorry it’s me,” BJ said.

“What?”

“I’m sorry it’s me that you’re stuck with. I’m sorry he went home without you, and that you ended up with me,” BJ said, into the skin at the back of Hawkeye’s neck. Part of him thought they’d always be bound together like this, no matter how many fires BJ set. It was the curse of loving someone in a warzone, of finding someone you couldn’t live without in a place neither of you wanted to be. 

Hawkeye was quiet. 

“You’re going back, aren’t you? I think I can feel it,” he said.

“Yes,” BJ said. His eyes rolled back in his head. He wondered what Hawkeye could feel. 

He held Hawkeye tight enough to bruise, and he looped back around.

Chapter Text

Hawkeye said he hoped one of these days he’d get thrown back somewhere even further. Maybe he’d end up in the airport, saying goodbye to his father, watching the ground below grow more and more distant, and Maine stretch out, bigger and more beautiful than he’d ever cared to think about before. Maybe it would be earlier, still. Maybe he’d wake up mid‐fight with Carlye, in their New York apartment. Maybe he’d say the right things the second go around. Maybe they’d curl up on opposite sides of the couch, like they used to, drinking decaf coffee and reading their respective books. She’d lean her head on a cushion and he’d watch the early evening light catch in the gold of her hair.

He’d tell her how pretty she looked. He’d tell her how much he loved her. He’d tell her that he’d be better, more devoted, more patient, less manic and obsessed with his work. 

Maybe he’d even end up home, as a kid, tugging on the hem of his mother’s apron, or sprinting through the long grass after Tommy, cupping fireflies in his hands, and tripping over his own feet. It had taken him a while to grow into his long limbs, and his exuberance. 

BJ thought if he went back too far he might go crazy. If he woke up in his Mill Valley house, if he saw Peg in the doorway, or Erin in her crib, and couldn’t stay, he might never recover. 

When BJ woke, back where and when he was supposed to be, Hawkeye was out on his shift at post-op. When BJ came to relieve him, Hawk looked up from his clipboard and gave him a once‐over.

“Where are you coming from?” Hawkeye said.

“The mess tent. I brought you coffee,” BJ said.

He held up their twin mugs in offering, and tried to smile. The aftereffects were worse this time around. All his skin felt raw and dehydrated, like a bad sunburn. His headache was splitting and his whole body was tired, despite the three cups of coffee he’d had before lurching slowly through the dirt to post‐op.

“Where are you really coming from?” Hawkeye said, eyebrows raised. BJ’s eyes caught on the bruise again. Some selfish, delusional part of him had expected it to be faded. But BJ hadn’t been gone a week, he only felt like he had. 

“Same as last time, my first day in Korea,” he said. 

Hawkeye’s eyes softened, and BJ was having trouble looking at him again. He was alarmed at how quickly Hawkeye had been able to tell that it wasn’t an ordinary hangover. He wondered how many times Hawk had come back from a loop with this particular sickness, and no one had noticed.

“Anything exciting happen?” Hawkeye said.

BJ sat down and looked over the clipboard Hawkeye handed him, eyes struggling to focus on the details. 

“Not really,” BJ said. If Hawkeye didn’t remember the pass he’d made, BJ wasn’t going to remind him.

“Oh come on,” Hawkeye said. “You’ve got to learn all the tricks. Get a poker game started and bleed us dry. Once Klinger accused me of being a psychic.”

“No one knows me when I go back. It’s my first day,” BJ said, massaging his temples. He could barely keep his eyes open. 

“Well then…tell my jokes before I tell them. I used to get a kick out of doing that too,” Hawkeye said. 

BJ had seen him do that. He wondered, dimly, given his headache, what version of the past he remembered. He wondered if half the times he and Hawk had seemed totally in sync it was because for Hawkeye it was just his third or fourth go around of that particular day. 

“Excuse me if I’m having trouble finding the bright side,” BJ said. 

“You’ll get used to it,” Hawkeye said. He reached out and put his hand on BJ’s knee. 

BJ flinched, involuntarily. He was having trouble drawing his thoughts away from the sensation of Hawkeye’s hand on his hip, in the dark. His calluses were the same, then and now (at the pads of his fingers and along the side of his pointer finger.)

Hawkeye frowned. “I can cover for you, if you need to sleep,” he said.

“I’m fine,” BJ said. “You should get some sleep. I’ll catch up with you later.”

“Okay,” Hawkeye said, voice hushed. 

BJ looked up at him, at the knit of his eyebrows and his guarded posture. Last night he’d coaxed BJ into his bed when he was too drunk and weepy to think straight. Last night he’d swept up the broken pieces of the still. BJ had the luxury of some distance. All Hawkeye had were bruises and a bunkmate who shrunk from his eyes and his hands like his attention burned. 

Hawk turned to leave, and BJ caught him by the sleeve.

“What do you need?” Hawkeye asked, like he meant it, like he’d bring BJ whatever he needed, no matter how unreasonable.

“I’m sorry about last night. I…look I behaved monstrously, and there’s no excuse, and if you want me to get on my knees and beg for your forgiveness you’d be completely justified,” BJ said. 

“On your knees?” Hawkeye said, expression softening.

“Hawk—”

“I’m the forgiving type. I thought you knew that by now. Extenuating circumstances, water under the bridge, I get it, you know? It’s okay,” he said.

“It really isn’t,” BJ said. He felt another wave of nausea.

Hawkeye put a hand on his shoulder. “Right, but, you know…you’ll get off duty and we’ll grab some dinner and finish that chess game and tomorrow we can build a new still. It’ll be even better this time.”

That evening BJ fell in step with Hawk, like he usually did, and the awkwardness between them dissipated. BJ could even stand to lean on Hawkeye’s shoulder, sitting beside him in the mess tent.

Hawkeye was on about some nurse from the 8063rd he’d met on leave who was writing him (in Hawk’s words) tantalizingly filthy letters.

“I keep asking when we can meet and she keeps teasing me. I get the idea she’s more interested in postal foreplay. It’s getting to the point where I get all hot and bothered whenever I see an envelope,” Hawkeye said. He sniffed at a spoonful of his mashed potatoes and then lowered his spoon. 

BJ hummed. It seemed to him that most of the time Hawkeye was the one who was all talk and no action. He went out with nurses on occasion, when they took him up on his frequent offers of drinks and fooling around. Most of the time, though, his flirting was met with eyerolls and exasperation. Nurses went on dates with Hawkeye because they were bored, not because they were wild for him. BJ had always got the feeling that it was the same way for Hawkeye, that the flirting and the schmoozing was an attempt to distract himself, or make life seem normal.

Of course, it was fun to watch Hawk flirt. It was nice to see his eyes get all bright and playful. It was a little thrilling to see him crowd a woman against a wall in pre‐op: his arm outstretched, palm to the wall, leaning down so their faces were close, his other hand on his hip or in his pocket, sneaking compliments in between jokes in that low, effortless tone that BJ envied, on occasion. 

Sometimes BJ imagined he was the one Hawk was flirting with, that there was some electric charge between them, that he could make Hawkeye’s eyes light like that, even if it was just to distract himself from where they were, or rather where they couldn’t be. He wondered what Hawkeye would do, if he took BJ out. He wondered if his mouth would be as feverishly hot on the side of his neck as it had been the night before. He wondered if Hawkeye only kissed him like that because they were strangers, because everything they did would be erased in the tide of time, because the war was only a mirage, a poor imitation of real life, where things like that didn’t count.

He wondered if he left marks on the nurses he kissed. 

BJ choked on a mouthful of creamed spinach. 

Hawkeye patted him on the back. “Gee, Beej, I didn’t mean to offend your prudish sensibilities,” Hawkeye said.

“I’m not a prude,” BJ said, blushing deeply.

 Hawkeye turned back to his mashed potatoes.

“Do you ever…you know…when you loop around—?” BJ started.

“Do I go back to the great trysts of my time here? That’s what you’re asking, isn’t it,” Hawkeye said.

BJ nodded.

“Well, it’s a good way to kill time. It’s a great way to kill time, actually, and the more times around the easier it is to pick up on what someone likes. You know I’ve been called an intuitive lover,” Hawkeye said, grinning goofily.

“Ah,” BJ said. “I suppose it’s easier when you know you’re going to get to do it all over again, fewer embarrassments, fewer regrets,” he said. 

Hawkeye looked him over, eyebrows furrowing. “Not necessarily,” he said. 

BJ got goosebumps up his arms. The sunburnt feeling had faded into something akin to feverish chills. 

“What do you mean?” BJ said. 

“Nothing, just, it’s complicated. Sometimes you learn things you’d rather not know. It’s easy to forget that it matters what you do, even if no one else remembers that it’s happened all before. It still matters,” Hawkeye said.

“Right,” BJ said, though he felt like there was a knot in his stomach. “It’s just that it gets hard to remember what’s real. You’ve met me for the first time about twenty times now,” BJ said.

He smiled. He wasn’t sure if what he was saying made sense.

“Maybe I’m afraid one of these days some version of you won’t want to meet me,” BJ said. 

He could see it in his mind’s eye. Hawkeye would wander off in search of Trapper and he’d just never come back. Hawkeye would shake his hand roughly and go on complaining to Radar, like BJ wasn’t even there. BJ would fail to capture some sliver of his attention or say something to sour the mood further, and they’d show up at camp indifferent to one another, or worse, enemies. It would be over before it even started. 

“Every version of me you meet out there is still me,” Hawkeye said.

“I know that,” BJ said, though it complicated things. Of course Hawkeye would have such a strong sense of himself that trivial things like tears in the fabric of time and the distinction between what was real and what wasn’t didn’t bother him. Of course Hawkeye was as sure of himself here as he was back in time or at home. Hawkeye was Hawkeye, wherever he was. BJ wasn’t sure he could say the same thing about himself.

Hawkeye stood and scooped up their mostly empty trays. The evening sun was hitting him in particularly distracting ways: illuminating the different colors in his mess of hair, catching in his long eyelashes, making shadows that pooled in the hollows of his collarbone and the sharp jut of his jaw. Hawkeye looked down at him.

“And every version of me wants to meet you,” he said.

It was the red party again. BJ lost track of Hawkeye and went outside to look for him. He found him lying in the damp grass, red dye coming off of him in a vaguely morbid looking puddle.

“You alright?” BJ said. There were a couple go‐arounds where he wasn’t. There were a couple go‐arounds where Hawkeye drank too much and ended up crying, overwhelmed by the emotions of the day. There were versions of the day where he snuck off in the middle of the festivities and fell asleep in the Swamp, his cheek pressed to his pillow, bloody lab coat still over his shoulders, boots half off, mouth open, drooling. 

“I’m over the moon,” Hawkeye said, squinting up at him. “Do you want to join me?”

“On the moon?” BJ said. 

Hawkeye stretched his arms over his head. BJ tracked the motion: the liquid way he moved, his uneven tan, his rough elbows. It was absurd that BJ had been around the block enough times that he was noticing things like Hawk’s elbows. 

“In the grass,” Hawkeye said. 

BJ lay down beside him and looked up at the stars. He’d cut himself off early this time around, in an attempt to spare his liver. He seemed to be the only one, given the volume of the drunken shouts and laughter from inside. 

“I haven’t seen that much red since my mother made strawberry jam for the whole neighborhood. I still remember all the jars lined up on the counter. Dad and I had jam on toast for weeks,” Hawkeye said.

“And the whole house smelled like strawberries and sugar,” BJ said.

He was trying to pay attention to the sensation of the wet grass on his skin, and the warmth radiating from Hawkeye. He’d started looking for things to ground himself. The more times he relived the same day, the harder it was to keep his feet rooted to the ground. This day wasn’t so bad. At least today the red was dye and not blood. They both knew Hawk wasn’t being entirely truthful. He’d seen more red. He’d been covered in red up to his bony elbows.

“Have I told you this story already?” Hawkeye said, turning his head to the side to look at BJ. The insides of his lips were red from the punch. His cheeks were flushed and his eyebrows were knitted together.

“Something like that,” BJ said.

Hawkeye looked at him, curiously, on the edge of suspicion. 

“You know you didn’t have to do all this just because I lost my head,” Hawkeye said.

“You didn’t lose your head,” BJ said, feeling a shiver up and down his arms. 

Hawkeye barked out a laugh. “You don’t need to sugarcoat it,” he said.

BJ thought about him speeding off in that jeep, fast‐talking his way through checkpoints and busting into the peace talks. BJ had seen him manic. He’d seen him on edge. He’d seen him joke with such a fervent, deflective energy that laughing at him was guilt inducing. BJ had never broached the topic. He’d been too self‐involved. He didn’t know how to talk about it now, either, hence the party. 

“I’m just happy you’re back,” BJ said. He gripped handfuls of grass, fingernails clawing at dirt. He was a little afraid he might do something crazy, like reach out and touch some part of Hawkeye: his wrist or his jaw or his neck so he could feel his pulse and make sure they were both still alive. It would be grounding in a different way to touch Hawkeye.

“That was a nice thing you did. Actually it’s one of the nicest things anyone’s ever…well,” Hawkeye said. He cleared his throat. “Thanks, Beej.”

“Don’t mention it,” BJ said. He meant it. 

His face was heating the way it always did. Every time he lived through this day he was reminded of the earnestness of the gesture. It was big. It was full of love. On the fourth or fifth go around Margaret had pulled him close for a dance, her crimson hair pressed to his shoulder, and said, half‐drunk, smiling brightly, that the red party was the most romantic thing she’d ever seen. 

Hawkeye studied his face. “You look good in red,” he said.

BJ swallowed, thickly. “So do you,” he said.

Hawkeye’s head tilted back, pressing deeper into the earth, like he was going to sink through the ground. 

“Party’s not over yet,” BJ said. “We could go back in.”

He felt better when Hawk was in a crowd. There were more people who could keep an eye on him. 

“Stay out here with me for a minute,” Hawkeye said. BJ felt Hawk’s fingers on the inside of his wrist. 

BJ felt the tide again: the rise and fall of time coming close and then receding, the nausea, the itchiness, like he was slipping out of his own skin.

“Sure, Hawk. I’m not going anywhere,” BJ said.

Margaret Hayden was sitting in his driveway, atop the hood of her father’s Pontiac. It was a dream or a memory or something else. Maybe he really had gone back. In any case, there she was, with her curled bangs and her ponytail frizzing in the humidity. 

“What are you doing here?” BJ said. He was sweating, still in his track uniform with his school shoes in one hand and his backpack on his shoulder. 

“Your daddy said you’d be home soon, so I said I’d wait,” Peg said. 

“Peg, are you telling me your father lets you drive his car?” BJ said. 

Peg tilted her head and gave him that sideways smile of hers that reminded him a little of Hawkeye’s. He liked that he was the first one to call her Peg. He liked that it was a nickname of a nickname. That reminded him of Hawk too. 

“Maybe,” Peg said. She crossed her ankles, daintily. 

Back then the thing he liked most about Peg was the way she talked. They could talk for hours. They liked the same books and movies. They liked the same subjects in school. BJ had always found boys at school to tag along with, but if he was honest none of the boys were his friend the way Peg Hayden was. She was probably his best friend in the world, that is until he met Hawkeye. 

BJ skimmed his fingers over the hood of the car, fingertips stopping at the approximate height of her thigh. He didn’t touch her, just the fabric of her skirt. The other thing he liked most about Peg was that she never pushed him to fool around with her. They kissed, on occasion, but most of the time they just talked, and went out to the diner after school and shared milkshakes and plates of fries. 

She leaned down and kissed him, gentle, on the side of his mouth. Her lips were very soft. It was like kissing a cloud. It would be rougher to kiss Hawkeye, he thought. It would be like crashing together. It would be desperate and slippery and warm.

“Do you want to go for a drive?” Peg said. 

“Sure,” BJ said. 

Peg had passed her driver’s test early. She was an exceptionally good driver. She had a little car later, when they lived in the city. Now though, she gripped the steering wheel with an anxious confidence. He’d teased once, a long time ago, that she’d need heels to reach the pedals. 

They took a spin through the neighborhood and out to the edge of town, where the stars got brighter and there was a spot to pull off the highway and lay in the long grass. Hawkeye would like an evening like that, reclining with their eyes to the sky, somewhere safe and familiar. Peg’s fingers skimmed his skin from wrist to shoulder. It seemed like they were always on the edge of really touching each other, back then. 

He’d thought that was what sexual tension was, for a long time: the tentative skirting around each other, the push and pull, the prodding of the boundaries of polite society. It was thrilling and anxiety inducing, but it was nothing like the hungry, overwhelming thing he felt around Hawkeye. 

Peg stretched. “Do you ever think about the future?” she said.  

“Only when someone makes me,” BJ said, tensing at the shoulders. 

His father had been on him about getting his grades up in preparation for college. His grades were always decent, if middle of the pack most of the time. He didn’t like the attention that came with being top of the class. When BJ was 16 his primary goal was to fly under the radar. If he could be popular but not too popular, smart but not a show off, funny but not desperate for a laugh, athletic but not a star of any team, and coupled (with lovely, extraordinary Peggy Hayden), then everything would be alright. Attention meant trouble, and BJ couldn’t afford trouble at this particular point in his life, not when grand ideas of the future were at stake. 

“Anne Reynolds was taking photos in her cap and gown, standing on the front porch stairs with  her hand on the railing, you know? In higher heels than I’ve ever seen her wear. I watched her wobble all the way through the grass to the car with the biggest grin on her face,” Peg said.

She leaned her head back and BJ watched the line of her neck, and the delicate gold chain at her collarbone: her initials, on a tiny charm. 

“It’s strange to think that it’ll be us soon, isn’t it?” she said. 

She turned her head to the side and looked at him, eyes blue and analytical, like they were playing a game.

“No,” BJ said. “You’re passing all your classes aren’t you?”

He grinned and she mirrored it. BJ liked it when Peg smiled like that. She had a gentler, polite, ladylike smile and then she had this one: wilder, unselfconscious, private in a way that was thrilling. 

“You know what I mean,” she said, swatting his arm. “You’re just being difficult.”

“Tell me what you think about the future,” BJ said, seriously. He rolled over to face her, folding his arms protectively over his ribs, the way he always did when conversations got difficult. He did the same thing with Hawk, when he asked questions BJ didn’t want to answer. 

“I think you go to college and I go to secretarial school, maybe. And we travel, maybe. We go on some big cross country roadtrip and I drive because I’m an excellent driver and we go to parties and we stay up all night and I write poetry and we go out dancing and you’re very good at it,” Peg said.

“Oh am I?” BJ said. 

“Yes,” Peg said, matter‐of‐factly, as if speaking it into existence. She could, if she wanted. BJ would do anything she liked. She’d make a good dancer out of him. She had that power.

It was a little like the way Hawkeye had made him a gambler and a drinker and a partner in crime and someone who wore red suspenders and pink shirts and straw hats and performed surgery (among other things) with quick care and precision. BJ was always remaking himself on the whims of people he loved. 

“Maybe we get an apartment and I work and you go to med school and then…well who knows,” Peg said.

She shrugged and glanced over at him, waiting patiently for a response. 

“Who knows? I thought you were the expert,” he said. 

She frowned at him. 

“I suppose there were a lot of maybes ,” he said. 

Maybe the United States would join the war. Maybe it would never end. Maybe there would be no college to go to or car to take across the country. Maybe he wouldn’t be good enough for med school. Maybe his hands weren’t steady enough to be a surgeon’s. Maybe his father would find the dirty magazines under his bed. Maybe he’d beat him. Maybe Peg would get sick of his evasive maneuvers and jokes and general lack of any remarkable qualities and decide he wasn’t the person with whom she wanted to spend her life. 

Maybe she’d find out he was a fraud and she’d reject him. Maybe he’d have to live that day over and over until it burned bright even with his eyes closed. Maybe, years later, he’d open one of her letters and find that he could hardly follow it. Maybe, in Korea, they’d be more than worlds apart, they’d be adrift in time. He’d read and reread the dates in her handwriting, because it would be getting harder and harder to tell what day it was supposed to be, and what future was supposed to be theirs. 

When BJ was 16 it was easier to theorize about the future because it seemed like such a distant, amorphous thing. It was full of maybes. 

“Maybe we’ll get married,” BJ said.

Chapter Text

Things were quiet for a while. Well, things were as quiet as they could be in a war. Days were progressing in a vaguely linear fashion, at least for BJ. He was waking up in the Swamp, in his own body (not some previous iteration of his body). He was marking days on his calendar and writing the right dates on his letters to Peg. 

The fighting had died down a little. Post‐op was encouragingly vacant. Some of the enlisted men had taken advantage of the quiet and the good weather and  started up a basketball tournament. BJ watched them bound up and down the court, dribbling a ball that was going a little flat.

Hawk was busy with knitting projects. (He couldn’t keep still even when things got slow.) A friend of his back home was having a baby, and he’d taken it upon himself to knit a whole wardrobe: a tiny sweater, two beanies, a pair of socks, a scarf and mittens that in BJ’s limited experience seemed impractical. Little kids were hard to wrangle into winter wear. (Though, perhaps it was a higher priority for winter in Crabapple Cove.)

Hawkeye had been examining the complex cable knit he’d chosen for the sweater with furious intensity. He’d been swearing and undoing rows and fretting about the size of his baby socks, interrogating BJ about Erin’s feet and hands and whether or not she’d like a pom pom on a hat.

“I’m not sure, Hawk,” BJ had said, not looking up from the paperback he was reading. He was sprawled on his cot, entirely at peace, taking the time to relax very seriously. “I’ve never seen Erin in a hat.”

Hawkeye frowned, and BJ felt something in his chest seize. He looked away from his book and up at the top of the tent. Maybe things were too quiet. Maybe he was moments from slipping back again. He studied a new stain above him: water damage or mud. He was trying to collect details to hold onto. If he woke up tomorrow and the stain wasn’t there then he’d have to reassess what day it was. 

“I’ve got to ship these out before things pick up again,” Hawkeye said, surveying the knitted goods he’d laid over his cot.

“What if it doesn’t pick back up?” BJ said, vaguely. He lay back and laid his book pages down on his chest. He closed his eyes. “What if we’re done?”

“We aren’t done,” Hawkeye said. “It’s got to end with a bang, if it ever ends.”

BJ opened his eyes, gaze sliding to Hawkeye’s cot. He was hunched and tense, brow furrowed, chewing on his lower lip (a bad habit from childhood.)

“I’m sure she’ll love everything,” BJ said. Peg had always been excited to choose Erin’s outfits, even the pastel onesies she spit up on and the little socks that she kicked off her feet into her crib. They were new parents. They’d been excited for gifts of any variety. 

“I should’ve ordered that softer yarn. If it’s itchy the kid won’t want to wear it,” Hawkeye said.

BJ imagined Erin in one of Hawkeye’s sweaters. He imagined her bounding through autumn leaves with her loping toddler gait. (BJ hadn’t seen this gait in person but Peg had described it in detail in her letters.)

“It’s not itchy,” BJ said. “It’s fine. It’s a lovely gift. It’s the loveliest gift you could give, really.”

“Oh yeah? What about world peace?” Hawkeye said.

“You’re going to give a newborn world peace?” BJ said.

Hawkeye sighed, deeply. BJ watched his shoulders rise and his chest fall. 

“Isn’t that what this is all about?” Hawkeye said. 

It occurred to BJ that Hawk was in need of some cheering. It also occurred to him that he was the wrong man for the job. Talk of babies, even when they weren’t his own, stirred up too much complicated baggage and emotional turmoil. The last thing he wanted to do was spin out of control. He might end up back in the Kimpo airport.

“I think Klinger’s trying to get a poker game going. Do you want to round up the usual suspects?” BJ said. 

Hawkeye shook his head. He collapsed back on his bed and closed his eyes. “It’s okay, Beej. I think I’ll just turn in early.

BJ studied him for a moment. “Alright,” he said, at last, and turned off the light.

The next thing BJ knew, Hawkeye had shot up out of bed, gasping, and struggling against his blankets.

Across the room, Charles groaned.

BJ got up and made for Hawkeye’s cot.

“Hawk, hey, Hawk, it’s okay. You’re dreaming,” he said, grabbing at Hawkeye’s shoulders. 

“BJ, what’s the date?” Hawkeye gasped. His eyes were wild and unfocused. He reached out and grasped fistfuls of BJ’s shirt. 

BJ told him. He put his arms around him while he struggled. It was a little bit like trying to pick up a chicken with its wings flapping. 

“Come on, Hawk. We can’t talk here. Let’s go outside, quickly, quietly,” BJ said.

Hawkeye settled, fractionally, in his thrashing against BJ’s chest. It was invigorating to be pressed against each other like this. BJ was very aware of the way his skin was flushing, and Hawk’s surprising strength. He could pin BJ down if he wanted. It would be easy. 

BJ managed to get Hawkeye to his feet and they shuffled, awkwardly, through the tent flap and into the dirt outside. The sky was clear and the stars were stark bright. Hawkeye’s face made odd shadows in the white light. He looked crazed and menacing. He looked overwhelmed and about to cry. He looked many ways all at once. Maybe this was the endpoint of their temporal escapades. Maybe the time loop drove people crazy. Maybe Hawk had been in too long. All of his other outbursts could be attributed to the brain scrambling of looping back around. 

That thought in particular was relieving. It meant that Hawkeye would be okay when he got home. He wouldn’t miss them all too much. He wouldn’t fall into one of his blue moods. He wouldn’t do concerning things, like sneak off to the peace talks, or scream in his sleep. That meant there was hope for the both of them. 

But Hawkeye had been in Korea far longer than BJ had. He’d been there forever and a day. Maybe it was too late already. 

“Where did you go?” BJ said. Hawkeye hunched in the dirt, breathing in spasms. He gathered himself and then he stood, brushing grime off the knees of his pants.

“I was at the front,” Hawkeye said. 

BJ’s blood went cold.

“I got stuck. Really stuck. I’ve been gone so…” Hawkeye trailed off, looking around them, still disoriented, like he’d just stepped out into very bright light, or emerged from underwater after holding his breath for too long. 

BJ stepped back, giving him some space, but keeping his hands on Hawkeye’s shoulders. He watched him breathe some more, fascinated by the way his shoulders moved. He was cooling down, panicked heat coming off him like steam. He was coming back into his body, now. BJ knew the feeling. It was like your skin stretched tight and needed a moment to snap back, like a rubber band. It was like your whole being was elastic. There was a fair amount of contortion involved in time travel. It was worse if you struggled, BJ thought. It was like when a patient tensed their muscles before a vaccination. It hurt worse that way.  A couple of times when BJ was being pulled backward he tried to fight it. He got bruised when he did. He got migraines.

BJ wasn’t much of a fighter, but Hawkeye was. He wondered how bad it got. He wondered if Hawk would even tell him, if he asked.

“How long have you been gone?” BJ said. 

“I’m not sure I remember yesterday, Beej,” Hawkeye said, voice a little too loud, like he was still speaking over the sound of shelling. “A month maybe, or longer.”

Hawkeye moved one hand to BJ’s waist, grabbing at his shirt, clawing at his side like they might be ripped apart again at any moment. 

“Well, you’re alright now. You’re safe, Hawk. You’re okay. I promise,” BJ said.

“You don’t know that,” Hawkeye said, adjusting his grip, sticking his other hand in BJ’s shirt collar, hauling him forward and down an inch, so they were eye level.

“Hawk—”

“No, no, no, no, don’t go making promises you can’t keep,” Hawkeye said. “I could be…you could be a mirage, Beej. You could be some hopeful dream. Maybe I’m dead in a trench somewhere. Maybe this is the hallucination I get while I succumb to my injuries. Maybe I am, at this very moment, being crushed to death under a pile of rubble. God in heaven, it’s good to see you anyhow,” Hawkeye said.

BJ wasn’t sure what alarmed him most: the notion that Hawk thought he was dead or the fact that he’d just said god in heaven . 

“Hawk—” BJ repeated. 

“I got to thinking about all the things I never told you, and all the things I’d miss. I got to thinking about Erin. It’s silly, you know? I’ve never met the kid, but I want to. You’ll probably think I’m overstepping, inserting myself into your family. And you’re right of course. I don’t belong. But‐but these boys come in with these pictures in their pockets,” Hawkeye said. He pawed at BJ’s breast pocket. 

“These little families they need to get back to, everybody looking stern in their Sunday best…and I think…I think it’s unfair, extraordinarily so, to see all these guys die over and over and over,” Hawkeye choked on his words. He was crying again, messily, the way he did when he was drunk. 

It wasn’t a new sentiment. In fact, maybe they’d engineered the loop themselves by sheer repetition of the words. It’s not fair. It’s not fair. It’s not fair. 

BJ wished he was better at this. He wished he was someone who could provide comfort with a few words. He wished he knew what to say. He wished his hands weren’t so big. He wished he wasn’t so tall and imposing. He wished gentleness came naturally to him, like it did for Hawkeye. BJ was gentle and brutal in starts and bursts. He wished he was in control. He wished time would behave. He wished his arms and legs would listen to him. He wished he could wipe the terrified look off of Hawkeye’s face, like that first night, the millionth go around, when Hawkeye had crawled into his bed and relaxed to his touch.

BJ held Hawkeye’s shoulders tightly, leaned in, and kissed him hard on the mouth. Hawkeye went limp, which was a little alarming, until his hand was on BJ’s jaw and his tongue was in BJ’s mouth and god in heaven was right, wasn’t it?

The kiss was grounding. BJ felt the electric hum that had been vibrating through Hawkeye still. All the background noise had been muted: the buzz of mosquitos, the wind through the sparse trees, boots thumping over dirt, the doors to the O Club swinging open and closed. 

He drew back and looked at Hawk in the dark. His lips were very pink and his expression had shifted from terrified and dazed to dazed and pleasure drunk. 

“Well now I’m sure I’m dead,” Hawkeye said.

“I’m sorry. I thought that might, uh…I thought that might help,” BJ said.

“You kissed me,” Hawkeye said. 

“I’m sorry,” BJ said. 

A horribly suffocating beat.

“Have we done that before?” Hawkeye said. 

“Sort of,” BJ said. “You made a pass once, on my first day.”

He blushed again, thinking about it. If BJ was honest, he thought about that night a lot. He thought about all the versions of Hawkeye that he’d met and what they might want from him. Hawk’s eyes were on him now, blue and intense. He looked like himself again, though he was still flushed and haggard. The night time noises flooded BJ’s consciousness again. He felt a little exposed, standing just outside the Swamp, where anyone who cared to look could see.

“Did I?” Hawkeye said.

“You did,” BJ said.

Hawkeye cleared his throat. “Well, I’m sorry, Beej. I hope you told me off,” he said. He wiped his face with the backs of his hands.

BJ wondered, guiltily, what Trapper John McIntyre would do, if he were here with Hawkeye. He would probably have the right words. Hawkeye wouldn’t apologize for kissing him. They’d had an understanding, it seemed. Something in BJ’s chest squirmed with discomfort.

“You didn’t know me back then. It’s really alright. I should be the one apologizing. I really don’t know what I was thinking,” BJ said.

He’d been thinking of the front. He’d been thinking of Hawk dying at the front. He’d been thinking of missed chances and last times to see one another. He’d been thinking of all the things Trapper could do that he couldn’t. But mostly he hadn’t been thinking at all. 

Hawkeye hunched down on the ground again, and stuck his hands in the dirt. BJ mirrored him.

“You were knitting a sweater, Hawk. A sweater for a baby,” he said.

Hawkeye’s head bobbed. He closed his eyes.

“I hear they’re making progress with the peace talks. They keep saying it’ll be any day now,” BJ said. His throat felt dry. 

Hawkeye was getting dirt beneath his fingernails. He’d have to be extra meticulous when they scrubbed up in the morning. Though, he always was. BJ watched: his long fingers, the veins in his hands, calluses, occasionally bruised knuckles. 

“Is that supposed to make me feel better?” Hawkeye muttered.

BJ chewed on his lip. “Maybe you can deliver the sweater in person,” he said.

Hawkeye looked up at him, eyes red rimmed, nose runny, expression distant and world weary. BJ imagined him at the front: running out of gloves, sticking his hands into mangled bodies, barking instructions until his voice went gravelly, losing kids as quickly as they showed up on his table. He imagined the sounds, the panic, the sharp smells of blood and sweat and vomit, the gunfire, and your own heart pounding in your ribcage. He imagined the numbness that came with repetition. He imagined sleepless nights, where just as you relaxed some force bore down on you and sent you hurtling backward.

“I’m sorry, Hawk,” BJ said, uselessly.

The edges of Hawkeye’s mouth quirked up, fractionally. “I liked your other technique better,” he said, tone spinning out into something bitter at the end.

BJ swallowed, thickly. He tried not to think of it as a goodbye kiss. 

In the morning Hawkeye picked up his knitting, examined the rows carefully, undid a few stitches, and began again.

“Sometimes I think I don’t know a thing about you,” Hawkeye said. 

It was a strange thing to say when they were back to back, leaning into each other so they could both stay upright for surgery. BJ could feel Hawk’s shoulder blades move as he worked. He’d watched the bones and muscles move in Hawkeye’s back countless times. He’d seen him in the shower, and in the Swamp, pulling off his shirt when it stuck to him. He’d seen him throw his arms over his head and stretch like a cat in pre-op, so the hem of his scrubs lifted and his shoulders cracked, satisfyingly or concerningly. 

He’d seen him once on accident, when he came back from duty early and Hawk and a nurse BJ didn’t recognize were fooling around on his cot: Hawk’s back slick with sweat, his muscles moving in fascinating arcs, the knobs of his spine delicate and defined. BJ had stood in the doorway for a beat too long before he turned around and gave them some privacy. 

He’d started with Hawkeye’s elbows and now he’d graduated to his back. He could hear Hawk tease him in the back of his mind. What’s next, Beej? My knees? My nose? 

Hawkeye asked Nurse Able for a scalpel and she handed it over. 

“What do you mean? You know my shoe size and where I went to college and how I take my coffee and what my snoring sounds like. That’s more than a lot of people,” BJ said. “Margaret, could I get some suction in here.”

Margaret obliged. “Doesn’t your wife know all of those things too, Captain Hunnicutt?” she said, meeting his eyes.

Her expression was partially obscured by her mask. He could see the warning in her eyes: smudged mascara, dark circles, and a world of worry. Sometimes it seemed like Margaret could see everything BJ wanted to hide with just one glance at him. 

Hawk’s left shoulder shifted. A spasm? No, he was shaking out his hands and peeling off his gloves. They were finishing up. The last of the patients were being rolled off to post-op. 

“Do you really think that?” BJ asked, at Hawk’s heels in the mess tent line. He followed him around like a puppy, sometimes, or rather an old dog who knew better, but hadn’t yet been kicked. 

“Think what?” Hawkeye said. 

BJ had cut him off mid-rant. (Something about European railway travel and American automotive infrastructure. He’d been half listening.) 

“Do you really think you don’t know a thing about me?” BJ said. 

Hawkeye deposited his tray on the table and slid over to make room for BJ beside him. 

“I think I’m losing biographical details in the shuffle,” Hawkeye said, gesturing abstractly with one hand. He stabbed at his liver and onions. 

“Like what?” BJ said, genuinely alarmed, but trying to hide it. 

Hawkeye blinked at him. BJ was vaguely worried he might start cutting his food into little pieces and rearranging it again, for another metaphor. 

“I’m not the foremost authority on identity and meaning making, but it seems to me that a lot of who you are is made up of what happens to you and what you do about it,” Hawkeye said. 

BJ nodded. His mouth had gone dry. “Okay, and?” he said, attempting some playful version of his usual bravado. It felt like an act, more so than usual, more so than it ever felt like an act when he was with Hawkeye. 

“And it seems like you’ve been to some places and done some things that I don’t know a thing about,” Hawkeye said. 

If BJ squinted he could see Hawk’s point. Sometimes he wondered if the Hawkeye he thought he knew was actually somebody else entirely. He had the impulse to accept all the versions of Hawkeye he encountered as Hawkeye (Hawkeye the proper noun, Hawkeye the center of the universe). But maybe Hawk had been knocked around in ways BJ would never know. Maybe he’d met versions of BJ out there that had done the knocking. Maybe he’d gotten to all of BJ’s dirty little secrets and he didn’t care a thing for him anymore. The longer he was in Korea, the longer BJ didn’t care a thing for himself. It would be presumptuous to think it was any different for Hawk. 

This was the moment BJ had been waiting for: the moment when Hawkeye saw him for the imposter he was. 

“I’m still the same dunce you picked up at the airport in Kimpo,” BJ said. He smiled his fake smile. It was the smile most people found convincing.

Hawkeye’s expression clouded. 

“I really didn’t mean anything by it,” Hawkeye said.

“No, really, tell me what you’re thinking,” BJ said. His hand was at Hawkeye’s elbow. It had been instinctual. Hawkeye leaned into the touch. 

“Beej, you kissed me. I never thought you…well, you love your wife. That’s the one thing I thought I knew about you for sure,” Hawkeye said.

“Oh,” BJ said, flushing down his neck and over his ears. “I do. I do love Peg.”

He wasn’t sure how to explain that it was a different kind of love. He loved Peggy Hayden like he loved the lights in the city. She made him feel less alone. She’d done that all through his lonely childhood. He’d married her because he didn’t know how to live without her and marriage was the way to keep her in his life. Whenever they made love a strange, panicky feeling rose up his spine and into his fingertips and kept his lungs from inflating all the way. He got to breathing in very shallow gasps. He was easily overwhelmed. But that was what arousal was, he reasoned. It was, at least, some distant cousin of arousal. He loved Peg too much, he thought. He loved her so much that touching her made him feel faint. 

Touching Hawkeye felt easy.

Hawkeye smiled, but there was something guilty and apprehensive in his eyes. Some vaguely delusional part of BJ thought that if he sat down and wrote it all out in a letter Peg would understand. 

It would be like high school graduation, standing next to her on the cropped grass of the football field, her palm on his arm to steady herself. (She was wearing the highest heels she could get away with.) They had their heads ducked, conspiring. She always had some funny commentary about their teachers, and the inane rules of the ceremony. Some of the girls called her catty, but BJ thought she was just clever and spoke her mind. Someone always made a fuss when a girl was like that.

They’d lined up the way they were supposed to, and came up one by one to receive their diplomas when their names were called. Peg was the salutatorian. Her folks took a lot of photos. They invited him to come out to lunch with them since his family had left early. She had to get some things from her locker before they left. He remembered it vividly: the way she took his hand and led him up the steps and back into the school, the soft warmth of her hand tugging him along, the click of her heels on the floor, her step already more confident than it had been an hour ago, the hallways dim and vacant and big in a way he’d never noticed before.

He remembered the way she’d stopped in front of her locker, cornering him against the cool metal.

“What’s wrong, BJ?” she’d said, reaching up to touch his face. Her nails were short and manicured for the occasion. 

He avoided her eyes. He was trying very hard not to cry, because he didn’t like crying in front of her (or anyone.)

“Nothing’s wrong,” he said, and meant it. 

His father had shook his hand and patted him on the back. His mother had pursed her lips and fixed his tie. They were proud of him, in their own ways. He knew that. He knew that they had trouble expressing what they felt. He knew that these limited points of contact were the most he could expect. The Hunnicutts didn’t hug or kiss or sweep each other off their feet, like Peg’s father had done when she met him in the crowd, spinning her so her heels nearly slipped off. 

It was silly to cry at a graduation. He wasn’t really older or wiser or more adult than he had been yesterday. His diploma was flimsy in his hands. All it really meant was that he’d completed the schooling the government required. All it meant was that he didn’t have to show up here day after day anymore. Nevertheless, there was something about endings and beginnings that made him uncontainably emotional. Hawkeye would understand that. That was why he was so hung up on goodbyes. 

Peg wiped away his tears. BJ hunched. His feelings were too big for his body and his body was too big in general. It was mortifying to be crying in front of her. He’d have to turn down the lunch invitation. He could walk home. He’d have to take off his button down and tie so he didn’t get them sweat stained or dirty and make his mother angry. Still, it was preferable to bawling like a baby in front of Peg Hayden.

“It’s okay,” Peg said. She reached up to cup his face. Her hands were gentle. “It’s been a long day.”

Back then he hadn’t known how long a day could be. He didn’t know a day could feel endless. He had yet to stick his hands in a kid’s chest cavity. He hadn’t been so dazed and sick with the loop’s repetition that time warped and blurred into some endless mass. He didn’t know, and so he let her comfort him. 

“You don’t need to hide from me,” Peg said. 

He’d felt strange and sick and broken open. He’d never been given permission like that.

Maybe that’s how he’d start the letter:

Dear Peg,

I don’t want to hide from you.

He couldn’t say all that to Hawkeye. Hawkeye didn’t know Peg, and if BJ was honest he wasn’t sure he really knew Peg either. Maybe he had attached a layer of rosy nostalgia to everything that had happened between them. Maybe he was misremembering, and always would be, because his memory was unspooling like so much undeveloped film: tangling and warping and getting ruined by the light.

“It doesn’t have to mean anything,” BJ muttered.

Hawkeye laughed, but it was harsh, bordering on a sneer. “What doesn’t have to mean anything? You loving Peg or you kissing me? You married men are all the same, I suppose,” he said.

“ Married men ?” BJ repeated. He wondered if Hawk and Trapper John had had this conversation. He dug his fingernails into his palms.

“I know I have a certain reputation around here, but a kiss still means something to me,” Hawkeye said, voice low.

BJ sucked in a breath. Hawkeye didn’t look at him, just stabbed at his liver and onions. The skin on his knuckles was dry and breaking. He was pale and his eyes were sunken. He hadn’t been taking care of himself, for a long time probably. BJ had been too self‐involved to really take note. He’d been too busy trying to stay right where he was.

“I’ve hurt your feelings,” BJ said. 

Hawkeye looked at him like it should have been obvious. “Brilliant sleuthing there, Beej. What’s next, the sky is blue?” he said. 

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to…I didn’t realize,” BJ said, blanching. All he’d wanted to do, really, was comfort Hawk, and calm him down.

“I know you don’t remember Tokyo, but I thought you had some idea of how I feel about you,” Hawkeye said.

“Oh,” BJ said, feeling the ground spin out beneath his feet. 

Hawkeye stood and picked up his tray. BJ looked up at him, dazed: the jut of his jaw, the length of his neck, the sharp points of his collarbone peeking out from under his collar, his lean arms, his tight posture. 

“I didn’t,” BJ said.

“Then never mind,” Hawkeye said. He turned, and BJ’s vision swam.

“One of the first things you learn over here, BJ, is that insanity is no worse than the common cold,” Hawkeye said, squinting in the sun.

“Uh huh,” BJ said, looking around. His hat was dipping into his vision, so he took it off. He took off his jacket too, and threw it over his shoulder. He rolled up his sleeves to his elbows and then noticed Hawkeye was staring.

“Everything alright, Captain Hunnicutt?” Radar was saying.

“I’m just fine, Radar. You missed him by what, five minutes? Ten?” BJ said, to Hawkeye, who was looking at him like he was some sort of wild, exotic animal. 

“It’s no use worrying about it now. There’s no going back,” Hawkeye said, mouth slightly agape. BJ could see the gears turning in his head. 

“I suppose you’re right, Captain Pierce,” BJ said, grinning wildly, feeling as out of control as he looked.

“Hawkeye,” Hawkeye said. “Call me Hawkeye.”

He got Trapper’s flight details from Radar so he knew where to go on the next go around. It was easy to sneak around if you looked confident and walked with purpose. He clutched his luggage tightly and ignored the way his heart was pounding against his ribcage.

He had a vague idea of what Trapper John McIntyre looked like. He was familiar with his curls and his crooked smile and his broad shoulders. He knew to look for someone who would fit in beside Hawk, seamlessly, if the talk around camp was to be believed.

Maybe he’d done this so many times that his remaining reservations had left the building. Maybe he was going crazy. BJ stepped into the terminal Radar had pointed out. He scanned the long rows of metal folding chairs and the clusters of men in uniform. He scanned the luggage and the flight listings on a big chalkboard behind a service counter. He looked at the line forming, of soldiers waiting to board. He filled his lungs with as much air as they would hold and shouted Trapper’s name.

Most heads turned to look at the crazy man who had just shouted in a crowded waiting room. One of the heads had a mess of curls and a confused expression, and then, before BJ had fully prepared what it was he was going to say, Trapper was crossing the room to meet him: hands on his hips, duffel bag slung over one shoulder, looking like he’d been hungover for days, maybe a week. 

“I’m John McIntyre, and there’s really no reason to yell,” Trapper said. He squinted at BJ’s uniform. “Captain,” he added.

“You’re Trapper John,” BJ said, looking him up and down, comparing the man in person to the image he’d had in his mind. He stood up a little straighter, on instinct. (Perhaps he puffed out his chest a little, silly, but inevitable.)

Trapper spread his arms wide, gesturing down to himself. “In the flesh. How can I help you, buddy? I’ve got a plane to catch, so this better be quick,” he said.

“You, uh,” BJ started. He could feel himself blushing. He was afraid again, of giving himself away. “You didn’t leave Hawk a note. He’s pretty torn up about it.”

Trapper’s eyes widened. “Is Hawk here? You know him?” he said.

Overhead there was a boarding announcement. The line Trapper had been in started to move. 

“I’m your replacement,” BJ said.

Trapper blinked at him, maybe sizing him up the way BJ had.

“Did Radar not pass along my kiss?” Trapper said, and BJ blushed deeper. 

What a thing to leave. What an infuriatingly cocky thing to leave.

“You couldn’t write him something? You had days. You know how he…you know how he gets about goodbyes,” BJ said. 

Trapper’s gaze sharpened.

“Who the hell are you, man?” he said. “Why are you talking like you’re…like you’ve been—”

“So you didn’t believe him one bit?” BJ said. “He told you what was happening to him and you just thought he’d lost his mind.”

“Whoa, slow down,” Trapper said. He reached out and laid a hand on BJ’s shoulder. BJ flinched away. People were staring again.

“He’s hung up on you. Sometimes I think he’ll never stop being hung up on you. That’s a fault of his, you know? He loves too much. He keeps giving pieces of himself away and people don’t give anything back. They just leave. I think it’s cruel. I think you’re being cruel to him,” BJ said. 

He felt drunk. He couldn’t control his volume or the expressions his face was making.

“I don’t know where you get off, lecturing me . You try to write that man a letter. You try to put everything he means to you in a few pages. We don’t write. We talk ,” Trapper said. He shook his head. “Radar tried to get a hold of him for days. I couldn’t write. Every time I started it came out wrong. He knows. Anything I could have written he knows already.”

“He’s not a mind reader,” BJ muttered, coming to the realization as he said it.

Hawkeye was a lot of things: a healer, a comic, a marvel, a leader, a lover, a coward, a friend, a man with a few screws loose and an overwhelming capacity for love. He was a time traveler, even, but he couldn’t read anyone’s mind. He was prone to melancholy and self‐doubt. If you didn’t tell him you loved him, he probably didn’t know.

A second announcement rang out, harsh, over the speakers. 

Trapper sighed. “I’ve got to go,” he said. He shifted his duffel on his shoulder, gripping the strap tight, maybe to keep himself from decking (stupid, hypocritical, presumptuous) BJ. 

“Wait,” BJ said. What would Hawk want him to say? Would Hawk even want him to be here?

“What’s your name?” Trapper said. He was turning to leave.

“BJ Hunnicutt,” BJ said. 

“He’s in your hands now, BJ. Look out for him, alright? It’s pretty clear that you care, even if you’re off your rocker. You’ve got my blessing,” Trapper said.

“Blessing,” BJ repeated, dumbly, feeling infuriated and jealous and deeply embarrassed all at once. 

He watched Trapper’s back as he disappeared into the shuffle. He watched the way his shoulder blades moved against the fabric of his jacket: like Hawk’s, but different. He imagined them walking side by side, in perfect step with each other, communicating with their movements before their words, intimate in a way BJ could only guess at. 

He bit down on his lip, hard, drawing blood, and then left the terminal in search of Hawkeye and Radar. 

He could always try again.

Chapter Text

If BJ was honest, his last three weeks at the 4077th were one big blur. He ended up back a couple of places where he shouldn’t have been: going through the motions beside Hawkeye, answering questions with the typical answers, acting the way he thought he’d acted back then.

Sometimes BJ lost the plot of the day. He had trouble fitting himself into the person he’d been. Going back in time was like wearing an ill fitting pair of shoes around. He moved differently. He thought maybe he’d adopted too much of Hawkeye into everything he did: Hawk’s presence, his fluidity, the hunch of his shoulders, the full body symphony of his laugh. 

It felt wrong to be back in his old body with his stiff clothes, where Hawk was a relative stranger. He wondered if Hawkeye felt the same agitation. They still weren’t speaking about it (the kiss, the looping of time, the end of the war, what would happen when they got home, if they were able to get home at all). Every time BJ opened his mouth to broach the subject he choked on his own air. Or worse, he said something dense and uncouth that got Hawk pissed at him instead.

They were sort of fighting, as much as they ever fought. It was hard to fight when you were inseparable. It was hard to stay mad at Hawk when he felt like his whole life was on a countdown timer.

“Would you come out and visit me?” BJ asked him, once, while Hawk was staring at the pieces on their chess board. (Hawk’s chess board. He’d be taking it with him when he went home.)

Hawkeye looked up at him. He had this distant, checked out look in his eyes, lately, a lot of the time. It was alarming. It scared BJ, so he didn’t mention it. He tried to distract him, to get some spark in his gaze, or make him laugh. He wasn’t very good at it.

“Visit you where?” Hawkeye said. He blinked, brain lagging for a moment. BJ studied him.

“In California, in Mill Valley,” BJ said.

“Oh,” Hawkeye said, eyebrows furrowing, expression warping. “I guess so, if you’d have me.”

“I want you,” BJ said. He cleared his throat. Hawk’s expression had shifted again and BJ felt stupid and embarrassed. “I mean I’ll want you to come, I’m sure of it. If you aren’t too busy,” he said.

Hawk smirked. “I won’t be busy. But, you might,” he said.

BJ thought briefly of home. (He had to cut his thoughts short, before they overwhelmed him.) He thought of the front door (in need of a coat of paint) and the welcome mat. He thought of the staircase: the way the light draped and pooled, the loose step he still needed to nail down, Peg sitting at the bottom of the stairs, putting on her heels, checking her stockings for runs, smiling up at him through a curtain of hair. That’s as far as he could get before things got dicey: the door, the front landing, the bottom of the stairs.

“Never too busy for you, Hawk,” BJ said.

Hawkeye snorted. “Okay, Beej,” he said. He leaned in, studying the chess board, but at the same time occupying BJ’s space. 

BJ could smell the warm, earthy scent of his hair, and the sharpness of his aftershave. He could smell his sweat, and the dirt of the camp, the grime that covered them all.

“Checkmate,” Hawkeye said.

BJ remembered the beach, in pieces. He remembered the blue of the sky and the crash of the waves. He remembered sand between his toes and his hat nearly blowing off his head. He remembered playing volleyball. He remembered crashing into Hawk. He remembered Hawk looking very flushed and windswept. He had more energy than he’d had all week prior. It was the sunshine and the fresh air. Hawk needed more days like this: restorative, bright, full of laughter and performance and attention.

It would be a nice day to come back to, if they were any place but where they were. BJ spent the whole afternoon thinking of things he’d do next time around. And then they got on the bus.

“If I could go back and change it all, I would,” BJ remembered telling him, sometime in the blurry toast scrap of time in which Hawk still remembered what happened, a few days or weeks or years before he drove a jeep into the side of the Officer’s Club and got sent away. 

The rest was even blurrier. BJ remembered the long hallways at the institution. He remembered thinking it was too dark. He remembered trailing Sidney like a ghost, trying to make himself invisible, wishing he was anywhere or anyone else. He’d started wishing for second chances before he’d even had his first. It was a regrettable side effect of going back so often. 

BJ could feel himself getting shorter with people, and meaner. He could feel his impatience and irritation bubble up under his skin. What did it matter? What did anything matter if it could all be gone tomorrow? He’d left some better version of himself behind: fresh‐faced and eager to impress, shaking Hawk’s hand.

“I’d have brought the whole still, but it would have been tough to sneak past the guards,” BJ said, presenting the flask from his breast pocket. “How are you?” he added, trying to appear more confident than he felt.

The second Sidney left them alone, BJ’s knees felt a little wobbly.

Hawkeye looked bad, out of sorts, unlike himself. He looked too pale. BJ supposed he’d always been pale, but it was more striking against the navy of his robe. That too, was wrong. BJ always pictured him in red: in a puddle of dye in the grass, wearing his robe and cradling a martini, face flushed with alcohol or excitement, really steamed red, up to his ears, leaning over Colonel Potter’s desk in some righteous rage.

Now he just looked washed out.

“You’ve got to tell them this is all ridiculous, Beej. You know I lose all sorts of things: socks and shampoo bottles and games of chess and relay races and tic tac toe and patients and patience and surgical masks and tests of will and awareness of rules of social decorum, evidently, given the way you’re looking at me, but I haven’t lost my marbles ,” Hawkeye said.

“I know, Hawk,” BJ said. He sat down across from him and poured him a cup from the flask.

He didn’t say that Hawk had scared him, before, when he’d gotten hysterical in OR, when it was clear his memory was lapsing, when he emerged, bruised and a little bloody, in the wreckage of the O Club. The front of the jeep had collapsed in on itself like a crushed soda can. Hawk was confused, laughing, clutching at his ribs. When BJ had helped up from the floor, so alarmed that it was written clearly across his face, Hawk had laughed harder. 

“This is just like the first time I went back and I didn’t know the rules. Remember? They sedated me? Trap did it, or Henry…ten times at least,” Hawkeye said. 

“You told me,” BJ said, slowly. “I wasn’t there.”

Hawkeye looked up at him, irritated, and then reached for his cup and downed it in one go. He coughed.

“I know you weren’t there. I’m not crazy, BJ. This is all a big misunderstanding,” Hawkeye said. He stood again and put his hands on his hips, pacing. 

“You believed me before,” he said.

“I believe you now,” BJ said. “You haven’t uh, you haven’t said anything to Sidney about looping back, have you?”

Part of him was terrified that Hawk would run his mouth about the time loop and he’d never get out of here. Part of him was worried they’d drag BJ in, to corroborate Hawk’s story and he’d end up in some padded room too. What if days started looping here? What if Hawk forgot what day it was again? What if time flickered like a bad light bulb? What if everyone else went home without them?

That was why it was essential that BJ slip out on an administrative error. Maybe he could only go home if he made a mad dash for it. Maybe he could leave if he left no trace. Maybe going home was like going back in time. He’d inhabit some previous version of himself: happy, sturdy, controlled, opening up the passenger side door for Peg. He could be that man again, if he really tried.

It would involve tearing himself from Hawk. And they were stuck together, so it would hurt.

“Of course not,” Hawkeye said, eyes scanning BJ’s face. He’d stopped pacing, and just folded his arms over his chest, posture tense and closed, expression alert and analytical, but concerningly paranoid.

“That’s good,” BJ said.

“You believe me, don’t you?” Hawkeye said. He chewed on his lip, tearing dead skin, biting one spot so furiously BJ was worried it would scab. 

“Believe what, Hawk?” BJ said, feeling a little nauseous. 

He didn’t like to look at him like this. His movements and expressions were sharp and jerky. His voice was too loud. He seemed to tower over BJ in his chair. Hawkeye was frightening. He was like a warped, funhouse mirror version of Hawkeye. It was the loop, BJ reminded himself. It was time that was stirring everything up again. Hawk could break free. BJ was sure of it. He was strong. He was rational when he wanted to be. Sidney could help. 

“You don’t think I belong here. You’d take me back with you if you could? If you could do something you’d do it, right Beej?” Hawkeye said, voice low and detached. 

Just close your eyes, and breathe. It feels a little like the drop on a roller coaster. Have you been on a roller coaster?

Every day with Hawkeye Pierce was a roller coaster. 

BJ sucked in a breath. “Of course I would,” he heard himself say.

Hawkeye relaxed, fractionally. “How’s work?” he said.

“We’re keeping busy,” BJ said. It was a shit show without Hawkeye. The fighting had gotten really bad, the closer they got to the end of everything.

“Well, it’s a nice location. You get a lot of drop‐in business,” Hawkeye said.

“I’ll gladly give it up to go home,” BJ said.

“What makes you think you’re going home?” Hawkeye said.

BJ wrung his hands. “Well, you know, eventually. You know Erin’s second birthday is coming up?” he said. 

Hawkeye’s mouth stretched wide, a smile but without warmth.

“What if the two of us get stuck over here? What if that’s how the loop works? What if the war ends for everybody else and you and I go back to Tokyo again and again and again and again—” he said.

“Hawkeye,” BJ said, cutting him off. “It’s not going to happen like that.”

Again, he’d mentioned Tokyo. Again, BJ was too afraid to ask what had happened while they were on leave together, and why it kept coming up.

Hawkeye laughed, harshly. BJ flinched. And then he put his foot in his mouth, trying to deflect. That was a bit of a blur, too. He remembered saying something about Erin’s knitted booties. He remembered Hawkeye snapping, and then ranting a mile a minute. He remembered Hawkeye sounding so unlike himself that it scared him, deeply. It scared him like the dark used to scare him when he was little. It scared him the way his draft letter had.

“Maybe Hawkeye and I ought to talk alone for a while,” Sidney said.

“Sure,” Hawkeye said. 

BJ stood in the doorway, looking for something to do with his hands. He ought to tell Hawk he was leaving. He ought to say something. Hawkeye would understand. He’d recognize the desperation. He’d know BJ had to make a mad dash for Mill Valley the second he could. 

“Go. What are you waiting for?” Hawkeye said, calmer now, but hunched on his cot, eyes dark like a stranger’s.

If BJ turned and walked down the hallway, where would he go? Would he take the jeep back to the 4077th and lay down in the Swamp, emptier now, without Hawkeye? Or would he open the door at the end of the hall and find himself at Hawkeye’s bedside again? Would they have to have this horrible conversation all over again? Would BJ ever figure out the right words to say?

“I don’t know. I just thought there might be something we wanted to say to each other, before I left,” BJ said. He felt hollowed out. 

“So tell me the next time you see me. I’m not going to be here forever. I can guarantee you that,” Hawkeye said.

BJ blinked, and it was like seeing each of the different Hawkeyes he’d met all at once. He blurred his eyes and they merged. Sidney was giving him a curious look.

“Yeah, well, I’ll see you,” BJ said.

He walked down the hallway, and outside onto the grass. He walked calmly down the path to the parking lot, and when he saw his jeep he couldn’t help himself and broke out into a run. 

Maybe there was some invisible line over the ocean that BJ was forbidden to cross. When he stepped off the chopper into the long grass and fell back into step with Hawkeye he felt numb and outside himself. He wondered if he was destined to make the same mistakes over and over again. He wondered if he was built to hurt the people he loved most, like a mean dog. 

The night BJ got back, Hawkeye slipped into bed beside him and they put their arms around each other. It was no use trying to hide how deeply they needed each other anymore. BJ needed Hawk’s skin on his like someone desperate or starved. Hawkeye curled around him, the hem of his shirt lifting so his stomach pressed to BJ’s ribs. He was warm and BJ could feel the rise and fall of his breath. Hawkeye gripped him tightly, like they were prone to slip sideways off of BJ’s cot and into another century.

Hawk wasn’t a fan of the line over the ocean theory. He said as much, whispering into the space just below BJ’s ear, breaths hot and syllables slow and sleepy. 

“The ocean is the easy part. It’s landing that’s the trouble,” he said.

“What do you mean?” BJ said, eyes closed, whispering too even though he couldn’t care less if Charles woke up and saw them intertwined.

Hawk moved closer, tucking his face in the crook of BJ’s neck, speaking directly into his skin.

“I mean what if the front door looks different? What if you get there and you don’t recognize anything? What if they don’t recognize you?” Hawkeye said.

BJ grabbed a handful of Hawkeye’s waist. “You think I look that different?” he said, worry prickling under his skin. He’d shave the mustache. He’d put on his old clothes.

“I think you look like you,” Hawkeye said, which stirred something hot in BJ’s lungs that was a little too insistent, and hard to ignore.

Hawk hooked his ankle around BJ’s.

“I look old,” he said.

“You’re not old,” BJ said.

“I look like my father. You’ve never met my father, but I have, so I’d know,” Hawkeye said. 

“Well, if you look like him then I’m sure he’ll recognize you. Erin won’t even know me,” BJ said, sick with the thought already. 

“She will,” Hawkeye muttered, sleepier now, on the verge of dozing, which was good and vital. He hadn’t been sleeping well. He needed his rest. “She’ll remember your arms,” he said.

“My arms,” BJ repeated, and Hawkeye nodded against him. 

“Hard to forget,” he mumbled. “I went back once to this time we put on a field day for all the kids at the orphanage. Games, you know? Two‐legged races, relays, tug of war,” he said.

“I’m familiar,” BJ said.

“I think I could go back there forever, just to listen to everybody laugh, just to end up covered in mud, with somebody’s arms around me,” Hawkeye said.

BJ loved him. He loved him, deeply, then, like he hadn’t loved before. He pressed a kiss to the top of Hawkeye’s head. It wasn’t enough but it would need to be. Maybe it wasn’t just tragedy that had caused time to fold in on itself. Maybe it was also love, deep and encompassing. Maybe that was why he kept ending up at the airport. Maybe the universe was trying to prolong the short time they had together. Maybe it was necessary that they meet over and over and over, so BJ could stockpile enough memories of Hawkeye Pierce to last a lifetime without him.

Maybe they’d never see each other again.

He didn’t go back again. It was karmic, maybe, that the second BJ missed looping back around, it stopped for good. He got up in the dark, shivering in the early morning chill, and laid stones for hours, until his arms hurt. He’d happily go back and do it all over again and again and again, if he could show Hawk how he loved him. 

Camp came apart fast, like soft serve melting in California heat. Hawkeye put his arms around BJ’s waist and squeezed. He could feel him breathing, under the growl of the motorcycle’s engine. He tried not to cry looking at him. He locked his jaw and squinted his eyes. When Hawk hugged him, he clung on for dear life. 

It turned out there was no line over the ocean. There was turbulence with the landing, Hawk had been right, of course.

When BJ got home, the door looked different. Peg painted it yellow. She helped him with his things, carrying his suitcase with both hands, despite his protests that he could take two trips. 

She handed over Erin, who wailed for a moment until she relaxed into him. She put her little arms around his neck and babbled something nonsensical, asking for her mother, presumably. She waved her little hands, gripping his arm hair. 

Peg grinned at the two of them. She had on jeans and a blue blouse and a bandana in her hair. She put her hands on her hips. She looked different. Her hair was shorter. Her posture was more confident. 

He held onto Erin and cried, openly. Peg kissed the side of his face. She stood on her tiptoes and put her arms around the two of them. They stood in the landing for a long while. 

Peg’s hands were at his wrists. There was broken glass on the floor. BJ wasn’t sure how it had gotten there.

“You’ve got to tell me what’s going on,” she said, eyes wide with concern.

“What day is it?” BJ said. Sometimes the only thing that could calm him was the date. 

Peg told him. She threw in, helpfully, that they were home in Mill Valley and that Erin was upstairs sleeping in her crib.

“It was a car, backfiring,” Peg said, stepping carefully around the glass. He’d dropped a plate, he realized. He’d been startled. “That’s all,” she said.

He nodded. “I know,” he said. “I’m fine. I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay,” she said, releasing his wrists. She opened the pantry door and found the broom. 

“I’ll get it,” he said. He scrubbed a hand over his face. His hands were shaking.

“No, darling, you just sit down,” she said. “Watch the glass.”

He did as he was told and watched her. She knelt to get all the glass shards into the dust pan. She examined the linoleum for any pieces she’d missed. She put the glass in a paper bag and then sat down across from him, so their knees touched.

“Really, BJ, talk to me,” she said. “You’ve been in a daze for weeks.”

She was right. He’d catch himself zoning out at the breakfast table, snapping back into his body only when Erin lobbed a piece of toast in his direction. Peg had taken them out to a concert in the park and he’d spent the whole time staring at the sky, convinced it was going to rain. He’d been having nightmares where he was back in Korea, operating on Hawk or Peg or Erin. They were cyclical nightmares. It got hard to tell them apart from looping. He woke up with the same symptoms: groggy, nauseous, head aching, fatigued. Peg had mentioned a psychiatrist. He’d been short with her. (He was still short with everyone. He had trouble remembering there were no second chances anymore.)

He put his head in his hands and closed his eyes. She moved closer, placing her hand on his back, between his shoulder blades. The gesture reminded him so intensely of Hawk that he forgot where he was again.

“I’m sorry,” he repeated.

“Don’t be,” she said, sighing. “It’s going to take time to adjust, I know that. I just can’t help feeling like you’re shutting me out.”

“I know,” he said, feeling intensely guilty, feeling like a liar and a cheater and unworthy of her care.

“I’ve been lonely,” she said, and he looked up at her.

Peg’s face was flushed and her chin was wobbling. He ought to take her out dancing.

“I…I’m trying to figure out how I fit over here,” BJ said. “I feel like I’m in two places at once. It’s making me distant. I’m sorry you’ve been lonely. I’m sorry I’m making you feel alone. I’ll be better. I promise,” he said.

She laughed, wetly, and wiped at her eyes.

“It’s a marriage, BJ, not a test,” she said.

“I know,” he said, sharply.

They looked at each other, intently for a moment. He wondered how she’d felt, alone here for so long. He wondered if every day had felt the same, routine: wake up, shower, breakfast for Erin, small talk with Erin’s sitter, work a shift at the café, lunch for Erin, clean up Erin’s toys, vacuum the rug, put Erin down for a nap, write a letter to a cold and distant husband, make dinner, drink half a beer, catch part of a movie on the couch, put Erin to bed, lay in bed and stare at the ceiling, fall asleep worrying, do it all again in the morning.

She folded her arms over her chest.  “And it’s certainly not a hostage situation,” she said.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” he said. All the color drained from his face.

“It means I want you to be happy,” she said.

“I am happy,” BJ said.

She laughed again. “You could’ve fooled me,” she said, in precisely the way Hawkeye would say it.

“I’m very happy,” he said, through gritted teeth. He leaned in and kissed her. Her lips were soft. She put a hand on his jaw.

“Maybe,” she said, between kisses. “You should call Hawkeye.”

“Why?” he said, alarmed. He’d sent Hawk one very detailed, very emotionally taxing letter, and gotten a clipped response. He’d been spooked out of calling. He was afraid Dr. Pierce Sr. would pick up and he’d lose his nerve.

Peg drew back. She tucked some stray strands of hair behind her ears and leveled him with a skeptical look. She was smart, smarter than he gave her credit for. He ought to spend more time taking her suggestions. He’d add it to his to do list: treat Peg right, give her everything she wants, be engaged, be happy, take her dancing, take her advice.

“If you won’t talk to me, maybe you’ll talk to him,” she said.

She stood and made for the sink. He watched her back. She leaned her palms on the counter and drew in a couple deep breaths and then turned on the faucet. She started rinsing the rest of dinner’s dishes. That was what he’d been doing, BJ remembered. He’d been cleaning up after dinner.

“Let me do that,” BJ said, but he couldn’t move yet. He felt glued to his chair, and dizzy.

“No, uh, you go on to bed. I think I just need a minute alone,” she said. Her head was bowed. He watched the back of her neck: goosebumps, pale hair standing on end. 

He worried for her. She was lonely, but she wanted to be alone.

“Okay,” he said. 

Maybe everything was a contradiction.

Chapter Text

“Meet me in the supply room, why don’t you?” Trapper whispered, leaning close to Hawkeye in post-op, so their skin nearly brushed. 

Hawkeye had done this before. 

“Uh, Trap,” Hawkeye began, trying to dismiss the usual dizziness. 

“What, you gotta date?” Trapper said. He winked. “Who with, Hawk? I might have reason to be jealous.”

“We’ve been through all this before,” Hawkeye said. “I remember this conversation exactly because I was totally enamored with you. And I remember you grabbed my ass.”

Trapper grinned. He thought Hawkeye was joking. He always thought Hawkeye was joking, even when he was serious. 

Hawkeye couldn’t very well blame him for that. People had had trouble taking him seriously all his life. He’d spent a lot of time in detention for it. He’d had a lot of failed dates and quasi‐shouting matches in his professors’ office hours. Sometimes he thought that he could say anything, and it wouldn’t matter. He was wearing some jester’s costume that everyone but him could see. 

“I didn’t take you for a mind reader, Hawk,” Trap said.

Hawkeye pinched the bridge of his nose. He’d been looping back constantly, as of late, and seemingly without reason. Back home in the present things were business as usual (as usual as the business of war could be.) Still, Hawkeye’s brain had been scrambled so thoroughly in the past week or so that he couldn’t help thinking something terrible was about to happen. His journal had a number of confusing entries in a row:

Got kicked back to that week everyone got the flu. I don’t know what it’s supposed to mean. Maybe it means I’ve got to take care of everyone. Maybe I should stop looking for any sort of meaning. I want to believe that there’s a reason this is happening. I want to believe there’s a reason it’s me. Trap mutters things in his sleep, when he’s sick. I think he misses home. We all do, of course, but Trap misses his wife and his kids. Ordinarily he doesn’t let on, because…well, what do I know? Maybe I keep going back because I never remember enough on the first go.

Came back groggier than usual. Frank’s been calling me a drunk. Trapper thinks I’m coming down with something. I don’t know what to say. I don’t know what he’d believe, if I tried to tell him. He and Henry sedated me, the first time around, but I wasn’t exactly composed when I explained. I’ve got some perspective now, and some evidence. Crazy things happen all the time here. I don’t know. Maybe he’d believe me. Maybe he’d believe anyone else, if they explained. Maybe he’ll never believe me because it’s me doing the explaining. I’m starting to think that that’s why I’m the only one stuck in a loop. I was already losing my mind. 

On the bright side, I’ve made a killing on five o’clock Charlie bets. (Perhaps that’s a poor choice of words.)

“I don’t have a date,” Hawkeye said, pulling off his scrubs. He ducked his head and tried to gather his expression into something calmer and more normal. 

Trap winked. “Okay, well I’ll see you later, then. Or rather, again ,” he said.

He slipped by Hawkeye. He grabbed his ass. 

Hawkeye looked up at the cracks on the ceiling. He chewed on his lip. He thought about home, to ground himself: long driveway, unmowed grass, Dad’s bird feeders, flipping through the paper with his legs thrown over one arm of the couch. Home stayed the same. When he was back home the vertigo would subside. He’d be in one place and one time and he’d be Hawkeye (a legible, clearly defined Hawkeye.) It was imperative that he remember all that.

He looked up at the clock on the wall: an hour before he could rendezvous with Trapper. If he was stuck here, he might as well have some fun.

Hawkeye was a little afraid he’d pass out, when his plane landed. He sat patiently in his seat, hands on his knees, shoulders hunched, legs in the cramped, folded up position they’d occupied for hours, and waited for the aisle to clear. He’d hardly moved, the whole flight back, or spoken. He’d gotten concerned looks from the corporal sitting next to him. He wondered if that was the way things would always be, from now on: staring, concerned looks, tiptoeing and apprehension. He was aware that there were certain consequences of having a public, well‐documented mental breakdown. 

He remembered the way BJ had looked at him, when he came back. He remembered pieces of their conversation when he was still committed. He remembered what BJ looked like when he was frightened of him. It made him feel a little nauseous to think about for too long.

He didn’t pass out. He collected his bag and stepped off the plane. He blinked in the fluorescent lights, at the terminal, shielded his eyes, sagged under the weight of his luggage, and then he saw Dad.

He was standing with his hands on his hips, squinting at the crowd through smudged glasses. He was wearing a big gray sweater Hawkeye had knitted for him a million years ago, a well worn flannel (one of Hawk’s favorites), and corduroy pants. Hawkeye made sure to memorize the details, because there would be no more repetition. 

Hawkeye ran to him. He couldn’t help it. It took a second or two before Dad saw him, and a second longer where he recognized him. Hawkeye tried not to think about how different he must look. He dropped his bags, opened his arms, and they crashed together.

“Hawk,” Dad said. Hawkeye couldn’t speak yet. He just held on tight. Dad smelled like home. He smelled like cinnamon and maple syrup and wool and mothballs and coffee and soap and wood and love and panic. He smelled just the way Hawkeye remembered. It was a deeper form of grounding to be holding him, to be anchored, this close to home.

Dad reached up to cup the back of Hawkeye’s head. He felt his fingers in his hair and started to cry. 

“Hawk,” Dad repeated, voice watery. “You’re okay. I’ve got you,” he said.

Hawkeye shook, hard. He was a little afraid that the ground would sink away from him again. He figured he’d keep being afraid, until they were home 

“I missed you,” Hawkeye said, uselessly. “I missed you a lot.”

His whole body gave out on the ride home. He tried to make conversation for a while. Dad cataloged changes in town as the landscape came into view through the passenger seat window and then receded. Hawkeye tried to follow along. He sagged in his seat, temple pressed to the window and eyes half open. Dad shot inquisitive glances in his direction, which made Hawkeye feel a little guilty. He probably looked a mess: unshaven, gaunt, hair graying, ganglier and bonier than when he left, exhausted to the point of near silence, which was never the norm for him.

He dozed off and woke when the car stopped and Dad put a hand on his shoulder.

“I’ll get your things. You just go on to bed,” Dad said.

Hawkeye felt his head bob. The porch was the same. The front door was the same, so were the stairs, though they were a little daunting at the moment. Hawkeye wasn’t sure he was fully in control of his feet. Instead, he turned to the living room. 

It was cleaner than when he left, but all the details were intact: Dad’s easy chair with a couple abandoned newspapers stuck down the sides of the cushions, floor to ceiling bookshelves, Mom’s old upright piano with the chipped keys, big window, thin curtains, cobwebs, the floor lamp Hawk loved, with its orangey light, cluttered coffee table, same old photos on the walls, of Pierces past, and a few of him with Mom and with Dad. There were new things too: an open box of Hawk’s letters among the usual coffee table clutter, a stack of new medical journals, unfamiliar throw pillows on the otherwise familiar couch, a couple new loose floorboards, new frays in the rug.

Hawkeye stood, swaying, in the doorway for a moment or two, memorizing. He took a few steps into the room and then collapsed, face first, onto the couch. He fell asleep instantly, and was out for a long time.

Trap had him up against the wall in the supply room. He was an excellent kisser, Hawkeye remembered, and this had been an excellent day. Trapper did all sorts of excellent things with his hands that thoroughly distracted Hawkeye from his existential angst, and the uncanny discomfort of being in an older version of his body (or younger, he supposed).

“You’re going somewhere,” Trapper said, between kisses.

Hawkeye redoubled his efforts. He kissed Trapper’s neck, sucking at a spot hard enough to leave a mark. That would feel real, he thought, if he could meet him for a movie in the mess tent later and see the hickeys he’d left. That would be enough evidence to prove things were real and he hadn’t left the iron on or the faucet running in his temporal lobe.

He drew back for a moment and laughed. It was funny! A hickey as evidence that he hadn’t entirely lost his grip on reality! 

“Hawk,” Trapper said, panting a little, eyebrows knitted together, but mouth pink and kiss-bruised. “I mean it. Is everything alright?”

“I think I have to tell you something,” Hawkeye said. 

Trapper drew back further, and crossed his arms. His expression clouded. “Look if this is about you and me then I’ve just got to say I can’t tell Louise,” he said. “You know how I feel about you, but I couldn’t—”

“It’s not that,” Hawkeye cut in. His face reddened. He didn’t like to think of himself as Trap’s mistress, but he was. And he wasn’t the kind of mistress who had delusions that his man might leave his wife. That was more Margaret’s speed. 

“Okay then, go on,” Trapper said. 

Hawkeye smoothed his hair and tried to think of the most believable way to start.

“At first I thought it was an intense sort of deja vu, but the more it happens the more I’m certain it’s all real. Maybe that’s what a crazy person would say, though? If you can’t trust your own senses then what the hell are you supposed to do?” he said.

Trapper looked spooked. Hawkeye wondered if he looked the same way when Hawk had that bout of insomniac mania. Hawkeye didn’t remember much of that. It was, he acknowledged with a healthy dose of fear, a separate issue. The time loop was toying with some preexisting faults in his disposition. Dad said he was eccentric. That was a kind way of putting it.

“Uh huh,” Trapper said, leaning his weight onto one hip, squinting at him like Hawkeye was some sort of fascinating beetle.

“And usually it doesn’t mean much, because every day feels the same over here. Usually I just keep my head down and do my job and I’ve got you , you know. You’re a good distraction from, you know, whatever’s going on up here,” Hawkeye said. He gestured vaguely to his own head. He drew in a couple deep breaths.

“I’m not sure what you’re saying exactly, Hawk,” Trapper said, slowly. “Did you, uh, you didn’t hit your head, did you?”

Hawkeye put his face in his hands. “No, Trap,” he said. Maybe it was a mistake. Maybe with this, like with everything, it was important to keep boundaries in mind.

Hawkeye didn’t have a particularly great track record when it came to boundaries. With Trapper, for example, it was easy to let professional boundaries slip away, like heavy rain down the sides of the Swamp. The war was an excellent excuse, and cover, like thunder, the first time they hooked up. Frank was off with Margaret. Everyone was taking shelter in their tents. The storm protected against prying eyes, and covered up the sound of Hawkeye’s heart beating out of his chest. 

Are you sure? Is this okay? Does it feel good, Hawk? 

It was all up in the air: marital boundaries, bunkmate boundaries, the personal and ethical implications of falling for someone in the place where you were both trapped, Hawk maybe more so, seeing as he couldn’t even put the days in the right order, and kept running himself ragged trying to test the boundaries of his cage, like a big hamster on a cosmic wheel. 

But he was sure. And it was more than okay. And of course it felt good, Trap. 

Maybe saying something would upset an already fragile balance. Maybe it was better not knowing the way time could twist and warp and fracture in Hawkeye’s hands, and that the bodies he’d fixed today would be broken again tomorrow. What right did he have to shatter the illusion, for Trapper? What right did he have to tug him along, if Hawkeye was the only one looping? It was like flipping a record too soon, before your favorite song came on. It was like tearing down sets, in high school theatre class: stripping the illusion so quickly it was like it had never been there. 

Hawkeye wondered what version of this day Trapper would remember. Perhaps it was unfair to burden him with the truth. Perhaps Hawkeye was scared he wouldn’t be taken seriously, again. And really, what did he know? 

And yet, the longing sparked up hot in his throat. Trapper was his best friend. He loved him. If Trap was the kind of man who’d leave his wife for his mistress, Hawk thought he might become the kind of mistress who stuck around, hoping. 

Trapper was his safety net, in case everything went wrong. 

“I guess I can’t explain, but…well look, I need you to make me a promise. It’s not going to make sense, but it’s important,” Hawkeye said. 

Trapper blinked at him. “Alright, I promise. What is it that you need me to do?”

It was very like him, to agree before Hawkeye had even laid out the details. 

“If I ask you what day it is, if I seem out of it or confused, if I need you to tell me what happened yesterday…I just need you to help, and not get worried or ask too many questions,” Hawkeye said. 

Trapper bridged the space between them for a moment, reaching out to grab Hawkeye’s wrist, gently. “Is everything okay, Hawkeye?” he said. 

“Everything’s fine,” he said. 

“Well,” Trapper said, scanning Hawkeye’s face, cautiously. “You don’t need to make me promise. I’ll always help you.”

“Okay,” Hawkeye said, a smile spreading on his face. 

Trap leaned in close and kissed him, in just the way he had last time they’d done this. Hawkeye relaxed into his touch, and tried to keep both feet on the ground. 

“What’s this?” Hawkeye said, coming into the kitchen. 

He squinted at Dad, who looked a little too blurry in the morning light. He wasn’t sure what time it was, or why his mouth was so dry, or when he’d last seen Dad in the kitchen. Maybe it was the night before he’d left for Korea, when neither of them could sleep. He remembered Dad made him a sandwich that he picked at, too nervous to eat.

Dad beamed at him. Hawkeye’s shoulders scrunched at the brightness and familiarity of the gesture. It was overwhelming, like watching his father through a shaken snow globe.

“That’s a day calendar, Hawk. You mentioned something about having trouble keeping track,” Dad said.

“Keeping track of what?” Hawkeye said.

Dad eyed him, concerned. “Keeping track of time, Hawk. That’s what you said,” he said. 

“Right,” Hawkeye said, face flushing. 

He remembered now, bits and pieces: coming home, dropping his bags in the yard, collapsing on the couch, waking, eventually, to Dad’s hand on his shoulder, ushering him to his room, asking if he needed anything to eat or drink. He’d slept some more, and dreamed deeply. Dad must have come to check on him, and he must have spouted something nonsensical about time. 

It was eerie, Hawk thought, to wake in his old room with its old wallpaper and its old sunlight filtering through the window, catching in the dust, and see an entirely new day calendar perched on his old desk. The calendar said it was Thursday. It sort of felt like it was taunting him, or the whole universe was. 

Hawkeye held the calendar up. “I thought I was Tuesday,” he said. 

“You were out for a while, kiddo,” Dad said. “Can I get you some breakfast?”

“Sure, okay. Thank you,” Hawkeye said. He fumbled in the pockets of his robe for a moment, looking for something. He couldn’t remember what. 

He looked at his hands, hoping they’d give him  some clue. 

“Hawk?” Dad said. 

Hawkeye looked up. Dad looked stricken. Something in his chest seized. He’d just gotten home and he was already worrying him: lapsing into a daze, staring at his empty hands, feeling his brain sputter like a dying engine. He felt a little light-headed, though he couldn’t tell if it was from lack of food or some strange withdrawal from the loop. 

He remembered what BJ said, about the line over the ocean. He wondered if he’d landed safely. He’d call him, as soon as his head was screwed on straight. 

“I’m okay, Dad. I promise. I’m just a little jet‐lagged. I’m just fine,” Hawkeye said, in a tone he hoped was reassuring. 

He sat, and put his hands away. A horrible silence fell between them for a moment. It was like the silence when BJ got a bad letter from home. 

“It’s okay if you’re not, you know,” Dad said.

Hawkeye looked up at him. He had his hands in his pockets too. He was leaning against the counter, like he was wary of his own son. Hawk had written, once Sidney had pulled the last of his repressed memory out of him (at least as far as either of them knew). Dad had some idea of what happened, with a few unnecessarily burdensome details omitted. 

It was like coming out of a bad cold: fatigue, congestion, a great deal of mental fog, and people kept their distance (even though it wasn’t the kind of thing that spread.) Dad was different, though. Dad was Dad . The trouble was that Hawkeye felt like he’d been gone ten years and half an hour all at once. Now that the strange accordion of time had revealed itself, it was difficult to think about things in a linear fashion. 

It was hard to imagine, for example, how long three years felt to Dad. 

“If I’m not what?” Hawkeye said. Christ, he sounded like a parrot with a head injury. Dad was probably tired of him already. 

“It’s okay if you aren’t fine. You don’t need to promise anything. And it’s okay if you don’t want to talk. I’m here whenever you’re ready. I’m capable of great patience,” Dad said. 

“Oh really?” Hawkeye said, eyebrows raised. 

Dad was perhaps the most impatient person Hawkeye knew. Dad’s impatience was the reason Hawk always had underdone toast as a kid and knew all the shortcuts to places in town. Dad never stood in lines with more than five people or listened to jokes that took too long to get to the punchline. When Hawk got to the morning paper before him he’d leave out a section or two so he wouldn’t hover while Hawkeye tried to take his time: features, classifieds, the crossword puzzle. Though, Dad was impatient with puzzles too. Sometimes he gave up and looked at the answers. 

“I’ve done a lot of growing in the eternity you were away,” Dad said. 

He took his glasses off and wiped the lenses on the corner of his sweater. His eyes were teary again, and he was wearing the same thing he’d worn to the airport. He hadn’t changed, Hawkeye realized, looking at his father’s rumpled clothes. What had he been doing since Tuesday? Pacing? Worrying? Listening outside of his son’s door, and walking by on tiptoes so he wouldn’t wake him?

“Has it felt like an eternity?” Hawkeye said, quietly. He could feel his eyes welling too. 

Maybe they could settle on an eternity and leave it at that. 

“It has,” Dad said. 

“I slept right through Wednesday and I’m still tired,” Hawkeye said. 

“That’s alright. Wednesday was boring without you,” Dad said. 

When he turned back to the stove, Hawkeye realized Dad already had breakfast in progress. Hawkeye watched him fry pancakes and bacon and scramble eggs and cut up fruit and toast bread and set out butter and jam and it was entirely too much for one breakfast, but Dad said he wanted Hawkeye to have options to choose from, and the gesture was so immediately and immensely endearing that Hawkeye sat and ate a little of everything, even though it all tasted like cardboard. 

That would go away, he thought. Sooner or later all fog lifted. He’d sleep and he’d eat and he’d keep score on his day calendar. 

He remembered the previous night’s dream later, stretched out on the couch with his ankles over the armrest, feeling both full and empty, and still so tired he could hardly focus on the book he was trying to read. 

He and BJ had been in a laundromat, with more laundry than Hawk had ever seen in his life. Hawkeye was sitting on one of the washers, feet dangling, machine rumbling beneath him. (It was probably bad for it. Someone would tell him to get down. But they wouldn’t: dream logic). 

BJ was putting nonsensical things into the washer: gin, martini glasses, Hawk’s nudie mags, his boots, suspenders, tent poles, scalpels. 

“I don’t think that’ll fit in there,” Hawkeye said, when BJ lugged the 4077th’s signpost out of nowhere and added it to the pile. 

BJ raised his eyebrows. He was dream BJ, indisputably, at once idealized and true to life: clean shaven, apart from the mustache, hair long and wild, arms bare and unevenly tan, shirt tight, eyes intense, expression wry and challenging. 

“I never thought you’d tell me I didn’t fit,” BJ said. 

Hawkeye’s face scrunched. He didn’t understand his inflection. The inflection came first ( you, me ) and then the meaning. 

There was a sharp clang beneath Hawk. Had BJ filled all the washers with wood and metal? 

“I meant the sign, not you,” Hawkeye said. 

“I am the sign,” BJ said. He pulled off his dog tags and deposited them in the washer. 

“What?” Hawkeye said. He felt dizzy, like he was in the washer too, spinning around. 

“Everything’s got to go in, Hawk. We’ve got to wash the past clean,” BJ said. 

“Why?” Hawkeye said. He felt like crying, all of a sudden. He felt that roller coaster feeling. 

“Because it’s the only way,” BJ said, undoing his belt. 

He slid it off and put it in the washer. He did the same thing with his pants, and then peeled off his shirt, so he was just standing there in his socks and underwear. Hawkeye watched him. He’d seen him undressed a million times, but that was all in the past now. 

“Arms up,” BJ said. 

Hawkeye raised his arms high, like a criminal, like a man surrendering. 

BJ moved slowly, hands at Hawkeye’s waist, and pulled his shirt over his head. Hawk’s shirt went in the washer too, and his dog tags, and then BJ leaned in, breath hot, and kissed the space between Hawkeye’s neck and left shoulder. 

BJ kissed his neck and then his jaw. He kissed the side of his mouth, just off center. Hawkeye breathed out a shaky breath. 

“You never kiss me for real,” Hawkeye said. 

“Just the one time,” BJ said. He kissed his nose and the space between his eyebrows. Hawkeye closed his eyes and BJ kissed his eyelids. 

“You kissed me all sorts of places in Tokyo. I had to stop you,” Hawkeye said, as BJ reached for his belt. 

“That’s not how I remember it,” BJ said. 

“You don’t remember it at all,” Hawkeye muttered, eyes still closed. 

The washer stilled beneath him, and then he was standing in the ocean, barefoot, smelling salt, with the waves crashing around his ankles.

BJ leaned in and kissed him, deeply, like he had that night, when Hawkeye hadn’t known where he was, or even if he was alive. 

He tasted salt: ocean or tears, and then blood: his or BJ’s. BJ drew back, and Hawkeye leaned forward, chasing the feeling of being so close. 

“Do you ever wish,” BJ began, closing the lid to the washer. “That you could go back in time?”

He reached for Hawkeye’s hand and pressed something into it: a photo strip, yellowed at the edges, folded down the middle so many times it was liable to tear at the crease, the one from Tokyo. 

“I thought it all had to go in,” Hawkeye mumbled, words thick and slurred.

“I’m out of detergent,” BJ said. 

Hawkeye woke up with his palms closed, and tears in his eyes. 

Hawkeye found Radar in the mess tent, with a plate full of mashed potatoes and surplus meat, which Hawk couldn’t look at for long without his nausea returning, full force. He’d been stuck at his party again. It was a little hard to believe he was the chief surgeon when he felt like his brain had been stuck in cheese cloth and wrung out, thoroughly. 

He poured himself a cup of coffee and took the seat across from the corporal, leaning his elbows on the table and arching his back. He hurt all over. He felt crazy, and sick as a dog. 

“Hiya, Hawkeye,” Radar said, glancing up from his tray. 

“Hey kid,” Hawkeye said, succumbing to the urge to drape his torso completely over the table. 

Radar looked at him, eyes bright and analytical the way they always were when he’d noticed something no one else had. 

“Are you feeling alright?” Radar said. 

“I’m the doctor. I’m supposed to ask you that,” Hawkeye said, voice muffled in his crossed arms. 

The thing about Radar was that when Hawk looped back somewhere, Radar was always at his elbow. His face got scrunched sometimes: glasses smudged, eyebrows furrowed, moon‐faced and highly suspicious of Hawkeye, the imposter in their midst. Hawkeye would say something he thought was innocuous and Radar would look at him like he’d stepped onto the wrong movie set and was reading someone else’s lines. 

Nobody else had caught on. 

Hawkeye blinked at him. It was funny: the Iowa farm boy with the gift of prophecy and the time traveling surgeon. It sounded like something Hawk’s mother would make up for a bedtime story, when he was riled up and kicking his feet under the quilts. 

“Doctors get sick too,” Radar protested. “And if you don’t mind me saying so sir, you don’t look like…well like you usually look.”

“How do I usually look?” Hawkeye said, batting his eyes. 

Radar blushed. “Hawkeye,” he said, voice edging into a whine. “I’m tryna talk to you.”

“Sorry, sorry, go on, Radar. Tell me how I look,” Hawkeye said. 

“Like something the cat dragged in, my ma would say. Though, our cat never did anything like that. Even though Uncle Ed wanted her for the vermin. I always thought it was because the mice were too quick for her. She mostly just napped in the sun,” Radar said. 

“Sounds like my kind of cat,” Hawkeye said. 

Radar shook his head, as if to shake off the distraction. 

“All I wanna say is that supposing you need someone to talk to, I suppose I could be that kinda person,” Radar said. 

He cleared his throat. Hawkeye watched him, intently. His lips were chapped and his nose was sunburned. He had bags under his eyes. It had been a brutal week (if Hawkeye was getting his pasts and presents straight). Fighting was heavy and supplies were low. It was a lot to put on a kid, especially a kid who worried about everyone and everything: like Hawkeye, and the cat back home. 

“Thanks, Radar,” Hawkeye said. 

“I guess you’d rather talk to Trapper if something was wrong,” Radar said, meeting his eyes. 

It would go over the same way if he tried to tell Radar. He’d think he was pulling some prank. He’d think he was trying to deflect from the real issue with a wild story. It sounded like something Hawkeye would try.

“Have you been able to figure things out before they happen your whole life?” Hawkeye said.

Radar blinked. “What’s that got to do with anything?” he said.

“I’m just asking,” Hawkeye said.

Radar’s face screwed up in concentration. “I don’t know. I guess so. Ma told me I used to cry before storms, when I was a baby. I guess the first time I really noticed it was when I was seven. My friend Andy fell out of a tree,” he said.

“And you knew it was going to happen?” Hawkeye said.

Radar nodded, hesitantly. He plunged his spoon into his mashed potatoes and shoveled them into his mouth.

“That could be anything though. That could be regular old intuition. You could’ve seen the tree branch bend or the wind could have picked up. You could’ve just been blaming yourself. You could have felt responsible, subconsciously,” Hawkeye said, fingertips drumming on the table.

Radar chewed on his lip. “Yeah, well, I’ve heard all that. Maybe not the sub…continuous part, but, you know. People don’t like believing in things that frighten them,” he said.

“I’m sorry,” Hawkeye said, guiltily.

 He imagined little Radar staring up at a tall tree, unfathomably tall, when he was seven, watching his friend climb higher and higher and feeling with acute, skin‐prickling certainty that something bad was about to happen. It had been like that all war. Radar had been leaping into action seconds before the rest of them. Hawkeye wondered if he ever got it twisted in his head, if he ever felt like he was the harbinger of wounded. He wondered if he had nightmares, like Hawkeye did, that he was failing to live up to some cosmic purpose bestowed upon him. 

“Oh, it’s alright, sir. I’m not angry at you. You listen to me, anyways. People listen to me over here more than they ever listened at home. I think it’s about the way you say something, too. You know, the words you say and how you get your voice to sound.”

Hawkeye nodded. It was a deceptively simple point. Maybe it was high time Hawkeye stopped pleading, fearfully, with the current of time and tried bracing himself against it, with some unearned confidence. 

Radar looked back down at his tray. “You’ll talk to Trapper, though. If something’s really wrong?” he said.

Hawkeye’s jaw tightened. “Are you worried about me, Radar?” he said.

Radar shrugged, eyes still on the table. Hawkeye wondered if he’d ever tried to avert his eyes or plug up his ears, so the premonitions wouldn’t come. 

“I just had a feeling,” Radar said.

“Mail for you,” someone said, above him. 

Hawkeye was sprawled, eyes closed, face warm from napping in the sunshine. He wasn’t entirely sure where he was. (That would require opening his eyes.)

The owner of the voice dropped a stack of mail on his chest. It was a very Radar gesture, so Hawkeye took a guess. He was laying on something lumpy and well‐worn, like his cot in the Swamp. The smells and sounds didn’t quite compute (no sweat or dirt, quiet) but Hawkeye had been confused before.

“Thanks, Radar,” he muttered. He opened his eyes, slowly, against the light, and saw Dad smiling down at him. He felt for the stack of mail on his chest (a couple envelopes, a postcard).

“Not quite,” Dad said.

“Sorry,” Hawkeye said. “I guess I was dreaming.”

“You don’t need to apologize,” Dad said. He lay a heavy hand on Hawkeye’s shoulder, which was intensely and immediately grounding.

Hawkeye remembered where he was: the living room couch, a month after the war. 

He looked down at the grocery bags in Dad’s other hand. 

“Do you need any help with dinner?” Hawkeye said.

Dad shook his head. “Stay put. Read your mail,” he said.

Hawkeye shifted and then sat up. Dad had retreated to the kitchen and turned on the radio. He could hear him washing vegetables and flipping through the stations, humming the way he’d always hummed, ever since Hawkeye was a little kid. 

Hawkeye looked down at the mail pile, blurring his eyes so he couldn’t quite make out the names. He’d gotten some mail since he’d been home, but he’d read very little of it. Whenever he saw BJ’s name on an envelope his chest was seized with such a terrifying and overwhelming sense of dread and panic that he’d been unable to keep his hands from shaking, let alone open and read the letter. Dad had found an end table drawer for Hawkeye’s unopened mail, and each time new mail arrived for him he retrieved the old stack, put the new things on top, and handed him everything, just in case Hawkeye was in the mood to try again.

Hawkeye felt the edges of the top letter. The paper was different: heavier, a little water stained. It wasn’t from BJ. Hawkeye focused his eyes.

It was a letter from Radar.

Hawkeye’s hands stopped shaking, fractionally, and he opened the envelope.

Dear Hawkeye,

I’m sorry it took me so long to write, after I said I would. I didn’t want you to think I was the kind of man person who doesn’t keep his promises. 

The trouble is, I think, that every time I start I talk myself out of it. I get to thinking that you won’t care what’s going on with me or the farm. Maybe you won’t. It’s not terribly exciting. Nothing’s as exciting as the 4077th. Which is a good thing I guess I know, but it’s been hard to adjust sometimes. (Don’t tell anybody I told you so. I don’t know who you’d tell or why you’d tell them.)

I’ve got a lot of responsibility. Not like a doctor's responsibility, but you know. Finances. Crops. Looking out for Ma. Everybody says I seem more grown up now. I didn’t notice. Sometimes I look in the mirror and I wonder who I’m looking at. Apparently, I look like my father and I talk like my Uncle Ed. I try to talk like you. Not jokes, but you know, authority, like you in triage. 

Boy, I wish we got a proper goodbye, Hawkeye. I’m glad everybody’s home safe and sound, but I’ve been having this dream where I go back in time to the day we met. The ground’s all empty and dry and barren and Colonel Blake is looking at me like I’m a little kid and you…well, you look scared, I guess. I don’t think I noticed. I think I was too busy being scared myself that I didn’t think you could be scared too. I’d never seen a doctor scared. Not even giving bad news.

Hawkeye, BJ wrote me.

Hawkeye put the letter down, took in a couple deep breaths, and wiped his eyes. 

He’s worried about you. He says you won’t write him. Did something happen? You don’t need to tell me if you don’t want to. I hope you’re alright, Hawkeye. I hope you and BJ work it out. I know there’s lots of things I didn’t know, about you guys, about what you were going through. I know I’m not the person you tell things. But I had this feeling, and I thought I ought to try anyway. 

Write me back, okay? You don’t need to promise, just if you feel like it. It’s okay if it’s not a long letter. I spilled some coffee on this one, sorry. I’d take anything. You could send me back a coffee stain if you wanted. 

Write BJ back first, if you can. 

From, Regards, Your friend,

Radar

Hawkeye set Radar’s letter down on the coffee table and curled up on his side, knees to his chest, face in a pillow, and breathed deeply for a while. Memories and smells mixed and changed. He was smelling old books and mothballs and Dad’s cologne and still gin and BJ’s hair and licorice and nutmeg and the floral, chemically, scent of his mother’s lipstick, when she pressed kisses to his cheeks and he squirmed out of her grasp. He imagined Radar standing over him, with more mail, or Dad, with slices of plum. 

He imagined being gathered up in someone’s arms. He squeezed his eyes closed, tighter, and gritted his teeth until his jaw hurt. He tried to imagine he was gathered in someone else’s arms, but he couldn’t.

They had to be BJ’s.

“I told you to pack your things,” BJ said, voice resonant with happiness and anxiety and exhilaration. 

Hawkeye felt shocked out of his skin. It had never gone this way. He’d been stuck in this loop for what felt like an eternity, and they’d never made it in the jeep to Tokyo. 

BJ was shoving things haphazardly into Hawkeye’s duffel bag. He ought to stop him from looking too closely at his things, Hawkeye thought, but he was too nauseous to move. 

“Hey, you okay?” BJ appeared overhead, tilting in and out of Hawkeye’s blurred vision. 

God, he looked good. Even worried, he was still handsome in a strong‐jawed, long‐limbed, rugged sort of way. His expression intensified, like he was looking right into Hawkeye. 

“I’m getting there. Sorry, it must have been something I ate,” Hawkeye said. 

BJ flushed. “Well, you aren’t missing this. We’re going to Tokyo if I have to drag you,” he said. 

“Alright,” Hawkeye said, thickly. 

BJ offered his hand and Hawkeye let him haul him up. They pressed together, briefly, and BJ clapped a hand against Hawk’s back. Suddenly Hawkeye was warm all over.

The jeep ride didn’t help his nausea, and neither did the drinks they had in the hotel bar. 

“Can I get another bourbon and water?” BJ said, leaning over the bar and drumming his fingers against the wood counter. He was in quick and remarkable form that evening. 

He’d slid through the crowd like he was a regular patron. He’d scouted a spot at the end of the counter and flagged down the harried barkeep with such commanding presence that he’d come directly to Beej and tilted his ear to the pair of them to hear their orders. That was three bourbon and waters ago, for BJ. They’d hardly gotten a look at their room. BJ had dropped their bags and whisked Hawk away (firmly, by the wrist) before he could collapse on the bed and sleep until things made sense again.

Hawkeye sipped at his first drink (gone a little warm from the lights overhead and body heat in the crowded bar). He was two and a half drinks behind Beej. Ordinarily it was the other way around. Those first couple of weeks at the 4077th it had seemed like BJ Hunnicutt was just a few paces behind him, watching, maybe judging. Tonight, he’d overtaken him. It was only natural. Hawkeye wasn’t even supposed to be here.

He leaned back, shifting his shoulder blades until he heard a satisfying pop. This version of his body was less tense, but only marginally. Sometimes he felt like the longer he occupied old versions of himself, the more rapidly his physique declined. It was some side effect of his ailing brain.

Another side effect was his irritation with this charming, assertive, self‐assured BJ, who was now speaking rapidly about going out on the town and wandering city streets just to window shop and see things, which was usually right up Hawkeye’s alley but was currently filling him with dread and compounding nausea. He’d rally for Beej. Maybe he could convince him to stop at the room beforehand so he could splash some water on his face and maybe vomit, quietly, in the toilet with the shower running, so BJ wouldn’t hear. 

The more times he looped around, the easier it was to shed things like logic and willpower. If he was stuck on this particular carousel he might as well drape himself over one of the horses and sing along to the tinny music. Which was all to say, it was difficult to avoid ogling BJ.

“Do you want something?” BJ said, looking over at him, and then down at his half‐finished drink, with bright eyes. He’d shaved for the occasion, and they’d both put on their Class A’s, though Hawkeye’s jacket was draped over the back of his chair and his shirt was wrinkled.

BJ was very attractive like that, in a way that made Hawkeye want to see him in a real suit: something well‐tailored, something that he’d picked and knew he looked good in. He imagined Beej in the suit, and then he leaned his elbows on the bar and imagined taking the suit off BJ: fumbling with the buttons, kissing every new inch of exposed skin, pushing him down on the soft heap of hotel bedding and tugging at the knot in his tie, watching his neck and the sharp rise and fall of his chest, tempting desperate little noises out of him, like there was no one and nothing outside their room. 

“Hawk?” BJ said, face flushed from the booze, but muddled with concern.

Hawkeye sat up straight and rolled his shoulders back, calming the vaguely aroused, electric current of energy that was pulsing through him.

He picked up his glass and knocked back the rest of his drink, bracing himself against the dizziness and the headache and the overexposed, sunburnt feeling. So, he wasn’t supposed to be here? That was nothing new. He wasn’t supposed to be over here at all. He was supposed to be home, or in New York or Boston, practicing at a big hospital and undressing men who weren’t married and who he wasn’t attached to like a deep scar. If BJ hadn’t deemed him the imposter yet, he might as well make the best of the situation.

Maybe he could take back a souvenir. 

“Get me another one of these,” Hawkeye said, holding up his glass, loosely.

BJ grinned at him, which was enough to get Hawkeye lightheaded and giddy again.

“Well, alright,” BJ said. “Where to next, Hawk?”

Days took on a particular pattern. Hawkeye would wake up in his childhood bed, to light bleeding through the curtains, roll over, press his elbows and knees to the cold wall, and scrunch his eyes closed tight to dissipate whatever dream or nightmare had kept him from proper rest. He’d started recording details in the same journal he’d used to keep time in the war:

BJ’s putting our whole lives in the wash.

Henry’s taking me fishing. He gives me a rod. I make some joke. He looks at me with sad eyes, like he knows exactly what’s going to happen. Sometimes when I go back, and he’s there, it takes all my energy not to cry. Now here he is in my dreams. We stand in the river. It’s like a river back home. I’ve got on Dad’s boots. They’re too big for me. I keep wiggling my toes like that’ll get them to grow. Henry’s waving his fishing line. And mines are going off. I don’t know how, but I can hear them in the distance. Maybe we’re fishing for mines. I don’t know. He turns to me. He drops his rod in the river and it’s gone, just like that. He puts his hand on my shoulder, and it feels so real that sometimes I wonder if I’m going back again. 

When I wake up it feels like I’ve walked miles. Maybe my brain has. That could be it, couldn’t it? A trek back to the past, via dreamworld. I wonder if it happens to BJ this way. Anyway, Henry puts a pocket watch in my hand. It’s gold, and engraved. I hold it up to my ear and I can hear the ocean. I open my mouth to thank him, or maybe just to ask him why, but he’s gone, and I can’t.

BJ’s digging a hole in the front yard.

Radar keeps waking me up when I’m just dozing. It’s really Dad, or the mailman, or some car with a loud muffler driving by, but sometimes I get the idea that it’s really Radar, reaching through spacetime. That’s silly. BJ would say it’s silly. He’d laugh.

I’m some circus act, juggling, only instead of balls they’re grenades (stupid, heavy‐handed). BJ’s in the front row, laughing until he chokes. He takes me outside, by the bright red circus tent, and he kisses me (stupid, heavy‐handed).

Hawkeye woke up early, with the sun, but it took him an hour to move from his fetal position, and another couple of hours to get on his feet and across the floor to the bathroom, where sometimes he had the energy to wash his face and brush his teeth (a shower if he was feeling ambitious), but mostly he just stared at his very haggard, very alien countenance, and stuck his head under the faucet to drink a few gulps of water. 

If Dad was off with a patient, Hawkeye would stalk down the creaky stairs, wrap himself in one of the couch quilts, and haunt the kitchen and living room like an aimless ghost. He’d read a couple pages of a book. He’d attempt several bites of whatever Dad had left him, wrapped in plastic, in the fridge, for breakfast. He’d pace, or he’d stare out the window. He’d try to get his brain to start up, and when he’d done half the job he’d abandon the quilt and move to the porch, to get a little sunshine. 

He’d also been working through the backlog of BJ’s letters, slowly, paragraphs at a time.

Dear Hawk,

I’ve been home three days, but I need to write to you already. Maybe I’ll wait to send this. Maybe it’s pathetic to need to speak to you already, but I do. I keep waiting for the signs. I’m taking some time before I go back to work, so I’ve been taking charge of Erin. She’s a mystery to me: the way she reaches out for me to hold her, the way she stares at clouds and tall buildings with her mouth agape, the way she threads her stubby fingers in my hair, the way she listens to everything I tell her, and nods sagely when I ask if she’d like to hold the grocery list. I keep waiting to slip back, away from her.

How are you? How’s home? How’s your father? Are you sleeping well? Are you having dreams? I have this one, where we’re doing laundry…

Hawkeye set the letter down, and looked up at Erin Hunnicutt’s clouds. He wiped at his leaky eyes. Dad came up the stairs, eyeing him suspiciously.

“Everything alright, Hawk? Can I get you anything?” he said.

Sometimes Hawkeye felt like he was held together with duct tape. 

Dear Hawk,

It’s alright if you don’t want to answer me. I understand. I swear…

The letters kept coming, more than would fit in Dad’s spare drawer, enough that he had to tie a big bundle of them together with twine and stack them on top of the fridge. 

“You’d think that boy would run out of things to say,” Dad said, presenting him with a new stack of envelopes. “Is he sending you chunks of the next great American novel?”

“He’s not a boy, and he’s not usually this verbose,” Hawkeye said, voice rough, half a growl. He was at the backyard portion of his day (which directly followed the porch portion) He’d taken to throwing a picnic blanket in the cool grass and reclining, with one arm draped over his eyes, until his whole body felt at peace with the vibrations of the earth or Dad told him to put on sunscreen. 

“What’s he usually like?” Dad asked.

Hawkeye removed his arm from his eyes and squinted up at him. He was holding a steaming cup of coffee, and wearing his smudged reading glasses. Hawkeye wondered briefly what time it was, and then if he’d ever look like his father, if time started progressing in a linear fashion, and he lived as long as Dad had. 

“Do you want to know?” Hawkeye said, not moving. The letter stack was heavy on his ribs: all Beej’s ink and paper and feelings.

“He seems quite taken with you, Hawk,” Dad said, eyebrows raised.

So far Dad had been gentle and encouraging, as he always was. Hawkeye had lapsed into melancholy and long periods of behaving like an invalid before. He’d been a very moody teen: moved by breakups and poetry and scuffles at school. All he needed before (funnily enough) was a bit of time, and maybe a shoulder to cry on. Dad insisted that Hawk take as long as he needed to figure out what came next. Hawkeye knew he’d alarmed him. He knew he’d aged. 

Hawkeye had been stony and tight‐lipped about BJ, which was probably suspicious. 

“He’s taken with his wife and daughter. That’s who he’s writing about,” Hawkeye said.

Dad sat down in a lawn chair. He sipped his coffee.

“I think you’ll feel better if you try to talk about him. At least, if you won’t read his letters, let me throw them out,” Dad said.

“No,” Hawkeye said, abruptly. Dad sounded like Sidney. He was baiting him the same way Sidney had, back then.

“He’s—I’m—well, I’ll get around to reading them soon. It’s just a lot to take in all at once,” Hawkeye said.

Dad nodded, and silence fell, heavy, between them. He was waiting for Hawkeye to go on.

“I can’t really say, uh—it’s not that I don’t want to, it’s just that I can’t put it into coherent words,” Hawkeye said.

“That’s okay. You could try some incoherent words, if you like?” Dad said.

Hawkeye laughed. It came rolling out of him, startlingly. He looked up at the clouds.

“Well, sometimes he can read my mind. I think sometimes he’s the only one who knows how I really feel. And he’s challenging, Dad, he really challenges me. Sometimes things would happen over there that made me feel crazy, but he—uh, he felt the same way. We felt the same things. People used to say we were joined at the hip, but I think it’s more than that,” Hawkeye said, fully aware that he sounded unhinged and enamored. 

He thought about all the different versions of BJ he’d met. He thought about BJ’s anger and his fear and his apprehension. He thought about his mouth and his arms and his naivety. He thought about his chin tucked over Hawkeye’s shoulder and his palm on the small of Hawkeye’s back. He thought about their arguments and their stillness and the way water washed over Beej’s shoulders in the shower.

“I knew it was going to end. I knew we couldn’t keep going back. And you know, he remembers things differently. He’s got different pieces of the puzzle…” Hawkeye trailed off.

“It’s okay, Hawk. You can tell me. I won’t even say anything, if that’ll help. I’ll just listen,” Dad said. His voice sounded more distant. Hawkeye couldn’t meet his eyes. 

He looked up at the very blue sky. He felt immeasurably lonely. At least when he was stuck somewhere he knew there would be people. They would say the same things, or approximations of the same things, and he’d have some chance to make them laugh, or just be near them. Now, he’d crossed that line over the ocean.

BJ would laugh. He’d think it was stupid. Hawkeye clutched at the envelopes.

“I think I need him in my life. I think I need every piece of him I can get my hands on. That’s greedy, isn’t it? It’s greedy to love somebody that much,” Hawkeye said.

Dad looked down at him, his eyes full of compassion Hawkeye didn’t think he deserved. It was greedy to ask for more love when Dad had already given him this much. He was always looking at him like that, ever since he was small. 

“He called, while you were napping. I told him I’d pass along his message,” Dad said.

Hawkeye put his elbows to the earth, and sat up. “What’s the message?” he said.

“I wrote it down,” Dad said, passing him a napkin, stained with blue ink.

It was Dad’s handwriting, obviously, but it might as well have been Beej’s:

Tell him: I think I remember Tokyo.

It was thoroughly inspiring to be dragged around by BJ. Hawkeye had been to Tokyo before, but not like this, not with BJ pulling him every which way, by the arm, or the waist, or with a hand at his shoulder, like Hawkeye was some beloved rag doll BJ was clinging to for comfort. 

BJ was also getting steadily drunker. He’d been tipsy when they left the hotel, but they’d been to three bars since then and now Beej’s words were getting slurred and his gait was getting crooked. 

Hawkeye helped him back to the hotel. He held him upright in the elevator, even though BJ was getting handsy. Something was wrong, Hawkeye could tell. Beej only got this drunk when something was on his mind. 

Usually, outside the safety of the 4077th, Beej got very careful about how much he was touching Hawkeye. Now he was hanging off Hawk, his face nuzzled in Hawkeye’s shoulder. 

“Okay, just a little further, turn right up here,” Hawkeye said, holding BJ’s forearms so he didn’t veer off course. 

“You know I think we could’ve gone to one more bar,” BJ said, words slurred together. He was looking at him with dreamy, eager eyes. 

“It’s this one, Beej, do you have the key?” Hawkeye said, blushing, when BJ reached up and tucked some of Hawk’s hair behind his ear. 

“It’s in my jacket pocket. Do you wanna come get it?” BJ said, patting his breast pocket, like it was a dare. 

BJ engaged in a very frat boy style of flirtation, on occasion. He liked challenges and he liked games. He probably thought it was innocent. He probably strung men like Hawkeye along all the time, without even realizing. 

“This is cute and all, but I was looking forward to laying down in a real bed and sleeping eight uninterrupted hours,” Hawkeye said. Though, he wasn’t quite sure he could make it to eight, if he was supposed to go back to where he’d come from.

“We’re in Tokyo together and all you want is to go to sleep?” BJ said, leaning on the doorframe. A comically wounded look overtook his face. 

Hawkeye slipped his hand into BJ’s breast pocket, feeling his warmth through his shirt. BJ leaned away, smiling again, trying to make Hawkeye work for the hotel key. 

“We’ve done plenty,” Hawkeye said.

He opened the door, ignoring the way Beej was hanging off him, trying to distract him further. Something in his chest balled up like a wad of notebook paper at the thought that BJ had been excited not just for R&R, but for R&R with him. 

“You still don’t feel well,” BJ said, frowning. 

Hawkeye ushered him inside and toward one of the beds: bright white, almost glowing in the dim light. He ought to get to one of the lamps, so Beej wouldn’t trip or knock into the furniture. 

“I’m alright. You’ve had enough fun for the both of us,” Hawkeye said.

BJ collapsed on the mattress, arms out, eyes closed, sinking into the comforter like he belonged there, like it was his bed and he’d only been away for a while. Hawkeye wondered what Beej’s bed looked like at home (well, BJ and Peg’s bed). 

He wondered how often they changed the sheets. He wondered if BJ’s bed smelled like him. He wondered if the mattress was soft or firm. He wondered if the springs squeaked. 

“Usually we keep the same pace,” BJ mumbled. 

“Take your shoes off. You’ll track mud,” Hawkeye said. His back hurt. He felt like somebody’s mother. 

“Are you angry with me?” BJ said, head tilting back, neck long, eyes slanting to look over at Hawkeye in the dark. 

Hawkeye turned on the lamp. 

“Of course not,” he said. “Why would I be?” Hawkeye said. 

He shrugged off his jacket and draped it over a chair. He loosened his tie. He took a seat on the bed across from him.  

“You seemed so down this morning,” BJ said, inspecting the ceiling. “I wanted to cheer you up.”

“I told you, Beej. It’s nothing about you. It’s something I ate,” Hawkeye said. 

BJ rolled onto his side. “We eat all the same things,” he said, arm and leg slipping off the edge of the bed. 

“And we drink the same water and we breathe the same air and we put our hands in the same bodies, on occasion,” Hawkeye said. He swallowed, thickly. 

BJ’s mouth stretched into a slow, lazy smile. There was something more earnest in the way he moved when he’d had a few too many. Hawkeye wasn’t sure if it was the kind of thing he’d notice the first or the second go around.

There was always something new to notice about BJ.

He propped himself up on one elbow, cheek smashed against his palm.

“You’re always cheering me up. I thought I should try to reciprocate,” BJ said, timidly. “When you get really down, I worry,” he added, like he was confessing a sin.

“I’m fine, Beej, honest. I feel cheerier already,” Hawkeye said, though what he really felt was light‐headed and vulnerable.

“Did you have an alright time? We took those pictures,” BJ said.

Hawkeye stood up and fished the photo strips out of his jacket pocket. The pictures would be important later, Hawkeye had a feeling. He wondered if it was a feeling like the kind Radar got. It prickled up the back of his neck and made his hair stand on end.

He held up the two strips: identical, four photos a piece, BJ smiling at him, looking fond when Hawk was too busy being ill to notice.

He wondered if BJ would believe him, if he told him.

He wondered if he’d laugh in his face, or if he’d get all quiet and concerned. He wondered how much proof he’d have to provide, or if Beej would take him at face value. He hadn’t tried to tell anyone, not since Trapper.

“C’mere, I want to see,” BJ said, reaching out for the photos. 

Hawkeye crossed the room and held out one of the strips. BJ took him by the wrist and tugged him down to lay beside him. Hawkeye laughed, all the air knocked out of him. Beej was squinting at the pictures now, rubbing his thumb over each panel in a way that vaguely worried Hawkeye because he was liable to smudge the cheap ink.

“I don’t really look like that, do I?” BJ said.

Hawkeye frowned. “What do you mean?” he said, looking over BJ’s shoulder at the photos again.

BJ looked like he always did. Maybe his smile was a little wider and his form a little looser with liquor and excitement. Maybe his finer points were grainier in black and white. His eyes weren’t as sharp and intent. His expressions lost some of their mystery in static images. And it had taken some effort to fit the two of them in the tiny booth: legs crowded together, BJ’s right shoulder pinning Hawkeye’s left to the back of the booth, BJ’s breath strong and his hands clumsy, fumbling with his money.

In the third photo BJ had elected to look at Hawkeye and not at the camera. He looked a little awed. Hawkeye mostly looked sick.

“I guess I just look older,” BJ said. 

The two of them stared up at the ceiling. BJ’s fingertips grazed the length of Hawkeye’s arm. He ought to get up and go to his own bed, before he fell asleep here, near enough to BJ that he could feel him breathing.

“When was the last time you had your picture taken?” Hawkeye said.

BJ thumbed the photos some more. “I don’t know. When I was drafted, I guess? Wedding photos before that,” he said.

Hawkeye closed his eyes. The image of Beej in a well‐tailored suit returned. He hadn’t heard much about BJ’s wedding, but he could picture it, clear, in his head. 

BJ released the photos. They laid on his collarbone.

“I guess it makes sense. I feel older, much older now than when I first got here. Time must move differently over here,” BJ said. 

He turned his head to the side and looked at Hawkeye. Hawkeye mirrored the motion, so they were a breath apart. BJ looked like there was a storm brewing between his ears.

“Is that what this is all about?” Hawkeye muttered.

“What what’s about?” BJ said.

“The drinking, the photos—”

“The photos were your idea,” BJ said.

“Well, the drinking then, and the uh, the vigor,” he said.

“ Vigor ? ” BJ said, mouth curling.

“You know, you’re quite the commanding presence when you want to be,” Hawkeye said.

“Said the pot to the kettle,” BJ said.

“I didn’t mean it was a bad thing,” Hawkeye said. He propped one knee up and crossed his other ankle over it so his socked foot hovered, throwing shadows in the lamplight.

“I was under the impression that you had an issue with authority. You don’t like to be under anyone’s command but your own,” BJ said.

Hawkeye scoffed. “It doesn’t always work out that way,” he said, feeling obvious, feeling seen, feeling overcome with the urge to fall asleep so the ground could be snatched out from under him and he’d have a more discernible BJ Hunnicutt with whom he could spar.

“I think time moves differently over here,” BJ said.

Hawkeye tensed. “How so?” he said.

“It’s like we’re in limbo. Back home it seemed like there was never enough time. School, residency, getting married, having Erin…it’s one big sprint to the finish line, or it was, at least. And I always feel like I’m running late for something, or I’m too early,” BJ said.

It would be that way for someone like BJ, who strove for order and structure and normalcy and routine without question, even if there was none, even if it wasn’t in his best interest. But what did Hawkeye know? He was a trespasser here. It would be silly to say that they were in limbo, that really they should be home—or, not home, but the 4077th, the Swamp. This trip to Tokyo didn’t exist, nine times out of ten.

“I think you think too much,” Hawkeye said.

“Said the pot to the kettle,” BJ said.

Hawkeye drew in a shaky breath. He was tired and he was hurting and the closest thing he had to stability was BJ’s warmth, radiating through his clothes. He smelled like the bar. He smelled like the past.

“I think you’re remarkably punctual, by the way. You found me right when I needed you,” Hawkeye said, throat raw. He couldn’t help himself.

BJ sat up, the blankets rustling audibly beneath him, and reached over Hawk, burying his palm in the comforter. He loomed over him, torso twisting, legs slipping off the bed again, like he wanted to straddle Hawkeye but lost the nerve. Beej’s face was flushed. His lips parted, like he had something to say.

“What are you doing?” Hawkeye whispered. He could hear talking and laughter in the hall: other GIs on their way back to their rooms. 

“I feel a certain way about you, Hawk,” BJ said, grabbing at handfuls of the comforter. 

He was still above him. Hawkeye held his breath. Any minute now the illusion would be shattered. BJ would come to his senses. Hawkeye would hurtle forward in time, or back further still, to some moment where Trapper had him similarly pinned.

“And what way might that be?” Hawkeye said.

“I wish I’d met you sooner,” BJ said. He leaned down and pressed a kiss to Hawkeye’s temple (safe and dangerous and overwhelming all at once).

“Are you still trying to cheer me up?” Hawkeye heard himself say. His eyes were watering, so he closed them.

He felt BJ kiss his cheekbone and then his jaw. He let his brain go someplace far and blameless. He leaned into BJ’s touch, because it was comforting, and natural, like sunshine. And it would always be, even if they weren’t meant to be.

“Is it working?” BJ muttered, drawing nearer. 

Hawkeye didn’t move, apart from bringing his palm to the small of BJ’s back as they pressed together. He had a vague awareness that BJ was hard, and so was he. They were edging toward a line Hawkeye couldn’t cross, had promised himself he wouldn’t, even if nobody but him would remember this night.

“How come I’ve never seen your wedding photos?” Hawkeye said. 

BJ drew back and Hawkeye opened his eyes. He watched the confusion and shock and shame pass over Beej’s face and then used the opportunity to slip out from under him. He retreated, halfway to the door, shaking a little, still aroused. He could hardly look at BJ.

“I’m sorry, Hawk…I-I—it’s not fair, to anyone. It’s a bad idea,” BJ said. He wiped his eyes, face going beet red, hair a mess, clothes rumpled. 

“It’s okay. I’ll uh, I’ll go down to the lobby and see if I can find you an aspirin, for tomorrow. I might walk around for a bit, get uh, get some fresh air,” Hawkeye said. He raked a hand through his hair. He found his jacket and pulled it on. 

Beej looked very small there, sitting on the bed. He nodded. “Okay,” he croaked.

“It’s okay, Beej,” Hawkeye repeated, needing him to know it, needing to break the awkward moment into pieces so they could get onto the next moment and the moment after that. “Don’t go anywhere,” he said.

BJ laughed, brokenly. “Couldn’t if I tried,” he said.

Later, outside in the teeth chattering cold, Hawkeye pulled the photo strip out of his pocket and folded it neatly in half. He felt that feeling again, like goosebumps, like BJ’s lips on the side of his face. And in the morning he was back where he was supposed to be.

The day after Dad passed along BJ’s message, Hawkeye called the Hunnicutt residence. 

That’s what BJ said, over the phone, in the panicked seconds where Hawkeye was unsure whether Peg might answer instead. Their phone was on the wall in the kitchen, across from the counter where Peg Hunnicutt fed Erin her breakfast in her high chair, and brewed her husband his morning coffee. The phone was also near her easy chair and ottoman, where she sat in the afternoons (kicking off her heels or her little white tennis shoes, or her muddy gardening boots, or the sandals she’d gotten from a flea market that were half a size too large) and read Life magazine. Needless to say, BJ had included a lot of details in his letters. 

“Hunnicutt residence,” BJ said, voice low, panting a little, as if he’d just run from the garage (working on his motorcycle) or the back yard (grilling something, for lunch, maybe, Hawkeye thought, noting the time difference).

It was difficult to plop BJ into sunny Californian suburbia, given the nature of the conversation he knew was coming. Mill Valley was the light at the end of the tunnel, and Hawkeye was about to drag Beej (kicking and screaming?) through some portal they’d opened to the past. It wasn’t fair, but Beej had called him first, hadn’t he?

“I got your note,” Hawkeye said, trying to imagine exactly how BJ looked: cradling the receiver between his cheek and shoulder, wiping his greasy hands on a dish towel or looking back, concerned, at the smoke rising from the grill. He wondered how he’d sounded to Dad. He’d been afraid to ask. 

“Hawk,” BJ said, voice softer and even more breathless. 

“Speaking,” Hawkeye said. He chewed on his bottom lip. He was sitting on the couch with his feet tucked under him. Dad was out. He’d be out for hours, though Hawkeye didn't imagine the call would take that long.

“God, Hawk. I didn’t think you’d call,” BJ said. “After all the letters…I even wrote Radar to see if he’d heard from you.”

“I’m sorry,” Hawkeye said. He was a little bowled over by the sound of Beej’s voice. He gripped the phone, hard.

“Don’t apologize. Not to me. I’m the one, well…I owe you a lot of apologies,” BJ said. “I’m just happy to hear from you. I’m happy you’re uh, I’m happy you’re okay. Your father said you were doing okay. I was worried, with all that talk of line crossing, that something might have—”

“No, I’m…well I got home in one piece,” Hawkeye said. “And so did you, evidently.”

BJ was quiet for a moment, an agonizing silence that almost made Hawkeye hang up and forget the whole thing.

“Did you read my letters, Hawk?” BJ said.

“Yes,” Hawkeye said.

“And you didn’t think to write back?” BJ said.

“I didn’t think it was my place,” Hawkeye said.

“You didn’t think it was your place to answer letters addressed to you,” BJ said.

“I’ve been having these dreams where you tell me I need to get over it all,” Hawkeye said.

“And you’d rather listen to me in a dream than in real life?” BJ said.

“Well, I’m a little murky on the details of real life. I thought you were, too,” Hawkeye said.

BJ drew in a deep breath. Hawkeye imagined him rolling his eyes, like back in the Swamp. 

“Peg found the photos in the pocket of my fatigues. I threw them in a box in the closet and forgot about them. I didn’t want to, well…I don’t need to explain it all if you’ve read my letters. She brought them out and showed them to me, and I uh, well, the second I held them in my hand it started coming back. In pieces, at first, and then in dreams. I think I’m getting at a lot of memories that I didn’t know I had,” BJ said.

“And?” Hawkeye said.

“And?” BJ repeated.

“What do you want me to say to that?” Hawkeye said. His voice was breaking. He could hear it, and he hated himself for it.

“Nothing! I missed you, and I’m embarrassed, and I’m sorry, Hawk. I’m sorry I left. I’m sorry I couldn’t see what was right in front of me. I’m sorry you had to be alone, all that time. I’m sorry I made a pass at you in Tokyo and I’m sorry I didn’t remember that it happened,” BJ said. 

Hawkeye blushed. “Keep your voice down. Isn’t Peg home?” he said.

Another beat of dizzying silence.

“She’s been staying with some friends of hers, uh, while we work some things out. I told her I wanted to be the one to go, you know, if someone had to go, but she insisted,” he said.

“Oh,” Hawkeye said. “And Erin?”

“Went with her. She drops her off when she works. It’s temporary, while we figure out something that works better. She’s got a thing about the house, right now, with me home. I think in time…well, I guess it’s not my place to say. We might sell the place, I guess.”

“Sell the place,” Hawkeye repeated, dumbly. “Really?”

“It’s complicated,” BJ said. 

“It sounds complicated,” Hawkeye said.

BJ laughed, loud and startling. 

“What?” Hawkeye said.

“You sound like a damn parrot. That’s the wrong bird, Hawk,” he said.

“I miss you,” Hawkeye said, because he felt he could, then, with the tension broken, with the full length of memory unspooled before them (still a little tangled, but coming back together). 

“You sure have a funny way of showing it,” BJ said.

“Well you’re an asshole, and I just lost my mind not too long ago, remember? I think you were there,” Hawkeye said, bitterly.

“That was…well that…you’re out of it all, now, there’s no looping to mix everything up in your brain,” BJ said.

“No, Beej. I think I’ve always been this way. I think I always will be. I’ve got a couple screws loose. It gets me in trouble, sometimes,” Hawkeye said.

“I…how are you? How are you, really? You can tell me. I can take it,” BJ said. There was something needy and fragile in his tone. 

Hawkeye laughed. His throat felt tight and his eyes were watering and he was pressing the phone insistently to his ear, as if the harder he jammed the receiver to his head, the closer they could be.

“How long have you got?” he said.

“All the time in the world,” BJ said, without missing a beat.

They spoke until the light shifted outside. Dad came home, saw Hawk on the couch, smiled, and retreated into the kitchen to make dinner (which he brought to the coffee table on a tray, setting it down gingerly so he wouldn’t interrupt their conversation). Beej called him again the next morning and they talked some more, and then Hawk called back a couple days later and talked Beej’s ear off through three whole records and half a New York Times crossword puzzle.

The phone calls didn’t stop in frequency in the following weeks. Hawkeye, feeling a little guilty for tying up the line, offered to cover the phone bill and maybe drive into town instead and call Beej from a phone booth. 

Dad waved him off on both counts. He reminded Hawkeye, though, that they had a guest room for a reason, and that it could be made up easily (fresh linens from the hall closet, a cursory vacuuming, moving a few boxes of books, and opening up the windows to let in the fresh air). It would be easy, Dad reasoned, if only Hawkeye would extend the invitation. The two of them talked like they were in the same room anyway. Dad could cook. He could show BJ Hunnicutt around town. The three of them could go fishing or rent bikes, or go to a football game at Hawk’s high school.

“Why would we do that ?” Hawkeye said, laughing, thinking about his father sitting beside Beej, disinterested in the game, but fully engaged in imparting quirky, small town lore, while BJ followed along and asked polite questions. 

It was a little ridiculous, but so was spending the bulk of his days on the phone.

“I’ll drive,” Beej said, latching onto the idea immediately. “I don’t trust planes. I think every plane will take me back to Korea,” he said.

“I think every plane will take me back to 1950,” Hawkeye said. “You don’t need to drive. You don’t need to come . It’s a lot of…it’s a lot of, uh…effort, for—”

“You’re worth the effort,” BJ said.

Hawkeye cleared his throat. “What if…uh, what if you can’t get here? What if it upsets the uh…the timeline? What if we have to start all over again?” Hawkeye said (paranoid, unfounded, deeply unsettling fears that kept him up at night).

“I’ll get there,” BJ said.

“We don’t know the rules ,” Hawkeye said.

“I don’t give a damn about the rules,” BJ said, evenly, confidently, the same way he’d asked Hawk if he was new in town. 

“Okay,” Hawkeye said, thinking, overwhelmingly, of Tokyo, and of their kiss outside the Swamp and Beej’s arms around him on their last night in Korea. 

He thought about the whir of the chopper’s blades, and BJ waving from his motorcycle. He thought about the rocks coming into view as he was lifted further and farther from camp, and how BJ’s goodbye had felt final in a way nothing else had. He thought about how grounding it would be to have his hands on BJ again. He thought about how different he looked, even to himself: rail thin, haggard, in need of a shave, in need of a nap no matter how long he spent sleeping. 

He wondered what Beej would say when he saw him, if he made it to Crabapple Cove at all. He wondered if he’d be startled back to reality and realize he ought to turn around and go home. He wondered if the sight of BJ in his yard would be enough to make him crazy again, if they were both destined to send each other skittering off the edge, like spinning tops knocking into each other, or marbles, or block towers, or some other chaotic, destructive children’s toys.

Hawk paced in the kitchen most of the night before Beej was set to arrive. Dad caught him, ruminating, and guided him, by the shoulders, up the stairs and into bed.

He kissed the top of his head, like he was small again.

BJ pulled into the gravel driveway twenty minutes ahead of schedule. Hawkeye could see him from the bathroom window. He was shaving, face lathered completely in shaving cream, hair damp and freshly trimmed (with Dad’s assistance), shirt half‐buttoned, pants ironed but laying on his bed. He’d been taking so long because his hands were shaking a little, and the nearer BJ got to Crabapple Cove the dizzier Hawkeye got. He’d had to lay down several times, while getting ready, to catch his breath and get his bearings. Dad had coaxed him into eating a couple pieces of dry toast and drinking half a cup of water. 

“He’s here, Hawk,” Dad called, from downstairs.

“Tell him to wait,” Hawkeye replied. 

“To…are you sure?” Dad said.

“Yeah, yeah, say everything’s all right. I just need a minute. We’ve got lots of minutes,” Hawkeye said.

“Alright,” Dad said, laughing.

Hawkeye finished shaving and put on his pants. He managed not to nick his jaw or wrinkle Dad’s handiwork with the iron. He gripped the railing hard on the way down the stairs and managed not to fall or faint or step backward into the dust at the Kimpo airport.

He reached the landing and Dad informed him that BJ had very politely requested to wait for Hawk on the front stairs, and that he’d called Dad sir , which alarmed him. 

Hawkeye opened the front door, and Beej turned his head to look at him. He started to get up, but Hawkeye told him to stay where he was.

“Alright,” BJ said. His eyes were on him, scanning him up and down, as if assessing for signs of malaise (emotional, physical, temporal).

He looked good. He looked tired. He looked a little tanner than the last time they’d seen each other. He had his legs stretched out over the stairs. The trees overhead were casting shadows on his face. He was a little scruffy. His jaw was tight and his eyes were shiny.

He was the same BJ. He was every BJ Hawkeye had ever met, and he was the only one he’d ever known.

“You stay right there and I’ll come to you,” Hawkeye said, like Beej was a wild dog and they were liable to spook each other.

“Okay,” BJ said, and he sounded the same. He sounded close and distant all at once. He sounded the same way he had the day they met and the same way he had when they’d said goodbye.

Hawk sat down beside him, close enough that their knees were touching. BJ looked at him, intently.

“You look good,” BJ said. 

“I look different,” Hawkeye said.

“But good,” BJ said. “Really good, Hawk.”

“If I kiss you, do you think something bad will happen?” Hawkeye said, leaning closer, feeling Beej’s warmth, feeling the prickling sensation again, wondering if it was strong enough to reach Radar in Iowa, wondering if out in a field somewhere he was wiping his brow and squinting up at the clouds, thinking perhaps a storm was coming.

“I don’t care if something bad happens, as long as you kiss me,” BJ said.

Hawkeye reached out and held Beej’s face in his palms. He kissed him: slowly, thoroughly, until his hands started to go numb and his heart was pounding.

He pulled away when he ran out of breath. BJ gaped at him: pupils blown, face flushed, grin spreading, wildly, across his face.

“Do you feel that?” BJ said.

“Feel what?” Hawkeye said.

“It’s a little like the drop on a roller coaster,” BJ said, smiling wider, like it was an excellent joke.

Hawkeye swatted his arm. “Let’s go inside. My legs are falling asleep,” he said.

BJ stood, and extended a hand. Hawkeye took it and he pulled him up. They stood there, tethered to each other, like that first day.

“Some roller coaster,” Hawkeye said.