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“Pierce.” Hawkeye cracked an eye open.
“Charles.” He answered back, in a low, sleepy tone.
“Go home.” Charles said, stepping in from the break room doorway and towards the coffee machine. Hawkeye sighed, slipping down further into his seat against the wall and crossing his arms as his eyes slid closed again.
“You’re gonna regret that at about—,” Hawkeye looked down at his wrist briefly, “oh, let’s say, twelve-thirty.”
“And you’re going to regret that angle you have your back at in the morning.” Charles sat down opposite of him and groaned, stretching his sore joints. “I think your team can handle the rush.” His crows feet creased as he smirked into his coffee cup. “Besides, they have me.”
“Forgive me, I completely forgot that you’re equivalent to ten men alone.” Hawkeye teased.
“Over three decades as head of surgery makes one quite formidable.” Charles responded.
“Uhuh…” Hawkeye voiced sarcastically. He looked up, having lost any grasp he’d had on sleep and starting to entertain the idea of coffee, himself. “That means we’ve known each other for what? Thirty-six?”
Charles considered the math for a moment and nodded. “I think that’s correct, yes.”
Hawkeye blew a whistle out of his lips before he tilted his head, peering studiously at Charles, a soft smile growing on his face.
“What?” Charles asked, tracing his fingers along his upper lip. “Do I have something on my face?”
It earned him one of Hawkeye’s shoulder-shaking laughs. “No.” Hawkeye said as he stood and walked over to the cupboard. “I was just, um… thinking…” he paused, hand hovering over the powdered cream, “about all these years.”
He finished making his coffee and leaned against the counter as he took a sip, relishing in the familiar warmth that slid down his throat. “You know,” he continued, noting Charles expectant stare, “how I’ve changed,” his gaze floated out into the hallway before he quietly added, “how I’ve aged.”
Charles opened his mouth to speak, wanting to break up the chill in Hawkeye’s tone even having not yet found his words. “Yes.” He finally settled on. “You’ve gone all gray, while I still have some color.”
The jive was enough to bring Hawkeye back into the room and he flipped Charles the bird. Charles rolled his eyes in return. “Ever the adolescent.” He told Hawkeye.
“Yeah.” Hawkeye sighed, almost fondly to himself. “I guess I haven’t changed much there.”
A comfortable silence stretched between them. There wasn’t much that could warrant any awkwardness between the two anymore. They’d been a part of each other's lives for so long that they’d stumbled upon all of their dirty little secrets, mannerisms, idiosyncrasies, and habits, as well as helped each other through countless professional and personal hardships.
It was something that they’d scratched the surface of during their time in the service, but had gotten elbow-deep into rather quickly after Hawkeye had started working at Boston Mercy.
In fact, Charles had been the one to finally get Hawkeye to accept the offer of Chief Emergency Physician at the hospital after he’d offhandedly thrown his name and credentials in at a staff meeting, not expecting his director to come back with an offer and a request to sit down with him. Hawkeye had initially declined when Charles had called to prime him for the meeting, in not so many words telling him I’ve done my time in emergency medicine and I don’t plan on going back.
A few weeks after the exchange, Charles fooled him into a private dinner under the guise that there was a highfalutin charity gala being held at the Elk Lodge, an expensive country club right outside of Crabapple Cove. He said he was inviting him as his guest on the condition that he was to be on his best behavior and Hawkeye accepted, thinking it’d be a good opportunity to get some free, high quality, crab cakes. But as they pulled up to the venue in Charles Bentley, and he noticed the emptiness of the place, Hawkeye started to become suspicious.
“You don’t think I’m that easy, do you Charles?” He joked through his confusion, walking into the grand ballroom. His voice echoed from a lack of bodies.
“I do think you’re that easy, Pierce. As history has proved. But that’s not why I’ve brought you here.” Charles responded as they sat and Hawkeye kicked himself for not seeing it coming sooner.
The dinner started uneasily, Hawkeye refusing food to show his indignation and any attempt at conversation being met with a sneer or turned cheek.
“You haven’t changed much there.” Charles had said plainly, staring at his glass of decades old Cabernet. “Still refusing to heal for anyone or anything. Refusing—” he’d measured Hawkeye’s aptitude for truth with a narrowed gaze, “to grow.”
Hawkeye slammed a fist on the table, not surprising Charles in the slightest who forked a bite of lamb indifferently, infuriating Hawkeye to no end.
Hawkeye then, with no holds barred, had let him have it. Going off about how he’d been in Korea twice as long as Charles had, and how he’d suffered tenfold more. How he’d had to come to terms with losing the people that he’d bonded to through those first terrifying days, and how painful it was to have his trust betrayed by everyone he was close to at the 4077th when they’d sent him to that psychiatric facility, including Charles himself.
And how it all wasn’t fair. The pain, the suffering, the way it followed him home. “It’s not fair.”
When he’d finally laid all of his cards out on that table, chest shaking with anger and frustrated tears at the corner of his eyes, he’d sat back into his chair completely spent as his focus slowly shifted inward.
A quiet horror pulled at his features, like he’d had a mirror thrust into his hands and he was looking at all of the fractured parts of himself in magnification. “Jesus…” he whispered, “I’m still there, aren’t I?”
Charles had let the silence speak for himself, respectfully averting his gaze as Hawkeye tried to swallow down sobs. He chose to look out at a bay window as he wrestled with his own bone-deep grief, and watching dusk start to kiss the Atlantic Ocean, he finally spoke.
“Out of the night that covers me, black as the pit from pole to pole, I thank whatever gods may be for my unconquerable soul.” Charles took a deep breath, almost smelling the salt in the air that he knew he would find right outside those doors. He heard Hawkeye do the same. “In the fell clutch of circumstance I have not winced nor cried aloud. Under the bludgeonings of chance my head is bloody,” his voice wavered over the word but he continued on, “but unbowed. Beyond this place of wrath and tears looms but the horror of the shade, and yet the menace of the years finds and shall find me unafraid. It matters not how strait the gate, how charged with punishments the scroll, I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul.”
His fierce authenticity and unwavering steadfastness despite the verbal attack was like a balm over Hawkeye’s frayed nerves, and a tide of calm that he hadn’t felt since before he’d gotten back from Korea washed over him. The calm, however, soon crested into shame for what he’d done. Hawkeye had started to apologize but Charles quickly dismissed it, taking it all easily in stride in the most Charles way possible: by offering him brandy.
They stayed there for another few hours after that, Hawkeye finally ordering food and the two finishing the bottle before dipping into an expensive cognac. And as a laugh lingered in the air after they were reminded of some ill-fated joke that they’d played on B.J., Hawkeye quietly accepted the position.
The first months at the hospital were taxing on him, something they’d both been expecting, and Charles arranged to have a certain temporary psychiatrist employed at the hospital without Hawkeye’s knowledge. When Hawkeye inevitably made the discovery by literally bumping into Sidney during a rush, Charles had told him it was a service being provided for the ‘mental health of the entire emergency team’. Hawkeye grumbled as he stomped away that afternoon, the other two stifling their laughter as they shared a knowing look between them.
But although Hawkeye had initially frowned upon the ‘babying’ he thought he’d received, about a week into the arrangement, Charles found a book of poetry on his desk. It was a collection of work by Rudyard Kipling, bound in a beautiful red leather, and inside the front cover had a scribble of familiar handwriting that read: You’re a better man than I am, Gunga Din. -B.P.
Charles had smiled to himself as he tucked it safely between the other novels he kept on his desk, a quiet pride filling him as he realized that Hawkeye had quite literally turned a chapter in his book. Over the years that followed, they developed an even deeper friendship (although neither would ever say that aloud) and Hawkeye was able to slowly repay him for his kindness.
In 1969, as everyone watched reporting of the Stonewall riots flash over the airwaves in dazzling technicolor, Hawkeye had been the first person that Charles had felt comfortable to come out to. Hawkeye had accepted him immediately, and continued their sincere friendship unchanged. Soon after, aggressively fighting the board to keep him on as Head of Surgery when Charles was outed by one of their co-workers.
Hawkeye even went as far as to pen a letter of resignation refusing his pension, presenting it to the committee at the hearing that would decide Charles fate. He’d pointed an accusatory finger at the members, using that same mean-mug Charles had watched him fearlessly use with three star generals while he growled. “If he goes. I go.”
Between the fear of losing two department heads and the possibility of it leading to a drop in their rating, they decided to keep Charles on. But coming out of the experience his reputation had been tarnished, and his confidence, which he tried desperately to hide, was completely shattered. Hawkeye forced him into therapy after seeing the toll it took on him, reminding him that he’d done the same to Hawkeye almost fifteen years prior. Charles regretfully conceded.
Five years later, Charles won a defamation case against the board members and in the process met his partner James who’d represented him. Over a decade, they built a beautiful life together, buying a house on the northern outskirts of the city before adopting a Belgian Malenois, which Charles had begrudgingly been strong-armed into naming Radar after Hawkeye had suggested it to James just to get under Charles skin.
Now, both doctors approaching seventy, they were seated much the same as they usually were during a holiday: drinking coffee in a slightly too air conditioned break room, re-runs of a sitcom playing low in the background, and the sounds of the hospital echoing softly around them.
“I think we’ve both changed.” Charles responded to his earlier comment. “But then again, I think we haven’t changed much at all.”
There was a cheer down the hall and then a series of rapid-fire booms outside the window causing both of them to jump out of their skin. But any fear was quickly replaced by quiet laughter as they realized the clock had just struck midnight, changing the calendar to January 1st, 1988.
Hawkeye looked around the room, wiggling his eyebrows like he half expected something magical to happen before he shrugged and smiled at Charles who pursed his lips trying to hide a smile of his own.
“Happy New Year, Charles.” Hawkeye said as he sat back down into his chair.
“Happy New Year, Hawkeye.” Charles answered back.