Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

To: B.F. Pierce (Crabapple Cove, ME)
From: M. Houlihan (Alexandria, VA)
WILL BE IN NYC FOR WORK MAR 16 STOP CAN YOU MEET ME STOP NEED TO TALK FACE TO FACE STOP

To: M. Houlihan (Alexandria, VA)
From: B. F. Pierce (Crabapple Cove, ME)
OH MY DARLING I THOUGHT YOU'D NEVER ASK STOP I'LL BRING THE RINGS IF YOU BRING THE PAPERWORK MEET ME AT THE WHISPERING GALLERY IN GRAND CENTRAL I’LL BE THE ONE WEARING A GREEN CARNATION ON MY COLLAR

To: B.F. Pierce (Crabapple Cove, ME)
From: M.Houlihan (Alexandria, VA)
SOMETIMES I THINK I DIED ON MY WAY TO KOREA AND EVERYTHING SINCE HAS BEEN PURGATORY 

To: M. Houlihan (Alexandria, VA)
From: B.F. Pierce (Crabapple Cove, ME)
I LOVE YOU TOO

Hawkeye switches trains three times and spends the better part of a day staring blankly as the New England landscape rolls by. Bare trees and pine trees, snow-covered fields, and iced-over rivers. An entire landscape he’d forgotten existed. He'd drive down if New York driving weren't absolute bloody murder. Anyway, the train helps him relax. That was the intention, at least. The Mabel Seeley novel he grabbed blindly off his shelf sits unopened on his lap; the same goes for the sandwich he purchased in the dining car, so he had an excuse to stretch his legs. 

Margaret’s train from Alexandria arrives an hour after his, right when the exodus of commuters floods in from the streets. Against all odds, they find each other under the giant clock in Penn Station’s once-glorious waiting room. On their way to The Plaza, Hawkeye tries and fails not to think of another promise made in jest about another clock in another concourse. Neither he nor Margaret say a word beyond placid pleasantries until they reach the hotel, but their pinkies brush on the seat between them. God, the cabbie must think they’ve been having an affair that will slowly and painfully be put out of its misery tonight. If the cabbie even thinks about them beyond payment, which is unlikely.

The Plaza is a miracle of gleaming marble and sepulchral ceilings, filigree handrails, and unseen orchids perfuming hallways that stretch out like late-night conversations. Hawkeye made infrequent appearances at the Oak Bar in college but never had reason to linger. Those liaisons were always about rendezvousing at a second location rather than admiring the architecture. If you had described the Plaza’s lobby to him in 1952, he would have thought it was as much a fantasy as Shangri-La. America threw millions of dollars into killing a whole generation of young men and traumatizing another, yet it still had enough left over to maintain luxury hotels.

As they approach the elevator, Margaret takes his arm and says, "Ever since I was a little girl, I dreamed about staying here."

He wants to say, I didn’t know you were ever a little girl. Logically, she must have. Even Margaret Houlihan must have been a child once. But the natural instinct is to picture her with dog tags rather than a birth certificate, kicking her way into the world with a tiny pair of combat boots already laced onto her feet. Extra-small fatigues, begging for a crew cut to match her daddy's.

Instead, he says, “Really? When I was a little girl, the only place I wanted to go was a muddy latrine halfway across the world."

Margaret unlinks their arms to shove him.

She looks good: red-cheeked, her lashes dark from a sprinkle of late-winter flakes. A far cry from the wind-up toy with too-tight springs she was when they first met. The change is subtle and easy enough to miss for people who didn't live under her thumb. There's a minuscule change in how she holds herself—her body is a living, breathing, glorious miracle of creation rather than an extension of her officer's uniform. No more shoulders tight enough to snap at the slightest touch. Her arms are no longer confined to the rigid geometry of a perfect salute. It's a lovely looseness of being, and Hawkeye wishes she didn't have to go to Korea to achieve it.

She wears a rich red sweater and black slacks tucked into clunky winter boots. No-nonsense as ever, but with a little more room for comfort and a little less olive drab. Her hair is short and sharp, more platinum than blonde. (Peroxide can’t take all the credit. He's one to talk; his hair was black in 1950. Now it's 70% salt and 30% pepper.) Out of all the 4077th, she was always the one he had the most trouble picturing as a civilian. But, in this light, an entirely new person shimmers under the surface of Major Houlihan, and Hawkeye is excited to meet her all over again. 

From the bar cart, she wordlessly holds up a martini glass.

"Make it a double and hold the gin. Hold the vermouth too while you're at it."

Faster than anyone has ever moved without the threat of an impending death, she crosses the room, laying the back of a cool, manicured hand on his forehead. "Pierce, are you feeling alright?"

"Yeah, I'm fine. I'm trying out this new concept called 'sobriety.' Sidney said it was supposed to help me readjust to civilian life or whatever." This confession is delivered to the chandelier as spots appear in the corners of his vision. He leaves out that Sidney gave an ultimatum of drying out or another stint at the funny farm. He also leaves out his appointment with Sidney to talk about lithium. The constant nausea from chlorpromazine made him shed 10 pounds he couldn't afford to lose, and the brain fog is something awful. 

There follows a long period of quiet. When Margaret returns to the bar cart, she fills two glasses with tonic water, adds a twist of lemon, and drops a fat Manzanilla olive in each. "How much do you know about Executive Order 10450?" She asks as she hands over a glass. Her hand trembles for a second, only noticeable to someone who spent three years relying on the steadiness of those hands. She does not sit down, the vomitous nerves of a fever coursing through her body, her heels bouncing against the spotless floors.

"Head of a pin."

"It gives the government clearance to investigate employees for any signs of so-called character weakness. Including," she clears her throat and screws her eyes shut, whether to try and remember or to avoid having to look him in the eye: "any criminal, infamous, dishonest, immoral, or notoriously disgraceful conduct, habitual use of intoxicants to excess, drug addiction, sexual perversion."

Another horrible pause. 

Margaret opens her eyes, waiting for a deluge of jokes that will never come. They didn't have to go to all that trouble keeping out little old me; the only way I'd work for the government is with a gun to my head. 

This isn't the sort of situation Hawkeye wants to dignify with a joke. "Why are you telling me this?"

"That last bit—sexual perversion—is the big thing they care about. The rest is set dressing. Don't you see?"

"I appreciate your concern, Margaret, but you don't have to worry about me. I haven't so much as thought about a nurse for months. Father Mulcahy probably gets more action than me.”

Margaret is pacing now, her voice carefully modulated not to betray any government secrets over jingles on the radio, not to betray too much emotion and fall to pieces. "You dolt. This is an order preventing people like you and me and Trapper and probably Klinger and—well, people like us—from holding any government position down to the lowest pencil pusher. It's a smear campaign. Widespread character assassination. They think it’s a character weakness, like gambling or subterfuge. They think we’re all double agents lying in wait so we can trade government secrets with the Soviets. This stupid order will ruin people's lives. Good, innocent people... We’re good people; it’s just that nobody believes us.” 

He reaches out to touch her elbow, the only part of her that’s close enough.

“Don’t interrupt me when I’m ranting.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I'm not sick. In fact, I've never felt more sane in my entire life! They're happy to use us for cannon fodder when a war is going on, but as soon as we want to be normal, we're just as much of a menace as the communists, and who knows when, how, or if it’s ever going to stop! Are they going to forget this the next time they need more bodies to throw onto bombs? What will they do when they get all of us out of the government? Will they force us from our houses? From any semblance of a normal life? They let us be ourselves when it’s convenient for them to look the other way, then force us back into the dark as soon as they can.” She takes a deep, steadying breath before continuing. “The other night, Helen said—"

Hawkeye nearly chokes on his olive. “Woah, woah, woah, hold up. Helen, as in Helen Whitfield? About 5'6", brown hair, southern accent, stone-cold fox Helen Whitfield? You’re telling me you willingly did the horizontal tango with Frank Burns, the Lipless Wonder when Helen Whitfield could have been a contender this whole time?”

Pink explodes over Margaret’s face, all the way down her throat. She makes a half-choked, half-laugh of a noise, sputtering for a minute before her composure makes a welcome return. “It was a different time. Anyway, Helen says thousands of people lost their jobs all at once. Helen has this cousin in Arlington... He’s a cipher clerk, nothing fancy. He failed the medical due to a heart murmur, so people already think he's, well... People have been following him home from work. Twice he saw men with cameras in the building across from him, peering through the windows to see how many bedrooms his apartment has, scoping out the bars he goes to, and following him to bookstores to see if he buys any deviant literature. All that for a clerk! If they court-martialed every gay person who served in Korea, there would be no one left!”

“Certainly some other MASH unit would have our 97% survival record.”

“Exactly! Since I was a child, I was taught to love this country, no matter what. It’s just about the only thing I know how to do. I gave my entire life to this country, and they don't even want it. It's like I was reborn into a world that would rather I burned up on impact."

Hawkeye doesn't think you can love a country. You can love the people who make it up, and you can love a place or an idea, but you cannot love the brick-and-mortar foundations of nationalism. A hairline fissure opens in his heart when he tells her that your country will never love you back, no matter how much you love it. It will trick you into thinking it loves you one second, then feed you into the meat grinder the next. One hand places a medal around your neck while the other cuts your throat. What kind of girlhood must army brats like Margaret Houlihan have had? Now, girls, if you eat your veggies and mind your p's and q's, you too can grow up to have your husbands and sons shipped home in a box! If you get lucky, maybe the boys will even give you a fancy little medal and let you fall on a grenade for them!

"What are you going to do?" Hawkeye asks quietly.

"I don't know. For the first time in my life, I don't know." Finally, something breaks. Margaret perches on the edge of the sprawling king-size bed, then flops backward with a groan. 

Hawkeye mirrors her posture. A dozen tiny prisms of light fall over them from the chandelier. If this were a film—one of those big-budget Technicolor melodramas—and if they were straight (the only films that get made about people like them are cautionary tales), this is where they would fall into each other's arms, and the camera would cut to black. But war isn’t a film, and neither is life after it. The only films about war are fairytales for people who've never been through it but still want to imagine it means something.

For a moment, he thinks that the chain on the chandelier will snap and come crashing down on them, and then they won’t have to worry about Order 10450 or whether they will ever be able to sleep without guilt. 

Since he came home, Hawkeye has had many cheery thoughts like that. 

"How's Helen?" he asks.

"She's good. She's really good, doing much better. Honestly, Hawkeye, when I'm with her, I feel like I can finally see clearly. Everything before was Vaseline smudged on the lens. Now it's like I can see everything in detail. I feel so quiet inside. With Frank and Donald and especially Scully, I was always so worried about doing everything right that I thought that if I went off script for just a second, they would stop wanting me. I had all this noise in my head telling me I had to be one thing or another, and Helen makes all that noise go quiet.” She frowns. “There are a few things that make a lot more sense in hindsight.”

"Cheers, I'll drink to that.” Hawkeye raises an imaginary glass, his own empty on the nightstand. “No offence, Margaret, but you had terrible taste in men, and I'm including myself in that."

"It's always good to be self-aware."

He touches the creamy bedspread, tracing a finger around the embroidered whorls. Sterile, generic evocations of wealth. He thinks about saying goodnight and going back downstairs, then loitering around frigid streets bathed in neon and still choked with people, wandering and wandering and wandering until the soles of his shoes give way to piles of slush until he collapses in the lobby of a hotel where he did not have the foresight to book a room for the night. He turns to look at Margaret’s profile and wonders if she also has trouble sleeping. Whether she has the same fears after full days lost to weeping chest cavities—if she falls asleep, someone will die—the only way she can get a couple hours of dreamless black is at the expense of someone else’s life. Does she wake and wait for choppers overhead or a voice crackling over the PA system telling her a new truckful of patients needs to be stitched back together? Someone else must feel this too—that hell isn’t somewhere you go later, but something you carry inside yourself, here and now. Something that gnaws away inside of you and grows or shrinks but can never be excised. How could anyone walk away from that and remain unchanged? How could anyone walk away? But maybe it’s different if you have someone beside you to remind you that you’re still alive. Hawkeye got so used to sleeping three in a tent that he spent the first two weeks back camped out in front of the TV with the volume on low. Otherwise, the silence made him nervous, just like the solitude made him nervous. Every time the whir of a siren went past his street, the sound hung in the air long after it was gone. 

As if reading his mind, Margaret says, "You can stay the night if you keep your hands to yourself."

Hawkeye holds his offending hands up in surrender. "Don't worry, I let my hands wander in Korea, and they never came back to me.”

"And your feet. If you kick me, I'm kicking back," Margaret warns. 

Fifteen stories in the air, the endless cacophony of midtown is almost peaceful. The mindless drone of background noise. On the radio, Dean Martin sings about Amore for the third time since they crossed the threshold. There was a time when Hawkeye would have done almost everything for a couple hours of quiet. And before that, there was a time when he had his own apartment, his own bed, and a private shower. Now, he can think of no worse home than one where he is the sole occupant. Margaret doesn’t know how lucky she is to have someone to hold her when the dreams come—someone who dreams in the same lurid shade of red.

From across the gulf of pillows and sheets, Margaret says, "Speaking of men...

"Jesus Christ!"

“No, not him. Have you heard anything from BJ?”

“No,” he lies.

Chapter Text

The thing is that he can’t write to BJ. Nothing of value, at least. BJ writes to him—two letters a month, sometimes two letters and a postcard if he takes the family somewhere for the weekend. Long, rambling letters pick up midway through conversations he’s imagined the other side of. Hawkeye thinks it would have been easier if that final goodbye really was goodbye.

There’s the letter the week after he gets back that starts with,  I can’t believe I’m about to say this, but I miss powdered eggs,  and ends with,This should go without saying, but I miss you more than powdered eggs. Then, there’s a letter in September, a real spanner, three pages front and back filled to the brim about how he keeps waiting for someone to pinch him and wake him back up on his cot, how all the colours in San Francisco overwhelm him to look at, how he’s the only doctor at his new practice who was drafted, and everyone else keeps calling him a hero. One package contains the poems of Wilfred Owen, the frontispiece inscribed with  Hawk—I know this is probably just about the last thing you’d want to read. I marked all the poems that aren’t about being muddy and miserable. Beej.

Despite the warning and the courtesy, he reads the whole book from cover to cover in a single sitting. His first thought when he comes up for air—bleary-eyed and starving at 4 in the morning—is, What the  fuck?  What else is he supposed to think when one of the poems helpfully marked with a star reads:

I slew all falser loves; I slew all true
That I might love nothing but your truth, Boy.
Fair fame I cast away as bridegrooms do
Their wedding garments in haste of joy.

BJ read these poems from cover to cover, picking out the ones he hoped Hawkeye would enjoy, and if Hawkeye were on the receiving end of his side of the correspondence, he would have thrown in the towel months ago. Either this is the world’s longest and most elaborate prank, or BJ Hunnicutt is the dumbest man to ever walk the Earth. He does not consider a third option.

The package after, as if to apologize for the previous show of emotion, is a stack of Californian nudie mags.

Some letters end with love and even more end with  yours . One letter must have been written in haste, for the sign-off is missing the final crucial letter, resulting in "your Beej."

The worst is the postcard from Carmel that says, "Wish you were here!" atop a generic scene of sun and palm trees. But it’s the back of the postcard that guts him—six crummy words:

Dear Hawk, See front. Love, Beej .

Peg writes too. She wrote to him twice in Korea—first to say hello, and after hearing so much about him from BJ’s letters, she felt as if she’d known him a hundred years and thought a formal introduction was in order. The other time was towards the end of the war. BJ must have written her something pretty about finding friends in foxholes. Even after a month, the letter still carried the aldehyde-honeysuckle scent of her perfume. For a week straight, he couldn’t sleep unless he traced a finger over the loops of his name and read that letter until he could recite it backwards in Pig Latin. 

Dear Hawkeye,

I hope you don’t mind me writing to you again. I’ve heard so much about you from BJ’s letters that I feel you are as much mine as you are his. You have no idea how ecstatic I am that BJ found a friend like you, especially under such circumstances. If I can be honest, most of our friends in Mill Valley are  our  friends or mine rather than his. In my experience, married people tend to bleed into each other. Our house, our mortgage, our child, our friends, our dog, etc. It’s like Plato’s creation story—how he thought we were all born with four legs and arms, two faces, and one essence, split in half until we stumbled blindly back to one another. I don’t know if you’ve ever read Plato. I’m not much into philosophy, but lately, I’ve been looking for meaning everywhere I can. 

That’s how it felt when BJ was drafted, like someone split a seam down the centre of us, of Peg-and-BJ, and left us both adrift. I know how silly it must sound to you, but I’ve been Mrs. Hunnicutt for so long (12 years! Terrifying to think that my marriage could terrorize a middle school hallway) I’ve nearly forgotten how to be Peg. I’ve made some new friends recently, very good ones who don’t know me as Mrs. Hunnicutt first and foremost. Most people I know on BJ’s side are coworkers, so it relieves me that one can be both a friend and a coworker. Either way, I’ll soon find out for myself. BJ might have told you that I’m going into real estate. If he didn't, then, well, I’m going into real estate!

Anyway, I’m writing this on the off chance that you need a friend. Not that it sounds like you’re in any shortage of them, but what damage can one more do? Reading BJ’s letters, I feel his love for you is mine to give. I don’t need to tell you in what high esteem he holds you, both as a surgeon and a man. Not one letter goes by without mentioning you at least once, even if it’s to say that you fell asleep on a gurney or you’re sitting next to him as he writes. Some days, I feel that, without even knowing what you look like, I could recognize you the second you stepped into a room. It’s the damnedest thing, isn’t it? Why do I feel so strongly about someone I’ve never met? Though I wrote a fan letter to Amelia Earhart when I was 12, perhaps it is not so strange. One day, I hope I might be so lucky to recognize you the second you enter a room. 

When all this is over—and sometimes it feels like it will never be over, even 5000 miles from Uijeongbu; I can’t imagine what it feels like for you—you must visit us in Mill Valley for a few weeks. San Francisco is a pain to navigate, and you’ll probably complain about the food, and the suburbs will bore you to tears, but Erin and I (and BJ, I imagine, when the two of you are no longer joined at the hip) want so desperately to meet you. The ocean and the fog are so different on the West Coast—this is complete speculation on my part; before this trip, I’d never been further east than St. Louis, which has no coast to speak of! Come to Mill Valley; there will always be room for you here. When Erin is a little older, I promise to repay the favour and visit you in Crabapple Cove. Erin would love to meet her Uncle “Hawkie.” 

Sorry for such a long letter about nothing in particular. I suppose you don’t get much fresh reading material. I’ll try to send some books for the crew next time. They make a pocket-size edition of  A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.  If you (or BJ) send a list of what everyone would like to read, I’ll do my best to get some books out to you. Sorry again for rambling on. I had a moment of peace while Erin was eating her pea and carrot puree, but now she’s more interested in smearing it all over her high chair, so I have to go. Try not to be a stranger.

Love from

Peg Hunnicutt

P.S. Your father was an absolute delight to meet! He kept the whole party (even the indomitable Mrs. Potter) up half the night in stitches at some of your childhood antics. Pictures were included. 

Nowadays, Peg writes to him like she would write a member of an old sewing circle: recipes (baked winter pears with a note saying "I’m sure even a perennial bachelor like yourself can handle this"), an anecdote about Erin shoving a lima bean up her nose, BJ’s progress fixing up an old motorcycle—girl talk like they're painting each other's nails in between deluges of patients. It would be worse if she weren’t so sincere. Then maybe he would go to California and see how different the ocean and the West Coast fog are. He could enjoy a pleasant but tepid vacation, content in the knowledge that he and BJ aren’t meant to be joined at the hip when their lives aren’t at stake. And then he could move on! Maybe they’d see each other again at a 4077th five-year reunion or send birthday cards until one year they forget. Peg's easier to write to because she isn't a person the same way BJ is. Peg is a picture in a wallet, an image on a screen, and a name on a letter. BJ is flesh and blood, antiseptic and aftershave, and Hawkeye could look him in the eye every day they were together, but he can't write a letter from the opposite side of the country. Peg is a conduit to channel BJ through. When Peg sends a recipe for Oklahoma bisque, copied dutifully from an old family recipe, Daniel insists they send back the Pierce family beef stroganoff recipe with extra rosemary.

One of these letters from Mill Valley even comes complete with a signature from little Erin Hunnicutt. Well, what he assumes is a signature. A cloud of hearts surrounds a purple scribble that would put even his handwriting to shame and is helpfully labelled "Erin."

Hawkeye can’t write BJ (though he writes everyone else, even if it’s a line or two once a month), he can’t settle down into the role of country doctor like he told everyone he would (though he's played nurse to his dad's patients under duress), and he can’t look at certain shades of green or, god forbid, a martini glass without bringing up the bilious layer of his stomach. The first time he saw a whole chicken in a supermarket, plucked and bloodless and waiting for the carving knife, he got so light-headed that he left without buying anything and had to be walked home by an elderly neighbour who still recalled the hollowed-out way boys came back from Argonne Forest. Like the food, the army pension is hardly enough to live on, but it will keep him alive as long as he can stretch it. So, instead of doing anything of value, he loafs. He knits until his hands cramp up; he spends so long in the bath that his dad has to periodically knock on the door to confirm that Hawkeye hasn’t drowned; he eats slice after slice of white bread.

He reads voraciously. Vidal, Genet, and Capote. Isherwood and Niles, and those paperbacks you can read at the drugstore while you wait for a prescription. The ones that are made to fall apart the second someone starts to love them, with the flimsy glue and the lurid covers of half-naked bodies bathed in shadows. For every book about men, there are about six about women, and he reads them all, ever the equal opportunist. Hawkeye may be stupid, but he isn’t an idiot. He drives up to Canada for some weekend R&R, thinking the people will be different even if the scenery is the same million-year-old rocks and coves. All the while, Spring tries to coax him into living again. Remember us? asks the proud v of geese flying overhead. Remember the fireweed blooming at the edge of the highway? Remember the bear and her cubs awakening after a long nap? Do you remember how to go about the unromantic mechanics of survival? The world asks him, and Hawkeye wants to say he is trying his best.

Canadians, it turns out, aren’t too different from Americans. The only difference is that they look him in the eye more. Every drugstore he passes from St. Andrews to St. John—a lot saints up here, he should write to Father Mulcahy and ask whether heaven has any vacancies with half the celestial residents camped out in Canada—he pulls into the parking lot. Instead, he grabs a handful of pulp novels and whatever other necessities make him look less deranged. For all he knows, Senator McCarthy has a whole file dedicated to the deviant sexual behaviour of one B.F. Pierce, and has tasked someone with tailing him for years. Maybe that someone was BJ, perfectly chosen for temptation and trained to make avoiding it almost unbearable. Or maybe Hawkeye has been too much by himself.

"I finally finished the Complete Works of William Shakespeare ," Hawkeye tells the cashier as his order of toilet paper and sleeping pills is rung up, alongside books with titles like Torment, Dark Passions Subdue, and Strange Desires. "I’m excited to see what other books there are in the world."

Nobody in Crabapple Cove would care or even notice if the younger Dr. Pierce was spotted leaving the drugstore with an armful of deviant literature. Even before the war, everyone always thought he was cracked. But he told Margaret he’d be careful, even if he isn’t working for the government (or at all). The only strange men he wants to follow him home are the ones he invited. So he goes to Canada for his dirty novels marked "ADULT ONLY" and sold for 25¢ a piece, and feeds each page into the fire as he reads them.

Now, at least, his antic disposition has some basis in reality.

A lot of these books are about one war or another. As if war is an excuse for men to touch each other without consequence. As if the only way people like him (and Trapper and Margaret and Helen and—) can only be in love is if people are shooting at them. None of these books—at least none he’s read—are about Korea. The one he has open now,  The Charioteer, is about the last war, but all wars are the same when it comes down to it. Whether it’s knights on horseback, soldiers blown to smithereens by cannon fire, or civilians tiptoeing around landmines, it all comes down to two people trying to tear each other's throats out in the mud. And he had the audacity to fall in love during it. Multiple times. Twice with married men.

He picks up The Charioteer, not to try and relive the war (who would ever want to remember the war? Who could ever forget?) but to learn how to outlive it. If the men in this book can find something true that won't shrivel up and slink back into the shadows the second the shelling stops, then maybe there’s hope for him. Maybe, just maybe, some of the past three years were real. Not because they missed their families or because war makes a man take a temporary leave of his mental faculties, but because there was a core of something beautiful; they just had to scrounge around in the mud to find it. That’s what he needs: a manual for survival.

Where do you go after a relationship that wouldn't exist without a body count? 

They’re never going to see each other again. A few years ago, Hawkeye would have taken a weekend drive down to New York, or Boston, before Carlye, then Trapper, then Charles ruined the whole state of Massachusetts for him. There, he would have drowned his sorrows in gin and found a body he doesn't ask the name of. Now, the mere thought of a martini sends his stomach into loop-de-loops. Apparently, it is a "bad idea" for an "alcoholic" to go to a "bar."

If Hawkeye can survive Korea, he can survive BJ Hunnicutt returning to his freakishly blonde family in sunny California. And if he can survive BJ, he can survive anything. How long was BJ in Korea, anyway? One year? Two years? It felt like seven, but it could have been 100, for all he knows. Time passed differently out there. Sometimes stopped entirely, and sometimes Hawkeye expects to wake up back in the Swamp and is almost disappointed when he doesn't. He remembers almost nothing of the decades of his life before, and every second of the past three years, the memories encased in amber beckon him to crack them open and return instantaneously. What kind of stories will they write about Korea when there’s nobody alive to remember it? The thing is, it wasn’t just a war story. It was a horror story. It was a Homeric epic. It was a comedy by Aristophanes. It was a five-act Shakespearean tragedy. It was a love story. And, someday, all of it—the minefields and missing persons, the entire 4077th—will be a ghost story children tell each other.

He does not burn the Mary Renault book, least of all because it’s bound with something resembling care. If he were a brave man, he’d wrap it in paper and send it across the country. Let BJ see what he has to say about it. But he’s always been a coward, through and through.

Chapter Text

Like every small town in America, Crabapple Cove is more of a fantasy than a place on a map. Never more beautiful than when you're coming home from a long time away. A serpentine tangle of poorly-paved highway hugs the coast before it straightens out at the one-streetlight downtown with a hodgepodge of buildings. Getting road rash from the gravel ditch along the jagged highway is more of a rite of passage than learning how to ride a bike in the first place. Houses have their paint stripped by the salt air one season and repainted the next. A grocery store guards one end of the main road, a joint elementary-high school sits at the other, and 3200 lives are lived entirely within that boundary. There are five churches—four at the same intersection—three restaurants, and something that can dubiously be called a bar. In the summer, the population swells with cottagers crawling up the coast and tourists who claim to want to escape to nature but complain about the smell of fish. The nearest cinema is half an hour away, and the nearest hospital is half an hour from  that , depending on whether you obey the speed limit. Few people do out here. 

If you drive about 5 miles down Route 12 and hang a left at Orchard Street (which backs onto a small rocky strip of beach, not to be confused with Beach Street, which is where the apple and pear orchards are), you’ll find a verdant green saltbox house with a silver mezuzah on the same plot of land that half of Hawkeye’s family has lived on for longer than the other half of his family has been in America. The front step has rotted through twice in recent memory, and the windows rattle something awful whenever the wind picks up past 30 mph anytime between August and April. But, hey, it's home. It used to be home, at least. Crabapple Cove is a great place to be a kid—if the garden at Misselthwaite Manor went stateside. A pleasant place to come back to for some R&R, but not so much the sort of place that allows you to slot back into a life you've outgrown. Hawkeye returned from the valley of the shadow of death—literally, half the town was midway through his wake  in absentia  before he could patch a call through, but at least there was no worry about how to bury him with an empty grave—and most days it seems like Crabapple Cove neither wants him back nor knows what to do with him. 

Hawkeye has been restless from the moment he came into being. The "mobile" part of "mobile army surgical hospital" made him peripatetic. Every day, Hawkeye underwent the worst trauma of someone else’s life, and then the next day, he did the whole thing over again. An endless loop of violence, crawling out of a mass grave only to be kicked back into the pit. Were it just the nightmares, it'd be better—not alright, but manageable. If he could pick up a scalpel without thinking just for a second about slitting his throat so he doesn't accidentally slit someone else's, then maybe civilian life wouldn't be so unbearable. If he could have the people back without having to take back the war, he wouldn’t be dragging himself through the motions of being alive.

It's phantom limb syndrome. 10 times a day, Hawkeye will hear a song on the radio that BJ used to whistle under his breath or think of a joke, and the only person whose laugh he wants to hear is five time zones away. When he stands side-by-side with his father as they make dinner, the only thing he can think of is those long hours in the OR spent pressed arm-to-arm or back-to-back with BJ, tilting his head back and feeling the rustle of BJ’s hair against the nape of his neck. He waits for BJ’s big head to appear in the mirror every time he shaves. 

Or perhaps it's not like phantom limb syndrome at all. A limb is an easy thing to miss. People notice when you don't have a limb; they expect you to mourn it. To be accurate, he misses BJ like a rib. From the outside, everything appears to be in order. He could, technically, live without a rib and be perfectly fine. You would have to see inside him to notice any deficiency at all. Sometimes Hawkeye wonders if BJ must have been taken from one of his ribs and sprung fully formed at the O Club in Kimpo. That was how it felt: BJ had lived inside him for so long that he must have been born out of sheer wanting. 

Hawkeye has other ghosts to carry besides BJ, but BJ is the heaviest. Certainly the loudest, but not the only one.

Once, Hawkeye hears a piece of music in a soap commercial and somehow knows it must be Tchaikovsky. He almost wants to call up Boston Mercy and hum a bit of it for Charles to identify, but that would require talking to Charles. 

Another time, he stops in front of a mannequin in a store window, aghast that someone would style a striped Dolman top with a floral circle skirt. He makes the beleaguered shopgirl describe the outfit in laborious detail—colour, fabric, cut, everything down to the hemline—to make Klinger understand how his eyes went to hell. Except for the fact that he isn’t sure where exactly Klinger is. His letters are short and scant, backdated by a month at least and never from the same place. He must have scoured half of Korea and still hasn’t found Soon Lee’s family. He could probably search for the rest of his life. 

Once a month, he dutifully takes a box of child-sized hats and socks and posts them to an orphanage in Philly. In his dreams, he sees a long line of children held together by a never-ending red scarf, black ragdoll stitching at their joints, and mismatched buttons for eyes.

Hawkeye buys a lone grape Nehi from the grocer and winces at the sweetness, thinking of how big the sky must be out in Iowa and wondering how Radar can sleep under it without wanting to cower. 

In September, he sees a tourist wearing the same blue and orange University of Illinois sweatshirt Henry Blake used to wear with that stupid fishing hat of his. For two weeks, his dreams are an explosion of orange over an endless and hungry sea. There was never any time for grief so massive that it swallowed up any fond memories of Henry. Was it instant? Did he see it coming? How long did it take the plane to burn, and how many pieces of Henry Blake fell into the Sea of Japan? The worst scenario he can imagine, and he imagined every one, is a half-burned, half-conscious Henry treading water before his head slips under. Two years of grief crawl out of his throat like truth from her well. 

He would have ended it all if not for his father. It helps to have someone to talk to, even if that someone can never really understand.  Tell me about Colonel Potter’s horse—what was her name again?   Daniel prompts when Hawkeye's eyes glaze over while drying dishes. When it’s the meanest winter in months, and they huddle together by the fire, afraid to sleep in case their eyelids freeze, it’s  tell me about Rosie’s , and Hawkeye tells him about how they danced until they were doing little more than holding each other up, like those photos you see of couples at Depression-era dance marathons in the middle of the dust bowl.  Tell me about Margaret. Tell me about Radar. Tell me about all the people you love so I can love them too . They did the same thing after his mother died. Hawkeye was afraid that he would start to forget her from the moment she was gone, a little bit of her piece by piece, day by day, until even her picture became foreign to him.  Tell me about how you and Mom met. Remind me what her laugh sounded like and what parts of me were hers first .

Hawkeye knows two ways to survive loss: you bury it, and when it digs itself out of every grave you build for it, you circle that loss like a drain.

It's a foggy, fecund Saturday in May when Daniel Pierce says, "You could call him, you know. I'm sure he would be glad to hear your voice." He says all this like it's nothing. His eyes never leave the classified section of the   Crabapple Cove Courier . Like it's the easiest thing in the world to pick up a pen and bleed. If he hears BJ’s voice over the phone, Hawkeye will walk to California or into the ocean. "Do you know how expensive that would be? I'm already freeloading. Now you want me to rack up the phone bill?"

Not to mention that the other end of their party line would undoubtedly hear more than they bargained for.

"You’ve written grocery lists longer than what you’re calling letters. I thought it would be easier to say the big stuff when you don't have to wait a week for a response."

The letter he’s drafting on a napkin reads, in its entirety, "Dear Beej—" Hawkeye’s pen rips through this failed attempt at a letter. "What else is there for me to write that he doesn't already know?"

Daniel continues to prod, "Have you told him you miss him? Have you told him you—"

Sometimes, Hawkeye wishes for a less supportive father. This whole heartbreak-over-a-married-man schtick would be much easier to hack if he could loaf and sulk in peace without his father—his own  father —preaching the values of extramarital affairs. Before Daniel can rhapsodize how he won his own ladylove with the written word, Hawkeye stows the pen in his pocket and discards the so-called letter with his best Scarlett O’Hara: "I think I’ll finish my correspondence on the verandah."

The lupines are in bloom. Hungry pink-purple-white stalks shoot up with every drop of rain. When he was a child, they grew so high that his parents used echolocation to get him to come in for dinner. 

The day after his mother’s funeral, it took half of Crabapple Cove to find Hawkeye curled up in a field of lupines right before the rocks slope into the sea. That was the closest he could get to death at 10 years old. He thought that if he laid there long enough, the lupines would hug their roots over him and bring him back to his mother. Nobody found him until the sun was a gold thread on the horizon. By then, the damp from the previous day’s rain soaked through his clothes, and the loamy scent of soil clung to his skin no matter how much he tried to scrub it off.

Ruthie Pierce died at the end of May following one of the wettest Aprils on record. One uncle or another said   it was good of her to pass in the spring, when all the frost was out of the ground, so they could bury her. A maiden aunt on his father's side thought it might cheer him up to think that every spring, the blossoms would make Ruthie a brand new dress, one with colours so vibrant no dye could ever match it. 

Good of her to pass in the spring... Even as a child, the words tasted bitter in his mouth. There was no decency about dying in one season over another, no moral high ground she took for making her burial easier than if they’d have had to defrost the plot of land to get her underground in time. It wasn't beautiful or heroic or anything like that. It was an excruciating period of feigning health that slid away in her final hours.

Going to the seaside is supposed to cure ailments; that was what the novels said. Dirty liars. Or maybe dry heat was supposed to benefit lungers—get the cold and the damp out of her chest long enough for her to choke to death on half the Mojave desert. Besides, who could ever picture Ruthie Rose Simon anywhere further south than Newark and west of Chicago? Ridiculous. She would have complained every day she was there about the food, the heat, and all those flat southwest houses. But maybe she might have lived.

April 1954 must have been the wettest since 1929. Hawkeye stomps out the back door. The mud and marshy grass lap at the soles of his boots with every soggy step, but the coast looks like it sprung forth from an Impressionist brush. What good is all that beauty if Ruthie Pierce isn't alive to see it?

Hawkeye wades into the field of lupines until he finds a spot where he will not crush too many. Then he lies down, hugging his knees like he’s got the granddaddy of all gut wounds. It would be peaceful to die like this, with the wind carding through his hair like a lover’s fingers and the salt from the sea in his nostrils. A much better death than the myriad he saw on the operating table or off it. But it isn’t his death. That much he knows, for sure. So, instead of dying, he rests in a field of flowers and considers that a world with Hawkeye Pierce in it isn’t that much different from a world without.

Tires squeal in his driveway only seconds before someone knocks on the front door like they're trying to break it down. The sound wakes Hawkeye from what could generously be termed a nap but is not adequately defined as rest. He rises from the couch, every vertebra in his back popping in a way that cannot be healthy. The knocking on the door continues.

“Alright, alright, I’m coming,” he mutters, too groggy to consider that someone knocking with such ferocity can never mean anything good.

The door swings open to reveal a young woman with wide, terrified eyes holding a bundle approximately the size of a good sack of potatoes clutched tight to her chest. 

“Doctor Pierce?"

"He's on a house call," Hawkeye says automatically.

The woman’s bottom lip quivers; her knees look like they might buckle. "I was told there were two. Father and son. Please, my daughter needs help.” She tilts back the bundle at her shoulder to reveal a child of about seven, drooping, oxidised blood in a steady stream down her forehead into one terrified eye. 

Hawkeye’s thoughts go like this:  beach / bus / bourbon / chicken / child / club / cold / crying / jeep / mask / mother / quiet / quiet / quiet.

And then there is nothing. A terrifying oblivion of thought. 

"I—I." The excuse catches in his throat like a broken record. He swallows the word  can't , stumbles around the excuse that he's not a pediatrician and confessions of insanity. There's no time. The way this wound is bleeding, she wouldn't make it to the hospital in time without a chopper. Held together by her mother's shaking hand, the wound still weeps. And then what? This child dies on his doorstep or retreating from it. That makes two mothers whose children's blood is on his nervous hands. 

You can't save that child, but you can save this one . 

He steps aside from the doorway. "Second room on the left. Put her on the table and keep pressure on the wound."

The first rule of medicine is that you can’t save everyone.

The second rule is that you have to try.

When he operated on the girl who was thrown into the trench, at least then, he knew that there was someone else to take over if his hands or his nerves failed him. That was supposed to cure him; that's what Sidney said. That's what Sidney implied, at the very fucking least. So why is it that the sight of a child bleeding on his doorstep makes his heart beat so fast that there's mortar fire in his chest? Goddamn, he's got to try.

As he collects the doctor's bag gathering dust from under his head, washes his hands, and throws on the nearest apron he can find (kitschy rather than surgical), he imagines he is back at the 4077th, Margaret at his side, and BJ at his back. The thought steadies his hands as he scrubs up, shoving fear down deep enough that he won't choke on it. Hawkeye Pierce is the great pretender; he can pretend to be someone else for as long as it takes to save this child. A quaint little country doctor with a quaint little family and a quaint little future ahead of him. A man who has never set foot on Korean soil, who cannot even find it on a map. The girl on the table has blood matted in her loose hair and smeared around her forehead, where her mother must have tried to clean it before it became too much.  Did you forget all your training when you lost your mind?  He thinks blindly. He won’t be able to help if he can’t even see the wound. 

The girl gurgles as he wipes away the dried blood around her hairline. Good, she’s not entirely unconscious. Even better, the bleeding begins to subside with enough pressure.

"What happened?" he asks.

"She slipped in the bathroom and hit her head on the edge of the counter," the mother answers.

Suddenly, there is a hut in Korea and a wrecked jeep outside. Hawkeye is juggling great handfuls of garlic that nobody will take off his hands, and a voice (very much like his own) says  don’t fall asleep with a concussion .

“I’m just going to use a local anesthetic,” he explains, mostly for his own benefit, pulling a dose of lidocaine from a bottle. “To be safe.”

Instinctively, the girl shuts her eyes as the needle approaches, blindly scrabbling for her mother’s hand. Needle meets skin. She winces. Hawkeye wants to tell her how brave she is, but what good is a medal of commendation left on a grave? He wipes away flakes of dried blood from her eyebrows while the drug takes hold.

“You feel that?” he asks, gently prodding the area beside the cut, unable to think of anything but the precious time being wasted.

She shakes her head.

The wound looks worse than it is. It has to be, or Hawkeye has to believe it is so he doesn't fall back to pieces. Most of the blood has already been dried or cleaned away, watery but still so alarmingly red. Now that the bleeding is mostly under control, Hawkeye can see a nasty gash, maybe six inches long but only skin deep. Her pulse is steady, as is her breathing. Hawkeye looks at the skin above the wound, the unmarked elasticity of childhood, and breathes out.

"There was so much blood," the mother whispers, "I didn’t know what to do.”

“You did the right thing,” he says, threading the needle. “Keep track of her pulse for me.”

There is only a moment of hesitation before he pushes the needle through the skin and starts knitting this child back together. It’s easy. Four interrupted sutures he could sew in his sleep. In fact, he’s pretty sure he  has  done this in his sleep or close to it. Some days he slept on his feet like a horse, catching a few moments of shut-eye between patients, leaning on whoever was close enough to support him until there were no more casualties left.

“You know, it’s bad practice to stitch up a stranger. What’s your name, kiddo?”

“Tony,” this girl says quietly.

“Antónia,” her mother says quietly from behind, like an incantation.

“How old are you, Tony?”

“9.”

She looks three years younger, sparrow-boned, and tiny.

“That’s a good age. One of my favourites, along with 16, 21, and the embryonic stage.”

Hawkeye blinks, and when he looks down, there’s a neat row of interrupted stitches done by hands he is not convinced were his own. Is he sure these hands are his hands? Is this house his? Is this life? Bile rises in the back of his throat as he watches the girl’s chest rise and fall. What if he did something wrong? What if the sutures won’t hold? What if he missed something obvious? What if she falls asleep and never wakes up? What if she hit her head hard enough to cause permanent neurological damage? What about her spinal column? This child needs a proper hospital and proper medical attention. Not some washed-up alcoholic whose brain has more holes than Swiss cheese.

The scariest possibility is this: what if he did everything right and it still wasn’t enough? What then?

Hawkeye settles the girl into the recovery position and takes her pulse manually, with his thumb at her wrist and his eyes on his watch, doing rapid-fire math in his head. He counts 475 successive beats before the fingers of her left hand begin to curl and uncurl in his grasp.

Hawkeye wishes Margaret had been here to anticipate his needs before he needed to say them. He wishes Potter had been here with that steady reassurance of his. He wishes Father Mulcahy had been here to keep the mother calm. He even briefly wishes Charles had been here. Charles is the better surgeon; he wouldn't have gone to pieces over a pedestrian scalp laceration. 

They saw worse wounds than this on their slowest days. Men with unexploded grenades  inside  of them. Boys with shrapnel riddled in their baby-soft cheeks like acne scars. Children who played too close to minefields. Worse than a scalp laceration only because of the context. But none of those cases scared him the way this one does.

Unable to look at the girl any longer, Hawkeye focuses on the mother. Jesus, she's hardly more than a kid herself—barely 25—with the long, wan face of a young person forced to grow up too fast. It's a face he saw often enough in Korea and, before that, in New York and Boston with the boatloads of DPs flooding in from the harbour. Come to think of it, it’s a face he sees every time he looks in the mirror. 

The woman’s eyes are uncannily dark, shining like a moonlit well, sat in a drawn, puffy-cheeked face that even the golden land can't keep weight on. Dark blood smears across her left cheek and the front of her dress.

Hawkeye gets up for some water and a clean rag. Wordlessly, he hands them both to the mother, who sets about wiping the last of the blood crusted on her daughter's face. Once the water runs pink and then clear, she scrubs at her own cheek, taking blush and powder away with the blood. The skin underneath glows pink and raw and very young.

Softly, Hawkeye says, "In all the hullabaloo, I never caught your name, Mrs...."

"Miss," she corrects, "Bárány. Vera Bárány."

Hawkeye presents his hand for shaking and hopes that she does not notice how it trembles. "It's good to meet you, Miss Bárány; I only wish it was under better circumstances. I'm Hawkeye."

She furrows her brow at this. "Hawkeye?” 

"I know, such strange names Americans have. My birth certificate says Benjamin. Of course, my birth certificate also says 8 pounds, so there are a few things out of date. My parents got Hawkeye from a book."

"Ah. My favourite brother's name is Benjamin!" She smiles, pronouncing his name with a soft y sound for the j.

"It's a good name; it just doesn't fit me. Uh, are you new in town? I haven't seen you around." Granted, he hasn't been anywhere with more than five people at any given time since coming home, but it seems polite to ask. 

She nods. "We moved from New York in February. Some of my family still lives there, but the city was so, so..."

"Loud?" he supplies. “I know the feeling; I lived there for a while.”

"Yes.” She nods. “It was too loud, all the coming and going and people on the street, I could never feel safe. I heard it was nice up in Maine, quieter. So, I looked on a map, and when I saw Crabapple Cove, I thought it was the prettiest name I’ve ever heard. And then we moved.”

“It’s a great place to be a kid. I should know; I’ve lived here my whole life, apart from when I lived elsewhere.”

Tony is moving again in earnest now, wiggling her toes in little blood-stained socks. Lace around the ankles. Patches of sunburn over her cheeks and nose. Nonsense falls from her lips. Hawkeye isn't sure if it's garbled English or something else (Hungarian, or Romanian, maybe; something from that region), but he steps out to give mother and daughter some privacy. 

The apron is balled up in the laundry tub with a splash of cold water. Hawkeye would burn it if he could, but it was made by some aunt or family friend who likely would not appreciate her hard work being used for dining room surgery and would appreciate it being burned even less. Hawkeye has enough ghosts peeking over his shoulders without one of them haunting him for crimes against the domestic sphere. The water runs as hot as he can bear, and he scrubs his hands raw. From a box his father picked up from the bakery, he unpacks two jelly donuts and pours two glasses of water to accompany them. 

Voices carry softly through the makeshift OR, speaking in a language he cannot understand but can piece together perfectly. When he returns, the child will be cognizant; maybe she'll even be sitting up. There will be no lasting head trauma, and the Báránys will continue their quiet lives as best they can. If he’s lucky enough, he’ll wake up in Boston with Carlye, and the past few years will be nothing but a bad dream.

Tony is well enough to sit up, a little groggy and more than a little shaken, but she cooperates when asked to wiggle her arms and legs and follows the penlight without difficulty. She can answer a few questions—where she is, and the last thing she remembers. For fun, he asks her favourite colour, thinking it will assuage some of her fear. ( Pink,  she says. T hat's my best friend's favourite colour too , he says.)

Once he runs out of questions, he returns to her mother. "Bring her back in a few days, so I can check the stitches. If there's anything, and I mean  anything  strange, with her—confusion, memory issues, fluid from her ears or nose, seizures, vomiting—anything unusual, you need to go to the hospital immediately. A real hospital. Do you understand?"

"I can't," Miss Bárány whispers. "I don't have health insurance."

"If you need to go to the hospital, you call me, okay? You call me, and I'll pay for whatever she needs. I can even drive you there; my dance card isn't very full at the moment."

After a moment of confusion at the dance card metaphor, Vera Bárány's prematurely aged face goes slack. She would cry, Hawkeye thinks if she hadn't used up all her tears already. The only thing left to do is turn to salt. She presses his hand to her cheek, not minding or noticing the tremors. Too overcome for her careful English, she reverts to her mother tongue, which Hawkeye understands perfectly—the same as when the Ethiopian soldier kissed his hand after surgery. Some parts of human nature transcend language, and kindness is one of them.

Once the Báránys have returned home, Hawkeye carefully clears away every sign that they’d been there. He scrubs every drop of blood from the sheet until it frays, and he mops the spotless floor to get the iron tang out of the air. When everything is sterile, he crawls under the table like he’s waiting for a bomb that will never fall. Curled on his side, he scrawls a letter without regard for spelling or clarity, ink smearing across the page and his hand. The words explode out of him, looping into each other like lines stacked atop one another like a brick wall. He fills the fronts and backs of four pages before finally running out of words. Before he can take it back, he seals the envelope and writes a California address on the front.

Chapter Text

The door opens like a car at the top of a Ferris wheel, swinging in a great rush of motion before giving way to a moment of suspension. Fear and awe all mixed together, staring out at every bright and beautiful thing for miles, the swoop of a stomach before the inevitable plunge back to earth. Everything goes still and silent. The sound of a dust mote falling to earth would be the loudest thing for miles.

"Hey, stranger," says a voice from a hundred years ago.

Hawkeye squints against the midday sun with half a mind to pinch himself. This is it: he's finally cracked. Shattered beyond repair. Lost track of each and every one of his marbles. Booked a one-way ticket to Crazytown, population: one. 

But….no… The figure in the doorway shifts against the light and takes half a step toward the threshold. A mirage settles into an unbelievable reality.

Fuck. 

It really is BJ Hunnicutt in the flesh. Cheesy moustache, size 13 Chuck Taylors, each of his all-American teeth fixed in a smile. Fresh and alive and beautiful. There is a duffle bag slung over one shoulder and a motorcycle parked in the driveway. He looks, objectively speaking, kind of like shit. Like a man who just spent a week on the road, subsisting on weak coffee, gas station sandwiches, and pure adrenaline. What kind of maniac drives a motorcycle from California to Nowheresville, Maine? There are bags under his eyes and a couple days of stubble creeping up on that horrible moustache. If he isn't invited inside soon, his legs jellify right there. BJ looks awful. He looks perfect.

Hawkeye punches him in the shoulder. Before BJ can react, Hawkeye has one hand gripping his shoulder and the other tilting his chin towards the light.

"Ow! Jesus, a fella drives across the country to see you, and this is how you repay him?"

"I’m making sure you’re real." Hawkeye tugs at the skin under his eye and holds two fingers to BJ's pulse as it jumps in his throat. “Say aaaah.”

Obediently, BJ sticks his tongue out. “Why? You’ve been dreaming about me, Doctor Pierce? What was I wearing?”

"A body bag."

"Well, are you going to invite me inside, or should I just turn around and drive back to California? I think I have enough gas left to make it down the driveway."

"You need an invitation to come in? What are you, a Dracula?"

"We have this concept out in California called politeness, which means you don't barge into people's houses unannounced."

"Well, Beej, I've a feeling you're not in California anymore."

"No, I’m not." BJ steps forward, bringing them chest to chest with everything balanced over the threshold.

Hawkeye thinks he might kiss BJ on the mouth or punch him on the nose, and BJ holds his palms open in supplication like he’s unsure of which to expect. Funny, Hawkeye assumed that the next time he saw BJ (if ever there was going to be a next time), whatever feelings had been eating away at his soft underbelly since Kimpo would have vanished. The intimacy they developed out of necessity should have died in Korea, not with a bang but with a whimper. It would have died if there was any justice in the world. Instead, he feels he ought to be facing down a dragon with BJ's favour pinned to his chest. As giddy and nervous as the first time that Tommy Gillis swung a leg over his windowsill in the middle of the night.

He feels…quiet. Like someone pulled the plug from all the static in his chest and the fog in his brain, leaving only silence.

From behind them, a throat clears. "Let the man in, Benjy; this is a communal doorway."

Awkwardly, Hawkeye flattens himself against the wall as his father scoots past with his doctor's bag, off to pick gravel out of some kid’s shins or reassure anxious husbands that their pregnant wives won’t to go into labour the second they're out of sight. Nothing in his demeanour suggests surprise at BJ being there. As though BJ driving a motorcycle across the country is as unremarkable as the spring thaw. The tides will rise, the lupines will bloom, and nothing in this house will ever stay buried.

Benjy, BJ mouths over Daniel's head.

Die, Hawkeye mouths back with a smile.

BJ offers a hand along with a megawatt Californian smile. "Dr. Pierce."

"Dr. Hunnicutt. You’re staying for dinner, I presume?"

"If you’ll have me, I pair well with a nice pinot grigio."

Once Daniel closes the door behind him, Hawkeye and BJ loiter in the entryway. Hawkeye stares at the bag slung over BJ’s shoulder. He tries to analyse how heavy it is by how the strap digs into his shoulder. You wouldn’t spend a week driving across the country only to spend a few days and then head home, right?

"Are you hungry?" He asks because the only questions he wants to ask are coincidentally the same ones he doesn’t want answers to. But food’s easy. They spent enough time bitching about that slop they choked down in the mess tent that it’s an easy thread of conversation to pick back up. Much safer than asking BJ what he’s doing here, how long he plans to stay, or why there’s a tan on the fourth finger of his left hand. 

"I could grill you a cheese," Hawkeye offers.

About 10 pounds of weight are visibly lifted from BJ’s shoulders. The bag falls to the ground with an alarming thunk as he unzips his windbreaker. "Yeah, I could eat."

Hawkeye stares at the bag in fear. "What do you have in here, bricks? A body? Is it Frank’s?"

"No, look." BJ crouches, wrestling with the zipper. "I brought you flours. The grocer was out of carnations, so I had to improvise." Cradled in his arms are two small bags of King Arthur Flour, one white and one whole wheat.

It’s the stupidest fucking joke Hawkeye has ever had the misfortune of hearing. Hysteria bubbles up inside him before he can catch his breath. Huge, honky laughter shakes his chest like a high school bully. It takes the air out of his lungs and would take his feet out from under him if he weren’t leaning against the wall.

"There’s a bathroom if you want to get some of the road off you," he gestures toward the back of the house, certainly not thinking about how much you have to want to see a person to drive 3000 miles and definitely not imagining licking 3000 miles of dust from the underside of BJ’s jaw.

BJ nods dazedly, navigating the uneven floor as though he’s been doing it his whole life.

In an ideal world, Hawkeye would be making eggs. He has a mushroom and chive omelette that can make a man weep. A hundred years ago, it would have been his dowry. It’s worth at least three goats, maybe two goats, plus a fat milk cow. But he used the last egg for a prairie oyster this morning. Hangover cures never worked when he actually was hungover, but now he thinks he’s tricked himself into believing they do. At the very least, it’s a breakfast he can keep down. So grilled cheese is a second resort.

There's an art to a perfect grilled cheese; like poetry or surgery, it takes time to master. It’s like poetry or surgery. Either way, it takes time to master. Any schmuck can toss a Kraft Single onto a slice of Wonder Bread, scorch the toast, and fail to melt the cheese. Anyone can cook, but you need to mean it if you want to do it well. The Greeks were onto something when they said hospitality was sacred. There is no point in cooking for someone if you do not want them to eat well today and for the rest of their life, even if that person is yourself. Especially if that person is yourself.

The powder room tap runs at full blast. Hawkeye breaks out the cheesegrater.

When he was little, his parents used to joke that they only had one child, so there would only be one extra mouth to feed. A clean, economic solution for a problem they never faced. From May 1929 on, Hawkeye and his father didn’t have to lift a finger to cook until Independence Day rolled around. Every corner of Crabapple Cove sent soups and casseroles, fresh-baked bread, and preserves to top them. Things that could be consumed with minimal effort, that could be eaten one-handed while the other hand filed tax documents or boxed up old clothes for donations. Six months before the stock market crashed, they ate like kings. For a while after that, he thought you only ate well when you were mourning. It took a long time—until Trapper helped him get those ribs from Adam’s Ribs—to understand that all those casserole dishes and Pyrex pans were a way of listening.

He tops the peak of shredded cheddar with a gooey slice of American cheese and closes the sandwich. The pan in front of him sizzles as he adds the sandwich. Hawkeye is so focused on making the perfect grilled cheese that he doesn’t realize BJ’s there until he feels breath against the shell of his ear. They lived so deeply in each other’s pockets in the Swamp that personal space became a foreign concept. 

"We should have had you in the kitchen," BJ laments over his shoulder. "Maybe the food would have been edible that way."

"Not even a necromancer could have made that food edible. Plate."

"Yes, doctor," BJ says, handing him a plate.

Hawkeye deposits one perfectly browned grilled cheese onto the plate with a flourish. He jabs the butt of the spatula into BJ’s stomach. "Eat up; you’re too skinny."

As if on cue, his own stomach lets out a ferocious rumble. Hawkeye tries to remember the last time he fed it, prairie oyster not included. He starts on a second grilled cheese, albeit with slightly less love.

"Beej, what are you doing here?" he asks.

"I made a promise, didn’t I?"

"Yeah, you said, one year, the Hunnicutt clan will come east. A year is a pretty vague thing. It could be 1972—that’s a good one; I like the sound of that one. Or you could save up and wait for the millennium—the big two-oh-oh-oh. Maybe by then, we’ll all be living in pods on the moon, ooh , or at the bottom of the ocean." Hawkeye flips his sandwich and waits for a rebuttal.

When no rebuttal comes, and BJ stops chewing, Hawkeye says, as serious as a heart attack, "I wasn’t sure if this was the sort of thing that would survive going home. Not everything does, and there’s a lot to not want to hold onto. I thought that maybe when we’ve come far enough that the only people who were alive for the war are the two of us then, and only then, you would stop by for a visit."

"You must not have heard me over the chopper. I made a promise to see you again in case my note wasn’t enough," says BJ.

Oh. Well, that changes things. It might just change everything. Hawkeye stares at his rapidly browning sandwich as though it were the most exciting thing in the world. He tucks himself deeper into the rumpled collar of his shirt and wills his ears not to burn.

"Hey," BJ says, unbearably fond.

Hawkeye turns on instinct. One of BJ's big hands catches him around the waist and pulls him in until they're flush against each other. Hawkeye throws his arms around his neck, resting his whole weight against BJ like he used to do after 20-hour days in the OR. Body after body after body was blown open and put back together as best they could, and the only guarantee that one of them wouldn't gonna be the next one on a gurney was the persistent thump of BJ's heartbeat. BJ untying the knot of his mask. BJ swiping the surgical cap from his head before he forgets. BJ grasping his hands to keep him from trying to reanimate the dead. A pulse against the oncoming tide of oblivion. In the present, an ocean away from the helicopter pad he thought was going to be the last place he’d ever see BJ, Hawkeye gathers up as much of BJ as he can hold: his shoulders, the curve of his ribcage, the bunched-up fabric of his shirt, and the sea-salt and cedar smell ground into it with a hint of motor oil. 

I love you, he thinks loud enough for BJ to hear. They hug so tight that something in his chest creaks, the way a tree creaks after the last swing of the axe. There it is—his missing rib.

One of BJ's hands toes the line of propriety, slung low around his waist. The other one rubs small circles into the small of his back. Neither one wants to be the first to let go; the hug becomes something generously defined as a slow dance. BJ sways softly to an unseen orchestra, and Hawkeye rocks in time with him like a boat in the middle of the ocean.

"As I recall, I also promised you a dance," BJ teases.

“Easy, tiger. I believe we said Grand Central in 1963.”

“We can do that too.”

“How do you know I have room on my dance card for you?"

“Is there some other guy who drove across the country for you? Some other name pencilled in for the kitchen two-step?”

Hawkeye raises his head from BJ's shoulder and stares him down. There has to be a punchline in here somewhere. He and Peg are so in love that they've decided to renew their vows and want Hawkeye to be their best man. BJ got terminal news from an oncologist, and this is one stop of many on his farewell tour. Even a simple "gotcha!" would suffice. 

Looking BJ dead in the eye, he finds only sincerity. Only cornflower blue and long, long lashes, and something else that he can't quite define, but it makes his stomach swoop anyway. For a single terrifying moment, he thinks they might kiss for the first and only time, standing on the cracked linoleum of the kitchen, where he used to sit poring over trigonometry problems late into the evening. And then he will wake up on the couch with a sore neck, and BJ will still be in California, and nothing will be different. But BJ's mouth is slightly open, and his hands are warm and alive on Hawkeye’s back. If this is a dream, it's damn convincing. He can't remember the last time he had a dream so realistic that didn't come with gallons of blood.

A sudden whoosh erupts from the stove as Hawkeye's grilled cheese goes up in flames.

"Shit!" he hisses, jumping apart from BJ. "Shit, shit, double shit!"

He doesn't remember how long you have in the case of a kitchen fire, but the pair of them waste 10 seconds staring at the bonfire rapidly engulfing the front burner.

"Where's your extinguisher?" BJ yells, hands held out as though approaching a spooked animal.

"I don't know!" Hawkeye yells back, scattering pots and pans from the cupboard. "You're supposed to smother it!"

"With what?"

Finally, Hawkeye grasps a baking tray and practically hurls it at BJ. Not a second too soon, BJ slides the baking sheet over the growing fire and moves it to a cold burner. They dare not breathe, lest that add more oxygen to the fire, and then Hawkeye will have to explain to his father that their house burned down because he was nervous-kneed over a boy like he’s fourteen again. The embarrassment would probably kill him if the fire didn’t.

They fan as much smoke out the window as they can manage with hands and rolled-up newspapers, hoping none of the neighbours see the smoke. For the rest of the afternoon, until exhaustion overtakes BJ, they are careful not to look at each other too long, lest something else catch fire.

By the time Daniel returns home for a late supper, the smell of smoke has nearly dissipated, BJ’s duffle is in the guest room that used to be Hawkeye’s old room (not to be confused with Hawkeye’s current room, which used to be the guest room), and BJ himself is snoring on the couch, his sock feet dangling slightly over the end.

Daniel raises an eyebrow at the smoke stain on the wall behind the stove and the scorched pan still soaking in the sink, even though it’s long past saving. "Is there an explanation for why you’ve nearly burned down my kitchen?"

"Tragic grilled cheese accident," Hawkeye says. "I was distracted. Bewitched, bothered, and bewildered."

"Do I want to know?"

"No."

"Alright." Daniel pauses, turning his head toward BJ’s sleeping form. "Are you happy?"

"Yeah, Dad, I really am."

“That’s good.” A pause. “But please keep the bewitching and bothering to a minimum when the stove is on."

Chapter Text

Three days after BJ arrives in Crabapple Cove, Hawkeye is waiting for something to explode.

BJ spends most of the first day sleeping once the adrenaline wears off. On the couch. In the spare room. At the table while still digesting. The second day, he talks relentlessly about the drive east, scared of silence—how he had to force himself to stick to the map through Iowa because he knew he would stay a week if he stopped in Ottumwa, and BJ refused to be distracted. How he vastly overestimated the number of gas stations in Nebraska and nearly ended up stranded on the side of the road in a landscape so lonesome that not even Cather herself could find the words for it. How he locked himself in a bathroom in a grimy Salt Lake City rest station until the manager had to knock on the door, thinking BJ was some kinda junkie when really it was that the sunrise was so red any sailor worth his salt would have thought it was an omen for the end of the world, and when that sunrise reflected off the Great Salt Lake, it turned the same pink as the water in the scrub sink; as though every single boy he stitched back up in Korea had come loose and drained back into the middle of Utah; how he called Peg, frantic, raving, unable to make his thoughts into anything cohesive, and (most damningly of all) that he would have called Hawkeye if he knew what number to call. 

All this without even leaving the Midwest. Hawkeye would have quit after Salt Lake City (in all actuality, he probably would have spontaneously combusted the second he crossed the Utah State border, but that's neither here nor there). But BJ must be made of sterner stuff. He certainly wasn’t the one who nearly ended the war in a padded cell. 

BJ must have wanted to see him a whole lot. He wanted to see Hawkeye so much that he drove across the country to knock on a door in Crabapple Cove.

So, for the first day, he sleeps. The second day, BJ talks (not a word about why he’s here or what spurned him on; he expects Hawkeye to take his presence for granted and not ask questions). The third day, BJ grows restless, crossing every square inch of the Pierce household, then stomping through the backyard, the slick grass, and the field of lupines. Hawkeye wants to tell BJ that his mother is buried under those flowers (to inform rather than scold), but he doesn’t. And then, when that isn’t enough, Hawkeye leads him to the beach.

There was a 12-hour terrifying period when he thought that BJ must have read that loony letter he sent about Tony Bárány’s head wound and immediately started driving, but he didn’t want to bring it up like, Hey, remember how you were crazy for a bit and then stopped? Is that, uh, happening again by chance?  But the timing was all wrong.

They walk. They do not talk. And somewhere, very quietly, Hawkeye hears a quiet tick-tick-tick like that propaganda bomb he and Trapper thought they would die disarming. Sooner or later, something is going to explode. He does not ask what will happen when BJ stops running away from himself.

BJ ambles over the rocks with all the grace of a man who grew up attending tea parties with his sisters in sunny suburbia. He probably never even ate dirt as a child. Talk about missing out on important milestones! Hawkeye follows two paces behind for optimal backseat stepping, directing BJ to go one way or avoid another. The last thing he needs is for BJ to slip on those damn black rocks and knock himself out. Even with the signs the Coast Guard put up warning swimmers, not one summer has passed without Hawkeye or his father stitching some up tourist because they stepped where they were told not to.

How BJ still has two functioning ankles after walking around five miles from the front in Converse is one of the great mysteries of the ages. Never even twisted his ankle.

The slender neck of a bottle crunches under BJ‘s sole. He ignores it and keeps walking, pressing forward even though there’s nothing but rocks, salt, and cliffs as far as the eye can see. Hawkeye knows him well enough to keep space between them. He remembers a punch, entering Potter’s office with his helmet, and how BJ, drunk as a skunk, had laughed at first before he realized who and what he was laughing at.

“You know, if we had some witnesses and a chuppah, that would’ve made us married just now,” Hawkeye jokes. He untucks his shirttails and begins gingerly scooping the shattered glass into it. “Speaking of marriage, are you gonna tell me why you left your wife and child to drive across the country and spend time with your old war buddy, or are you going to make me guess?"

BJ snorts, not unkindly, but in that slightly uppity way he gets sometimes. Golden boy who nobody could ever say no to, not even Hawkeye. “Is that what you think we are, old war buddies?”

“I’m told that comrades-in-arms is strictly no bueno nowadays on account of the comrades part. Dear Harry, the brave men and women you forced into war to sew up high school freshmen are turning into pinkos. Please advise on the matter so we can all continue to blindly follow the stars and stripes. Love, Hawkeye.”

“And here I thought we were friends or something.”

And here I thought that maybe you loved me. The thought sours in his stomach. Hawkeye pushes down the bile. He catches up to BJ in three long steps, matching his stride but far enough out of arm’s reach. He tells himself this is just in case all that anger bubbles up with no place to go. Really, he’s afraid of how BJ will touch him when nobody is watching. 

“Well, friend, it sounds to me like you’re avoiding the question. Where’s the Missus? Where’s the little Miss?”

“Back in Mill Valley.”

“Thanks, wiseguy. Jesus, Beej, I can drive you to a dentist if you want your teeth pulled, but I’m not that kind of doctor. Why don’t you just come out and tell me why you drove all the way across the country—and don’t say you were in the area or you just wanted to see me? This boyish face may say otherwise, but I wasn’t born yesterday. Please tell me what’s wrong, and I’ll do my best to help, but you have to show me where it hurts.” 

Hawkeye unfolds his shirttails over a garbage can, nearly overflowing with crumpled cigarette cartons and ice cream-stained napkins. The glass  thunks  against the side of the bin.

“Nothing’s wrong,” BJ lies.

“Don’t bullshit me!" Hawkeye snaps. He remembers BJ saying a lifetime ago that he had to chase Peg down before she would admit something was wrong. Otherwise, she would gnaw off her leg rather than admit it was caught in a trap. It seems like those roles got all mixed up—like BJ took a piece of Peg with him when he shipped out and never gave it back. "Something certainly isn’t right.”

“Peg and I aren’t together anymore.”

Hawkeye stops dead in his tracks. Everything falls horribly into place. How selfish he was to think that BJ drove across the country because that final goodbye wasn’t really goodbye. He would have brought Peg and Erin with him if this meant anything at all. And how like Beej to run as far away from his problems as he can without leaving the contiguous United States, leave all his problems on Hawkeye’s doorstep, and expect him to know how to fix everything without saying a word.

“You’re serious. What was it—a trip down to Reno? She took up with Handyman Carl and his big muscles and sleeveless shirts?”

“No, it was mutual. We realized we were more in love with the idea of each other than the actual thing. We’d been going through all the motions of marriage because we were told it was the right thing to do without any thought as to whether we wanted it at all. And when we got far enough away from each other, things became a bit clearer. We aren't going to divorce. I wouldn’t do that to Erin. Hell, I wouldn’t do that to Peg; did you know that in some states, women without husbands need their fathers to sign off on their bank accounts?"

“So do men without husbands.”

“I’m serious!”

“So am I! Dad has to co-sign all my cheques because nobody’s made an honest man of me yet.” Though not from a lack of trying.

“Will you please, for the love of God, shut up? For once in your life, will you say something genuine or shut up for a minute? I practiced saying this the whole way here, and I still can’t get the words right.” He sits heavily on a petrified log, cold and mildewed from the fog rolling out onto the bay. 

Hawkeye sits next to him and waits. He stares at his feet and BJs, his pant legs hitched up above his ankles like an overgrown schoolboy. A tantalizing glimpse of a calf just visible above the olive drab of his socks. Blech. If BJ had any sense, he would have burned every piece of army-issued clothing that made it back over the Pacific. He would have left it over there for the refugees, who had nothing to wear but the clothes on their backs, if they could even stand to be kitted out in GI Joe chic. Hawkeye threw a ceremonial bonfire when he came home, right on this very beach. Every single army-issued piece of clothing went into the flames—everything except that damn bathrobe, which he still can't bring himself to part with. BJ’s socks are slightly scrunched over the tops of his shoes, a monogram that looks less like BJH and more like BFP just peeking out.

Christ on a bike. Not only did BJ borrow (steal) his socks and forget to bring them back, but he stole them all the way back to California. Why didn't he burn them? Why hang on to those of all socks? The only excuse is that BJ must have developed a sort of Stockholm Syndrome from that pressure cooker. Sock-holm Syndrome, perhaps. Three days with BJ Hunnicutt and the terrible puns are already rubbing off.

Hawkeye looks at BJ. BJ looks at the devouring fog rolling on from the bay. And then he says as if someone else wrote the lines for him:

“Peg and I aren’t getting divorced, but we’re not staying together either. It’s…complicated. The long and short of it is that neither of us wanted to continue living lives that were picked out for us by other people. It was all so flimsy, being that perfect catalogue family, the epitome of the American dream. It's a nice dream for someone else, and it used to be mine, but I couldn’t go home and pretend day after day that I still wanted it. You know, nice TV family, nice beach house to escape to for the weekend, nice dog running around inside a nice white-picket fence. A Norman Rockwell portrait of a family. I think I would have cracked eventually, even without the draft; Korea just helped me see things a little more clearly. It helped us both. I love Peg, and she loves me, and we both love Erin, but not the way we used to. We were different people before the war. Peg—well, she cleans her own gutters now, you know? She went and got one of those German haircuts.”

Hawkeye raises his hand like an overeager student. “Permission to speak?”

“Granted.”

“You’re trying to tell me that she wears sensible shoes.”

“Yes.”

“Lavender’s her favourite colour.”

“Yes.”

“She joined a women’s baseball team.”

“No—well, yes, but no.”

“You’re talking in circles, Beej. I have no idea what you’re trying to say.”

“The most compelling proof we have for the existence of the divine is the fact that you’ve made it this long without getting throttled.”

“Many have tried; none have succeeded.”

“You know what I’m trying to say.”

“I know you know I know, but I want you to say it out loud.”

It’s almost funny, in a twisted sort of way. All that time BJ spent agonizing over his fidelity like he had something to prove, the way he made his whole identity into being the perfect all-American husband because it gave him a safe harbour to come home to (Hawk would have done the same thing if he had a wife, eight months pregnant when the draft notice came; if all he saw of his baby girl were photos, already out of date when they arrived, he would feel the same, do the same). All that work, only for Peg to be—

He thinks back to that first letter and how it arrived almost out of nowhere. I’ve made some very good friends recently, and even at the time, Hawkeye wondered if there was something she was trying to tell him that she was afraid to tell BJ. Sometimes, I feel so changed that I worry that BJ won't recognize me when he gets home, written about two weeks before the armistice was called. And, Please, please, please tell BJ not to worry about me, how I'm getting along, or how I'm taking care of Erin while balancing a household and a career. I know how much he worries about me. If I tell him I’m fine, he won’t believe me, and if I tell him I’m happy, he’ll wallow in guilt over not being here with me. So, as his friend and mine, reassure him that Erin and I are doing just fine. Us Hunnicutt girls are pretty tough.

Did Peg write those letters knowing she was talking to a hundred-footer? Was she leaving hints, hoping that he would pick them up? When BJ wrote home about his queer new bunkie, did Peg pick up a stray thread here or there and knit them into something whole, growing into herself as she did? Did BJ drop a hint here or there in one of his letters because he wanted  Peg to know? 

As a matter of fact, did BJ know his best friend is queerer than a three-dollar bill? Does he? Sometimes Hawkeye wonders. He thinks that maybe BJ wouldn’t be so touchy if he knew; he wouldn’t look at him so open and trusting that sometimes Hawkeye wants to put a fist to his jaw. He  must  know, even if Hawk never bothered to spell it out, because he may be many things, but he isn’t a dumb Dora. BJ has to know, even if he still thinks it’s half a joke (sometimes it feels like the only real thing in the world).

Still looking at his shoes, after what feels like an entire lifetime trapped in the blink of an eye, BJ begins to speak again. Slowly, very quietly, the words spill forth from deep inside him. Then, faster, less measured, almost possessed—as though if BJ stops to catch his breath, he won't ever be able to finish, and everything he wanted to say so slow and perfect will stay locked in his chest and fester until the day he dies. 

“Peggy attends this murder mystery book club at the library. About a year after I shipped out, she made a friend. Hit it off instantly, talked until closing, and when Ray invited her up for a nightcap, Peg accepted. She said it was like something had been lodged in her throat for so long that she didn’t even notice it until she could breathe properly. She told me about it two weeks after I came back. I thought I would be angry. At first, I wished I  could  be angry with her, not because she found someone else, but because she got a year’s head start on a new life, and I was still trying to find my footing. Mostly, I was happy for her. Isn’t that something? A man comes home from war only to find out his wife is a lesbian, and all he can say is congratulations. She’s so happy—happier than I could ever make her. The other week at preschool, Erin drew a family portrait of me and her and Peg and Waggles. But she drew another one too, one of ‘Mommy and Auntie Ray,’ And she knew not to talk about it at preschool and not to show that drawing to anyone else. Preschool, Hawk.

“I thought everything would fall into place once Erin was born. You have no idea how many nights I spent lying awake, wondering why the hell I didn’t go into obstetrics so I could help my wife, and all the fear I had that I was never cut out to be a father. When the doctor said it was a girl, I put my head in my arms and wept. Jesus, I was so relieved that she wasn’t a boy, because that way I wouldn’t be able to do a worse job of raising a son than my father did with me. I thought that having a baby would fix everything. It was supposed to fix everything. I thought if Peg and I did as we were told, it would, eventually, stop feeling like we were playacting. We were supposed to be happy and normal. We were never meant to want anything but this. When I was deployed, there was a part of me that was almost thankful, you know, that I wouldn’t have to deal with the mess, the sleepless nights, and the reality of having a baby. And I thought that when I came back, Erin would be a little more of a person, and we would be a real family. It didn’t feel like a home. It felt like we were kids playing house, waiting to be called in for dinner. It’s not that I don’t love Erin or Peggy. I do, of course I do; I never lied about that. But all I ever wanted was someone to love, and all Peggy ever wanted was to be loved, and we thought we found that in each other, but now she has Ray, and what do I have?”

BJ folds in on himself like a slashed sail and sinks to his knees. He presses his forehead against the rocks and screams long and sharp, like lightning coming down from the sky. He screams again, and when his voice gives out on the third scream, he sobs. BJ sobs and all Hawkeye can do is watch, as though this is happening on a screen, and he can’t peel his eyes away until it cuts to a commercial.

Only real life has no handy commercial breaks. BJ keeps sobbing, and Hawkeye sits frozen in front of him. All he can think is that that was probably the most genuine thing BJ has ever said to him. Instinct kicks in eventually; he scuttles over to BJ and pulls his head against his chest, one hand on his waist and the other in his hair.

The sky splits open like a faulty stitch. Gallons of icy water pour down their spines in sheets. Hawkeye knows that they should get inside before the path back home becomes impassable with mud and rain, before they get sick from it, and yet he stays, unmoving, as BJ trembles in his arms.

Chapter Text

"Isn’t this trespassing?" BJ asks.

Hawkeye shrugs. "Only if someone yells at us to get off their lawn." 

"How often do people yell at you to get off their lawns?"

"It depends on the lawn."

His boots sink into the soft, thirsty grass. Warm grass, grown wild from all the rain, and so green it looks sprung from a paintbrush. An owl hoots from a hollow tree; goldenrod grows up to his waist—this is Crabapple Cove in summer. Frogs sing in teal ponds all day, then crickets through the night. Mama deer and her white-spotted babies creep out from the forest at dusk, stock-still, as tourist families cross the road with their ice creams. The Midwest is dying of thirst if Radar's letters are anything to go by, but up in Maine, the air is so heavy with water that you can feel rain three days before it falls. Crabapple Cove has always been beautiful; lately, that beauty has been almost unreal, like Hawkeye is walking around in a dream, waiting to wake up, sleepwalking through his old life.

The only detail that ruins the picture is Hawkeye. His lonely head, his lonely heart. BJ, with his broken heart and his broken marriage, and this nebulous thing between them, rapidly growing too cumbersome to be ignored for much longer. Sooner or later, one of them will snap more than they already have. What will be left once they pass the point of no return? Crabapple Cove was the only place in this rotten, beautiful world that belonged to Hawkeye and Hawkeye alone. And now he doesn't even have that. 

Each time Hawkeye wakes up in this house for the rest of his life, he'll think of BJ in his pyjamas at the same kitchen table where Hawkeye learned his mother died. BJ falling asleep not beside his wife or in his beach house but in the same bed Hawkeye slept in for the first eighteen years of his life (except, of course, when he was in someone else's), staring up at the same water stain, the same ceiling, and the same faint cracks in the plaster that come with old houses. BJ looking at the photos that line the walls, listening as Hawkeye points out cousins he hasn't seen in years, who only ever called him Ben because what kind of name is  Hawkeye  anyway?

Et in Arcadia ego.

But for now, they walk in peaceable silence. The wicker baskets knock against Hawkeye's thigh as BJ follows. All that rain has brought the berries out early. Tiny buds of raspberries, wild strawberries that the Summer People step right over without realizing, and blueberries, of course, ready to be sold on the side of the road or shipped to grocery stores all over the country. But Hawkeye is here for the blackberries, the best of which require subterfuge. They cross a dozen sprawling, overgrown lawns, and each time, BJ waits for someone to come out and yell at them to get off their property before they call the police.

What is California like? Those clean, regimented subdivisions on the outskirts of untamed urban sprawl. Too-green lawns manicured down to a respectable length; endless cul-de-sacs filled with houses distinct enough to differentiate but dizzying in their similarity; all those breadwinners and housewives with their picture-perfect children. The artifice alone would have driven him mad before he could drive. What does suburbia sound like? Like children laughing in fenced-in yards. Like an armada of automobiles pulling into the driveway in perfect synchronicity. Like trees devoid of birds to sing the day into existence because all the bugs have been eradicated. Like the gentle hum of central air conditioning. A vacuum of dead sound.

Hawkeye's house is three hundred years old, give or take. It holds onto heat like a closed fist. It would rather sink into the ground than accept modern innovations in climate control. Half the summers of his childhood were spent in the creek or at the beach because the air in that house grew so thick that he could practically swim in it. When his parents finally managed to get him inside, right when the fireflies began to wake, he would sleep on his stomach on the uneven hardwood of his bedroom floor, sunburned skin stretched tight over his shoulders. In New York and Boston, he refused to live anywhere too shiny and new. It gave him the heebie-jeebies, being the first person to call a place home. He can't live anywhere that doesn't have ghosts, his own aside. All those subdivisions for urban commuters. New construction. Houses without history on land carefully pruned of it.

The sun is high and relentless in the sky; sweat trails a leisurely path down the small of his back before they reach their prize. A trellis long overtaken by a snarl of bramble greets them. And, on those brambles, the first blackberries of summer.

Hawkeye gestures towards a white house with a meanly gabled roof that overlooks the bush from the top of a low hill. "That’s Mrs. Carver-Goodman-White."

BJ laughs. "Sounds like a law firm. Carver, Goodman & White LLP."

"Yeah, well, her illustrious ancestors came over on the  Mayflower , and she won’t let anyone else forget it. Come to think of it, she might have been on the  Mayflower  herself. Oldest woman I've ever met; I swear she came out of the womb at 90."

"Didn't you say your folks  also  came over on the  Mayflower? "

"Yep, great-great-great-great-great-grandpa Alexander Pierce. But that's only one half of my family, as opposed to an unbroken line of Pilgrim stock, let alone three."

BJ cuts him a glance. 

Oh, right,  Hawkeye remembers. People who religiously trace their ancestry back to the Mayflower tend to stay where they're planted for bragging reasons. California wears its history differently.

"Sounds like someone who will going to yell at us to get off her lawn."

"Keep your head down," Hawkeye advises. Forbidden fruit tastes the sweetest: the tree of knowledge, Mrs. Carver-Goodman-White's blackberries, married men. "Besides, she doesn't even pick them! She stays shut up in her house and leaves the berries to rot because she refuses to let anyone else near her precious bushes. Picking them is a public service. We're redistributing the wealth, Comrade Hunnicutt."

BJ frowns. "Hawk—" right as Hawkeye presses a wicker basket into his hands.

Quickly, methodically, they begin to strip berries from the brambles. Thorns catch on their sleeves as they plunge their wrists into the thicket.  Like a chest cavity , he thinks grimly and wonders if he will ever see the world any other way. He tries to think of it some other way—any other way, a story, a wonderful one...

The summer before his mother died, Hawkeye was stupid in love with this girl from Jersey. Her parents came all the way up to Maine for three weeks, Summer People. Hawkeye doesn’t remember her name or what she looked like, but he remembers that she was allergic to bramble thorns. Or maybe she wasn’t and didn't want to spread her summer rooting around in a bush. So, Hawkeye crawled through those brambles that were so much bigger than they are now, not caring when his clothes or skin snagged on the thorns, only caring about the berries he cradled in the bottom of his shirt, the skin ripe to bursting. When he finally emerged from the bush, his arms and legs were ribboned with scratches, his nose smudged with dirt, and his shirt stained purple from the berries. The girl from Jersey didn’t think it was romantic at all. Hawkeye fucking  bled  for her, and she just walked away. Her family never came back to Crabapple Cove. The Summer People never last long.

In the present, he and BJ each fill a basket halfway. A reasonable bounty for this early in the season. They don’t talk. For once, Hawkeye feels comfortable with the silence. He presses further into the brambles, having the foresight to wear long sleeves this time. Even if he were to get nicked by a few thorns, it would hardly be the first time BJ’s seen him bloodied. At least it would be his own blood. Hawkeye doesn’t know if Mrs. Carver-Goodman-White is home; truthfully, he doesn’t even know if she’s still alive.

Right on cue, a hoarse voice booms down from the open window. " BENJAMIN FRANKLIN PIERCE ! " 

How can she even see them from up there? Hawkeye can’t make out any signs of life in that house, and he has the advantage of being younger than the Declaration of Independence. Maybe the angle from which she looks down her nose gives her an edge.

Some habits die hard, and some never die at all. Hawkeye grabs BJ by the wrist and drags him back through the brambles before the oldest woman in Maine beats them to death with a sock full of quarters. They run, breathless, laughing, back in time and out of it entirely, tearing through hiking trails and fields of lupines. There's no getting lost in Crabapple Cove. You have to try to get lost. You have to want it. If they keep it up, Hawkeye thinks they could keep running forever. He thinks that running is the only thing he and BJ know how to do together.

Eventually, a stitch forms on Hawkeye’s side. He skids to a halt, catches his breath, and then stretches out in the sun. A few paces ahead, BJ turns his head and loops back. They lay down next to each other on the long grass. One of BJ’s long arms lands against Hawkeye’s hip. For a few moments, they feast ravenously, devouring handfuls of blackberries like they’re expecting the hangman’s knot in the morning.

The summer before eighth grade, Hawkeye and Tommy Gillis picked that bush bone dry and clipped a sign to the laundry line saying THANKS FOR THE BERRIES. When she found out, Mrs. Gillis marched them both down by their ears to apologize. The inside of the Carver-Goodman-White house smelled of talcum powder, mothballs, and rotting rose petals—that peculiar old person smell of the long slide towards decay. That smell lingered on his clothes for weeks. And after he and Tommy were thoroughly chastised, they went down to the creek with birch branch spears. They didn’t catch any fish; they didn’t try much, but afterwards, they lay on the shore, hidden in the soft, long grass, and put their tongues in each other’s mouths.

"Do you think we would have been friends as kids?" BJ asks when he can breathe.

"I can’t imagine a world where we wouldn’t be," Hawkeye says honestly. It's not just sentimentality. He cannot conceive of a world where he and BJ are not two parts of a whole. Pierce-and-Hunnicutt. Korea or no Korea. In the same way, Hawkeye can't imagine a world where he grew up anywhere other than Crabapple Cove. He couldn't imagine a version of the 4077th without Trapper, and look how that turned out.

"What were you like as a little helion?" BJ asks. His fingers are stained a deep purple, and Hawkeye wants to lick them. Instead, he displays an admirable level of self-restraint.

"Strange, I guess. Sad," he answers. "I was desperate for everyone to like me. I had a new best friend every six months." And then, when that new best friend got tired of him, embarrassed by his eagerness to be liked, or told by their parents that Ben Pierce was a bad influence, they would find someone else. So Hawkeye spent his first decade hopping from heart to heart, hoping that one of them had room for him. Here's a secret he's never told anyone but himself: he's never really forgotten any of those six-month childhood friends. He's never gotten over them; the same goes for everyone and anyone he's ever loved.

Lately, he's been thinking a lot about his childhood self, Little Hawk, as it’s easiest to think of him. At Sidney's request, of course. He wouldn’t go scrounging through thirty years of memories for just anyone.

You had a childhood, Sidney said,  but you didn't get to be a child. It isn't too late to make up for lost time .

How the hell was he supposed to do that? How could anyone see what he saw and be unchanged? The only thing he has left from his childhood is the loneliness that will never leave him.  You could try playing,  Sidney advised.  Try to look at the world as a child would and love it that way.

So Hawkeye takes long, meandering walks and tries to name all the birds he hears. He swims when it's too cold to swim but not cold enough to make him sick. He sits at one end of the hallway and rolls marbles down the slanted floor, narrating his victories. Being a child, it turns out, is easiest when one  is  a child. A walk to the five-and-dime could turn him into a cowboy passing from town to town; he could spend hours playing basketball with classmates who now have wives, houses, and mortgages.

Every month, a book arrives on his doorstep with Sidney’s instructions to write back his thoughts. The finest curated picks from the shelves of one Jakie Freedman. Some of them, like  The Velveteen Rabbit  or  Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm , he remembers from childhood, but not well. He remembers craning his neck over the atlas, trying to find Riverboro on any map of Maine, unable to understand that real isn't a place on a map. He doesn't remember the ending of  Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm , possibly because he refused to finish it as a child. If he never reads the final section, Aunt Miranda never dies, the farm is never purchased by a railroad company, and the wild, impetuous girl named after a storybook never demures and matures into a young woman. If he never read the last page, Rebecca never had to grow up, and neither did he. But he reads it now, scribbles a few sentences that are marginally more articulate than schoolroom grammar books, and sends the book back exactly as he got it. They all come neatly wrapped in brown paper and bright blue ribbons, with notes from father and son tucked inside the front cover.

The newer books are easy to lose himself in— The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe,   Charlotte’s Web,  and  The Little Prince . They don’t have the same history attached. Even so, he weeps at the end of every book, careful not to let any tears spill on the pages. The only thing worse than a two-person book club with your psychiatrist’s kid is ruining one of the books with your tears. Little Hawk cried all the time, sometimes for no reason at all. At 35, Hawkeye can only cry if someone or something rips it out of him.

June's pick was  Madeline . He read it while BJ was passed out on the couch and wrote back that kids nowadays are spoiled with appendectomies in their picture books. When he was eight, he had to look in his dad’s medical textbooks to get any action.

If he squints, he can see Little Hawk now. The way he started growing out of clothes the minute he got them; his hair always a little too long in between haircuts; his laugh always a little too loud, hanging off of anyone who gave him a second look. Gawky and coltish, with a heart so big it was a miracle it fit in his chest. Scrappy as a junkyard dog and twice as affectionate once you get past twelve layers of self-deprecation. 

Here’s another secret: sometimes Hawkeye still feels like that kid. In Med School, he waited for someone to catch him, to see through him. Like Little Hawk is trapped somewhere inside his chest. Like the second right before Billy pushes him overboard, and his lungs flood with water. The unbearable claustrophobia of his life. His skin itches and pulls, and Hawkeye wants to root around himself, looking for the seam he can unravel. Other times, his body is a cave he cannot see a way out of, his skin pooling around him. It's a special kind of fuckup to be too much and not enough at the same time.

When a skinned knee is the worst pain a child can endure, the whole world feels like a wound.

After he sewed Tony Bárány’s head back together, he looked at her mother and said  kids are durable. They can go through a lot without breaking . And the dark, haunted look in her eyes said,  I know , and when Hawkeye held her gaze without flinching, he said,  So do I .

"What about you? What was baby Beej like?" He asks, too suddenly, too eager for any shreds of BJ’s history.

BJ gnaws on the inside of his lip before answering. "I was shy. A real mama's boy. For a while, at least."

"What a coincidence; I was a daddy's girl," Hawkeye jokes. "Out of necessity, of course."

A frown tugs at the edge of BJ's mouth. He waits before continuing. "I didn't have many friends aside from my sisters for a few years. They used to dress me up and play with me like I was one of their dolls. I didn't mind, but my father said I wasn’t going to ever be a doctor if I kept this up. Three generations, and I didn’t want to be the weak link. I was his only son, after all. So I tried tee-ball and little league soccer and was absolutely awful at both."

Hawkeye indulges in the image of the two of them—Little Hawk and Little Beej. Their young, unlined faces. Sunburn peeling over their cheeks and nose. Scabby knees. BJ's hair the shade of white blond that only children have. Their heads bent over a catseye, comic, or toad liberated from the window wells.

"You must have gotten better eventually. What did you letter in, Big Jock Hunnicutt?"

"Guess."

"Hmmm…Track?"

BJ smiles. "That’s one."

Hawkeye thinks for a moment. Definitely not football, and he doubts that BJ would have taken up baseball or soccer again after such disastrous attempts. Californians don't play hockey, do they? Physical education in Crabapple Cove means sending twenty kids out into the woods to capture the flag and hoping nobody fell out of a tree and broke their ankle. He hopes that’s still the case; it was great for letting off some steam between subjects. The school was barely a school; pitting their meagre sports teams in front of anyone else would have been a bloodbath. And that is the extent of Hawkeye’s athletic experience, aside from one memorable encounter with a nationally ranked swimmer in undergrad—remarkable lung capacity on that girl.

"Field hockey?" he guesses, "Lacrosse? I give up."

"Gymnastics," BJ pronounces with a shit-eating grin.

One thing about BJ is that he could fool a polygraph test into believing him. Half the stuff out of his mouth is bull, and the other half is dressed up so pretty it may as well be. The man lied about the mortality of his own grandmother. He'd probably lie about his own mortality just for fun. Lying is a skill like anything else; it takes time for a master to hone their craft. Sometimes Hawkeye wonders if BJ got so good at it by lying to himself, out of necessity or fear, until he could even fool himself.

"Why are you here?" Hawkeye asks for the fourth time in a week. He’s tired. "You learn your wife is a card-carrying member of the Lavender Menace, you get not-quite-divorced, and you crawl back into the arms of your old army buddy."

"Something like that." BJ stares up into the deep, empty sky, his face more unreadable than ever. He shifts uncomfortably, like the grass is scratching under his shirt.

Hawkeye hoped to get one straight answer out of him without needing to go in with a scalpel. Just one, and it’s no fun when he can already guess the answer. He picks up steam as the story unfurls itself until the bitter end. If all those pulp novels taught him anything, it's how to see a lost cause from a hundred miles away. "Once you finish crying and eating your feelings, you’ll go home to California and find a nice, reliably heterosexual woman so little Erin can have three mommies and one daddy, and the next time you get your heart broken, you’ll crawl back to me. This isn’t something you can put on ice when you have no need for it." The words are sour in his mouth. Hawkeye sits up and flicks a bug off his knee.

BJ blinks like one of them is stupid. His brow furrows. "Which one of us is telling this story, Hawk? You or me? I never said anything about nice heterosexual women."

Hawkeye flinches like he’s expecting a blow. He scowls, standing at once. "Not funny.” Out of everyone at the 4077—everyone he knows—he didn’t expect this from Beej. Not that BJ never raised an eyebrow here or there, and it took a while to catch on to what was an act and what wasn’t. But he never made fun of Hawkeye. Never like that; never  about  that.

"I'm not being funny, are you? You're so glad to have someone to talk you, that you haven't listened to a word I’ve said this entire week." BJ snaps. His hand reaches out and anchors itself around Hawkeye’s wrist before he can get away. The anger lasts only a moment before BJ deflates, more helpless than Hawkeye has ever seen him. "The decision was  mutual.  Peg and I have more in common than not; it just took me a little longer to figure it out. A couple of Kinsey Sixes putting on a show."

Fucking hell. BJ and Peg from San Fran-fucking-cisco. Lavender marriage of the century .

Chapter Text

One Saturday, they wake up at what Hawkeye affectionately dubs ass o’clock in the morning to drive along the coast. All 16 miles of Crabapple Cove spill out in front of BJ’s motorcycle. Hawkeye feels like a revenant—not quite like stepping back into time, but like side-stepping into a time that could have been his if everything were different. Holding their shoes in one hand and keeping the front door from slamming to avoid waking Daniel. Trying not to laugh as they ease the bike down the driveway, nervous as bumbling schoolboys afraid of getting their knuckles bruised with a ruler. Flush against each other as the motorcycle tears down the street, gobbling up pavement like it’s going out of style. 

Hawkeye purchases two sandwiches of dubious quality while BJ tops up the gas. There’s just enough time to scarf them down and scorch their mouths with coffee a step above diesel before returning to the road. The tranquil pre-dawn blue fades to pink at the edges. Sunrise takes its time here in Crabapple Cove, even if the people don’t. Trawlers and lobstermen are already carving through the ocean to get the catch of the day on tables before the sun has time to warm it. If they kill the engine and sit very still by the coast, they can hear the artillery of a pod of humpbacks off the shore, singing to each other with the same range of 88 ivory keys. Fins and flukes, schools of fish move unseen under the ocean. There’s a whole world secreted away under those waves.

Crabapple Cove was too much when he got back. It's like BJ said: there was too much colour. The blanket of flowers over his mother's grave, the blaze of autumn leaves and the azure of the cove ( from the algae , he tells BJ absentmindedly), and, worst of all, the impenetrable whiteness death of winter. It was like being blind again; it made him wish he were blind again. In Korea, he could only see two colours—olive green and blood red; everything else was a washed-out shadow of itself. Colour blindness in reverse. By the final few weeks, he was so worn out that the world presented itself in a spectrum of murky greys. 

Once the sun rises, they get back on the bike, stopping and starting every few minutes so Hawkeye can point out one local landmark or another, no matter how small. Growing up, every corner of town seemed crafted for giants. Sometimes, it still feels that way.

That’s where the old sardine cannery used to be; Frank Lloyd Wright was on vacation when he designed it in 1915. That building over there with the red awning used to be an Italian place, but the lady who ran it passed, and none of her grandkids could make her recipes the same, so they sold it. That’s the baseball diamond where Hawkeye had his first job at the snack hut, and that clearing over there is where the lobster festival and county fair set up shop at the end of August if BJ will be here for it (which Hawkeye doesn't think he will be). Coincidentally, it’s also the first place he got his heart broken (behind the bumper cars). See how the roof on the east side of the school doesn't match? It got ripped off in the 1938 hurricane. Over there is the oldest building in Crabapple Cove, dating back to 1671. Naturally, it's haunted. Anything that old comes with its fair share of ghosts.

Sweat gathers between their bodies as the sun climbs higher over the horizon, a shimmering pearl bobbing above the ocean. BJ laughs and squirms when Hawkeye’s fingers dig into his sides. “Stop that! You’re going to make us crash!”

"You know, I always figured I’d be on the front of the bike,” Hawkeye yells over the wind.

The motorcycle swerves off the highway and onto a side street leading to the beach. BJ slides off, knocking the kickstand down. He gestures for Hawkeye to take his place.

He raises an eyebrow. “You can't be serious.”

“As the grave.”

"That's where we're gonna be if you let me drive."

"C'mon, try it."

Hawkeye slides forward to grab the handlebars, planting his feet firmly on the ground. He makes a valiant attempt at listening to what BJ is explaining with patience that should net him a Nobel prize. Instead, he watches the lovely motion of BJ's extremely talented hands as he takes apart the bike piece by piece. Clutch. Throttle. Rear brake. Gearshift. Speedometer. Make sure to ease into the clutch like turning a dimmer switch. Keep the upper half of your body loose. Gradually increase the pressure on the brakes.

Of course, Hawkeye pays very little attention to the instructions and much more attention to the mouth saying them. The bike roars and bucks under him.

BJ slides on the seat behind him, hands (featherlight, gentlemanly) on Hawkeye's waist. "Easy does it now." 

The bike takes off like a rocket. Hawkeye lets out a highly undignified yelp before remembering where the brake is and that BJ is behind him; he can lean forward and steer if it looks like they might plummet off a cliff. Against all odds, Hawkeye manages a few hundred feet without sliding off the road or losing control. He stops abruptly, teeth chattering from the wind rushing through them. The bike gives one final jolt before Hawkeye jumps off. He walks around the front of it to stare at BJ, who looks as smug as a kitten in a dairy plant.

“I can’t believe you drove this thing from California, you absolute maniac!" Hawkeye says. He smacks a hand down on the handlebar to prove his point. Driving a motorcycle a couple of miles around rural Korea, spitting distance from shellfire, isn't exactly brilliant, but that was a jaunt now and then. A lap around the compound when BJ got bored. There's a world between that and driving a motorcycle from one side of America to the other.

BJ’s hand automatically closes over his on the handlebars. “I wanted to do it right,” he says as if it explains anything.

Before he can explain what  it  is, his stomach growls loud enough to rival the engine. So back onto the bike they go, roaring down the main drag of Route 6 past Eddie’s Bar & Grill ( Overrated , Hawkeye claims).

They stop in front of a diner so ubiquitous and quintessentially American that it could have been picked up and dropped off anywhere in the country. The only thing grounding them in Maine is the garland of buoys strung along the roofline. Dozens of buoys adorn the front of Salty Joe's, painted in every imaginable colour and pattern. Inside, the same formica counters and squeaky bar stools have remained unchanged since it opened 25 years ago and will probably remain unchanged until the next century. Clean stainless steel and art deco lines, the untarnished romance of small-town America, with a handful of paintings of lobsters playing poker.

"Sit wherever," a waitress hollers from the till. "I'll be with ya in a minute!"

In between meals, Salty Joe’s is nearly empty. Aside from the staff shuffling aimlessly around the checkerboard floor, there is a collection of teens. A gaggle. A flock, if you will. Two appear to be on a date that will end in marriage or tears. The remaining six crowd into a booth, shooting straw wrappers at one another and cheering whenever the jukebox queues up a new tune. Mr. Simmons, the old druggist, is seated in his usual spot by the counter with a cup of coffee, a book of crosswords, and his hearing aid turned off. 

Hawkeye and BJ slide into the booth, tucked in the back corner, the humid vinyl seats squelching against their arms and the sticky backs of their thighs. Under the table, their knees interlock. 

"Thought this would be a seafood joint with the theme and all," says BJ.

"That’s New England for you. But if you supply your own lobsters, he'll cook 'em for you." Hawkeye reaches behind the napkin dispenser and slides a menu over to BJ. 

After a minute, the waitress comes over to their table. She’s not wearing a name tag; there's never any need for them around here. One of the innumerable Casey girls, maybe? She has the chin for it. Either way, she's probably the much younger sister or cousin of someone he went to school with. Someone he got into a scrape with, flirted with at an assembly or lent a pencil to. You can't throw a pebble in a small town without hitting an old flame or foe. 

"Bring a pot of strong coffee; I want to be able to arm wrestle it, you understand? I should be able to stick my spoon straight up in my cup," Hawkeye says.

"Please," BJ adds quietly. 

The waitress bobs her head, looking at him with undisguised curiosity. Everyone wants a glimpse of Benjamin Franklin Pierce, back from the dead. "Anything else I can get you, or do you need more time?"

"A number seven," Hawkeye orders without even a glance at the laminated menu. He sure hopes there have been no changes to the menu in the last decade. Otherwise, he's going to look foolish.

The waitress scribbles it down on her pad. She turns to BJ.

"The same," he says with a shrug.

The waitress stares at him for a moment after she's done writing. It's hard not to, height aside. Nobody has ever stuck out more in Crabapple Cove than BJ Hunnicutt, with his walrus moustache and bright red suspenders. A tourist from 100 feet away. A shiny new toy to hold up to the light. That’s how he first looked in the officer’s club in Kimpo—untouchable and bright. For a few minutes, until Hawkeye got his hands on him at least.

"You from out of town?" the waitress asks.

"San Francisco."

Her eyes nearly pop clean out of her skull. "No way! Gee, I've always wanted to go California. The movies make it look so exciting. More exciting than boring old Crabapple Cove, that's for sure. I want to apply to Stanford next year for their English program, but my parents would be apoplectic at the thought of me all the way across the country.." 

She enunciates the last word carefully, with the pride of being at the top of her class. Hawkeye would know; he used to be this kid.  SAT word , he thinks. Then the waitress blushes upon realizing how much she's gabbing at a complete and utter stranger.

BJ gives one of those big, all-American grins. "My wife studied English at Stanford. She said it was fantastic."

Turning back to Hawkeye, the waitress forces her face into a child's idea of authority. "I'm supposed to tell you, sir, that you're still not allowed near the jukebox."

Hawkeye tries not to laugh. "That's fair."

As she returns to the counter, BJ's eyebrows start to ascend his forehead. "Two questions."

“Blueberry pancakes,” Hawkeye answers without missing a beat. “And twenty consecutive plays of  Animal Crackers in My Soup .”

BJ looks at him in abject horror.

Hawkeye shrugs. “I was trying to be annoying." It’s half the truth, at least. He was trying to be annoying, though he didn’t have to try very hard, and he was trying to get someone to look at him. Kids with normal brains don’t learn how to block out trauma at age seven. They don’t learn to put on a show because they think they'll only ever be good for a laugh.

A steaming pot of coffee arrives at their table, so fragrant it could wake the dead. Dry as a martini and dark as a country night. Hawkeye gulps down a cup without tasting it, scorching the roof of his mouth. He watches the waitress turn on her heels, her ponytail swinging with every step. When she thinks nobody’s looking, she nudges the soda jerk and gestures to the chrome above their heads, catching the distorted image of Hawkeye and BJ in their booth.

It shouldn’t be too egotistical to admit he’s a bit of a local legend. Crabapple Cove’s answer to Errol Flynn, Butch Cassidy, and the Sundance Kid all rolled into one. He snorts into his coffee. First, last, and only time anyone will ever call him butch with any amount of sincerity. Still, it's strange that he's remembered not only as a menace and a lothario (reputations he's worked hard to cultivate) or as an army doctor, even against his will, but as someone who got out of Crabapple Cove. Someone who got a college degree from a good school and used that degree to rent a fancy apartment in the big city.

Retirees are a third of the population here. Fishermen are another third. They make good money, far more than people from landlocked states would ever think, but it isn't generally the type of upbringing that leans towards ivory towers. If Crabapple women attend college, it's to become teachers, and then the town absorbs them back into its ecosystem. Occasionally, new people put down roots, like Vera Bárány. People in need of some goddamn peace and quiet, a fresh start, or both. What's left, then? Shopkeepers. Artists and hermits. A skeleton crew of infrastructure. Marine biologists stick around for a season or two to do their thesis research. Forty years and his father never travelled more than 100 miles from that green saltbox house. Forty-three years and a couple of months until last December, when he had no choice. And people like Hawkeye, who got out. Who got out for a while, for what looked like forever, who died and got spat back out of hell, who crawled home to Crabapple Cove because the only place he can exist in is the past.

Sometimes, Hawkeye thinks time must pass differently for him than it does for others. Non-linearly. Not a cohesive sequence of events, but something that coils around him while he remains unmoving, that grows and grows while he stays the same. A painting that tells the same story for as long as you look at it and resets with every new set of eyes. Peg's mystery novel, with the final page torn out. Alice falls down the rabbit hole but never reaches Wonderland. Prometheus and the eagle. A wound that barely has time to heal before being reopened. That's what time is to him: pus over a wound. 

BJ will return to California and carve out a new space for himself. Meanwhile, Hawkeye will stay in the same house he was born in until he dies of cirrhosis of the fucking liver at 50.

"I used to be banned from here, you know?" He says, startling himself out of his reverie.

BJ blinks once, twice at this. Seems like he was also lost in something.

Hawkeye continues, "From 1936–1940, they had a strict "No Hawkeye" policy. Sign on the door and everything. Poster with my face too, in case I tried to sneak in with a disguise."

"I would have put the sign up after the fifth round of  Animal Crackers in My Soup ."

"Then you would have missed out on the greatest six-and-a-half minutes the state of Maine has ever witnessed. I asked Sally van Ryn to prom by getting up on a table and doing  Anything Goes . Acapella, I might add, on account of the withstanding jukebox ban."

A furrow appears on BJ’s brow. "That song's only three minutes long."

" Au contraire  my theatrically ignorant friend. There's an eight-minute tap break on stage. Me, I had to improvise. Sally was more of a Hope Harcourt than a Reno Sweeney if you get me. Sweet kid, lyric soprano. She had a great sense of humour. Right before my big finale, I slipped on a spot of mustard and went straight through the window. Six stitches in my head and two pins in my arm.” He extends his right arm for BJ to investigate the lumpy scar along the ridge of his elbow. 

BJ frowns, manoeuvring Hawkeye’s arm like a wooden doll's. He tilts Hawkeye’s arm so that the harsh afternoon light illuminates a mostly faded scar, brushing his thumb over each puncture where the pins were. “I’ve never noticed this.”

Gently, Hawkeye extracts his arm before people stare. The teens are probably wrapped up in their adolescent microcosm, but all it takes is one whisper about Hawkeye Pierce’s old war buddy from California. And then what? People take him seriously for once, and he loses the only place he ever knew to call home. BJ’s still so enamoured with his revelation that he hasn’t yet learned that visibility isn’t always good. Even if there’s nothing that could get them sent to court. It isn’t illegal for Hawkeye to love another man, just to fuck one. It would kill his dad if something happened, if he got hurt.

“Salty Joe put the sign up after he helped pick the glass out of my hair,” he concludes.

"Did it work?"

"Yeah, I was worried we'd be turned away at the door."

BJ kicks him under the table. "I meant your grand gesture. Did Sally van Ryn go to prom with you?"

"Her parents thought I was a menace and a disturber of the peace—I can't imagine why—so they didn't let us take photos on their staircase, but she carried my books until I got the cast off my arm."

Two plates arrive laden with deep purple pancakes, tiny pots of blueberry compote, and whipped cream on the side. Hawkeye squints at the waitress as he thanks her.  Christa ? No, she has light hair.  Ellen ? No, she’s the one who married a factory owner and moved down to New Haven.  Jane ? No, she should still have bandages on her nose, and Hawkeye would know; he supervised its realignment. You don’t forget a thing like that.

For a few minutes, they eat together, communicating only in nods and affirmative grunts.  Sh-Boom  fades into static as the teens argue over which songs to spend their hard-earned carwash money on and in what order to play them.

BJ’s voice softens. “I would have said yes. If I were Sally.”

“Out of pity, I bet,” Hawkeye sighs. He drizzles some more syrup on his pancakes.  Real  maple syrup. None of that table syrup slop. It’s enough to make a man consider doing something drastic to get sent home if only to tap a maple tree and drink straight from the source.

“I like grand gestures.”

Red party. Goodbye spelled out with 136 rocks. Driving from California to Maine to listen to Hawkeye tell the history of every tree he’s ever carved his name into. One of the teens takes charge and punches a button on the jukebox. Kitty Kallen’s dulcet tones croon about little things. A groan breaks out.

“Hey, I don't wanna listen to that shit," one of the boys grumbles with the euphoria of being able to swear without reprimand.

“I didn’t play it for  you ,” the other responds. His date cuddles up under his arm. Hawkeye can’t see, but he’s pretty sure they’ve got a milkshake with two straws. Don't these carefree teens have any compassion for manic-depressive queers in their thirties?

BJ tilts the gleaming napkin dispenser to catch the reflection of the teens. He takes a thoughtful bite of pancake and says, "I wish I had all that. Y'know, normal kid stuff."

"I thought you and Peg went to senior prom together. High school sweethearts and all that jazz."

"We did. We were." He pauses and looks around at the pastel diner walls, the scabby-kneed kids rushing past the window that 17-year-old Hawkeye plunged through, the laminated menus, and the teenage staff saving up for cars and college. "But I didn't have a childhood the way you did, not a real one. The first 18 years of my life were a dress rehearsal for everything that came after. My parents were picky about the image they wanted to present."

"Hence the all-boys school."

"Give the man a prize."

"What was it like?" Hawkeye asks.

The two teens on a date pay their tab and walk out, staring straight ahead without any indication that the other person exists, and BJ watches the precious few inches between their arms with something like envy. Hawkeye's almost ready to change the subject and apologize for assuming that BJ would allow himself to be emotionally vulnerable more than once a year. There’s only room for one raw wound in this relationship, and Hawkeye has that position comfortably locked down.

BJ takes his time chewing before he answers. "It was like the Swamp in a way. Or the Swamp was like school. We slept in bunk beds, four to a room. Every time I woke up from the time I turned 13, I had to be careful not to concuss myself on the guy above me. Everything was always in motion. A third of us weren't even Catholic, but it was a better education if you could afford it. Another third were only sent there to avoid distractions." It doesn't take a genius to guess which faction BJ belonged to. 

"And did you?" Hawkeye asks. "Avoid distractions?" 

Distractions,  meaning, did you ever fumble in a closet when you were supposed to be clapping erasers? Did you ever stare too long after PE or before lights out? Did you have a friend—one of those special friends whose laugh put your heart on wings—an older boy whom you obsessed over like a matinee idol, a teacher whose tests you studied extra hard for to watch the way he smiled when he gave back that paper with a proud red 95 scribbled in the top-hand corner?

It's not voyeurism, or at least it isn't just voyeurism. Above all, Hawkeye wants to know how long BJ kept this inside—whether someone beat it back at the first sign of danger or if he did it himself. Was it a gradual bubbling over several years or an eruption all at once—30 years of careful artifice crumbling like the walls of Jericho—and if so, what note did that unseen horn blow to bring it all to pieces? It's like Margaret said, going through life with Vaseline on the lens. And then, all of a sudden, blinding Technicolor. You realize it's been this way for everyone else, but you spent your whole life not knowing how or where to look.

"I had a friend," BJ says, so quiet that Hawkeye has to lean halfway across the table to hear. "He wasn't the type of friend you're thinking of. I can see your brain moving under there. Morris Holbrook. We used to pull pranks together. A precursor to Leo; I guess there’s a pattern there. Filling the fountain with dish soap, and freezing guys' underwear—there was a special common area only upperclassmen were allowed to use, so we jimmied the lock and stuck all the furniture on the roof. Whenever we got caught, he always covered for me. No matter what, he never gave me up, even though it would have been so easy. I would have shared the punishment, but I was too scared to admit it."

Hawkeye puts off eating the last few bites of his meal, dragging the tines of his fork through rivers of syrup to appear occupied so that BJ has time to talk without worrying about being interrupted or overheard by their waitress. The jukebox and the teens muffle their conversation enough. "This Morris guy must have been a mighty good friend to throw himself on the sword for you,” he says neutrally.

BJ mimics his movements. He cuts a slice of pancake into smaller and smaller pieces and pours another half cup of coffee. He chews thoughtfully, then says, "Yeah…yeah, he was. Anyway, he got expelled in 10th grade, and I never knew why. His family moved out to one of the Dakotas; I don't remember which one. The only girls I really knew growing up were my sisters and girls from good families that  my  family wanted me to marry into. And Peg, of course. Everything else was an inevitability."

“I assume you never played Spin the Bottle as a kid.”

BJ shrugs. “My mother thought it was vulgar. She refused to let me go to boy-girl parties if she got the slightest whiff that there’d be kissing involved.”

"There are boy-girl parties  without  kissing?"

"Very few."

“The vulgarity is the best part of it!" Hawkeye hoots, not caring who overhears. "C'mon, even Father Mulcahy has you beat in that department."

“Guess I missed out.”

“You bet you did. There were, like, 15 kids in the entire grade, and we all kissed each other. You can’t afford to be picky in Crabapple Cove. It was very educational.”

“I suppose it’s no fun with only two players.”

All the blood momentarily rushes from Hawkeye’s brain before he gets ahold of himself. He tries to think of the flayed diagrams in  Grey’s Anatomy —the 27 bones that make up the hand. Distal phalange. Middle phalange. Proximal phalange into the metacarpal. Do  not  get a raging stiffie in the middle of the diner, Jesus Harry Truman Christ. After a moment too long, he says, “Sure, wise guy. Half the fun is the anticipation of who it’s going to land on. There’s no tension if you know who it’s going to be.”

“Before I buy a book, I read the first line and last lines so I know what I’m getting into.” BJ pops the last bite of pancake into his mouth and drains the last drops from his cup. Moment of vulnerability, gone in a flash.

Hawkeye stares at him for a long time. Then, he says, “The next volume of the DSM will have an entire chapter dedicated to the terrifying machinations of the mind of BJ Hunnicutt.” 

“When I married Peg, somehow I knew it was going to end like this. From the very moment I met her. Not like  this , obviously, but I knew it would end.”

“Everything does.”

"It doesn't have to." 

Hawkeye throws a napkin down on his plate and rests back with a groan.  Sh-Boom  starts up again, much to the delight of the teens. He fishes his wallet from his back pocket. “It’s on me. The gentleman always pays.”

BJ raises an eyebrow. “I thought it was the gentile-man who always pays.”

“Just for that, you  are  paying, Bad Jokes Hunnicutt.”

Right on time, the waitress reappears to take their plates. 

“Marcia?” Hawkeye hazards one final guess.

“Lauren,” she corrects. “Marcia is two years older. Anything else I can get you?"

“Just the bill. What’s the damage, Lauren?”

“Joe says it’s on the house. Veterans discount.”

Hawkeye knows that she sees his face fall for a second. Were any other of Crabapple Cove’s finite supply of young men drafted, or was it just him and Tommy and that one kid's brother whose name he can't remember? And he’s the only one who made it home.

“Hypothetically,” BJ starts, “what would we owe you? Veterans discount notwithstanding.”

“$5.25 total.”

BJ unfolds a fiver from his wallet. Then he upends the change pocket, sending a shower of dimes and nickels bouncing across the table. Hawkeye tries not to laugh, first at keeping the coins from rolling onto the floor, then at Lauren’s gobsmacked expression. It’s only fair that he contributes a five-dollar bill of his own, a handful of quarters that went through the wash by accident, and a few pieces of lint.

“That’s for good service,” he says, swinging his legs out of the booth. “Put it towards Stanford.”

As he and BJ make their way toward the door,  Sh-Boom  starts up again. There’s a round of muffled giggles from the colony of teens. No doubt the song will loop another eight times at the very least, and Salty Joe will have to enforce another jukebox ban; the Hawkeye of that friend group will make a fool of him or herself trying to impress their crush, and the stories they tell about him will continue to grow and mutate until they eventually fade, and Hawkeye Pierce is little more than a name on a stone and a story repeated ad infinitum. And maybe, just maybe, he and the memory of Tommy Gillis will be the only part of Crabapple Cove that war will ever touch.

Chapter Text

After a long dinner of lobster mac & cheese (one of the recipes he sent Peg, even though California lobster would never be the same), Hawkeye curls up across from BJ on the ugly, overstuffed sofa. The sofa is hardly long enough for one man over six feet to comfortably recline, let alone two, so their feet meet in a tangle in the middle; one of BJ’s size thirteens is tucked snugly under Hawkeye’s thigh. 

When he finishes recounting the spam lamb saga, BJ throws his head back in a cackle, hands clutching at his stomach. The line where his wedding ring used to be is still slightly visible—the same ring Hawkeye has seen strung on a chain under his clothes like dog tags. 

“I'll hurl if you make me laugh any harder," BJ threatens. 

“Easier to get you upstairs that way. Man, I'm stuffed."

“Leave a light on for me.” Absent-mindedly, Daniel drops a kiss on the crown of Hawkeye's head. There is a moment where it seems he will ruffle BJ's hair out of reflex. Instead, he claps a hand down on BJ’s shoulder.

BJ watches as Daniel retreats and says, “House call or a hot date?" 

“Neither. Every Saturday, he goes down to argue and play chess with Mr. Rosenthal from the bakery. Hey, can you lend me a hand?"

"I can lend you two," BJ says. Automatically, he sticks out his hands, waiting for yarn to be wound around them. He gestures with his chin at the front door and hears the fading sound of an engine. “That will be us in 30 years.”

“Something is seriously wrong with you if you think I’m going to go all the way to California each time I have a bone to pick with you.”

“Maybe I’ll just be down the street.”

He snorts, “Yeah, right. Your delicate Californian constitution would wither after one November here. Not even January.  November .”

“Guess you’ll just have to come to California with me.”

"Well, that won’t work either. My hearty Maine constitution would wilt after one second of direct sun exposure. Not to mention the  heat!  Did you know that you’re at the same longitude as Uijeongbu? I looked it up.”

“Latitude,” BJ corrects absentmindedly.

“No, it’s longitude. Latitude is up and down; longitude is lengthwise.”

“Longitude is the long way around.”

“They’re  both  the long way around. It’s the same distance. San Francisco is the same  latitude  as Uijeongbu.” 

“Once I get this yarn wound, I’m gonna break out the Atlas,” Hawkeye promises, “and then I’m going to kick your ass. I maintain that if humans were meant to withstand such temperatures, we would live on Mars."

"It's a dry heat." BJ muses.

"Mars?"

"San Francisco, you goon."

"So I've heard."

As though he's been thinking about it for a while now, BJ says, "Our only choice is to alternate. Summer in Mill Valley and winter in Crabapple Cove one year; winter in Mill Valley and summer in Crabapple Cove the next.”

"We'd have to spend the fall here. Beej, you haven't seen anything until you've seen a New England fall. It makes you want to live so that you can keep seeing them. What about Mill Valley? What are your springs like?"

"Mild. Foggy. Your type of weather."

“It sounds nice." 

“What are you gonna make?”

“Mitts, y'know, with the flaps,” Hawkeye gestures with a wiggle of his fingers.

“Convertible.”

“Exactly.”

When the yarn is all wound, BJ stretches his wrists without complaint. "Mind if I put something on?"

“So long as it isn’t  Oklahoma!  be my guest—oh, wait, you are.” He doesn’t think he could bear to listen to Laurey telling Curly not to laugh at her jokes too much under the present circumstances.

As BJ rifles through his records, the fantasy of domesticity tightens like a hangman’s knot in Hawkeye’s chest. If only things were simple enough to allow them to go on forever this way. The scene is all too easy to picture: the two of them growing old and grey (well, greyer in his case) for the next fifty years if they’re lucky. An eternity of BJ patiently allowing Hawkeye to wind yarn around his hands. All snuggled up on the couch like this with their feet tangled in the space between them. Existing in the same space like a promise. They could go on like this forever if neither of them blinks. This could be forever. Sure, they played at domesticity in the Swamp— hi darling, tough day at work? Here, sit down, and I'll fix you a martini, the finest lighter fluid for a hundred miles —they all did. That was the only way they made it to the other end of the war with their sanity intact. It was little more than a charade, playing house the way kids do when they think a home is an empty blueprint—the things inside rather than the memories.

Hawkeye never liked playing house as a child; he was always playing doctor instead.

But this? The gentle thunk of BJ sorting through his records in search of the perfect album, alongside the metallic click of Hawkeye casting on... this could be real. This domesticity, this ease, this—this fucking  love  without the stress of war and without any blood on their hands—could be a future. Somewhere between arranging 136 rocks in a goodbye note and BJ driving clean across the country, that love grew beyond circumstantial. Or, maybe it never was circumstantial, and he just pretended it was because that was easier.

How sincere is this moment? Less sincere than the burlesque of heterosexuality Peg and BJ perform for their old college friends? More?

By the time BJ decides on an album, Hawkeye has already finished the first three rows of his gloves. The needle drops into the record, and the first tinny notes of the  Carousel  waltz pour into the living room, sweet as the first sap of the season.

"This one is about Maine, right?" BJ asks.

"Uh-huh."

Satisfied with this confirmation, BJ scrounges for paper and a pen. Successful in his quest, he props the page up on an old medical journal and props  that  on his folded knees. For three songs, knitting needles and pen scratching accompany the canned orchestra. Then, disaster strikes in the form of the bench scene. 

Hawkeye makes a valiant attempt at persevering through  If I Loved You . That is to say, he drops half of one row and has to unpick the other, but at least he manages to hold it together. BJ is too busy gnawing on the end of his pen to notice if Hawkeye were to start purling his intestines. Meanwhile, Julie Jordan and Billy Bigelow sing about letting their golden chances pass by not confessing their love for each other. Hawkeye’s heart feels so huge in his chest that he can hardly breathe around the weight of it. If Hawkeye had any sense, he would have put a blanket ban on Rodgers & Hammerstein. If he had any sense, he would stop falling for married men; he definitely wouldn’t let one stay in his house in what appears to be a midlife crisis for the ages. But he’s never had any sense—none at all—for as long as he’s lived.

“What are you writing?” he asks once the four-minute torture chamber is over.

BJ’s eyes remain laser-focused on the paper. "A letter to Erin.”

"Can she read?"

"She's almost four years old."

Hawkeye repeats the question.

"She can’t read Tolstoy or anything, but she can read simple sentences. Besides, there are a lot of pictures.”

"Really? From the way you talk about her, I thought she would be a prodigy. Can I sign it? Give her a little something to remember her Aunt Hawkeye by."

“Sure.” BJ hands over the paper and pen.

Hawkeye stares at the page for a long time, pointedly ignoring the oversized, careful sentences and zeroing in on the pictures. Nothing worthy of the Met, certainly. There’s a rough diagram of the town and an even rougher diagram of the house. A grilled cheese on a plate and a grilled cheese on fire are helpfully labelled  grilled cheese  (that rat fink! There wouldn't have been a fire at all if Hawkeye hadn't been trying to erase all memories of puberty so that BJ could be his first real kiss). What appears to be a lobster with two crushing claws hugs the top right corner of the page. Stick-Peg, stick-Erin, and stick-Waggles sit atop block letters reading, "Wish you were here!" Right smack dab in the centre of the page are a stick-Beej and a stick-Hawk. There’s something so comfortable about how BJ drew him—a familiarity that bleeds through the paper. How many times has BJ drawn him as part of a matching set? It's easy to imagine BJ holding up a copy of the photo from Fort Dix next to a letter filled with five-minute caricatures and connecting the dots for Peg.

He stares at stick-Beej and stick-Hawk, who may or may not be holding hands, and decides to file that away for a night where he has a solid 4-5 hours to mull it over. Under the signature  Love from Daddy , he adds  & Hawkeye  in his most child-friendly handwriting. On second thought, he draws hearts around his name, as Erin did in the letter he keeps safely tucked in his copy of  The Last of the Mohicans . Silly cartoon hearts, nothing like the real ones he’s held in his hands and massaged and watched as they went still. Not that Erin would know the difference; if there is any justice in the world, she never will. Then, he draws everything else he knows how to draw, filling every inch of the paper until the pen runs off the page and onto his jeans. Stars and storm clouds with lightning bolts and ocean waves; lupines that make him wish he held onto his pencil crayons from childhood; and in the middle of it all, stick-Beej watching stick-Hawk draw.

“There,” he says when he returns the letter. The Act I finale fades into static. Before BJ can rise to flip the record over, Hawkeye hooks a foot around his ankle. The second act will ruin everything. Better to let BJ have hope; better to leave him with the image of a father resolved to do everything he can for his future daughter, even at the cost of his own life. He doesn’t need to know everything that comes after. Not to mention that  You’ll Never Walk Alone  is an all-time weeper. “No, don’t change it. The second act is so maudlin. We can listen to something else.” 

BJ lets out a theatrical yawn like they're in the romantic part of a movie—and in this light, they may as well be. "Actually, I was thinking of turning in early."

"Smart thinking," Hawkeye says and stows his knitting away, about a salvageable quarter of one glove completed. 

They walk upstairs, shoulders overlapping, like this has been their routine for thirty years and will continue to be for thirty more. BJ is as familiar in this house as the furniture—an old routine transplanted to a new setting. They brush their teeth side by side, taking turns spitting in the same sink so they don’t concuss each other, jostling for the best angle in the mirror. When it’s time to say goodnight from the bathroom door and head to their respective beds, Hawkeye will do the sensible thing for once by not grabbing BJ by the collar, kissing him blind, deaf, and dumb, and pressing that long, lean body into the guest room mattress. He'll think of it, of course. Thirty different takes of the same scene until the monotony puts him to sleep and continues even then. And so this ouroboros of longing will continue into the next day and the next. Every day until BJ decides he’s had enough of this vacation and returns to the real world.

Even if he—even if they—even if anything were to happen, Hawkeye knows they would both end up regretting it. It wouldn't be magical at all. He'd probably brain himself on BJ's massive forehead or his six million teeth. One of them would cry, maybe even both. BJ's clearly going through some bizarro dyke-powered post-marriage emotional crisis. He got one whiff of his lavender persuasion and promptly drove across the country in search of the queerest person he knows for a shoulder to cry on, not a roll in the hay. Hawkeye has taken advantage of people in more vulnerable situations. He's not proud of it, but it's true.

The only thing left is to learn how to live with this thread that knots somewhere in the cavern of Hawkeye’s sternum and ends in a neat little loop around BJ’s pinky. Otherwise, it will end up strangling both of them.

Looking at Hawkeye through the bathroom mirror, BJ says, "My window was making some freaky noises last night." He says it so plainly.  My  window. Like he intended to stay.

Hawkeye stares back at BJ’s reflection. Were it anyone else, he would have assumed this was a weak come-on. Then again, he’s been taken in by worse and used far worse himself. “Squeaky hinge or ghostly rattling?” he asks, trailing behind BJ to his old bedroom.

“Ghostly ratling.”

BJ perches on the edge of the extra-long twin bed like the world's oldest, tallest middle schooler.

"It does this all the time," Hawkeye explains, halfway hanging out the window to fasten the top hook-and-eye. "The humidity and the salt make the windows swell if they stay open too long. I snuck out in eighth grade, and this one has been stuck ever since." 

He watches as BJ takes in the pencil marks in the wallpaper detailing his height, the photos tucked into the corner of the mirror smudged with fingerprints, the Groucho glasses pinned to the corkboard filled with long-faded ticket stubs and notes, the mystery novels stacked two deep on the highest row of his bookshelf, and the yellowed magazine cut-outs taped to the side. “This used to be your room.”

“Uh-huh.”

Worry creases between BJ’s brows. “Where are you sleeping, then, if I’ve kicked you out of your room?”

“Don’t worry about it. I haven’t slept here since I came back. It’s a little small for me.” Hawkeye plops on the bed beside him, keeping a cordial six inches between them. Maybe Crabapple Cove has been too small for him from the moment he came out of the womb. Strange kid, strange desires. The room is suddenly airless.

Hawkeye starts speaking, recreationally as he often does, with no clear end or purpose in sight. Just another way to fill the silence. Most of it is chatter for the sake of chatter—jokes to take his mind or someone else’s off of whatever is eating them, a way to slow time or speed it up, drawing out goodbye until it is the only word left. But if you tell enough jokes, that’s all people expect of you. Nobody knows when you’re serious, and Hawkeye nearly forgot how after spending three years as the 4077th’s personal court jester. 

“You know, the first person I ever loved, besides my folks and besides Stany—" He falters, the truth acrid in his throat. Instead of saying what he wants to say, he nods towards an early publicity still of Barbara Stanwyck ,  so faded by age and sun that she’s little more than a shimmering gown.

BJ makes a gesture,  of course . This moment fortifies him enough to take a deep breath. After that, the words pour out, growing faster, more frantic with each passing syllable—a tragedy told at breakneck speed.

“The first person I ever loved was Tommy Gillis from down the road. It was an inevitability, you know, only two queer kids from here to Portland. Maybe there were others. There probably were; there are more of us than anyone wants to admit, but nobody else I knew about. You can use your imagination to fill in the beginning; it’s nothing to write home about, but the end...it was something out of a movie. The last time I saw Tommy, he was climbing down that trellis during my first year of premed, and I thought, logically, that it was nice while it lasted, but I’m never going to see the guy again. A pretty ideal first love with a clean, easy separation. Nobody had to cry, and nobody had to bleed. Dad knew, but then again, he's always known. I never even had to tell him. I figured we would meet for a beer whenever we were both home for the holidays, but Tommy stopped being attached to his folks when they cut the umbilical cord. 

“Anyway, he became some big-time reporter when the war got him too. He was writing a book about the old lie:  Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori . And what do you know? Of all the operating tables in all the wars, in all the world, he ends up on mine. I couldn’t save him. They wouldn’t let me save him, and there was no time to breathe before we had to move him to make room for the next guy. Worst thing was that I couldn’t say anything. I could have told Trapper if I wanted to, but I couldn’t find the words to say what Tommy was. I didn’t want anyone to know this was real. Everybody knew, of course. I wasn’t subtle, and he was even less so. He kissed Henry Blake on the mouth. He kept telling Trap how much of a sissy I was growing up. He was right, but you're not supposed to say the quiet part out loud. He never had one ounce of survival instincts. Everybody could see, but what was there to say?

“You wanna know the worst part? His parents still live on Hemlock Street. They had me and Dad over for dinner when I came back. Great big pot roast, gravy so thick you could stop a bullet with it, green beans, mashed potatoes, the works. Nobody could stomach more than five bites. I think I just pushed my food around. Mrs. Gillis was on the verge of tears the entire time. Once the plates were cleared, she thanked me for being with Tommy in his last moments. She was so glad that Tommy found an old friend in Korea. I didn’t know what was worse: that I loved him or that I couldn’t save him.”

BJ puts a hand over his in the precarious space between them that has, somehow, over the telling of the tale, shrunken into no space at all. He squeezes Hawkeye’s hand twice, like a pulse. “Thank you for telling me this.”

“Yeah, well, I didn’t know if I could tell you before. Some of the guys, they thought it was an excuse, an experiment, or abnormal behaviour during exceptional circumstances, and then they went home to their wives and sweethearts like it was all a joke to them. It was a joke to Trap; I was at least."

It was so easy for it to be a joke. Sometimes, Hawkeye even convinced himself it was, and that joke grew like an open wound until it consumed every part of him. Everyone else thought it was a joke, even when he was serious. Silly Hawkeye and his silly jokes. Limp your wrist when a general shakes it; camp it up to remind visiting brass that you’re not one of them; mince and simper your way through every interaction with Frank so he will leave you alone; play the girl part for a laugh; warble Cole Porter at the top of your lungs to diffuse the tension after long hours of surgery. Flirt with the psychiatrist who could get you sent home. Why not go for the gold and flirt with the priest? After all,  you’re  not Catholic; there's no danger to your immortal soul if there is any of it left.

And then it became a little less of a joke. An act of defiance. Refuse to back down, remind the hierarchy all the way up to Truman himself that one of the best damn surgeons in this entire war is a fag, and watch them try to give you a blue discharge after that. Make them squirm in the knowledge that if they take you out of this unit, the blood of all those soldiers you could have saved will be on their hands. Flirt with your married tentmate, who leaves not a note but a kiss, and not even one he delivers himself. Flirt with your  other  married tentmate because you think you might die without something to cling to, knowing that he will go back to California and slot his wife back into the place that was temporarily yours. Act like all this is normal until people believe it could be. What do they have to hold onto in a war zone, if not each other?  I’ve loved as many of you as I could.  You meant every word of that.

“Hawk,” BJ nudges his shoulder. “Are you going to tuck me into bed after that story?”

Hawkeye searches his face for any semblance of a joke or a dare but finds only loneliness in the face of a man living in an empty beach house. The hangdog look is so bad that any last vestiges of his sanity nearly crumble.  Come bunk with me , he almost says.  We don't even have to touch. In fact, it might be better if we don't. It's just that I got so used to your breathing that I haven't been able to get a good night's sleep since I stopped hearing it. Sometimes, I wake up and imagine your outline on the other side of the bed. It will be like old times. We can have powdered eggs and stale toast in the morning. If we pretend that nothing has changed, maybe it never will.

“Alright.” Hawkeye says, standing. BJ does the same, shimmying under the top sheet. He’s almost comically too long for the bed, even with his knees bunched up to the side.

He gestures to the deep purple afghan flung over the end of the bed. The first project he ever completed by himself; he slept under that thing until the draft. “Blanket up or down?"

"Up. It's cold out here."

"Baby." It’s June, for crying out loud.

"Honey," BJ responds, from what Hawkeye prays is a leftover instinct from marriage.

As he tucks the afghan over BJ’s chest, he tries to keep his composure. "No, I'm saying you have the constitution of an infant. I'm not trying to be cute. I'm trying to insult you."

BJ's first winter in Korea, his heart rate dropped so low that it was a miracle he didn't fall comatose. Even with every stitch of clothing to his name and half of Hawkeye's, his hands were clumsy from the cold. It wouldn't do for one of their best surgeons to have cold hands, not when they have 30 hours of meatball surgery ahead of them, and it only takes one slip of the knife to do irreversible damage. He did what any good doctor would do if it meant saving at least one of the boys on the operating tables. In the scrub room, when Frank and Potter were already in the OR, Hawkeye caught BJ by the wrists, brought his hands to his mouth, and blew. Neither could look at the other; both were fixated on his hands, carefully held by his friends. And if, in the process, he pressed a kiss to the centre of BJ’s palm, well, that’s between him and Korea. Hawkeye used the same manoeuvre on Nurse Bigelow with dazzling success and promptly repressed the episode. 

Only when he flicks the lamp off on the bedside table only then does he give in. Only then does he lean down and kiss BJ’s forehead when BJ cannot see him tremble. In the sliver of moonlight, he watches BJ pull the edge of the blanket up to his chin. “This is a nice blanket. Your mom made it?”

Hawkeye touches the edge of the blanket as he leaves. “I thought you knew my stitches anywhere. Sweet dreams, Beej.”

Chapter Text

The same picture plays on repeat every time he closes his eyes. Hawkeye is in the OR when he snips at an infected stitch, and the whole body falls open—bone and muscle and tissue and gallons of blood dropping onto the floor already soaked from previous patients. And then, they lift the body up and move on to the next one. He’s in the OR, trying to remove shards of shrapnel from a patient’s neck. Except his hands keep shaking, and the tweezers keep shaking. He yanks on a piece of shrapnel lodged above the jugular, and the patient’s neck yawns open with a torrent of blood. And then, they lift the body and move on to the next one. He’s in the OR, and his hands are not his own; the body on the table takes the shape of everyone he has ever loved, a shimmering, bleeding mirage that keeps hemorrhaging grief from him. He’s—

INT. O.R.

A doctor (TRAPPER) and a nurse (HOT LIPS) wearing gaudy Hawaiian shirts but no masks or gloves walk up to a body on the operating table.

TRAPPER
(reading from the chart)
Pierce, Benjamin Franklin. His parents must have hated him to give him a name like that.

(Beat for audience laughter.)

What seems to be the problem, nurse?

HOT LIPS
We’re not sure, doctor, but we think there’s something wrong with his heart.

(beat)

Namely, it doesn’t appear he has one.

TRAPPER
(laughing)
That’s impossible! What kinda man doesn’t have a heart?

(He cranes his neck down and puts an ear to the patient’s chest, then gestures for Hot Lips to do the same.)

Why, I can hear his heart! Loud and clear, I don’t even need a stethoscope.

Hot Lips does the same and then listens to the patient's breathing.

HOT LIPS
If I may, doctor, hearing it isn’t the problem. Seeing it is. We have a dozen X-rays, and none show anything inside.

TRAPPER
(Like this is a joke.)
This is why women are nurses and not doctors.

The audience laughs even harder.

HOT LIPS
I’m telling you, this man has no heart in his chest. He has lungs, ribs, and everything but no heart. It’s like one of those shells you hear the ocean in.

Hot Lips hands over a folder. Trapper consults the X-rays, looking back and forth at the patient in disbelief. He knocks against the patient’s chest. It makes a strange metallic sound, like kicking a tin can.

TRAPPER
You know, it isn't the ocean you hear with those shells. Not really. You hear white noise, but everybody pretends they hear the ocean. It's a better story that way. I think we had better open him up.

The hand of an anesthesiologist is seen putting a mask over the patient.

HOT LIPS
Good call.

TRAPPER
Scalpel.

HOT LIPS

(handing it to him)

Scalpel.

Tight shot on Trapper’s hands as he makes the first cut. There’s an explosion of blood, the lurid red of a horror movie. As the scalpel continues down the patient’s chest, more blood pours out. Blood pools around the body, running down the edge of the bed.

TRAPPER
There has to be a heart in here somewhere. This is the damnedest thing I have ever seen. I can hear it. Goddamnit, I can hear his heart.

He scratches his head in confusion as a trail of blood runs from his temple down to the neck of his shirt.

HOT LIPS
I can hear it. An echo of it, at least. Like he lost it somewhere.

TRAPPER
And how do you expect us to return it to him if we can’t find it? A heart is a tricky thing to lose. You can lose your mind, no problem. A mind is easy. I lose mine every day I spend here...the problem is that it never stays lost.

Audience laughter

TRAPPER
A limb…We could make a Frankenstein battalion out of all the spare limbs we have lying around.

HOT LIPS
Frankenstein was the doctor, actually–

TRAPPER

(cutting her off)

But who ever heard of a man who went out and lost his heart?

HOT LIPS
Maybe he gave it to someone who didn’t want to return it.

TRAPPER
Or, more likely, he gave a piece of it away to every pretty girl who smiled at him.

(beat)

Every pretty boy, too, from the look of him.

Uproarious audience laughter here. It nearly drowns out the next line.

HOT LIPS
That’s a serious accusation to make, doctor.

TRAPPER
I call ‘em like I see ‘em.

ANOTHER ANGLE

Trapper and Hot Lips wade through half a foot of blood on the floor, seemingly unaware or unbothered by it. We HEAR snatches of conversation before they're drowned out by the torrent of blood.

TRAPPER
I don’t see the point in looking for something we’ll never find. Get me some 4-0 silk; I may as well stitch him back up.

HOT LIPS
Where’d you lose your heart, Benjamin Franklin Pierce?

FADE OUT.

"Ben–" one voice says.

No. 

"Hawk–" says another.

Yes.

Hands clutching his hands, hands firm between his shoulders, hands untangling him from sheets wound around his body like a shroud, hands catching him as he falls back to earth. Hawkeye blinks once, twice, and on the third try, his father's face, then BJ's, swims into his line of sight. Real. This is real. Hawkeye's back is soaked with sweat down to his sheets. His heart pounds like a stampede of lemmings off the edge of a cliff. When he gasps for air, he tastes salt on his tongue. When did he start crying? The nightmare subsides, inch by inch.

"I was—" He was what? Having a scary dream? Even though he knows that neither BJ nor his dad would mock him for it, Hawkeye can find no words to explain himself without sounding silly. Instead, he puts his head to his knees and cries so hard that he swears something inside of him ruptures. Crying that feels like the massive hands of God are wringing you out like a sodden towel, wrenching every drop of water from your body. Nothing like how people cry in movies—a single artful tear tracing its way down a beautiful cheek. This is ugly grief—grief that drags itself out of every grave you dig for it, that snarls and snaps at your heels until it finally gets you in its teeth, and you cannot remember a time without it. Grief that transforms every room into a morgue the second you cross the threshold.

By the time Hawkeye runs out of tears, his whole body aches. He understands the meaning of bone tired now. Not tired down to your bones, but like your bones are exhausted from the weight of holding you up. He was a child the last time he cried like this; it was a funeral in May, and Hawkeye wept so hard he thought his throat would close up. He cried for Tommy and Henry and for that poor baby, but never for himself—and not for his failures, his losses, or his loves, but for his own bleeding heart. 

A glass of water is guided to his mouth. He manages half of it before coughing. Spasms wrack his diaphragm, and then, before he can issue a warning, he spits bile down the front of his shirt.

Daniel holds the wastebin between his knees while BJ keeps him upright with a strong arm around his back. Pathetic , he thinks. A grown man of thirty-five crying himself sick. Sweat-drenched, tear-tracked, bile-stained. No better than an infant.

His vision goes watery again; even his eyes are sore now after that last round of vomiting. One of the voices says, "Let's get you cleaned up."

The other says, "Don't worry, baby, you're safe here."

Hawkeye allows himself to be disrobed and swaddled in his red bathrobe. Jesus, he should have burned this thing in celebration of the armistice. It still smells like the Swamp, which is to say it smells terrible. One set of hands passes him off to the other, checking the temperature of the half-filled tub.

Every window on the second floor is flung open to the briny scent of fog; sometimes, he swears you can smell hurricane season before it comes. Hawkeye settles a little deeper into himself. He watches the movement of BJ's back under his shirt, the muscles and tendons coiled snakelike as he turns off the tap. "Tell me if this is too hot."

The water is fine. Even lukewarm dishwater occasionally feels like burning nowadays. Hawkeye sinks into the tub, submerged up to his chin. "Did you draw straws to see who would play lifeguard?"

BJ sits on the bathmat, his back slumped against the tub. "I volunteered; your dad was pretty shaken up."

"I scared him." He tastes copper in his throat.

From deep in the bowels of the house, the washing machine rattles to life. He imagines his dad stripping the soiled sheets from his bed and bundling them into a laundry basket. You should never flinch from someone you love, Daniel said on another sleepless evening, not unlike this one. Hawkeye was 12; the winter was bone dry, and he woke up with blood pouring down his chin. There was so much of it that he didn't know what to do. It took five minutes for the nosebleed to stop and three rounds of bleach until his pillowcase was white again. And all the while, Daniel never complained.

Last winter, Hawkeye got so sad that he thought he would die from it. Part of him hoped he would die from it. It was nothing in particular and everything at once. Three decades of sadness simmering to the point of quiet eruption. He saved all those lives in a war he opposed, only to end up in the guest room of his childhood home, unwilling to work and unable to move past himself. Everyone who could understand is scattered across the country, like wishes on dandelion fluff. Homecoming was supposed to be easy—BJ's dumb-eyed Sausalito seagull, Odysseus carrying an oar inland—but nothing has ever been easy, not for him. He was supposed to go from picking live grenades from bodies to charging $75 for a simple tonsillectomy, the horror story fading into a ghost story.

Instead, he drank too much. He stayed in bed all day and lay awake at night, watching the shadow puppetry on the wall across from him and emerging only under darkness. Any colour he had picked up in Korea was leached out by September. By mid-November, he swore that if he held his hand up to the light, he could see rays coming through his skin. Drinking made his dreams bad, but sobriety made them worse, so the best thing to do was to avoid falling asleep. He wore through the heels of two pairs of socks while pacing the house, drinking endless cups of coffee until his pulse grew frantic and slippery in his throat. At the beginning of December, gaps began appearing in his memory. With so much darkness, there was no need to differentiate between night and day or worry about meals. After three days, he found the bottom of a bottle of whisky (gin turns to ash in his mouth) and decided to go out and replace it. The store was close enough to walk to. Hawkeye was so drunk he only felt the cold when he realized he wasn't wearing shoes.

There was a long gap after that. Not a gap like with the bus, where one thing was swapped out for another, but rather like a poorly edited film. Like someone—perhaps himself—had taken a pair of scissors and spliced two scenes together, the unimportant bits mouldering in a studio trashcan. One moment, Hawkeye was slumped over in the snow; the next, he was in the backseat of a car, delirious but warm. Hawkeye remembers velvety, almost comprehensive darkness thinning out at the edges as they approached New York. He remembers choking on a scream that had been lodged so long in his throat he learned how to live with it; remembers the car pulling off the road a few miles from the Connecticut border; how Daniel clambered over the console and wiped the hair from his clammy forehead; how neither of them could cry, could only keen and low like cattle; how Daniel kept saying my only boy, my baby bird, and refused to let his only child die.

And then there was a couch in Brooklyn, an address memorized from the front of a letter, and Sidney Freedman sitting across from him. That was the only thing either of them could think to do. And he supposed it worked. Sidney put him back together once; why not a second time? (Or a third or fourth?)

Eventually, Hawkeye says, "I didn't mean to wake you."

He watches BJ shake his head from the corner of his eye. "One of us would have woken the other eventually.” BJ sucks in a sharp breath, then rotates enough so that he can look at his friend. “I didn't move to the beach house because Peggy took up with Ray. It was because from my first week back, I would scream in my sleep, and it scared Erin. Every night I dreamt of that soldier with the missing face, and when I reached up to grab your hand, you were never there. That was the worst part, I think, being all alone. It scared Peg; it kept her up half the night trying to get me to calm down, but it scared the hell out of Erin. I would be scared too if suddenly there was a strange man in my house who screamed in his sleep. She was afraid to let me hold her. I started sleeping on the downstairs couch, and then I moved out because it was that or destroying this precious, fragile thing we had, and I couldn't bear becoming more of a stranger to my daughter than I already was."

“Beej, I’m so sorry—”

“What do you have to apologize for? Were you the one to declare war on South Korea?"

And then—

“Lean your head back,” BJ murmurs. “I’ll wash your hair.” It isn’t a request.

Hawkeye feels another monologue fizzle in his chest as BJ lathers shampoo on his hands. He talks, if only to distract himself from BJ’s nails tickling his scalp, BJ wiping shampoo before it can slide into his eyes, and how utterly safe he feels. The foreign and comfortable sexlessness of this desire. When was the last time he was naked with someone without the looming promise (or threat) of sex? Looking back, he can’t remember if anybody aside from his folks ever washed his hair, and even that was when he was very young or very ill. This, too, is an illness, he supposes. And unless he lets some of the noise inside of him out every once in a while, he’s going to stay ill.

Because Hawkeye cannot say the one thing he desperately wants to, which is, of course, I love you , he says, “When Carlye left me she said that I was more married to my work that I would ever be to her, and for a while, I thought she was talking about me being a workaholic. But it was more than that. She said a bunch of stuff about how I was easy to like but difficult to love, which I can't argue with. Anyway, uh, I wasn't working myself half to death because I didn't know how to stop. I knew how to stop. I was scared of what would happen if I did. I thought horrible things would happen to me or to other people if I stopped. Sidney would blame Freud, or generational trauma, or the 10 pounds of guilt I carry around. It could be any of those things or all of them. All of them and something else. Margaret said the only thing she knew how to do was love this country, and I thought I was better than her for that, but the only thing I know how to do is stitch people back together, and now I can't even do that. The only reason they didn't court martial me for that is because I was chief surgeon. I was less trouble than I was worth, and I was a lot of trouble. But since I came home, the sight of a scalpel makes me sick and I hate myself for it. What good am I if I can't do the one thing I was put on this planet to do? What parts of me that are left over are worth anything? I don't like spending time with myself—by myself, I mean. Something in my head is all fucked and now I don't know what to do with those other parts of me. I don’t know where to put them.”

BJ's thumb presses neatly into the base of his skull, and Hawkeye goes boneless. He nearly slides out of BJ’s hands, slippery as a minnow. His eyelids flutter, the peppermint of the shampoo making him woozy.

“You want to be the only person in the world with a fucked-up head because you think suffering is worth more if you do it alone," BJ says firmly but not unkindly. “You think the rest of us came back unscathed? The second I got back, I wanted to bury my head in the sand or put a bullet through it because I kept thinking about everyone who died on my table. I can’t stand loud noises anymore. Peg’s alarm clock went off one morning, and I dove under the bed, waiting for a shell. The second time it happened, I made a pretty dent in the wall where I threw it. We started sleeping on different floors after that. A few times at work I would start to close, and one of the nurses would stop me and say, Doctor, you’re only halfway done because I was so used to putting kids back together just enough to get them to Tokyo. Mill Valley has no room for meatball surgery. Sometimes, I feel like it has no room for me." 

Hawkeye's hair has to be clean by now, but BJ’s hands continue to hold his head like a relic, rubbing aimless circles into his scalp down the hunched ridge of his spine. They sit there for who knows how long, unspeaking and unflinching. Pearlescent moonlight pours in from the open window, the faint gleam of hundreds of stars like pinholes on an old map. 

Eventually, his heartbeat slows enough that the prospect of sleep is no longer a long, dark tunnel. Goosebumps rise over his shoulders, his hands and feet have long since pruned. "Can you pass me a towel?” he asks BJ.

BJ doesn't say anything. His eyes are shockingly demure, considering that they used to be psychologically incapable of showering without each other, and those showers were not designed with men over six feet in mind.

"Beej, can you, uh, can you stay a little bit? Just until I fall asleep. I don’t want to go back into it."

In the guest room, they lie shoulder-to-shoulder, their calves tangling. It could be one in the morning or nearly dawn without a clock to tell the difference. The open window carries the sound of the ocean up to them. For all Hawkeye knows, he and BJ could be the only living things in Crabapple Cove, maybe even the whole world. The birds are quiet yet. Not even the crickets have it in them to chirp. All there is left is BJ and Hawkeye and a love that, without even realizing it, he stopped seeing as a blocked path. 

“So what do we do now? Where do we go?” He asks, not expecting much of an answer.

“Come to California with me,” BJ says, like crossing the country is the easiest thing in the world. And maybe it is.

“Okay,” he agrees.

Hawkeye thinks of dream-Margaret-who-is-not-his-Margaret listening for the echo of a lost heart. He thinks of dream-Trapper-who-is-not-his-Trapper with his bare, bloodslicked hands rummaging around in Hawkeye’s chest cavity like a dusty old attic. He thinks of Trapper, who never wrote once he got back stateside and who, for all he knows, thinks Hawkeye died. He thinks of Margaret rolling up the carpet and pulling the shades so she and Helen can dance in their living room. He thinks of Caryle and Tommy, whom he never expected to see again. And then he thinks of BJ, the only person who came back to him on purpose. 

He reaches over and grabs BJ’s arm, wrapping it around his own tabescent body. "Tell me about California. Where do we start?"

Automatically, BJ adjusts so that they’re tucked neatly against each other. Head against shoulder, back against chest. It has no right to be so familiar. There was only that one other time, when they were too tired to make it back to the Swamp, still shaking from having to pick through shards of shattered ribs for a kid who should have been pronounced DOA. They barely got out of their scrubs before collapsing on the nearest flat surface, arms locked around each other. Everything else disappeared in that country; who could say one of them wouldn’t be next?

Nobody ever said a word about it. If Truman and MacArthur rolled up to camp for a surprise inspection, Hawkeye doubts that anyone would have breathed a word, even then. Another one of those exceptional circumstances in the face of war.

There is a discordant note in his voice when BJ asks, "How much time do we have?" Something like panic.

"All the time in the world.”

If BJ is to be believed (and Hawkeye wants to believe him very much), and if there is a heaven in this world or any other, it is very much like San Francisco. They start at the airport, of course ( "No offence, Hawk, but I don't have room on the back of the bike for you and clean clothes." "We would kill each other if he tried to drive across the country together," Hawkeye agrees ). So, the airport. Peg and Erin will meet them there, right on the tarmac, with a cheesy handmade sign. From there, they’ll drive through the city with the windows down so Hawkeye can hang his head out the window and harangue Californians about what passes for driving on the West Coast. Ray will come by in the evening to say hello; she plays oboe for the San Francisco Opera, and her busy season is starting soon ( “I don’t understand it much if I’m being honest, but Peg took me to Pagliacci, and I cried through the entire second act. Half the time, I didn’t even know why I was crying.” ). They’ll have one picnic in Alamo Square Park to watch the sunset over the painted ladies and another where they can watch cars try to navigate Lombard Street, awarding points for whichever ones hit the curb or one another. The zoo is an obvious must-do with a small child in tow. Erin will insist on dragging Hawkeye by the hand to see the elephants, whom she knows all by name, thanks to every second weekend spent pestering the zookeepers. They could spend a month in museums alone and still probably miss out on some gallery or historic house, but the aquarium is a good place to start (“ Jellyfish give me the heebie-jeebies ”), or the planetariums ( “I’ll only wake you up if you start to snore.” “I do not snore" ). Walking across the Golden Gate on a clear day to see those cherry-red cables stretch over the bay, then coming back when it’s foggy, clutching each other’s hands to not get lost. BJ will take a picture of him staring up at the redwoods in Muir Woods, craning his head back until it can’t go any farther and still unable to see the tops of the trees. The house at Stinton Beach has high ceilings and smells like eucalyptus, and the only operations that have ever occurred involve cardboard boxes. It’s right on the water, too, so the salt ground into their clothes from the Atlantic won’t even have time to wash out. They can alternate taking turns cooking dinner ( “I can make at least 10 different meals now,” BJ brags) and washing dishes side by side, singing along to the radio. And in the evenings, they can get someone to watch over Erin and go out dancing. Hawkeye and BJ, and Peg and Ray. There are places on Polk Street, little hole-in-the-wall dives where there’s hardly room to breathe, and cabarets with unmarked doors (“ places for people like us,” the truth coming out of BJ in a whoosh, “ I didn’t think they even existed” )

The last thing Hawkeye remembers before he slips back into blissful unconsciousness is moonlight painting the whole room silver as BJ’s thumb rubs circles over his own.

“You make us sound like a nice little family,” he mumbles, too tired to keep his eyes open. 

BJ’s smile is audible when he says, “Yeah. A nice little family.”

Chapter Text

Hawkeye sleeps deep and dreamless and, when he wakes, finds his nose cradled in the hollow between BJ’s clavicles, one of his knees hooked halfway up BJ’s thigh. Good dream , he thinks groggily. Much better than the first one. Maybe he can stay here for a few moments longer. There is stubble on BJ’s throat, reddened like someone’s been nuzzling into his neck. I put that there , Hawkeye thinks. He blinks at the red along the hinge of BJ’s jaw, then rubs the sleep from his eyes.

“Good morning ,” he mumbles to himself. He carefully extracts his leg from BJ’s thigh but keeps his hands at the collar of BJ’s red sweatshirt. The one with the cut-off sleeves that used to be grey until he painted the whole camp red so he could see Hawkeye's smile. It smells like peppermint soap, sweat, and fresh air. 

“Good morning to you too,” BJ says, the words warm against Hawkeye’s hair; the sound puts a rumble in Hawkeye's chest. His voice is quiet and fond, like he’s been awake for ages but was afraid to move if it disturbed Hawkeye, happy to cling to him for a moment longer.

“Were you watching me sleep? Creep.” Hawkeye accuses

“I had a nice view.”

Hawkeye fiddles with the hem of BJ’s red sweatshirt. “I didn't think you'd want to keep a piece of the army with you, let alone part of the uniform Mr. Chuck Taylors in Surgery."

“Well, you're wrong. It's not a piece of the army, it's a part of you."

"Were my socks not good enough?"

"Do you want them back?"

" Do I want them back he says. Of course, I don't want them back, your big feet stretched them all out!" Hawkeye scolds. Then, his voice goes almost embarrassingly gentle. “You know, that party might just have been the nicest thing anyone has ever done for me.”

"I'll do it again if you want. Get the whole gang together and tell them that the theme is blue or purple or chartreuse. It will be like old times again."

"No, it won't." Too many things are different now. Many of them for the better, but not all.

A pause. Hawkeye taps on BJ’s hands, locked tight around his midsection. “Unhand me, villain.” And Hawkeye lets out an involuntary shiver at the loss of warmth.

They stare at each other for a long time, unwilling to speak. There are fine lines at the corners of BJ’s eyes, and strands of silver shot through his hair where it waves above his ears. They both look so much older than they would have if not for the draft, and sometimes Hawkeye can't help but wonder how BJ would look if they met under normal circumstances and whether he would still love him. The war got her teeth in them, but not all the way. The mid-morning summer light that creeps under the shades is a vibrant gold, the ochre of an overexposed photograph.

“Why are you here?”

“In your bed? You asked me to stay.”

Just for that, Hawkeye kicks him in the shin. “In Maine, you menace.”

BJ blinks in confusion. “Because I’m in love with you,” he says slowly, carefully, as though he's practiced saying this in front of a mirror, said it a million quiet times to himself, but is not yet used to letting himself be heard. The words are not a revelation, not anymore, but the invocation of them is.

Hawkeye understands what all those dead poets mean when they say they go into raptures over their beloveds. He is floating five feet above his body, looking down on himself like a butterfly behind glass. At the same time, he has never been more in his body than this moment. He feels everything, the tickle of wind from the open window, BJ's breath against his cheek, the crumpled brush of fabric under his side, the low groan of the mattress with the weight of two grown men atop it, the staccato thud-THUD-thud of his pulse in his throat and his wrist, and his chest, and the whole room—nay the world nestled carefully in the unstoppable ventricles of his heart.

 "Say that again, will you?" he whispers.

“I said I love you." BJ smiles. "I thought it was obvious."

“If it was obvious, you should have opened with it." Hawkeye swats him in the chest. " Hiya Hawk, lovely weather you have out here. By the way, I thought you should know that  I'm madly in love with you. I drove 3400 miles to tell you. See how easy that was?"

BJ chuckles. “Three thousand, four hundred, and forty-five miles, to be precise. The driving of which, I thought, would be answer enough.”

“You should have said something before I spent the past two weeks worrying that you were having some sort of midlife crisis or psychotic break. Why didn’t you say something?”

“Every time I tried, I got scared.”

"Of what?"

"Of saying it out loud, of rejection, of ruining everything. Take your pick." 

"Would you give me a moment, dearest Beej?"

"I'll give you a few."

Hawkeye rolls out of bed like a deadweight and scuttles out of the room. "Where am I going?" He mutters, "This is my house." 

God, all the screenwriters in Hollywood couldn't write a screwball like this. Hawkeye almost wants to bemoan all the time they wasted by dancing around one another, loving each other in silence because they didn't believe they could speak it, but then again, it wasn't wasted. Not really. Not one moment of friendship can ever be called wasted, even that which fades and flickers or falls apart. The same love was there; it merely went by a different name.

Hawkeye takes the stairs two at a time, not wanting to waste a moment while BJ is kissable and warm in bed. He bounds into the kitchen, shakes one pill from the bottle of lithium, and tilts his head to drink from the kitchen sink. "BJ is in love with me," he announces smugly. 

From the table, his father raises an eyebrow over the Courier . “Uh-huh.”

Hawkeye groans. “You could at least try and act surprised.”

Daniel laughs softly. “Tell me again, and I'll try and act surprised this time. Seems like everyone knew but you. Water is wet, the sun rises in the east, and BJ is stupid in love with you. Such are the facts of life.” He takes a long sip from his mug and stares at the lupines blowing lazily in the breeze. “It looks like a beautiful day for a walk." With that, he leaves his empty mug in the sink and departs the kitchen, but not without tugging at Hawkeye’s shoulder to press a kiss to his hair.

“When you want to start the day, can you tell your man I need help with the shingles? He’s the only one tall enough.” The front door shuts before Hawkeye can answer.

Hawkeye waits in the kitchen, the water still running. He has, he realizes at once, all the time in the world. BJ will wait a couple minutes, will wait a year if it means a dozen spent together,

Hawkeye thinks about how Margaret lit up like a comet when she first talked about Helen. He thinks about little Erin Hunnicutt colouring a picture with two mommies and BJ on the side, waiting for someone to take ahold of his empty hands. Hawkeye thinks about BJ in that Utah rest station, sobbing into his palm but refusing to turn back. He thinks of the letter Klinger sent with— finally —a Toledo postmark saying he wants to open up a clothing store so he can put a little bit of beauty back into the world that has tried so hard to rob them of it. He thinks, most of all, of how stupid he’s been. How selfish and stubborn he is! How accustomed he became to his own suffering that he almost began to love it, like how a beat dog loves its master because it doesn’t know any other option.

People left him so often that it seemed impossible for anyone to return. Except BJ did. BJ came back and must have counted each of those 3400 miles like a heartbeat, and Hawkeye should have known from the second he opened the door that this was more than two old war buddies catching up.

This is how he thought it was: Nothing created during war can exist without alteration during peace. Or, in simpler terms, the Death Machine (which is all that war really is) destroys everything not in its image. It takes, and it takes, and it takes, and when you're inside, the only way to keep your head is to latch on to everyone else trapped in there with you. That's why you want to keep the people but not the war; that's why Hawkeye fell in love three times because it was the only thing that kept him alive. The past is ancient history on the front, an alternate history where you worried about trivial things like oil changes and grocery prices. And the future? Best not to think about the future. The Death Machine knows when your hopes are up and strikes before you can make them real. That's why Henry Blake's plane was shot down before he could meet his infant son. That's why things were never going to work with Kyung Soon. The Death Machine is fueled by hope. Hope that the war will be over in time to kiss your loved ones at midnight, that your side will win, and that you're doing the right thing, convincing yourself that war is justified so long as the good guys are on your side. It takes that hope and sustains itself on the dreams of the people it chews up and spits out. What you have is the present, the here and now, and the people who are with you here and now.

So, you're in the Death Machine, and you meet someone also in the Death Machine (a man walks into the Death Machine, etc.), and you know that the Death Machine will not let you leave intact, and you know that you are clinging to each other as a means of forgetting that you are, in fact, trapped in the Death Machine and that your clinging together makes the Death Machine bearable if not livable, which is what it needs to continue existing as the Death Machine.

You force yourself to accept that the Death Machine will destroy everything outside of it. And everyone you leave outside the Death Machine is safe until they return to your orbit. Tommy left you in a coffin, Carlye left with another man’s ring on her finger, and honestly, you still aren’t sure which one was worse. But here’s the catch—here’s the knife in your gut: the Death Machine will let you go, but it will only let you go alone. Everyone you know and love inside the Death Machine, you know and love because you have no choice, and once you get out, all of you will slot yourselves back into your pre-Death Machine lives, embrace your pre-Death Machine loved ones, and wonder how you ever survived without them. When you meet your friends from the Death Machine one year, two years, or ten years after the fact, you will wonder how you ever thought you wouldn’t be able to survive. The ties that were once the only thing grounding you to this scorched earth will start to fray before they snap entirely, and you will forget to say one final goodbye because you assume you already did.

And yet, Hawkeye got out. He got out, and BJ got out, and it took them a little while to find each other in civilian life, but they made it. In a few days, when he can think straight again, Hawkeye will write a letter to Margaret saying, Did you know— and she will write back saying, Yes, of course, I know . And in a few more days, because it’s easier to measure in days now rather than weeks, it will be one year since the bus, and Hawkeye will still be alive. And a few more days after that, it will be one year since the war—one year since he touched BJ for what he thought would be the last time. And the years will keep falling like cherry blossoms in spring, and not all of them will be easy, but if he can survive this first year post-MASH, Hawkeye thinks that maybe he will survive the whole world.

For the first time (surprisingly), he imagines BJ dragging 136 rocks up the hill to the helipad. He would have had to do it quietly so nobody would overhear and ask him what he was doing. He imagines BJ crouching in the dead of night, arranging those rocks so they spell out GOODBYE, imagines him bleary-eyed and sore the next day, with a tightness in his shoulders and a muscle pulled in his lower back that persisted even when he was back in his own home, in his own proper bed, with his own family, which reminded him of Hawkeye.

My man , he thinks dopily. He brushes his teeth quickly, only five times per tooth, and remembers BJ calling him obsessive. What sort of man looks at his bunkmate’s mouth long enough to track his dental habits without wanting to kiss him?

Hawkeye leans against the doorway and stares at BJ, sitting primly against the headboard. And, in his hands, the familiar blue, white, and black cover of The Charioteer . True to his word, he has it open to the final page. Hawkeye watches quietly the almost imperceptible motion of BJ’s eyes reading the last few lines of the book before furrowing his brow and flipping back to the first page. He looks so comfortable, so firmly settled, and Hawkeye feels bad about interrupting him (it’s one hell of a book) but feels reassured that there will be other mornings like this. There will be more mornings where they will wake up half-dressed and rumpled, undressed, fully dressed in matching pyjama sets, nights where they sit side by side, reading paperbacks illuminated by matching lamps on either side of the bed, putting their books down at the same time, dog-earing the corners the same way, then sweet dreams, Beej , nighty-night, Hawk , kiss kiss, lights out. Maybe not forever. They might only have a few years, perhaps only a few months before the urge to cling grows claustrophobic. Or, it could be forever. If they want it to be. If they really try.

Hawk watches for a moment longer. Then he clears his throat. "You know, I was going to send that book to you because I couldn’t send a letter like a normal person.”

BJ looks up. "Yeah, is it any good?"

“You can take it back to California; copies aren’t exactly selling out around here. I didn’t know how you would take it. If I sent you a queer book in the mail after months of silence, I mean."

Hawkeye crosses the room and takes the book from BJ. Funny, he doesn't even remember having it on his nightstand. He looks down at BJ, desperate to have something in his hands, before settling beside him on the bed. "Mostly, I wanted to send it after you sent me those Wilfred Owen poems. I mean, Beej, what the fuck? I thought you were playing one of your fucked-up little mind games starring those love poems. I thought this was another joke or that you were the most oblivious man on the planet."

"You thought I'd send you love poetry as a joke?" BJ looks genuinely stricken. 

Hawkeye stares at him. “You did your best impression of Charles Boyer in Gaslight because you were jealous of Trapper! I slept with a golf club surrounded by barbed wire because of one of your jokes. I ended up half-naked on a table, serenading you with You’re the Top —”

“Tabletop serenades of Cole Porter do seem to be a running theme with you."

“I refuse to dignify that with a response. The point is that up until about 12 hours ago, I thought your whole cross-country jaunt was going to end with some type of gotcha.”

"I was trying to figure things out. When you didn't write to me, I thought you had no space left in your life for me. I was sending you all these letters and only ever heard back from you through Peg."

“The last time I saw you, you wouldn’t shut up about your wife and baby!”

BJ holds up his hands in defence. “The last time you saw me, I still somehow thought I was straight! I told you, it took me a while. I had all this love for you, and I didn’t know where to put it or what to do with it. I didn't know I could love you like this. Hell, I didn't know I could love anyone like this.”

“When did you, uh, when did it start?”

“ On the first hour of my first day/In the front trench I fell/Children in boxes at a play/Stand up to watch it well, ” BJ quotes.

“Rudyard Kipling.”

“That’s the ticket.”

“Beej, that was the first time we met,” Hawkeye scolds.

BJ nods. “I know.”

“And here I thought I was easy. You need to get higher standards.” But even as he says it, Hawkeye swings a leg over BJ's lap and settles there, his hands absentmindedly running over the fine hairs at the nape of BJ's neck.

BJ stares at him with heavy-lidded awe, like he cannot believe his luck. His arms lock around Hawkeye's back. This is the kitchen dance all over again. God, they should have kissed then. They should have kissed in the O Club and on the helipad. He should have kissed BJ goodbye instead of Margaret. They were all going home anyway; who would have given a fuck? The second BJ showed up on his doorstep, Hawkeye should have pulled him inside and taken him to bed. Let him explain everything later.

“You know my head is fucked," Hawkeye warns.

“Mine too.”

“And I look like shit.”

“I think you look perfect.”

“We would drive each other crazy.”

“We already do.”

"And here I was thinking you were afraid of heights ," Hawkeye whispers, putting as much double entendre behind the last word as he can manage. One last out for BJ if he needs it.

"Not anymore." BJ chuckles.

"Freud would say that has something to do with sex," Hawkeye says with a lascivious grin. He bats his eyelashes to hammer home the point.

"With tall men? I think I'll take my chances."

Hawkeye laughs so hard that he nearly slides off BJ's lap, off the bed entirely. BJ's hand at his waistband saves him from tumbling to the floor. “You really love me,” Hawkeye says one final time.

"I really do,” BJ promises. “Oh god, I love you so bad.”

“That’s—that’s great, Beej, because I love you too."

"Did you know," BJ says conversationally, his mouth against Hawkeye's cheek, his hands under Hawkeye's shirt, "that your eyes have a little bit of grey in them?"

Hawkeye tilts his head back, matching BJ's tone. "Have you been staring into my eyes, Hunnicutt? Did you know that your mouth is about to have my tongue in it in a second?"

"You have no idea how relieved I am to hear that," BJ laughs. "I thought I drove all the way across the country to get rejected."

They laugh together, and then, "Hawk," BJ whispers, like a spell, like a wish. And BJ takes a deep, shaky breath like he’s about to dive underwater—