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Hawkeye is the last to leave the scrub room, twenty-six hours after he first went in.
Walking past the door to the OR he sees movement through the window and, wondering which unlucky bastards drew the short straw for cleanup duty immediately after coming off shift as ad hoc nurses, Hawkeye peeks through the window. The first person he sees is Father Mulcahy. He’s standing over the second operating table from the end of the row, head bowed, lips moving in silent prayer.
“You must be even more exhausted than I am, Father,” Hawkeye says, pushing through the door. “You realize you’re praying to an empty bed? Oh wait, don’t tell me – it’s the holy ghost. Right?”
Mulcahy looks up, face gray and expression bleak, and meets his eyes over the table. It is, in fact, the table where they had worked together on a patient who didn’t make it. Unfortunately it’s also a fact that returns to Hawkeye just a beat too late for him shove his blasphemous little witticism back behind his teeth. The sound of the corpsmen’s heavy footfalls and water sloshing in mop buckets fades into the background until it feels like they’re alone there in the OR, standing on either side of the table like they’ve just said grace and now they’re about to sit down and share a meal. It’s the worst of that kind of gruesome imagery that always comes to him when he’s this dog-tired.
“Hawkeye,” Mulcahy says at last, his voice scraped raw. “I must confess, I feel…responsible. For what happened to that boy. If you’d had a real assistant—”
“Oh no, Father, none of that. I had a real assistant – you. Don’t argue with me, I’m very tired and liable to make sense.”
Mulcahy had dropped his eyes, now he looks up at Hawkeye again, questioning. Hawk drags his hand over his face, two-day beard rasping beneath his palm, and tells him, “As it turns out, ’Doctor’ is also a verb. And occasionally it means letting go. We all lose patients sometimes, and once they’re lost, we can’t go after them.”
He intends the words as comfort, after all it’s the phrase he’s kept on repeat in his own brain since the day his boots hit Korean soil, but they seem to have the opposite effect on the priest; as Hawkeye watches, he seems to be turning the corner from upset to distressed.
“Come on,” Hawkeye says, walking around the table at last to take Mulcahy by the arm. “Let’s get out of here. Our job in this particular room is over for now, okay?”
He pulls the cap off Mulcahy’s head and the mask from around his neck and then helps him scrub out, gently but meticulously removing all traces of blood from the priest’s skin, returning him to his natural pristine condition before they sit, knee to knee, in the changing room.
“I suppose I need to remember that you weren’t trained to handle such abrupt departures,” Hawkeye says to break the silence, nudging him with his boot. “In your profession, even when someone gets lost they aren’t really gone, but unfortunately there aren’t too many prodigal patients around here. Once they’re lost, they’re out of our hands. You don’t have to like it but you do have to accept it, otherwise you’re just sucking around for a one-way ticket to the bug house.”
Mulcahy’s eyes are a crystalline blue, shining in the impersonal overhead light. He makes the cramped little space feel like a cathedral, his voice carrying the gravitas of a pipe organ. “Do you accept that, Hawkeye?”
He makes Hawkeye feel like a very little boy, whispering up to the stars that he will be so, so good, will never tell another fib or shirk another chore or be anything but the very, very best – if only his mother will come home. “I have to,” he whispers now. “I have to believe it.”
“That doesn’t mean that you do.”
“No.”
Across from him, Mulcahy rests his arms on his knees and leans forward, hanging his head. They’re sitting so close that his head butts up against Hawkeye’s arm. Hawkeye doesn’t move, stunned into stillness and silence by the unexpected intimacy of this one small point of contact, the rush disproportionate to where the brush of another man’s hair over his bare skin would normally fall on his personal sliding scale. Then again, and it’s all turned into a blur but this may be what he was just trying to tell the father…everything is a matter of perspective. He feels as warm, as stimulated, as expansive as if Mulcahy had leaned in and brushed their mouths together.
Hawkeye leans forward too. They each shift in silent renegotiation of their shared space until their temples are pressed together, and Hawkeye hears Mulcahy take in a quiet breath that sounds as stunned at Hawkeye feels. Slowly, as slowly as he’s ever done anything, he turns his face to nuzzle against the hair at Mulcahy’s temple, nosing through the strands, breathing him in. He feels a timid touch to the back of his hand and then Mulcahy is wrapping his fingers around his wrist. His hands are big and warm and dry and just a little rough. Hawkeye sucks in a breath like he’s about to be pushed underwater, and presses his open mouth to Mulcahy’s cheek.
“We shouldn’t,” Mulcahy whispers.
“We’re not,” Hawkeye murmurs in reply. “We’re not doing anything. You’re not doing anything wrong, Father.”
Mulcahy shudders, and the catch of stubble against Hawkeye’s lips is agony in its most sublime form.
“Hawkeye, please,” Mulcahy says, and his lips brush the corner of his mouth. “Please stop.”
All the breath leaves Hawkeye’s body as he sags forward, catching himself with his forearms on his knees, head hanging between his shoulders.
“I’m sorry,” Mulcahy whispers, solicitous. “I’m sorry, Hawkeye.”
“You didn’t do anything wrong.” He hears the way his own voice comes out, weary and flat. “You don’t have anything to be sorry for.”
“I do. I’m sorry for stopping you.” The hand at Hawkeye’s wrist moves up to his elbow, holding fast. “I didn’t want to stop you, but I need to say this. Hawkeye…I’m afraid you would never forgive yourself. I couldn’t bear to see you live with that remorse.”
“Forgive myself?” Hawk barks a laugh as he looks up, eyes darting all over Mulcahy’s face, pulling back. “I think you’ve got us confused, Father, I’m not in the business of asking for forgiveness, in fact I’m not sure I even believe in a god who would hold it over me who I manage to find a moment of happiness with, especially not here in this place where humankind have utterly failed to follow that one simple directive about loving thy neighbor. Don’t paint me with your own guilt, Father, I’m not the one looking for forgiveness here.”
“No, Hawkeye, you’re not. And for what it’s worth, I think it will – I know that it will be more than a ‘moment’ of happiness. I know you don’t think much of my God, but I also know that you wouldn’t be able to forgive yourself if you thought you were the one who finally coaxed me to break my promise to Him.”
Hawkeye stares at him, befuddled. “What are you saying? Are you, am I, what am I supposed to be, am I Judas in this analogy?”
“There’s no analogy, Hawkeye!” Mulcahy says, with more zest than Hawkeye’s heard him say anything since about halfway through that marathon surgery session. “How could you think – Judas? How could you think that?”
"Betrayed by a kiss, isn't that how it goes? I've heard the stories!" Hawkeye says, wanting to shout, barely finding the breath to whisper. “Was I supposed to think something else?”
“Yes,” Mulcahy’s voice drops, matching his. They’re right back where they started, sitting knee to knee, mirror images of one another. “You’re supposed to think, I would hope that you’d believe me when I say that this is not your fault. I can’t…ask you for what I’ve wanted to ask for so long, until I know that you understand that this, that I…”
“Are you saying I’m not the straw that broke your back?” Hawkeye asks into the floundering silence, and isn’t sure what to think of the crooked smile that tugs on Mulcahy’s lips in response.
“I’m saying that I don’t feel broken. Do you?”
“No,” Hawkeye says, starting to smile in turn, feeling a little helpless with it. “No, not broken, no. Maybe a little bent, but never broken.”
“That’s what I hoped you’d say.”
Voices in the next room over bring reality crashing back in, and Hawkeye lets go of Mulcahy’s hand almost before he realized that he’d taken hold of it.
“Come on,” he says, getting to his feet, jerking his head towards the door. “This is no place to talk about it, bent, broken, or otherwise. Let’s go…”
“Where?” Mulcahy asks after Hawkeye trails off, settling his Panama hat on his head. “Where can we go, Hawkeye?”
“Well,” Hawkeye drags the word, darting a glance over his shoulder as Mulcahy follows him to the door, trying not to grin. “I do know of a certain tent sitting lonely and abandoned right now…”
Mulcahy’s puzzled frown is transformed into a wide-eyed look of surprise that borders on awe as he whispers, “The nurses’ tent?” and then, just as Hawk is fighting back a heart attack at the thought of everything he wants to do to this man and his wide-eyed innocence, the cheekiest little smile that Hawkeye has ever seen comes creeping in through the blush. “Lead on, then. I’m told you know the way.”
Blackout conditions means the electric light outside post-op has been turned off and everything is calm and still and the darkness spreads out like the ocean around them as Hawkeye takes Father Mulcahy in his arms and, acting on the evidence of things not seen, lays a reverent kiss on his lips, the first of many.