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It’s late. It’s so late. Your body is exhausted but your brain refuses to let you settle down. Something about the need to potentially wake at any time for surgery has unsurprisingly made it so you are unable to sleep at most times. This is how you find yourself in your nightly ritual of trying to work a little of that energy out physically. Nothing like you used to in college—no big football games, no long practice sessions with the guys. You’re afraid your body would shatter if you did that again, as nice as it would be. No, instead you’re slowly wandering the compound, hands in your pockets and head up, faced towards the stars as you try to figure it all out.
Maybe you apologize to Hawkeye. Maybe you leave it. Maybe you just check in on Hawk, see how he’s doing. Play it by ear a little. The events of the day had not been the best. Not the worst, but not the best. Hawk had spiraled out and yelled at one of your patients. You’d lectured him on that earlier, sure. But now, you’re not really sure how to feel. More than anything, are you sure you want to encourage Hawk to repress his feelings more? Surely you’ve done enough of that for the two of you. That’s what has you wandering the camp aimlessly, walking in the night trying to bring things together in your head.
Thank god for your wandering mind and body, because in your nighttime ambling, you’re able to catch a glimpse of the movement of two men in the Swamp. Two men? Charles couldn’t be in there, you just saw him headed away from the Swamp a bit ago, but you can identify Hawk easily. His gangly frame is easy to spot as he faces a second man who you can’t quite make out.
Hawk holds up some sort of case like a shield between his body and the other’s body and your brain starts to spark like a downed power line. Then you see the other man lift something up and bring it down towards Hawk and... Ah. You’re in it. You’re in the moment and your adrenaline spikes and before you can even think it, you’re running, full sprint slamming into the Swamp.
You dig your heels into the floor, lower your center of gravity, ground yourself to become stronger as you grab the other man. Get the weapon out of his hand. The broken cane clatters pathetically to the ground.
You know this guy. You know exactly who he is. Your patient. The one who Hawk yelled at. The one you are now yelling at as your brain is screaming to kill, to obliterate, to destroy.
“Basgall! What the hell do you think you’re doing? I oughta break your neck!”
Your body is panicking. Your brain is focused on one thing and that’s protecting Hawk by hurting this man, by scaring him into submission. Your heart rate is up and your muscles feel good… real good. It’s been a while since you got to get your heart rate up this way. Like you used to.
On a mental level, there is some peace to be found in your old contact habits. Playing football was the only place you could channel your less than savory feelings (all of them) to save yourself from exploding. You have found ways to cope since then, but nothing is as good as this. Nothing is as good as hitting a man, intimidating a man, letting your pent up feelings wash into him. It’s what the others did to you; would you hold back on them?
“Beej, Hold it! Hold it!” and like a zap through your shoulder you can feel Hawkeye’s hands as he attempts to pull you back, to fix whatever you’ve fucking done. What have you done? Just like that, you realize where you are—what you’re doing.
You massive fuck up. Deflect. Fucking fix this. Don’t put this on Hawkeye.
You attempt to apologize as an uncomfortably familiar yet different, less physical sort of panic sets in. The adrenaline is wearing off and you’re no longer in the safe spike of fight. You’re crashing into the dry sort of dread—the type you feel in your chest, making your body hollow as your mind gleefully tells you precisely how you’ll be punished for what you’ve done. Before you can fully work the knot out and escape the feeling, Hawkeye is calling someone over to take Basgall away, quickly leaving the two of you alone in the Swamp.
Blaming Hawk for losing his temper was easy. When your emotions threatened to spill over in California, you’d slam into other men enough that your muscles burned and ached, dragging you back from the edge of feeling anything. Here, you get mad and you run for an hour, the full body ache bringing you away from your emotions and back to the acceptable version of yourself. It took a physical sensation to pull you out of the feeling. You had figured it out! You spent your time taming your tempers; why didn’t Hawkeye?
But then. Here you are, just barely dragged away from the cusp of violence by Hawk’s hands. Blaming Hawkeye for his temper now feels a hell of a lot harder. Maybe you weren’t as good as you thought you were. You aren’t as good as you thought you were. You know that for sure now.
That’s what it is, then, that crackles in your brain when all is said and done. After your hands grasped Basgall’s clothes. After you screamed at him. That was your fucking patient. Not your teammate.
But didn’t it feel good? Didn’t it feel so good to almost hurt someone? To almost hurt yourself?
Shame on you.
You can sense it. Hawk rests his arm on the shelf behind him. Not moving. Letting you set the energy. You’d almost say he was relaxed next to how wired you are right now. Which… surely can’t be the case; he must just be keeping it together, keeping it in like you had pressured him to do earlier. The idea makes your brain spin out. How the fuck are you more affected by the attack than Hawk, in the aftermath?
The silence stretches thinner by the second.
You let out a deep exhale, your body still coming down from the high of fear and anger and hate and whatever else was lurking inside you. A tear threatens to spill from your eye. Wipe your face. Shift attention away from yourself. Lighten the mood. Anything.
“Well” — you feel trapped in the moment, all too aware of the now, and you just barely register your mouth moving as you try to make a joke of your instincts — “I notice I don’t practice what I preach.”
“Yeah, and thank you.”
You got scared. You did the right thing.
But also the wrong thing.
And it felt so good. You missed protecting someone physically. Besides, what if you hadn’t been there? What would Hawk have done? What if he was all alone when he needed you? You cast away the thought. You were there this time, if nothing else. At least you didn’t fuck that up.
You can feel yourself start to tremble, just a little. Get it together, BJ. Fucking pull yourself together. Tears threaten you again and one arm hangs limply as you start to nervously grab it with your other hand, folding your body into itself.
There. Dig your fingernails into the flesh. The small but sharp pain becomes a focus. Adrenaline is starting to fade. You didn’t push yourself enough to ache and you feel saddened at the loss of opportunity for feeling. Nothing else to focus on other than the usual general weariness of standing for as long as you do every day.
So, you turn and you sit on the nearest cot. Hawkeye’s, to be precise. Your breathing is ragged and occasionally you’ll take a sharp inhale you can’t help and you’re fighting back the all too real possibility of tears but god. You’re trying, huh?
If you sit perfectly still, undisturbed, you can pull yourself together enough to help Hawk. You don’t need to discuss your side of this. No one needs to know. It’s not about you. It can’t be. You’d die if it was.
You can do it. You can pull yourself through. You’ll find a new thread to pull. Your mind is drawn to Hawk’s lurid fantasies he’ll spin for you sometimes, the steady sound of his knitting needles clicking together as he regales you with some story. You can do that too. You think.
In this fantasy, you’re not the one panicking. No one’s said you’re panicking, who would? You have it together. Instead, it’s Hawkeye who’s panicking. You’ve threatened the guy and you’ve sent him on his way and now you’re looking at Hawkeye who’s misty-eyed and blustery.
(A tear threatens to spill down your face once more. Wipe your cheeks. Fix the uneven breathing. You can feel the heat of Hawk’s gaze on your face and it doesn’t matter, it's fine.)
“Oh Hawk…” you croon. Your voice sounds so tender and masculine. Everything you could want. Everything he could want. Fantasy you moves confidently as you move from your position to cover his hand with yours. In this dream, he’s positioned just like you. Well… not just like you. That would make this about you, and it’s not. It’s about him. His hand on his arm. Not yours. Nails digging painfully into the skin. Would he do that? Is it out of character? It’s your fantasy, you tell yourself. You grab his trembling hand, because of course you do, prying it from his arm, small indents remaining on his skin.
He’s looking into the distance. You’re holding his hand in both of yours. You know he can sense your gaze on his face and it burns and burns—not in a good way—and his breath hitches as the tears begin to spill.
You know this to all be true. Not from experience. Because you’d never cry like that, you think, even as you can feel a real tear roll down your face through the haze.
He’s so scared.
You’re not.
You’re holding his hand, and when you hold his hand, it’s for his sake. Not yours. You don’t need it. He does. You’re helping him.
You open your eyes slightly (when had they closed?) and Hawkeye’s got that sharp look. Like he wants to crack your chitinous shell and see what’s going on underneath, slinking through your guts to see how you’re strung together. He sees your eyes open and his eyes dart to yours. You freeze there a moment. Just staring.
It’s for him, it’s not for me. It’s for him, it’s not for me. Your mind begs you to make this true.
As you squirm slightly under his gaze, your breath still coming out wrong and too fast and everything is still too much and–
You break eye contact, opting to stare through the tent flaps into the night sky and you thankfully think about Hawk’s knitting needles clacking together as he spins you a fantasy and you remember again.
You slip out of the now and back into what could be.
You’d like to be rubbing soothing circles into his hand with your thumb. And you’d like to turn that into a hug as you hold him as he sobs. And you’d like it if you could hold him close and gently sway, and even though you’d like that, even though it would be great for you, it wouldn’t be about you because it would be about him and–
“Beej.” Hawkeye is staring at you, concern continuing to cloud his face. Thankfully, the fantasy was scored so beautifully, the camera work so deftly directed, that you’ve all but collected yourself. You relax your arms, fingernail indents in your skin just barely noticeable in the low light of the Swamp, and maybe you’re still panicking a little, but it’s fine. You’ve pushed it back to your livable, abysmal ideal.
“Beej, you’ve gotta give me something to work with here.” Hawk’s voice is tired and his tone is weary, but he’s here. Hawkeye’s sitting next to you. You didn’t see it happen, you didn’t feel it happen, but as he speaks you can feel his thigh next to yours, not touching but close enough you swear you can feel the warmth.
“What’s going on up there, Beej?”
He’s still looking at you. You can feel his gaze on you as you avoid his eyes, his shoulder knocking into yours. You cherish what little of his warmth you can feel.
The rush of adrenaline is finally abating. Your muscles feel impossibly heavy. You want to crawl into a hole and lick your wounds.
“It’s just…” you mumble. You rub your hands down your face, trying to unscrunch your feelings. You’re too aware of yourself for how little you want to be here, be now. You don’t want him to know what’s boiling inside you.
You don’t know what part of yourself makes you keep going, but you hate it. “You’re supposed to need me, Hawk. I’m not supposed to…”
You want out of the moment again, so you drag yourself back into your fantasy. Your brain finally solved it, a beautiful final shot, a real stunner. The strings swell. The camera pulls back. The crickets chirp and the stage is set perfectly and slowly, slowly, in the low lamplight of Korea, two men sway gently to some unheard music, hands rubbing soothing circles into each other's skin. They tell stories to themselves about what it all means.
It’s beautiful.
So beautiful, in fact, that you don’t immediately clock when Hawkeye leans closer to you, slipping his arm around your waist. You only jolt back into the now when he wearily sighs as he nuzzles his head into your shoulder.
“I’m scared too Beej. It’s fine. We’re all scared.”
In that moment, you realize he knows. He’s always known.
He lifts his head slightly from your shoulder, looking at you, thoughts rising to his mouth as he uses his free hand to do hand gestures that help the ideas come out clearly, “This isn’t Lone Ranger or some TV show where everything gets wrapped up neatly, gun smoking and criminals locked up safely in jail Beej. You just have to constantly weave around people and see where they’re at and I guessed wrong. I guessed he wouldn’t try to hurt me. You guessed the same thing and here we are.”
Hawk stays silent for a second, staring off into the distance, before squeezing your torso reassuringly, “Two miserable peas in a pod, huh? It’s all the same. I don't know if either of us would make a good Tonto so it works out in the end, eh kemosabe?”
He lowers his head back onto your shoulder but this time he seems contented, his body softening once more into yours.
In the beautiful present, in the now, you can hear the strings swelling, the camera pulling back as you lean into him. There’s no fantasy necessary as you relax your body into his, muscle tension easing as you slip back into awareness. You place your hand on his knee and rub soothing circles with your thumb. It’s as much as you can hold each other in the here and now.
You’d always figured your fantasies were just that: fantasies. Things dreamed up by others, written and sung and painted and made in all other manner of creation. At the end of the day, they weren’t meant for you. They were never meant for people like you.
But just this once, in the low lamplight, it feels like they could be made for you. And maybe if you’re lucky, they could be made for the both of you.
And so you spend your time, pressed together, fantasizing about the now as if it weren’t real.