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Max misses having Radar around at least once every forty-five minutes, but never for fervently or more frequently than in times like this. Radar was always good at the day-to-day business of being company clerk; until recently Max has been quite happy to be the port of last call when every avenue along the straight and narrow path was exhausted. Being the one expected to exhaust all those avenues before he can get to the business of actually solving an issue has been cramping his style.
Case in point: he and Hawkeye have struck out yet again in their pathetically polite quest to “borrow” enough penicillin from another MASH unit to tide them over until the laggards in charge of clearing the snow holding up the supply train get their asses in gear and do their jobs.
In his more charitable moments—and as a born-and-raised midwesterner—Max can admit that there is little point in shoveling a driveway with the snow still falling. So here they are in what could be termed a small blizzard, returning once again empty-handed to the 4077th, where Hawkeye will be welcomed back into the warm embrace of the Swamp to regale BJ with the saga of the 8063rd’s stingy clerk and Max will, once again, be ridiculed for his failure to do the impossible.
The hush of the falling snow outside the jeep only amplifies the tense silence within it. The silence is Max’s fault, although Hawkeye, too, has given up trying to make conversation by now, and Max knows he ought to break it. That’s what the Klinger of the old days before Radar left would have done. But Max’s life now feels sometimes like a series of small slights, and the prospect of a cold welcome home after such a cold drive has him taciturn and unwilling to engage even in advance of the inevitable disappointment.
Instead, he focuses on driving, white-knuckled on the steering wheel as he navigates the twisting backroads in visibility so appalling even a long-haul trucker would call it impassible. Again he curses Colonel Potter for insisting they try the official channels one last time before letting Max get to work on a real solution. Radar would have been on the phone making backroom deals from the jump and no one would have complained, but the rules are different for Max.
The silence is finally broken not by another of Hawkeye’s attempts at a tension-cutting joke, but by the regrettably familiar sound of an engine spluttering and the jeep slowly coasting to a stop. Just what Max needed to top off this fool’s errand: a stalled jeep in the middle of a snowstorm as night falls is honestly par for the course.
“Not exactly the time or place for a pit stop, Balto,” Hawkeye says with a nervous laugh. “I hear they have very nice bathrooms in Nome if you can make it there.”
Max doesn’t reward him with a responding laugh, nervous or otherwise.
“Mush, Klinger,” he mutters to himself as he clambers out of the jeep and makes his way around to the still-warm hood.
Hawkeye follows him outside, the fool. “What was that?”
“Nothing. Hold this open while I take a look so we can keep the snow out of the engine.”
“You’re in a terrible mood considering the circumstances,” Hawkeye says, obediently lifting the hood just enough to let Max duck beneath it. “Is it the prospect of cuddling with me for warmth? I promise not to get fresh.”
“It’s not you.” Max extricates himself from the jeep and unceremoniously slams the hood shut, ignoring Hawkeye’s yelp as he scrambles to get his fingers out of the way in time. The engine is fixable, but ten-to-one it will have cooled down too much by the time Max can fix it to start again anyway. They’re better off waiting until the morning and hoping the temperature will rise. “Looks like we’re cuddling up, Captain.”
Hawkeye, who always seems to wilt a bit when Max doesn’t follow along with one of his flirtatious tangents, rallies enough to answer with a rakish smile made slightly stiff by the cold. “Well, I usually prefer a more enthusiastic partner, but when in Nome.”
Max grits his teeth against any snippy reply that would, inevitably, only spur Hawkeye to new heights of needling and climbs back into the jeep. Hawkeye again follows, though not as eagerly as Max has seen him follow any number of nurses into the Swamp to “wait out” whatever flimsy excuse of a brewing storm—atmospheric or interpersonal—he has managed to lure them in with. Cuddling up with Max, it seems, is a matter of necessity more than pleasure.
The interior of the jeep is colder than it was mere minutes before when they settle back in, pressed hip-to-thigh in the back bench seat. The waterproof canvas top does little to keep heat in, and without the engine running to generate even that small bit of warmth the metal body is icy to the touch.
“Here,” Hawkeye says, leaning even further into Max’s space. He has unbuttoned and removed his winter parka and draped it around his shoulders like a cloak. “Take off your coat and drape it over us. We’ll have to hug for this to work, if you can stand to be that close to me.”
He’s tetchy; clearly he doesn’t believe that Max’s bad mood has nothing to do with him. Needling back won’t help anything.
“It’s hard to believe the nurses aren’t falling at your feet, with lines like that,” Max says anyway.
It’s the kind of thing BJ says when he and Hawkeye are at odds, which is probably the only reason Hawkeye listens. Either that, or he has finally cottoned on to the fact that there’s something bigger than just their failure at the 8063rd weighing on Max’s mind. He frowns to himself as he arranges the coats around them as best he can and gathers Max into a chilly embrace.
“Alright, what’s eating you? Sure, we might freeze to death, but then at least we’d be out of this army.”
“It might be hard to believe, but I’m not actually a beast of burden, Captain,” he says, taking some small pleasure in Hawkeye’s full-body wince. “Carry the bags, Klinger. Change the lightbulbs, Klinger. Pull the sled, Klinger. I wish Radar was still here too, but I’m company clerk whether everyone else likes it or not. And moreover I’m a human being with feelings, not a pack mule.”
Hawkeye shifts in place, bony wrists pressing against Max’s spine. How this man, who is so graceful in an operating theatre or a one-man dinner show, can be such a bag of bones when he’s trying to hug a person is a mystery for the ages. Max would mind it much more if he weren’t so cold and Hawkeye weren’t so warm.
“I didn’t mean it like—I was calling you a sled dog metaphorically, in a poetic sense. I know you’re good at your job,” he says, voice wavering as he vacillates between apologetic and defensive. “It was a joke, about, about the snow, and the penicillin, and since you were the one driving—”
“It wasn’t even penicillin. They had diphtheria.”
“I know.” Frustration briefly crowds out any apology Hawkeye might have been in the process of making, but he reins himself in. “I was just—never mind. Clearly it wasn’t my best joke. I’m sorry.”
“A low bar.”
Hawkeye lets the jab slide and pulls Max in closer. Max has the grimly amused thought that the way they’re holding each other makes this seem almost like a lover’s quarrel. Ironic, then, that Max is the last person on earth Hawkeye would willingly go to bed with.
“But you were in a bad mood before I said that. Before we left the camp.”
Max burrows deeper into Hawkeye’s warmth and presses his face against the scratchy canvas of Hawkeye’s fatigue jacket. There’s something pathetic, he thinks, about being trapped in a situation like this with Hawkeye Pierce, of all people, and knowing that nothing will come of it. Surely Hawkeye would prefer to be here with anyone else—Radar, even, if only because Radar wouldn’t have gotten them stuck in the snow in the first place.
“You’re everyone’s savior when it’s one of the nurses getting flak,” he says. “But when we get back to camp and everyone laughs at that dummy Klinger, getting stuck in a snowstorm, tell me you won’t laugh along.”
“I won’t,” Hawkeye says immediately.
“You always do.”
This time, Hawkeye doesn’t answer right away. Max feels a prick of guilt at having shaken him. This far into the war, Hawkeye’s ever-fraying sanity seems to depend entirely on maintaining his image of himself as he was at the beginning: the righteous idealist, lab-coated defender of the oppressed and the ridiculed alike. He is clinging to that image with his fingertips these days, and Max doesn’t really want to shake him.
He waits to see whether Hawkeye’s equilibrium will recover. And, truth be told, with Hawkeye’s nose buried in Max’s hair in an attempt to shield it from the cold and Hawkeye’s palms two points of welcome heat beneath Max’s shoulder blades, it’s hard to remain angry with him.
“I thought you didn’t mind the jokes,” Hawkeye says finally. The defensiveness of before is nowhere to be heard, but now he just sounds confused. “You flounce, and you make big speeches, and you come up with schemes to get back at us, and it always seemed… like it was a smokescreen. Like if they’re laughing, they aren’t looking closer.”
“Like you do,” Max says.
“I don’t care what people see when they look at me,” Hawkeye says, which is the biggest lie Max has ever heard. Hawkeye is more image-obsessed than BJ Hunnicutt; the only difference is that BJ knows it and Hawkeye doesn’t.
Max lifts his head to meet Hawkeye’s gaze in challenge. “Then tell me why you’re happy to sleep with Oliver or Trapper or BJ, but a man in a dress is a step too far.”
He intends it to be a defiant closing statement, a way to slam the door on a conversation he’s sick of having and, without Hawkeye’s knowledge, find closure once and for all on why, to Max’s eternal chagrin, Hawkeye seems interested in everyone except him.
But Hawkeye, contrary to every expectation of how he should react, just laughs.
“Klinger, you’re the most heterosexual person I’ve ever met. Why on earth would I try anything with you when I know you wouldn’t be interested?” His laughter tapers off into quiet chuckles and he adds, as if in defense of their virtue, “besides, I didn’t sleep with Ollie or BJ.”
No defense of Trapper’s virtue, Max can’t help but notice. Maybe Trapper hurt Hawkeye badly enough by not writing that he’s forfeited all right to Hawkeye’s protection. Out loud, he lets his incredulity override his good sense and says, “I wore dresses. For a year.”
“And BJ wears a pink shirt. That doesn’t mean anything.”
Max is fairly certain it does, in BJ’s case, even if he and Hawkeye aren’t cuddling after all. But he has enough to set Hawkeye straight on without adding that into the mix. “You never asked me if I did.”
“I thought it would be rude,” Hawkeye says. “A man should be allowed to wear dresses without having his taste in women questioned.”
The study of where Hawkeye’s scruples end and his blind spots begin could take a lifetime. But, when Max thinks about it, it all makes perfect sense. Hawkeye looked at Max and, like everyone else at the 4077th does, constructed his own idea of who Max was: the man in a dress, the Section Eight case, the court jester. And, like everyone else—no matter how much Hawkeye might protest to being different—he never bothered to look further.
It’s time he learned the error of his ways.
“I do like women,” Max says. “I just don’t like only women. What then?”
Hawkeye’s hands have drifted from Max’s ribcage to his waist, thumbs brushing his t-shirt just above his hipbones. Max is slightly alarmed to realize he didn’t even notice them moving. Hawkeye has this seduction thing down to an art, and Max is suddenly very out of his depth.
“Well,” Hawkeye says, pitching his voice lower and softer, the way he talks to nurses in the scrub room after long OR sessions just before whisking them off to the Swamp, “I did promise not to get fresh. But, since we’re already here, and you’re practically already in my lap, and we really don’t have any other way to pass the time…”
That’s what all those nurses are, for Hawkeye: passing the time. Max isn’t like that. He’s never wanted to sleep with someone he didn’t love with his whole heart and soul. But… they are already there. And what he feels for Hawkeye, though certainly not love, is more complicated than anyone who has never been at war could understand. For all Hawkeye’s flaws, he does see Max more clearly than anyone else ever has. It has to be worth seeing where that could lead.
“Go easy on me, Captain, I’m not used to strange men seducing me in cars,” he says.
Hawkeye laughs and, in a move so smooth it takes Max’s breath away, pulls Max into his lap without disturbing either of the coats. “Not that kind of girl, huh?”
“I’m saving myself for marriage.”
“You were married.”
“That one didn’t count; the connection kept cutting out while we said the I dos.”
Somehow, it’s easier to talk about Laverne without pain when he’s using the sham of their marriage to flirt with Hawkeye. It’s nice.
“Well, I’m not the marrying type, and I hate to string a woman along,” Hawkeye says, heaving an exaggeratedly woeful sigh. “If I said I’d let you escape with your virtue intact, what would that buy me?”
Max pretends to think. It isn’t hard to come up with an answer. “I guess I could be persuaded.”
“Then let me,” Hawkeye says, breath ghosting warm over Max’s lips, “be the first to persuade you.”
Max has not kissed very many people, and even fewer not counting Laverne, which Max no longer does. Hawkeye is undeterred by his hesitance, though, coaxing Max’s mouth slowly open with gentle, nipping kisses until Max becomes bold enough to begin kissing back, trading breath and quiet sounds even as their noses bump and the cold makes Max’s jaw ache within moments.
“Even the weather is telling me not to get fresh,” Hawkeye says mournfully, working his jaw to loosen it. “Slow it is, then.”
Max likes slow. He likes Hawkeye’s arms around him, bony though they are, and Hawkeye’s stubble scraping his own as Hawkeye presses kiss after drugging kiss to his lips. He thinks he could do this all night.
They do spend a fair amount of the night in exactly that manner, because sleep is dangerous in temperatures like this. Max is more than happy to while away the dark hours learning the feel of Hawkeye’s body beneath his, the way Hawkeye likes to be touched within the limited range of motion they have beneath their coats. Hawkeye sticks to his promise, but even so, by the time the sun rises Max’s lips are swollen and tingling.
“Hey, wait,” he says, struggling out of Hawkeye’s hold with stiff, clumsy limbs, “the sun’s out.”
Hawkeye, who has been dozing despite Max’s best efforts to keep him awake, yawns and reels Max back in. “It stopped snowing a few hours ago. I knew we’d be fine; I’m too hot to freeze to death.”
Max doesn’t dignify the pun with a response. He cranes his neck to look past the frost on the jeep’s plastic windows to the bright, sparkling world beyond. As he watches, a drop of water gathers on the tip of the nearest branch and falls to the ground—not much of a thaw, maybe, but a thaw nonetheless. And the sun is going to keep rising.
Sure, they don’t have any penicillin, and Potter will be beside himself with anger and worry at their having stayed out all night. But the worry will win out in the end and Potter will fold in the face of the evidence and let Max start making deals, and maybe once that’s all sorted Hawkeye will let Max come and find him and, maybe, kiss him again without the threat of hypothermia hanging over them.
“Someone up there must like me after all. For a while there I was worried I was going to die a virgin,” he says, and he isn’t surprised at all now when Hawkeye kisses the laughter off his lips.
“I could have fixed that for you.” Hawkeye pauses. “Or maybe not. I don’t think I’ve ever been that cold in my life; it wouldn’t have been my best showing.”
“What a loss to camp morale it would have been if you’d gotten frostbite,” Max says.
Hawkeye winces. “Perish the thought. I’d be no good to anyone like that.”
Hawkeye is, to Max, more than his skill in bed, more than just a way to pass the time. Maybe Hawkeye doesn't feel the same way about Max, it's true. But it matters more that Hawkeye sees him now, and that maybe, going forward, Max might have someone in his corner.
If he can get them home in one piece.
“Help me clear the snow off the hood,” he says, fixing Hawkeye with a stern look, “and don’t feel me up with those cold hands.”
“I’ll be as chaste as a bride the night before the wedding,” Hawkeye says, and, though he crowds close while Max coaxes the engine back to life, Max doesn’t mind all that much. He’s grown fond of Hawkeye’s warmth.