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Margaret will never get used to the way it rains in Korea, the sheets of water falling like the curtain at the end of a play. Two and a half years into a war and it still takes her by surprise how the downpour mingles with the steam rising off the distant rice paddies, shrouding the world in a warm mist.
The Margaret of two years ago would have screeched about the humidity frizzing her hair. The Margaret of now has at least grown to appreciate the beauty of it—and, luckily, to care somewhat less about what other people think of her hair.
There’s no time to worry about frizz in a deluge like this, anyway; Margaret is focused entirely on battening down the compound as quickly as possible and returning to her tent to dry off. The rain has worked its way beneath the hood of her poncho to plaster her hair against her head and now drips coldly down the back of her shirt. Even her eyelashes are waterlogged, sending rivulets of water down her cheeks each time she blinks.
The sodden ground makes her job of rigging up temporary shelters even harder. Margaret’s foot finds a patch of mud and slides forward several inches, and the waterlogged rope slips from her grip, loosening its tension enough to allow the half-erected tarpaulin above her to cave in and send a bucket’s worth of pooled rainwater down the front of her poncho. Margaret calmly and efficiently reels the rope back in, ties it to the stake, and only then allows herself to stomp her foot in the sucking mud and curse the weather and her own bad luck in turn.
The canvas shelter over the triage area is secure enough, she decides, and they’ll wind up down a head nurse due to pneumonia if she stays out in the rain much longer anyway. The tarp is just a precaution; no one is fighting in this weather and they’re unlikely to receive wounded until things dry up.
She pauses beside the wall of the OR, beneath the slight overhang on the tin roof, and tries to shake off as much of the water pooling in the folds of her poncho as she can before she goes in search of a towel. Someone else is taking shelter there, too.
“Fancy us meeting out here like this,” Hawkeye says conversationally. He isn’t dressed for the rain, but rather stands there in his white lab coat with his shoulders hunched uselessly against the persistent drip of water off the edge of the roof. “You know, I’ve always thought ‘wet and disheveled’ was a good look on you.”
Margaret ignores the innuendo. It’s been a long and hard-fought battle, but she’s learned that’s the best way to get along with Hawkeye most days. “Why are you out here? Is the still not enough to drown your sorrows anymore?”
“I’m ‘checking on something’ while Kellye convinces Martinsen that killing me won’t get him the second opinion he’s hoping for,” Hawkeye says, pulling his hands from the safety of his pockets only long enough to make air quotes.
Margaret rifles through her mental roster of recovering patients until she remembers Martinsen—minor shrapnel wounds to the left arm, discharged for return to active duty this morning. He’d been on Hawkeye’s table, so it fell to Hawkeye to give him the news.
“I’d send every one of them home, if I could,” Hawkeye says. His eyes are shaded with the weariness Margaret can’t seem to get away from these days as he stares into the sheeting rain. “Not that telling him that would help anything.”
Margaret doesn’t have anything to say to that. She hates the waste of life as much as anyone, but they have a job to do, and that job is getting their fighting men back on their feet. Sending men home only results in new men coming over; Hawkeye knows that. He’s just become increasingly maudlin as the war has gone on, and nothing Margaret or anyone else says ever seems to pull him out of it.
“Remember the last time you and I got caught in the rain like this?” Hawkeye says.
Margaret snorts. It’s unattractive, but so is she in this moment. Not that seeing Margaret at her worst has ever put Hawkeye off his flirtatious digs, she supposes. “Don’t even try it, Pierce.”
“I was only reminiscing. You’re a happily single woman now; I wouldn’t dream of interfering with that,” Hawkeye says, theatrically wounded, lifting his hands defensively within his coat pockets. He lowers them again and shoots her a salacious grin. “Now, if you were to tell me that you’re actually unhappily single…”
“You know exactly what percentage of you I want out of a man, and it’s not nearly that high,” Margaret informs him, but she can’t quite keep the smile off her face. It’s nice to have the old, fun-loving Hawkeye back for a few moments, even if it means enduring his half-serious advances.
Hawkeye’s grin turns full and bright and he laughs, shaking the rainwater out of his hair like a dog. The droplets nestle in the silvering strands like stars, and privately Margaret can admit that the percentage is perhaps higher than she told him out loud.
“Ten percent, I remember. Which ten percent of me is it? I’d guess my charm, my dashing smile, and my wit, and my—”
“Those are all the parts of you I like the least,” Margaret says, cloyingly sweet, just to watch Hawkeye splutter. “And that would add up to at least forty percent.”
“Well, what is it, then?”
“You care,” Margaret says. Hawkeye can be moody and difficult, it’s true, and half the time he drives her up the wall with his nervous antics, but it’s clear to everyone that he only acts out because he doesn’t know what to do with all the caring and passion in his heart. Donald and Frank didn’t have that. “You’d send every one of those boys home if you could.”
Hawkeye stares at her, shedding raindrops as he blinks. “That’s the part of me you’d choose? The part that hates the army? You love the army.”
“The part of you that cares,” Margaret corrects. “I’ve never met anyone who cares so completely about every single person he meets. I don’t think… I couldn’t ever be with someone again who didn’t care that much about at least one thing. One good thing.”
Frank cared about the army that much, and Donald probably cared at least that much about himself. Once upon a time Margaret thought those were good enough.
“I’m glad. You care, too, a lot more than you always let on. You deserve someone who’s the same,” Hawkeye says quietly, startling here. His head is downcast and he speaks to the muddy ground, but he isn’t trying to hide from her, she thinks—rather, he’s trying to protect her from the vulnerability of being so known. “You might end up making some lucky man very happy someday, Margaret.”
“Might?” Margaret says, purposefully arch in order to break the fragile, honest silence that would otherwise descend after his words. Two and a half years into a war is too far in to let things like gentleness linger. Better to break them yourself than wait for something else to shatter them.
Hawkeye flashes her a wink. “As you were quick to remind me, you’re a happily single woman. I don’t want to presume you’ll lower your standards anytime soon. After all, ten percent of me is a tall order.”
“Ten percent of you is as much as any woman should be expected to put up with. I’m going inside to dry off before I catch pneumonia; are you done hiding from Martinsen?”
“No, but if I stay in the bath any longer my fingers will turn to prunes and I won’t be able to perform surgery.” Hawkeye heaves himself off the wall and, pressing a swift kiss to Margaret’s cheek, heads for the door. “If Martinsen kills me, you have my permission to say we were secretly married to claim my benefits.”
“You and I? They’d never believe it,” Margaret says, falling into step with him in a way she never could have dreamed of two and a half years ago.
Perhaps it’s not so unbelievable anymore, she allows, as they enter post-op side by side.