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Sidney is too old to be sitting cross-legged on the concrete floor of an airplane hangar like this. He was already too old before the war, and he feels as though he’s aged at least a decade or two since then. But Hawkeye is sitting on the floor, and Sidney never wants to loom over Hawkeye again, so he, too, must sit.
“I don’t know if I can do this, Sid,” Hawkeye says, picking at a thread on his fatigues. They’ve been cleaned and pressed, but he’s lost weight during his confinement and they hang off him even more than they used to. “I was ready to get on the plane, and then the delay, and now… it’s like now that I’ve stopped moving, I can’t start again.”
“It’s only a few hours, until the wind dies down,” Sidney says, though he knows it isn’t much help. He’s watched Hawkeye lose momentum before, though never quite as dramatically as this last time, and experience has shown him that there’s nothing to do in those moments but let him restart his motor himself. Tokyo was a tune-up job; it’s up to Hawkeye now to get himself running again.
“You know, I should be scared of planes,” Hawkeye says. He’s poking at loose teeth like he often does these days, testing out the recently-reopened wounds where there used to be scars. Sidney is proud of him for it. “Henry got shot down in one, coming from this airport. But I’m not. Why is that?”
Sidney shifts in place, trying to spare both his ankles and his tailbone from the unforgiving floor. It isn’t working. “We don’t always get to choose what affects us. Maybe his death was more abstract to you, since you heard it second-hand.”
Hawkeye makes a face. Sidney doesn’t blame him; it does sound trivializing even if it’s likely the truth.
“It’s funny,” he says, “my first day here, Ollie picked me up from Kimpo, and we got caught in a rainstorm. I thought that was some sort of omen. Rain on my first day. But then I started to like the rain, because it meant less fighting. Fewer casualties.”
“And now?”
“Rain is rain. The weather doesn’t care about us; whatever meaning it has is what we give it.” Hawkeye unfurls beside Sidney, leaning back on his hands and kicking his long legs out in front of him. He looks almost like his old self—even more so when he cocks his head and shoots Sidney a faint, sideways grin. “Are you checking to see if I think this wind is a bad omen for my return?”
“Not out of professional interest. You’re not my patient anymore,” Sidney says honestly.
Hawkeye bats coquettish eyes at him. He’s pulling the starting cord on the lawnmower, putting on his old affectations one at a time until the ignition catches and he finds his way back to them naturally. “Will you miss me?”
Sidney chooses his answer carefully. He doesn’t want to give Hawkeye cause to feel any more like a burden than he has already admitted to feeling. But the truth is that no, he won’t miss having Hawkeye as a patient at all. He’ll never be able to turn off the part of him that analyzes and worries, but he’s closed Hawkeye’s case and he doesn’t want that responsibility again, even if the wounds he helped Hawkeye reopen and treat don’t all heal over perfectly. He never should have taken the case in the first place, he knows; he’s always been too close to the situation to see it clearly. But it was Hawkeye. He had to.
“I feel like I let you down,” he says. “After Blake, after Trapper, when you seemed so fragile, I wondered if maybe I should recommend… but then there was BJ, and you rallied, and I thought, he’s young. He’s picking himself back up.”
“I’m only fifteen years younger than you, Sid.” Hawkeye’s laughter, even at Sidney’s expense, is a wondrous sound. Sidney has missed it terribly. But it’s short-lived, and Hawkeye’s voice is subdued when he turns to look at Sidney again. “I don’t feel young anymore.”
Sidney thinks of Hawkeye, two years and an eternity ago, hitting on a pretty Red Cross nurse at a hotel bar in windy Seoul so shortly after those twin losses, and Sam Pak’s prescient diagnosis: his breaks still heal quicker than ours. The Hawkeye before him has lost that youthful elasticity alongside the color in his hair, aged prematurely by care and grief.
He tries to make a joke of it, the way Hawkeye would.
“I don’t think any of us do. Especially sitting on this floor.”
“Jesus, Sidney, I’m sorry. You don’t have to sit with me,” Hawkeye says, immediately contrite. He thinks he’s a burden.
Sidney throws caution to the wind. He will never let Hawkeye think that about himself again, and besides, don’t they owe each other honesty, after all this? He’s free of his professional obligation to Hawkeye, free from the ethical guidelines telling him to keep his distance and not say what he really feels. He’s always cared more about Hawkeye than he should about a patient; maybe that’s what Hawkeye needs to hear.
“No offense, Hawkeye, but I’m sick of being your psychiatrist,” he says, barreling past Hawkeye’s wince. “I’m your friend, and friends don’t hover and monitor. Friends sit with you on the floor. My old bones can deal with it.”
He has a moment to watch the beginnings of a true smile creep over Hawkeye’s face before a young sergeant with a pilot’s insignia on his collar steps into their view, glancing between the two of them with obvious confusion. He begins to salute, thinks better of it, and simply nods.
“Sorry to bother you, Sirs, but the captain says the wind’s died down. It’s safe to take off now. Wheels up in fifteen minutes.”
“Thank you, Sergeant,” Sidney says, though neither he nor Hawkeye make any move to stand.
The Sergeant waits for a few indecisive seconds, offers an awkward, downwards salute, and leaves them be. Hawkeye watches him go.
The fifteen minutes tick down as Sidney waits, tailbone going steadily number, and watches as Hawkeye’s motor slowly, grudgingly splutters back to life. The change overtakes him gradually: his spine straightens, his smile turns crooked, and, somehow, the grey seems to recede from his hair, leaving him younger and fresher-faced than Sidney has seen him since his arrival in Tokyo. Finally, he nods to Sidney and pushes himself to his feet.
“War waits for no man. See you round, Sid. Thanks for sitting on the floor with me.”
Sidney returns his nod, but doesn’t humiliate himself by attempting to stand as well. “Anytime.”
“You’re lying,” Hawkeye says, but he’s laughing.
“Yes,” Sidney admits. In some ways, at least, Hawkeye still has him beat when it comes to elasticity. “Will you help me up? I think my knees have locked in place.”
Hawkeye extends a hand to help Sidney off the floor and steadies him when his feet immediately turn to pins and needles and he stumbles. “Careful, old man. If you break a hip while I’m in the air you’ll have to put yourself at the mercy of a lesser surgeon.”
“Call me when you land; then I’ll know it’s safe to injure myself,” Sidney volleys back. Hawkeye knows what he’s really saying.
“I’ll come sign your cast,” he promises. He clasps Sidney’s hand in both of his own, smile slipping for a moment to reveal not sorrow, but something much more promising: tenderness, Sidney thinks, and gratitude. His pulse thrums steadily against Sidney’s wrists, like the purring of a well-loved motorcycle. “Thank you, Sidney. For everything.”