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If it wasn’t for Trapper, Hawkeye thought he might have given up a long time ago.
It was just so much. Korea, the war, the war in Korea. The Swamp and the fleas and the rats and the fleas on the rats and the worry in the back of his head that occasionally made it to the front that maybe the fleas on those rats were going to start a brand new outbreak of the Black Death. And then what would there be to do? It was a surgeon’s purview to cure cancers and wounds and fractures, anything that could be stitched back together with thread made from someone else’s intestines, but he didn’t think he could paste a person back together from nothing but lesions and sores.
He could swear that Trapper had a sensor in his head that told him when melancholia was descending on the Swamp. Hawkeye only ever got a few minutes of staring at a rat milling about in Frank’s knick-knack shelf before Trapper came in with a fly swatter and a dream of creating the first rodent-based waffle in Korea.
“Ruminating again?” Trapper asked as he slumped into his cot.
“I’ve chewed the cud so much I’m effectively a ruminant.”
“Mess tent food taste any better when it comes back up?”
Hawkeye finally dragged his gaze away from the shredded pages of Frank’s Bible that he would no doubt be blamed for. Trapper grinned brightly at him, as sunny as the yellow robe around his shoulders, and popped his bubblegum between his teeth.
Softer, though Trapper’s voice still might have been overheard through the mesh netting that was their only protection from the outside world in the heat of summer: “What’s on your mind, honey?”
Hawkeye sighed. “The usual.”
“Four horsemen?”
“Particularly those riders of the white and black horses.”
“Lotta debate about whether that first one’s Pestilence or Conquest, y’know.”
“Do educate me, Father McIntyre.”
Trapper’s laugh was just as bright as his smile. “Ah, c’mon, Hawk. You don’t wanna learn Catholic theology from a guy who burned his rosary.”
Hawkeye could feel his ears perk up. Trapper never talked about home, not unless it was his daughters or his alternating belief in whether or not he loved his wife. “I didn’t even know you were Catholic.”
“You think John Francis Xavier McIntyre wasn’t raised Catholic?”
“Well, when you put it that way.”
Trapper snickered and turned over onto his stomach, one long, long-fingered arm draping over the side of his cot to drag its tips in the dust-covered floor. It felt strangely like the days Hawkeye and Tommy used to sit up in Hawkeye’s bed late at night, legs pressed together, giggling about everything and nothing while Dad pretended he couldn’t hear. Except he and Trapper weren’t touching, and it wasn’t Dad, but Frank Burns lurking outside the mesh walls. No matter how much Hawkeye wanted to crawl on his hands and knees for the comfort of Trapper’s hand in his hair, the softness of his lips, they lived their lives together in Tokyo back alleys and locked supply tents.
He wouldn’t give it up for anything, of course.
Well, maybe he would give it up for a more just world, one where guys like them didn’t have to hide, but that wouldn’t be giving it up at all.
“I’m only a generation outta Ireland, y’know.”
There it was again: that soft, quiet feeling that usually only came in the dead of night. “Oh yeah?”
“Mm.”
“And here you are talking about Boston like your family’s lived there since my namesake was right next door.”
“Whadda you think I am, some Beacon Hill jackass?”
Hawkeye laughed. “Baby, I barely know what that means.”
The canvas ceiling was uninteresting in the moment of silence that followed. When Hawkeye turned his head, Trapper was blushing, and Trap looked away as quickly as he could.
“Thought about runnin’ away a lot,” he mumbled. “When I was a kid. Go back there, find my granddad or somethin’. Get outta that damn house.”
Clearly Trapper was in a secret-telling mood. Hawkeye wasn’t about to stop him. “Why’s that?”
“Take a guess, dumbass.”
“I feel as though I’m being led into a stereotype-based net.”
“Ain’t wrong.” Trapper rolled back over and stretched, shirt riding up just enough for Hawkeye to get a glimpse of a sliver of tummy. “I got plenty’a scars to prove it.”
Hawkeye winced. Trapper noticed, which only made Hawkeye’s face try to curl up on itself.
“Tell me somethin’ good, Hawk.”
“About me?”
“’Bout your dad.”
“I’ve told you everything good about my dad. I’ve told everyone everything good about my dad.”
“So tell me again.”
It was so hard to look into those big, brown puppy-dog eyes and not give in. “Alright, alright. This scar, on my lip, I got it from a fish hook. I was gangly—not like I am now, of course—and casting, I just– it just got stuck. So I go home, hook still in my lip, and dad pulls it out and stitches it up.”
“Not much of a story.”
“I’m getting there, I’m getting there. You know me, I can’t take any pain, so for two straight days I don’t eat anything. It went all the way through, it hurt like hell. So Dad, he goes down to the general store, and– we don’t even have an electric freezer yet, just an icebox, and he still buys me all the ice cream he can carry home and tells me that’s my punishment for getting a fish hook stuck in my mouth! Eating all the ice cream he can carry. I ate it, and I was– Trap, I got so sick I opened the stitches back up.”
“You didn’t.”
“God’s honest truth. I’ll swear on Frank’s Bible.”
“Don’t do that, it’s covered in rat shit.” Trapper held out his hand. “C’mere, Hawk.”
It was like he had a piece of twine wrapped around his finger and sewn into Hawkeye’s heart. He couldn’t resist coming over and sitting beside Trapper’s cot, watching his breaths in the tiny, exposed sliver of stomach.
His breath smelled terrible. “You know what I like about you?” Trapper murmured.
“What’s that?”
“I think growin’ up was worth it ‘cause I got to meet you.”
Hawkeye smiled to hide how he felt like his heart was about to explode. “If you were there, I would have given you some of my ice cream.”
Trapper’s eyelashes fluttered. “Yeah?”
“Yeah. Only the flavors I didn’t like, though.”
“Fink.”
“Proudly!” Hawkeye took Trapper’s hand, kissed his knuckles with a smack, and scrambled up before he could be tempted to kiss his mouth with the tent flaps open. “Now, what do you say we engage in co-finkery and suture Frank’s boots together?”
Trapper laughed behind him. “I’m with you, Hawk.”