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They have the funerals early in the morning, when the air is still crisp and wind stings past exposed skin. BJ's never been to Maine but he imagines that this is how the weather must be like there, at least on the nicer days. Hawkeye would have wanted this, he thinks. The thought doesn't bring him much comfort.
There are two gravestones, courtesy of the engineering guys tying thin sticks of wood together to make crosses, then carving names on them. Captain Hawkeye Pierce , says one. Major Margaret Houlihan , says the other. The way they sit atop the hill, below a tree with drooping branches and pretty flowers, could almost be considered peaceful.
They had lowered the coffins into the ground only a few minutes ago. They lay there, not yet covered by soil, so underwhelming that BJ would puke if he had eaten more than the bare minimum to keep himself alive the past few days. Hawkeye—loud, outlandish, beautifully emotional Hawkeye who chased away BJ's mourning and his worry with a wink and a joke as if it was the easiest thing in the world—was never meant to have his memory confined to an Army-issue coffin and a sloppy gravestone.
BJ had been one of the guys carrying Hawkeye's coffin, and the lightness of it had felt wrong, so wrong. Nothing about this is right but if they must lay Hawkeye to rest he wants to do it properly. He owes Hawkeye this much, at least.
But they'd never found his or Margaret's body, even after two weeks of searching. "The shelling on where we estimate Captain Pierce and Major Houlihan were was some of the heaviest of this whole damn war, buddy," someone from I-Corps had said, sounding as regretful as I-Corps could. "It's more likely than not that there's not much of a body left. We're sorry, but no one can spare the resources to keep searching for them. Our condolences."
Father Mulcahy stands next to the gravestones now, prayer book in hand, intoning a prayer for the both of them. BJ can't bring himself to pay attention or latch onto any of the words, though there's a small voice in his head telling him he'll regret not doing so later. He keeps his eyes on the gravestones, tracing over the M in Margaret and staring at the small, irregular chip in the H of Hawkeye.
Wind whistles past him loudly. Everyone gives him a wide berth, and for that he's as grateful as he can manage being. He keeps feeling a flicker of warmth next to him, an echo of Hawkeye's laughter carried by the wind, and if he looked up to see someone else there, taking Hawkeye's place as if it wasn't something holy, he might snap and start throwing punches.
Father Mulcahy shuts his book gently and lowers his head, mouthing another prayer. And then he steps back, and without being told BJ knows what it's time for.
It's an unspoken agreement to let BJ step up to Hawkeye's grave first. Next to him, he sees Kellye, who had spent the longest under Margaret's command, similarly step up to Margaret's grave.
He hates calling them graves. Hates it so much he feels like his brain drips poison every time he thinks the word, corroding his throat and carving into his chest and sizzling into his stomach.
There's a shovel in his hand, suddenly. He doesn't know who put it there. He doesn't care. He digs it into the pile of soil that had been upturned by whoever dug the graves in the first place, scoops up a handful of dirt, and hovers it over the cavity. The coffin stares at him, dark and ugly and leering and so damn sad. The shovel is just a hairbreadth away from depositing the soil, but BJ can't bring himself to continue the motion.
This isn't fair. So deeply unfair that it could be engraved into the core of the earth. Hawkeye had had only two years of working in a proper hospital, of doing what he trained for for a decade and dreamed for longer than that. Only two years of being able to help people who wouldn't be choking on their own blood again in a couple of weeks. And then the war had grabbed on and whisked him away, and BJ knew he had spent every day since wishing he could go back to a life where recovered didn't mean that the patient would be able to run up a hill and pull a trigger without falling over. But life hasn't allowed him that, either, even though he had been the one who most deserved it.
The hesitation only lasts a moment. He knows the war isn't fair, much less the world. He wouldn't still be standing if he hadn't learned to accept that early on. He tips the shovel over and watches the soil scatter over the coffin. Robotically, heart flashing between cold and hot every few moments, he repeats the action a few more times, then steps back and hands the shovel to the next in line. It's Radar.
Radar. Jesus. First Henry, now Margaret and Hawkeye. He's not surprised to see how bloodshot Radar's eyes are. He claps Radar's shoulder, a cruel imitation of what Hawkeye once did, and then moves into the back of Margaret's line.
Is it bad that he can barely mourn Margaret? He searches for space to do so, sometimes, but finds it lacking. He's too overwhelmed by Hawkeye, by the slight evidences of his presence all over camp, that he was here and that he lived and that it couldn't last.
Finally, the burying process is done. The sun has well and truly risen by now and BJ has to squint, his eyes watering. The graves look as neat as they can be expected to be, but the disturbances in the topsoil are obvious. He feels seized with the sudden urge to rip the dirt away and claw his way down to the coffin with just his fingernails, see if maybe he opens it with enough longing Hawkeye's body will be there and he can clutch it to his chest and imagine a heartbeat and maybe get some semblance of closure.
He thinks he might have, too, if Potter hadn't walked up to him right at that moment. "You okay enough to say a few words?" he asks in a voice barely above a whisper.
"Of course I'm not okay," BJ says shortly, then walks to the space between the graves. He faces out to the members of the 4077, all in matching army green and somber expressions. He knows this is their last opportunity to properly mourn before they force both Hawkeye and Margaret out of their minds, the only way someone can protect their sanity in a place like this.
BJ's hand twitches. He had tried to pen out some semblance of a speech last night, at least a few thoughts, but sometime between picking up a pen and getting through the first sentence he had started crying—huge, scratchy sobs that had taken up his whole chest. Charles had walked out quickly, and BJ was left free to cry himself to sleep, feeling like the Swamp was about to collapse in on him and smother him.
He starts with Margaret. As cruel as it may be to think so, it's easier. "Margaret was a good nurse," he starts, and is surprised by how strong his voice can sound when every other thing inside of him is crumbling and crumbling, "and an even better friend. We had our disputes—I think I must have spent half my time in this camp scheming ways to further agitate her—but we only became stronger for it. And at the end of the day, when push comes to shove, I think we could all rely on her." He swallows roughly. "At the end of 32 hour shifts, when we were ready to collapse onto benches right then and there, Margaret was the one who forced us into showers and then to bed. She kept the camp running. She kept us running, even if it was easy to miss it. She was as valuable to us as oxygen."
BJ sucks in a breath. Exhales it just as quickly. Watches the world spin around him, then screech to a stop. He turns, just slightly, to Hawkeye's grave.
His throat is dry. He feels stupid for trying to give a speech. How does he put what he and Hawkeye were to each other into words? How does he come close? How does he look into the faces of a hundred people and force them to understand how so very close they were, two sides of the same coin, shadows of each other, two souls who could read each other—every lip twitch, hand gesture, laugh—like they were nothing but extensions of each other, two stems from the same root?
He can't. But he'll be damned if he doesn't at least try.
BJ lets his eyes flutter closed, just for a moment, and then wrenches them open. He breathes deeply, sucking in the vague smells from camp—molded meat and the dull stink from the latrine. "When I first came to Korea, I thought I would go insane. First day here, shells were falling ten yards from me, I was drunk, and I was supposed to—to cram organs back into goddamn teenagers on the side of the road. And then I got here, and I puked up the meal from the Mess Tent and I spent twenty-four hours prodding and poking around soldiers' inside in OR and then went back to the Mess Tent and realized that this was my life now, no end in sight, and I thought to myself holy shit, there's no way I'm getting out of this with my mind intact .
"I still don't think my mind's completely intact, anyway. In a place like this, to keep your sanity you've got to be willing to lose half of it. And the half I kept was—was almost entirely thanks to Hawkeye."
The sun is beating, beating, beating down on him.
"He—he hated this place. Hated the situation. Every last inch of it. But he kept smiling and laughing and joking. And, somehow, when he did that...even if he was talking about the war, he had a way of making you forget it was ever a thing. He could just...sweep you away with his wonder and his absurdity. And I needed to get swept away. I think we all did. Especially in OR. Hours of stitching men back together, keeping them together with thread and a prayer, soaking our hands in blood and changing into new gloves just to soak them in again, and Hawkeye could still find it somewhere inside of him to come up with...with a quip or a prank and just dazzle you with it."
BJ realizes too late that tears are rolling down his face. So what? Let them fall, one last tribute to Hawkeye. One last tangible reminder that he lived and breathed and mended.
"We went everywhere together. As I'm sure all of you—all of you are already aware. And that's a comfort they don't commonly talk about, the comfort of being to turn your head just a few inches and see someone you know almost as well as you know yourself, someone true and real, someone grounding. Like an invisible string is connecting you, pulling you together. Assuring you that there will always be someone you can drink martinis with or play cards or just throw around a ball. To panic and fume and be bored with. Sometimes, I would blink and think that if the next time I opened my eyes, I wasn't looking at my house and family in Mill Valley, I would start tearing my hair out and get Klinger's Section 8. And I would open my eyes, and I'd see Hawkeye instead, and suddenly I wouldn't feel like ripping my hair out anymore. Like just because he was there, it would all be okay. It's a beautiful thing. A holy thing."
He really thought it was holy enough to last. Thought always meant always . He had nightmares of Hawkeye falling, eyes hollow and chest red, but then he'd wake up and see Hawkeye, just a few feet away, snoring lightly with a little furrow between his eyebrows, and he'd convince himself that he could fret and worry all he wanted but that Hawkeye was too resilient, too perfect, too Hawkeye to ever let the war end him.
The aftermath of the sniper shots and bullet wounds of his dreams were too terrible to imagine. So he didn't.
He doesn't have to imagine anymore.
"There was a level of trust, of—of reliance between us that's hard, almost insulting, now, to imagine having with anyone else. The only other person I've felt that with is my wife. Peg. Which I guess says something. I could just—just crumble onto him if I wanted to. He could crumble onto me. We could crumble onto each other. And we might judge each other, just a bit or more than—more than a bit, sometimes, might grow angry or frustrated, but we would never abandon each other. I think we would rather die first—wait. Shit. I didn't mean to say that. Fuck. Fuck, I'm sorry."
He meets Potter's eyes, who inclines his head a bare amount. An unmistakable signal to keep going.
BJ sucks in a breath, which rattles and skitters and at last settles in his lungs. "Right. Um. You know, in a place like this, it's easy to forget you're human. DC gives you breaded liver for the twentieth time in a month and forces you to learn to sleep when bombs are dropping all around you and sends you broken body after broken body and then an absolutely decimated one, too, thrown into the mix just for fun, and you start to wonder if you're just a cog in a giant machine, made up of a bunch of other cogs inside of you instead of organs or veins. Motor oil instead of blood.
"I think—I think Hawkeye reminded all of us we were human. It was hard not to be reminded of it when I was him. There was just something so bright, so vibrant and so damn humane in his every action. And—he never forgot that his patient was human, too. Right until the moment when they were pulled under anesthesia, he would just keep joking with them and teasing, as if he wasn't going to hold their hearts in his hands in ten minutes. God, what I wouldn't—what I wouldn't fucking give to see him do that again."
There's a stinging pain in the space right between his eyes. He has to fight to keep from doubling over. He doesn't know why the fight is so hard. Or why the world is spinning like this. The pain isn't that bad. Shouldn't be that bad. The tears feel impossibly heavy on his cheeks, as if they're loaded with iron.
"I hate this war," BJ says, scattering the words on the ground, watching them land, hoping someone will pick them up and tell him what to do with them, "I hate it so much that I want to tear through the dictionary and mash up every miserable word I find in there and display it in an art museum as a sliver of the bitterness in me." He swallows. "But I think I'll always be grateful to it, too. A bit. For giving me Hawkeye. Even though it took him away, too.
"We were everything for each other, here. Each other's home away from home. The best we could be for each other. He was my salvation. And I think I was his, too."
Automatically, by some instinct that's been ingrained in him, BJ turns his head, trying to catch sight of Hawkeye, see what he thinks, what he feels, what judgment he will hail down upon BJ.
Hawkeye's not there. BJ's eyes flicker right and left, across the whole camp, but his eyes never catch on that familiar mop of black and silver.
Fuck. Shit. Of course he's not going to see it. He's delusional for thinking he could. Hawkeye's gone, in the one way that can never be fixed. BJ's a surgeon, he's seen people die on the table, on the ambulance, in post-op, everywhere. He's listened to a pulse as it dragged to a stop and lay there, too tired to pick itself up again. He knows death, is so intimately familiar with it that it feels as though he could wear it like a coat. He knows death and he knows Hawkeye is dead.
And yet he can't stop the terrible blows on his soul that come, pounding and pounding and pounding, the type that come only after a starving man has been given a last shred of hope, only for it to be torn away like it was foolish to imagine it even being there. He knows Hawkeye is dead, and yet he can't stop looking, waiting for him to roll in on a jeep, splayed out in the back with his limbs spilling out of the sides, maybe a dry martini in hand, because why the hell not.
His vision keeps blurring, further and further, turning grainier and grainier, until Hawkeye could be cast down from the sky in a shower of meteors and BJ wouldn't be able to see a single inch of it. His calves burn, and he realizes too late that he's crouched down.
A shadow hangs over him. "Come on, BJ," Potter says, his voice slow and coaxing in a way BJ's hardly ever heard before. He wraps his hand around BJ's arm and tries to pull him up. "Get up now, that's a good lad."
BJ grabs onto Potter's hand. "No," he says. His voice comes out in something like a moan. "No, you don't understand, I can't ."
Distantly, he hears the scuffle of boots and low murmur of voices, growing more and more distant. He squints, and he can make out the shapes of people moving away. Giving him whatever privacy they can.
"Sure you can," Potter tells him. "One step at a time. Just try standing up right now."
"No," BJ says again. "No, I can't. I have to wait here. Hawkeye's coming. I have to wait for him."
There's a heavy pause. "Radar," Potter says, "go get me a sedative."
Pause, one, two, three. "Alright, sir," Radar says, voice wavering. His boots make wet thunks as he moves away.
"You wanna wait with me?" BJ asks Potter.
"No, I'd rather not," Potter tells him, tightening his grip on BJ's arm slightly. "BJ—Hawkeye's not coming back. He's gone. Forever. He can't come back."
"Don't say that," BJ snaps. "He's coming back. I know he is. I know him. He won't let us have his funeral without him."
"BJ—"
"We have to wait for him, Colonel," BJ insists. His heart jumps, kickstarts, accelerates. "He'll come. I promise. I promise ."
"He's not, BJ. You've seen patients. You know when they die. That's Hawkeye, now."
" No ," BJ says, something low and guttural snaking its way into his voice. "No, Hawkeye wouldn't let that happen to him. He wouldn't—wouldn't let the war win."
Hawkeye can't die. He falls and he breaks, sometimes, but then, always, without fail, he picks himself up and glues himself back together and doesn't die .
The sky is a blur around him, tilting and spinning without pause. Dust and sand clogs his throat, and sucking in a breath seems impossible.
"He's coming, Colonel," BJ says. "He wouldn't leave me. He wouldn't do that to me."
"I don't think he had much of a choice in the matter, son."
BJ makes an anguished sound and buries his head in his hands. "How do you think he died, Colonel?" he asks. "Was he injured for a long time? Did he have to feel each ounce of blood slowly leak out his body until it couldn't sustain itself? Did he feel his pulse stop?" He swallows what tastes like blood. "And Margaret? What about her? Do you think they were together, until the end?"
The world is wavering beneath him, around him, above him in a way that digs itself into his soul and shakes him over and over.
There's a hand pressing into his back, all of a sudden. "Breathe, Hunnicutt," Potter's voice says. "Deep breath in, deep breath out. You know the drill. Breathe."
BJ sucks in a breath, just enough to continue, "Or do you think a shell just dropped on them and they died? Blown into a thousand pieces?" He laughs suddenly, too stretched and too loud. "Didn't even have a chance to see it coming?"
"I think," Potter says carefully, "that thinking about this won't do you even a mite of good."
"You're right," BJ says. "You're right. Hawkeye can tell us himself, right? He's coming back. He won't leave me ."
No sound from Potter. He must be at a loss for words. Shame. BJ has nothing but words, flowing out of him and hovering in the air like stars, distant and echoing and insubstantial.
"It's not fair, Colonel," BJ says, and he thinks he might be wailing now, like a child who's stumbling around in the dark, lost. His world torn away from him. "This stupid war took everything from me. My daughter. My wife. My home. Food. Comfort. All I wanted—needed—was one thing. And the war took that, too."
He'd thought he was in hell for a year. What did he know of hell? Hell is when you have nothing. Nothing left, except the cruel promise of going home that you know you won't last long enough to experience. Hell is complete and utter desolace.
"He can't be gone , Colonel," BJ wails. "Not yet, he has to be coming back, because I need to tell him something. That I didn't get the chance to before."
Maybe that's a lie. BJ had plenty of chances, while showering together or hunched over meals or crammed in the supply closet while doing inventory to do it, to rip his heart out and bare it in front of Hawkeye for him to play with as he felt fit, to let a gentle, heavy I love you roll of the tip of his tongue and change everything forever.
But he never did, and now Hawkeye's gone, and he could say it over and over and find that it doesn't make any damn difference. I love you, I love you, I love you so much it feels like I was born feeling it, BJ wants to say, scream, but the words fizzle out pointlessly before they make it out of his throat and to his mouth.
Footsteps again. "Radar, finally," Potter says. The shuffle of something being exchanged.
"Radar?" BJ says, lifting his head. "Incoming wounded?" He hopes so. God, he hopes so. He needs to go drown himself in blood and stitches and scalpels and leave his life behind.
"No, son," Potter says, and then there's something sharp sinking into his arm. A needle.
"It's not fair," BJ tells Potter, even as his hand feels like it's about to float away and his vision keeps flickering to black. "It's not fair, you know that, right?"
"Damn right I do," Potter says. And then BJ is falling, falling, falling, and he doesn't get back up.
When BJ wakes up, he's in post-op with an IV tube in his arm and Potter and Klinger sitting next to him.
"What do you remember?" Potter asks him, carefully, like BJ is made of glass ready to shatter.
BJ lets his eyes flutter closed for a moment before opening them. "Hawkeye. Margaret." He sucks in a raspy breath. "God, Hawkeye ."
"Anything else?" Klinger asks. Potter looks at him like he's trying to see right into BJ's soul. It's clear they're expecting something.
Memories flicker across his mind, narrow and sharp as knives, cutting the corners of his mind. He remembers crouching on the ground, burying his head in his hands, convincing himself that Hawkeye would come, would chase away the pain and the loneliness with one tender touch. That the world wasn't enough of a traitor to hurt him so thoroughly, that there must be a loophole somewhere that could fix everything.
He wants that surety again. Mourns it. Anything is better than the emptiness that drags itself onto BJ's chest and lays there, sinking deeper and deeper into it until every breath seems trivial and his thoughts dull at the edges into a gray blur.
"Right," Potter says, and then the three of them sit there. There is nothing to say, nothing that can fill the gaping wound that is this silence. It would be fruitless and insulting to try.
Wounded come that afternoon, and BJ moves out of post-op into the Swamp to make room. They've moved the distillery from the tent, but the entire 4077th feels bad for him and it only takes ten minutes of sweet talking to get it back.
He, of course, gets absolutely hammered.
It's fine. Klinger's there. Radar, too. Charles. Potter comes an hour in and stays. They laugh and they cry and then they laugh again and BJ's head is so blissfully full and empty at the same time that he never wants to stop.
Sidney arrives a few days later.
"Hi, BJ," he says as he walks into the Swamp, taking care to shut the door after him.
"Hey," BJ responds, not taking his eyes off of Hawk's bunk. He does this a lot, whenever he's not looking at the picture of Peg and Erin or pouring over the letter Peg had sent him once she found out what was going on courtesy of the snitches of the 4077. He just stares. No one's touched Hawkeye's stuff ever since he went missing, and a layer of dust has gathered over it. A part of BJ wants to wipe it off but he also can't risk accidentally shifting something and breaking this tentative monument that stands to Hawkeye's memory. So he keeps staring. The folds and creases of the blanket are so well-grained into his eyes that they seem almost artificial.
He remembers another time, what feels like a century and a moment ago. When he would wake up and glance over at Hawkeye's still, breathing form, the gentle creases forming under his eyes and between his eyebrows, and want nothing more than to cross that ocean of five feet, crawl into Hawkeye's bed, and press himself against the warmth of his body.
Sidney follows his gaze to Hawkeye's bed, and a shroud of grief falls briefly over him before he straightens his face to the determined neutrality it always is. BJ's sort of grateful for it. He can hardly deal with his own grief, let alone someone else's.
"Well," Sidney says, "mind if I pull up a chair?"
"Go ahead." With no small amount of effort, BJ tears his eyes off of Hawkeye's cot and focuses on Sidney. "Potter called you here?"
"He did," Sidney affirms, "but I also wanted to come. I'm worried about you, BJ. You can't be holding up well with all of this."
BJ laughs humorlessly. "Of course I'm not. I'm six thousand miles from home, I miss my family, I'm not fit to operate but they still won't send me stateside. The entire camp tiptoes around me like I'm liable to break if they say one wrong syllable. And the one person who made it all tolerable, the one person who came close to making it worth it, is gone. And I just spend my days staring at his bed. So, no, I really don't consider myself to be holding up well with any of this."
"You keep staring at his bed," Sidney echoes. "Why is that? Are you still expecting him to return and lie down there?"
"They told you about my little nervous breakdown, didn't they?"
"They did," Sidney says. "But that's not the only reason I'm asking. Denial is nothing new. You'd hardly be the first person to use it."
BJ shifts his head so that he's looking up at the ceiling. It's the same dank, wet dark green as always. It feels comforting and spiteful all at once. "I'm not waiting for him," he says quietly. "I wish I was. I wish I believed he would be coming back. It would be easier."
Anything would be easier than whatever this is—scrambling between emotions like they're something new to him, feeling too sweaty and angry one second, nerves singing with the urge to march out and scream into the stupid Korean desert until the earth cracks under the weight and fixes itself, then feeling bone-weary and tired and wanting nothing more than to collapse into dust and cease thinking, being, existing until he can go home. "But I'm not."
"I see."
"Don't believe me?" BJ asks, glancing at him.
"I do," Sidney assures him, "it's just that I wasn't expecting you to adjust so quickly."
"What can I say? Surgeon. I deal with death every day. It's in my dreams, on my hands, everywhere. I can learn to adjust or I can go insane."
"That's one way to look at it." Sidney leans forward, placing his elbows on his knees. "So why do you just keep staring at Hawkeye's bed? For hours, if Major Winchester is to be believed?"
"As much as I hate to admit it, for once in his life he is," BJ says. He huffs out a breath. Digs his nails into his palm. "It's just...it's one of the last reminders of him. That I have, at least. I'm sure his dad has a lot more."
"Have you talked to Hawkeye's father?"
"No," BJ says. "He doesn't know about it yet."
Sidney's eyes widen, just slightly. "No? Why not? I would think that he deserves to know."
BJ feels something inside of him hitch, the way it always does when he talks about Hawkeye. "There was a mishap that happened once. A clerical error, really, if the clerk happened to be drunk. Hawkeye's dad got a letter saying Hawk had died. I don't remember why, maybe a mortar or dysentery or something." He bites the inside of his cheek. "So if someone told him about all this...we think he'd think it was another mistake. Especially since no one found the—found the body. And no one wants to give him cruel hope."
BJ remembers, vividly, his own hope being snatched away during the funeral, and a part of his soul being snatched away along with it.
"I see," Sidney says. "Maybe I can talk to him."
"Sure," BJ says noncommittally. "We can't keep it under wraps forever. He'll get the notice of death letter eventually, no matter how slow army mail is."
A few beats. "But we're not here to talk about Hawkeye's father," Sidney says, "we're here to talk about you ."
"Alright," BJ says, clapping his hands together, "talk."
"So, the cot is one of your last reminders of Hawkeye," Sidney says slowly, his eyes boring into BJ, as though trying to map out every action. "You must know that they'll give it to someone else at some point. The 4077 needs a surgeon and space in this camp isn't exactly abundant."
"Of course I know that," BJ says, because he does, even though the knowledge hurts more than he wants to admit to. "That's why I'm doing this, I guess. Trying to store as much of it in my memory as possible before the army wipes it away like they wipe every good thing we can get away."
"And you think that will make you feel better?" Sidney sounds honestly curious. "Later on, when someone else takes his spot?"
Irritation creeps up on BJ. "Well, obviously I don't know that ," he snaps. "I'm not a fortune teller. But, yeah, if I think that when some other surgeon marches in and makes this place home, it'll provide me with even a bit of comfort to be able to remember what it looked like before, then I'm going to do it . I don't know if you're aware, but we're a bit starved of comfort around here."
Sidney doesn't rise to the bait. "You're awfully antagonistic of someone you haven't met yet. You're absolutely sure you won't like the next surgeon, whoever he is?"
BJ exhales slowly. Past gritted teeth, it sounds like a low hiss. "It's not that I'm sure that I won't like them," he says. "Though if they're anything like Frank or Charles that is certainly a possibility. It's just that they'll never be him. They'll never be Hawkeye." He runs his fingers through his hair. "The next guy might be funny and a prankster and sweet as fuck. He might keep things light in OR and make martinis drier than the Sahara but he'll never be Hawkeye. He just won't. No matter what he does."
"Interesting." Sidney cocks his head slightly. "So you're extremely attached to Hawkeye, aren't you? Even more than I previously thought."
BJ rolls his eyes. "I go on a whole monologue and that's the shocking conclusion you draw from it?"
The corners of Sidney's lips tug up. "Just trying not to jump to conclusions." He leans back in his chair, still watching BJ closely. "BJ, you always looked forward to going home, didn't you? Everyone in the army does, of course, but you especially. For you, it was almost like...a religion."
BJ's eyes sting all of a sudden, and he glances down at the picture of Erin and Peg, smiling like there isn't and shouldn't be a care in the world, lying on his bed. The edges are creased, evidence of him thumbing over it many, many times. "A religion," he repeats. "You know what? I think that fits."
"But you'd have to live without Hawkeye when you went home. You must have known that. So how did you cope with that knowledge? Or did you just not think about it?"
BJ tips his head back, thinking carefully about his next words. "Death is different than just being separated," he answers slowly. "I obviously knew I could never convince him to move to San Francisco. I can't perform miracles . He practically worships—worshiped—Crabapple Cove. But he could still visit ."
Something bitter and scalding slips down BJ's throat. He'd dreamed of Hawkeye meeting and holding Erin, showing her how to climb a tree, sneaking her desert when she absolutely should not have been having it. Meeting Peg, how'd they'd laugh under the cool shade of a tree as he fixed them martinis, just for old times' sake. Thinking about them now feels sour and sweet all at once, like a pinprick he isn't sure is supposed to hurt or not.
"And letters." He tears his mind away. "There are always letters."
"Still. For two people as close, as dependent on each other as you two are," Sidney presses, "I can't imagine that would be an easy adjustment to make. Regardless of how many letters were exchanged or visits were made. How did you imagine coping with that?"
BJ hesitates, the words swimming in his mind. "I guess I just...didn't," he says lamely. "Thinking about returning home was one of the only things I had going for me. I would fantasize about it constantly. And...anything that wasn't just complete happiness and...and pure relief didn't fit in that picture I had made for myself. I knew I would miss Hawkeye, but I left it at that. I never dived any deeper. I didn't want to think that going home would hurt.
"Fuck." BJ feels something working its way from his lungs up his windpipe. A sob, maybe, or a scream. "Do you think I didn't appreciate it enough, Sidney? The moments I had with him? Because I think so. I think that I worked so hard to think about the end of the war that I didn't focus enough on what I had." His eyes dart to Hawkeye' cot—the wrinkled blanket, his cowboy hat hooked on a banister, the last dredges of water collecting in his army helmet from when he used it to shave. It's as familiar to him as breathing. "Hawkeye."
He'd thought, like an idiot, that they would have forever. Even though a boy died on the table every forty-eight hours, he thought that what he and Hawkeye had was too solid and pure and wonderful to dare be broken. He'd thought that he could take as long as he needed to parse through all his feelings until he could look Hawkeye in the eye and say Hawk, I think about you day and night and if you don't put your mouth on me right now I might go mad . Even though he'd already started falling in that madness people call love in Kimpo, just a bit.
And now. Now, it's too late, and BJ has lost his fucking chance.
"And I think," Sidney says quietly, snapping BJ out of his daze, "that you were doing what you had to to survive, to keep sane, and you shouldn't allow yourself to find fault in that. At the end of the day, everyone feels as though they haven't appreciated someone—or the time they spent—until that person is gone. It's completely normal. Natural."
BJ stays quiet for a few minutes, and then: "I'm not giving very promising responses, am I?"
"I'm in the habit of being honest with my patients," Sidney says, "so I will tell you that you have a lot of work to do in order to cope with Hawkeye's death." He glances down, then up again. His voice grows firmer, strands of iron woven into his tone. "I want you to look inside of yourself, BJ. Think. Deeply. Do you consider yourself as having any hope, any at all, that you can adjust to somebody else in Hawkeye's position?"
" Adjust ?" BJ echoes. "Maybe. I never thought I would survive here, but look at me now. I've already outlived someone. So yes, maybe I would. Maybe I'd find a way." He gives a wet, pathetic laugh. "But maybe I'm sick of adjusting. The war takes and takes from me—first my family, then my home, then the best friend I've ever had—and I don't want to just keep adjusting to it. I don't want to keep hollowing myself out until there's nothing left." He swallows roughly. "There's only so much a human can adjust to."
There's a heavy silence.
"It's good that you feel that way, BJ," Sidney tells him eventually. "Healthy, in fact. You're able to recognize a standard and hold yourself up to it. You don't keep running yourself and your mind and your heart to the ground."
"Yeah? So?"
" So , I can help you." Sidney's eyes bore into BJ's. "I know it may seem like this is the one obstacle that you'll never be able to cross. The final straw. And maybe you'll never be able to completely move on from it. War has a way of doing that to you. But I can help , at the very least, and you can go on living. Not sitting here like this. A shell of yourself. A shell of the man you could be."
"Go on living?" BJ laughs again. This time, it's laced with mirth. "No, Sidney, I don't think so. This is no life. Forcing myself to bend to every army mishap until I break. Make a joke to block out the sheer unpleasantness of my life until every damn thing seems funny in a terrible way. Breathe in death. Take tragedy after fucking tragedy, never knowing whether the next one will be some nameless soldier or the head nurse or your best friend. It's no life. I realize that now."
"So you're going to sit here until they send you home?"
"No, I think I'll get up soon," BJ muses. "They're awfully short in OR right now. And I'll eat. I'll sleep. I'll operate. Maybe make a pun every once in a while. But until I'm back with my wife and my daughter on a California beach, I don't think I'll properly live. Consider that a self-preservation tactic. It's needlessly cruel to give myself hope that I can be human in a place like this."
"BJ—"
"No. I'm done talking." He closes his eyes. "Leave, Sidney. Please."
Pause. One, two, three. Then the creak of Sidney standing up from his chair, the shuffle of his boots moving towards the door, the woosh of the door being pushed open. "I'll be back, BJ," Sidney says, and then the door snaps softly shut.
"I don't doubt it," BJ says to no one.
Sidney tries to talk to BJ again the next day, but no sooner has he entered the Swamp than a couple of ambulances roll in, right on schedule. BJ actually brings himself to go to the OR this time. A few people—more than a few—give him worried glances as he ties on his scrubs, but no one can deny that they're short-staffed and the latest struggle for hill number whatever has left them with higher demand than supply, so everyone keeps their mouth shut. Even Charles.
OR is quieter than usual. There's the frenzied medical talk between the surgeons and the nurses as well as the distant sound of shells dropping, but there are less jokes and less light, meaningless talk. No one sings. The void left by Hawkeye and Margaret's absences sits heavily, the empty space where before they might have been operating glaring cruelly under the lights.
"When are we receiving a replacement surgeon, Colonel?" Charles asks, familiar irritation dripping from his voice. "The number of patients I've gone through must be in the double digits now and there is still no shortage of soldiers waiting outside."
"I've talked to command," Potter says, sounding tired, "and they don't know. There's a shortage of surgeons all around, you know that."
"Doctor," Able says softly, and BJ realizes his hands are clamped too tightly around his scalpel. It takes a frankly inordinate amount of self-control to relax them.
OR ends, somehow, and BJ wanders over to the Mess Tent, manages to force half of his meal down his throat without it sticking unpleasantly in the back of his mouth, then throws out the other half. The wind whips hard against him as he makes his way back to the Swamp.
Charles is already snoring by the time he gets in, having foregone the luxury of a 1.5 star meal at the Mess Tent in favor of sleeping for forty-eight hours straight. BJ would have done so too—his legs are aching and he thinks that if he doesn't sit down soon his feet will commit mutiny and abandon him—except he doesn't know if he'll actually manage to sleep.
Another development, ever since the incident. BJ's no stranger to nightmares, hasn't been ever since he got stuck in this place, but never in such intensity or as often. They're always a blur, the bright flashes of machine gun fire and the deep boom of a mortar meshing together. He sees part of Hawkeye and Maragets' faces, most times—a chin, the cheek, the hair—but never the whole thing. Their voices, though, are clear as day. Sometimes they beg for help. Other times, they tell him their last wishes in that defeated sort of voice, as if they know full well what's coming and have lost whatever fight they had in them. Like they're already dead.
When BJ wakes up, he always feels like he hasn't slept at all.
Exhaustion wins out, though, and he collapses on his bunk. His eyes flutter shut. Sleep grabs him almost immediately.
BJ's in the dark. Stumbling, confused, unsure of how he ended up here or where he's supposed to go. Leaves crunch under his feet, though he's not sure how they came to be there. This place seems too decrepit for trees. He thinks he sees the moon and he looks up to peer closer, then realizes it's just the flash of a gunfire. There a moment, then gone.
A hand grasps onto his ankle and he looks down, alarmed. It's Hawkeye. One half of his face is visible, the other half shrouded in darkness. There are thin, delicate rivulets of blood on the visible side.
"Oh," BJ says. He feels like he could just stand here and look at Hawk's face forever, but his eyes dart down on their own accord. His heart putters. There's a three feet long piece of metal—from a Jeep, he thinks, maybe it's a Jeep?—skewered through Hawkeye's leg. Blood oozes out, fast and slow all at once.
He glances to the side. Margaret. Her eyes are hollow, staring into nothing.
"Is she dead, BJ?" Hawkeye asks. His voice is raspy, like rocks that have been scraped together for too long. The sound of it makes BJ shiver. "Margaret?"
"Yes," BJ tells him, "I think she's dead."
"Oh." Hawkeye's eyes almost roll to the back of his head but he forces them to look at BJ. "Am I going to die?"
"Yes."
Hawkeye hums. He doesn't seem disappointed by this. More resigned, and content with his resignation. "That's a shame." His voice echoes oddly. "I always thought I'd die just a bit past my prime. Didn't think the world would take me away when my body still had so much to gift to it."
His eyes do roll to the back of his head this time. His chest stills.
"Fuck," BJ says. " Fuck , Hawkeye, no ." He drops to his knees, places his hand on Hawkeye's chest, starts trying to compress it.
No use. The muscles refuse to give under his might, refuse to even move an inch.
BJ feels like there's a vacuum inside of him that won't stop sucking. He leans forward and places his head on Hawkeye's chest. It's cold and warm all at once. "No, Hawkeye. Come back. Not again."
A beat, one, two, three.
"BJ?" It's Hawk's voice. BJ snaps his head up, but Hawkeye's mouth hasn't moved. "BJ? Wake up."
Everything is rippling around him. Like a pond that's just had a stone thrown into it. But Hawkeye's voice is somehow more solid, more grounding than whatever echoes followed Hawkeye before.
" BJ . Come on. You can do it, follow my voice, wake up." Hawkeye grunts. The rippling intensifies. "Nightmares are my thing, you know that, you can't just steal that from me. Not without permission, at least."
BJ's eyes snap open and he jolts into a sitting position with a sharp gasp. His eyes flicker everywhere—Hawk's bed to the mirror to the clothes strewn on the ground to Charles's empty cot—before landing on someone.
Fuck.
Holy shit.
It's Hawkeye. Hawkeye, in his Army clothes that have gotten all ripped up. Hawkeye, with a long scrape right above his eye. Hawkeye, staring at BJ with such blatant concern that it pierces into his soul.
BJ looks. And then he starts laughing.
"Did I say something so insanely funny?" Hawkeye asks. "Tell me what it was, if that's the case. Don't say it's an inside joke, I'll die of curiosity."
"Oh my God, Hawk," BJ says, still laughing. "It's happened. I've cracked. Completely. I'm hallucinating now."
"Hallucinating? Well, I would hope not." Hawkeye pulls on one of the many stray strands of his battered clothes. "If this is how you see me in your subconscious, I don't want to be friends with you."
BJ's laugh putters out, but the smile remains. He gets out of bed in one fluid motion. "Shut up," he says, and then wraps Hawkeye in a hug.
Hawkeye gives a dull umph as he collides with BJ's chest, but his arms come up and he returns the hug almost immediately. He smells like wood chips and straw and smoke. BJ breathes it in.
If BJ's mind has chosen to play tricks on him, then he's not going to complain. He's going to appreciate this and let it overwhelm him in the best way, even if he knows it'll hurt to get pulled out of this fantasy.
"BJ," Hawkeye says softly, his breath a thin whisper on BJ's ear. "BJ, this is very nice and I'm not complaining, but you do know that I am not, in fact, an illusion, right?"
BJ pulls away, keeping his hands clasped on Hawkeye's arms. His eyes dart across Hawkeye's face, sucking in every detail. The bags under his eyes. The streaks of dirt across his face, smeared further by sweat. It might very well be the most beautiful thing he's ever seen.
"Don't talk about that," BJ tells him. His voice cracks. Wetness is building up in his eyes. He brings his hand to Hawkeye's face and strokes his thumb across Hawkeye's cheek. Warmth leaks into his hand, and he holds onto it like a drowning man holds onto wood. "God, Hawkeye, I missed you ."
"I missed you too, believe me." The concerned look hasn't left Hawkeye's eyes, and BJ wants to laugh at the fact that Hawkeye's expending so much energy towards being worried about him when he looks like he went up against a Jeep and lost. He suddenly wants to hug him again and so he does. Because he can.
This entire thing seems delicate. Fragile. Balanced on a string, and if BJ tilts them too far in either direction, everything will snap and Hawkeye will vanish into dust and BJ will be alone again, back to the cold hard truth of the world. He holds Hawkeye tighter, as if that alone will keep him here, ground him.
"BJ," Hawkeye says again, his voice gentle in that way that's so very special, in the way that makes BJ think that everything's going to be alright, somehow, "listen to my heart, will you? I think you can feel it. It's beating, you know it is. I'm not a hallucination. You are not hallucinating me. I'm very much real, and I'm very much right here. You can't say liar, liar, pants on fire to that."
"It's okay, Hawk," BJ says. "I know you're not actually here. It's fine. You don't have to try to make me feel better."
Hawkeye's the one to pull away this time. "Beej,it is actually a bit insulting that you think I'm such a fibber. I am real . I know it's been more than two weeks, I know the army has declared me dead, but I promise you, I am actually here ." He sucks in a breath. "What do you want me to do for you to buy it?"
BJ feels like his breath has been robbed from his lungs. There's a fire in Hawkeye's eyes, a passion that he sees when Hawkeye is trying to resuscitate a patient or complaining about fish and liver for the thirtieth day in a row. A passion he hasn't seen in a long time. His lungs constrict.
Somehow this is what grounds him. His vision shakes, tilts, and then straightens, everything seeming more vivid and firm than the moment before. His mind doesn't feel like it's been stuffed with cotton anymore.
There are deep creases under Hawkeye's eyes. Stubble dotting his chin. The blood on his face seems brighter now, the dirt darker. He's favoring one leg. Why would BJ hallucinate Hawkeye to be this rundown? Why, when all he's been yearning for for weeks has been for them to laugh and to live and to be okay for once?
"Oh," BJ says, squeezing his eyes shut and opening them just as quickly, " shit ."
It's impossible. People don't just appear from nowhere after being dead for three weeks. Presumed dead, BJ reminds himself. Presumed . This is the shit that's saved for movies, with a dramatic score playing in the background and flashing lights, not in the sticky, cold, miserable war zone.
But impossible things have happened before. Charles getting married, for one. Frank getting sent home. Radar growing two inches in as many months.
"Yeah," Hawkeye says, smiling in that way that creases the corners of his eyes, "that's a pretty accurate description of these past few weeks."
A tear slips onto BJ's cheek, and then another one. " God , Hawkeye," he says, "where were you?"
"Nowhere especially pleasant, I assure you. I thought about using this as an opportunity to visit Tokyo for a few days, but the swim seemed too long." He starts to move away, and BJ tenses.
Hawkeye notices. "Easy, Beej," he says softly. "I'm just going to sit down, okay? I'm tired and my leg says he'll put in his two weeks' notice if I don't sit down soon."
BJ nods. He watches Hawkeye closely—maybe to see if he'll just up and turn into a piece of dust or disappear into a magician's hat, he doesn't know—but Hawkeye just walks to his bed and sits down gingerly. BJ doesn't even entertain the thought of doing the same. His body is too full of energy, too much energy, rippling and sizzling and finding nowhere to go.
"Where's Margaret?" BJ says suddenly. Something cold slides down his spine. "Fuck, Hawkeye, where's Margaret?"
"She's fine!" Hawkeye says quickly. "She's at Colonel Potter's now, trying to wake him. I don't know if she'll succeed, to be perfectly honest. He's a deep sleeper. If she does, though, she'll explain everything to him. But I—" He looks briefly uncertain.
"You needed to see me first," BJ finishes. Something warm blooms in BJ's chest and drips down to his stomach.
"Yeah," Hawkeye says. "Anyway, to answer your previous question of where we fucked off to for three weeks—we were in a Korean village."
"I-Corps said they asked around all the villages in the area."
"That's because it's not officially on the map yet. Hell, it's barely a village. It was put up maybe a month ago, from the survivors of another actual village that got totalled by bombs. They're practically living in tents." He hesitates. "And let's be honest, it's not like I-Corps looked too hard. They've got a war to run, or so they say. Seems to me like they just give pilots coordinates to bomb and they do."
He's right, and it hurts BJ to think it. That his life could be tearing itself apart at the seams because his best friend is gone and all I-Corps would see is a small and insignificant number amongst piles of larger and more significant numbers.
"You stayed there for three weeks," BJ repeats. "Was it because you were injured?" He inclines his head toward Hawkeye's leg. His pants are drenched in dried blood, something he hadn't noticed when Hawkeye wasn't in the direct line of sight of the moon. His stomach flips and boils at the sight of it.
"Yep," Hawkeye says, smiling ruefully. "The first night we were gone, Margaret and I found a hut to wait out the bombs. Which were pretty damn close by that point. The roof caved in. A wood shaft got my leg. Another got hers. Both were infected in two days. The bombing had ended by then, and a Korean guy—he was searching for anything salvageable, I think—found us. Took us to the almost-village I was telling you about." He swallows roughly. "They took care of us."
"For three weeks?" BJ's stomach drops. "How bad were you two?"
"Oh, very naughty," Hawkeye says. BJ looks at him, unimpressed, and Hawkeye rolls his eyes. "It was extremely bad," he says, sobering. "To be—to be honest with you, I thought I was going to die. I think Margaret was a bit better than me, but she wasn't exactly running around and rolling down hills either. Pus. Fever. For a week, never lucid enough to think straight. And once I was, it's not like I could go anywhere, with my and Margaret's legs like that. So we had to wait until we could put more than one tenth of our weight on them, bandaged the wounds with some cloth, and went on our merry way." He winces, fingers skirting over where the wound must be. "Fuck, I've got to change these bandages soon."
"And you walked," BJ says, disbelievingly, not wanting to believe it, "all the way here? With your leg feeling like it had been mashed to make stew?"
"I'd love to say yes and dazzle you with a show of my manly toughness," Hawkeye says, "but because I have sworn to tell the truth and nothing but the truth, I feel responsible to inform you that a jeep found us when we were halfway here and drove us the rest of the way. Lovely chaps. I'd say we invite them for dinner, but a wilting tongue seems like a terrible way to repay such a service."
BJ laughs and fuck, he's missed this. The jokes, the lightness in his chest, Hawkeye . Everything slots into place whenever he speaks, everything feels alright.
"I'm glad my struggles amuse you so much, Beej," Hawkeye says. "You're welcome to try this three weeks cruise anytime yourself if you're so interested."
"Sorry, sorry, shit, I'll stop," BJ says, wiping the tears from his face. "Though I will make sure to contact you if I ever need to go on the run for murdering Charles. I'm sure you get a 3% commission from selling it to me, don't worry."
"Great, I'm in the phone book, so don't forget."
BJ smiles, then drops it. "But why didn't anyone from that village contact a MASH? Or any army post? It's not like they're a rare delicacy around here."
Hawkeye shrugs, the corners of his mouth tightening. "These people had just been bombed, Beej. Most of their families were dead. They weren't about to go off in search of an army post on their own. They thought those places were more likely to be targeted and bombed, even MASHs."
"Oh." It's just a syllable, far too simplistic to convey the way BJ's mind is reeling like it's a rubber band that's just been snapped back, but it's all he can say.
He doesn't understand how he got so lucky. So damn lucky. Just a few hours ago, when he was in OR and knowing that this terrible, all-consuming loneliness and grief that enveloped him would stretch on for days and months and years without providing him any way to claw his way out of it, he would have given anything to face Hawkeye again. And now he is, and he doesn't quite know how to process any of it.
"Hawkeye," he starts, his voice wavering, "I missed you so damn much. So much that it can't properly be put into words. Don't ever, ever make me go through that again."
"I'll try my best not to." The lightness in Hawkeye's tone sounds more forced now. "Let me just write a letter to the North Korean forces. If you notice a dashingly handsome captain riding about , please do not bomb him, he has already received that service once and is very displeased. I think that ought to do it. You've got to be polite with them, that's the key."
"No," BJ says, "no jokes. Not right now. Please."
Hawkeye looks searchingly at BJ for a few moments. He's always had a way of doing that that made BJ feel like the corners of his mind were being scoured, that there was nothing that could be hidden. "Alright," he says quietly. "No jokes."
BJ breathes in shakily. "When you were gone. Those were the worst three weeks of my life. I was a mess, Hawkeye. Sidney was in here, you can ask him. I felt...I felt half-dead. Like there was no point to getting out of bed, not even rolling over. Sitting up took everything out of me. And the times I did have energy...it was just anger. A lot of it. At the unfairness of everything. It was so intense I could barely think." He swallows. "And when it was gone, I felt like I could just crumble to ashes and not feel a thing."
Hawkeye gazes at BJ with that mournfully still, almost apathetic look that takes control of his face the millisecond before he has to start chest compressions on a flatlining patient and the millisecond after a heart stops for good. "What about your family, BJ?" He doesn't sound accusatory, not in the least, just sorrowfully curious. "What about Erin? Peg?"
BJ exhales slowly, wiping the sweat that has amassed on his palms on his pants. "Peg and Erin and our life in Mill Valley...that's the light at the end of my tunnel, Hawk. It's the thing that keeps me moving, that gives me hope. But you...you're the one who keeps me alive while I'm still in the tunnel. You're about the only thing who gives me something to look forward to about the next day when I'm going to sleep other than the possibility of a letter from Peg. And letters aren't everything." He hesitates. "I need someone, Hawkeye. Human connection, and you give me that. You make me feel alive, you make me feel as happy as I can be in a place like this. Sometimes as happy as I can imagine being at home, too.
"So...thank you, Hawkeye. Thank you for everything."
He didn't get a chance to say that before he thought Hawkeye was dead, and he'll be damned if he doesn't say it now.
"And I love you, Hawk. I love you so much it hurts. I love you in the dead of the night and I love you in the morning when you can't get up and I love you when we're huddled in the Mess Tent and I love you when we play poker and get drunk together. I think I'll love you forever, even if I never see you after the war, even though I pray to God that I do. I'm sorry it took me thinking you were dead for me to...to get the nerve to say it, but that doesn't make it any less true. It's as true as the fact that I need oxygen to live and that they're serving fish and liver again and that the atria are above the ventricles."
There's a long silence between them. Despite this, despite everything, it's not an uncomfortable one. Hawkeye has a thoughtful, slightly faraway look, as if sifting through words, trying to find the perfect one.
"Trapper left me," Hawkeye says abruptly. "Trapper left me, without a single note or letter after that. Just told Radar to give me a kiss, packed his bags, and left. Which I guess I don't blame him for. No one wants to remind themselves of this place any more than they have to. But I also do blame him. Because after everything we did for each other, with each other, that fact that we were everything to each other, the fact that we loved each other...for him to toss that aside felt like blasphemy. A betrayal of the worst possible kind. When I heard he left, I thought I was going to drown, you know? I still feel that way, sometimes, the more time passes and I don't get a letter. Not a single explanation or apology or a note that says I'm here, I exist, and I still remember that you exist and loved me and I loved you too ."
BJ nods carefully. Hawkeye doesn't talk about Trapper, not more than he absolutely has to, and never with as much detail as this.
Hawkeye continues, "And I thought to myself holy shit, this is the one thing I'm not going to be able to get over . But then you came along, Beej, and you made me think I could. And I did." He cocks his head slightly. "I just want you to know that you're not the only one who feels that way. You make me happy. You keep me going. You make me think that because I'm here and you're here and we found each other despite everything, the world isn't nearly as bad as the war wants to trick us into thinking."
BJ's lips quirk up. "Hawkeye—"
"I thought I was going to die," Hawkeye interrupts. "I thought about it and I hoped for it. I wanted an escape, after everything, and you know I always like taking the quick way out of things. The shortcut."
BJ's eyes widen, his heart pounding against his rib cage like it wants to tear its way out, what if s circling his mind like flies in summertime, but he keeps his mouth shut. This is Hawkeye's purge, this is Hakweye trusting him, and he's not going to shatter this delicate little bubble they've made for themselves.
"And then I thought of my dad, and I thought of you...and I didn't want to leave you, BJ. No matter how tempting it was. It feels like it's just you and me against the world, sometimes, and I couldn't just break that." He swallows. "So I fought and I survived and here I am." He holds his arms out like a showman, like an actor at the end of his peak performance.
"Fuck, Hawkeye," BJ says, "come here." He walks over to Hawkeye's bed, plops himself down, and pulls Hawkeye into another hug.
They're both crying now. There's no point trying to hide it. It's the silent type, the kind with too much emotion to package it all into sound, but BJ can feel the wetness forming on his shoulder from Hawkeye and the tears stinging down his own face.
"I love you," Hawkeye says against him. "Fuck, BJ, I loved you during Kimpo and I loved you every day since then. It's one of those...things that just seem like a constant in the universe, no matter what. I love you."
They lean away from each other, for just a moment, and then they move towards each other again and suddenly their lips are pressed together.
It's chaste and gentle and achingly sweet. It feels like puzzle pieces fitting perfectly together after being apart for the longest time. It feels like a wayward planet being jerked back into a proper gravitational orbit. It feels like BJ and Hawkeye, just the two of them, nothing more and nothing less.
BJ's heart is thumping wildly against his chest, and he can hear Hawkeye's doing the same. He moans and Hawkeye parts his lips, and suddenly it isn't so chaste as BJ pushes his tongue inside Hawkeye's mouth, determined to explore every single inch of it. Desperate to meld himself to Hawkeye in a way that can't be broken.
Hawkeye's arms are looped around BJ's neck and his hands sit firmly at Hawk's waist, just on the edge of squeezing. Testing the limits, he pushes Hawkeye against the wooden pole and Hawkeye whines against him, the kiss deepening.
"Wait—shit—" Hawkeye places his hands on BJ's chest, pushing him away. His skin hums. "Peg—"
"Do you make a habit of saying someone else's name when you're kissing someone?" BJ asks.
"Only when I'm trying to make them mad with jealousy. But—BJ—"
"It's fine," he tells him. "She's fine with it. Our marriage was never one of—love. Not in the common use of the word. Trust, and friendship, but not passion. Not like this."
"Oh." Hawkeye puffs out a breath. "You could have started with that, you know."
"What's the fun in that?" And then their lips are mashed against each other again.
"We're never going through all this again," BJ tells him once they part, after what feels like a decade, a perfect decade.
"Oh, definitely not," Hawkeye says. "We're not leaving each other."
"Not even when we go back stateside?"
"Especially not then. Letters every day."
"Sure, if your hand can resist cramping as you describe every last apple in Crabapple Cove in great detail."
"I'll have you know, that's some of my most thrilling material."
"I'm sure."
"You can come to Maine yourself, if you want to absorb the greatness of the apples properly," Hawkeye says. "Bring Peg and Erin. Better do it in the summer, though. Your delicate Californian skin couldn't handle Maine winters. It'll give Erin some opportunities to see real trees, not just palms."
"Mill Valley has trees other than palms . What about you? Willing to grace the oh-so-lowly California with your presence?"
"For you I guess it's a sacrifice I'll make." Hawkeye heaves a great sigh. BJ laughs.
He taps Hawkeye on the shoulder. "But we're not going to leave each other."
"Of course not, Captain."