Chapter Text
Somewhere in those first few desperate fumbles, BJ switches from being a passive observer – i.e., sitting there and letting Hawkeye kiss him – to an active participant – i.e., kissing Hawkeye back.
He curls an arm around his waist, pulls him in, cold noses bumping together.
Ten different alarms are going off in his head – Hawkeye’s head isn’t right, BJ’s married, they’re on the front porch and no matter how dark and late it is there’s no guarantee someone won’t stumble upon them and ruin their entire lives.
He slides his hand up Hawkeye’s sweater anyway.
The skin is too pale, not enough padding over his stomach and ribs. But it’s still warm to the touch, in the narrow space between them. BJ’s thumb brushes against a metal edge of something by his clavicle.
Hawk pulls back, lips ghosting the soft spot where BJ’s neck slopes into his shoulder. Sternocleidomastoid bone, the part of his brain that never stopped studying for the MCATS supplies helpfully.
“C’mon Beej,” he murmurs, standing up and holding out a hand. His eyes are still wet, rimmed red.
Like always, he takes it without another thought.
BJ kissing him back wasn’t the outcome he was expecting.
Not that he expected a punch to the nose, or being called some unimaginative name; that wasn’t Beej’s nature, turning to hate when faced with something unexpected.
But the second he decided fuck it and brought their lips together, he braced for a kind smile, gently pulling away and patting his cheek. Save that for all the hearts you’re going to break in Portland. Once or twice during the war, when there was heavy shelling but no patients at their door, BJ let Hawkeye curl his arms around his neck on one of their cots, sit in his lap like he had tonight, both of them cracking jokes to hide their terror. Comfort, not desire.
But he’d gotten loud and hyper, mad and messy, and BJ responded by trying to get under his clothes. He almost got his hands on–
So he gives him something else to hold. They need to keep moving, before the thought can catch up with him. That maybe it had never been just about comfort.
Hawkeye doesn’t lead him inside. Daniel might be up, or maybe it’s all just too weird, to stand in this place with BJ, to be here and there all at once. Winding around the porch to the backyard, BJ feels a stab of jealousy. Towards all the girls – and maybe a boy or two? – Hawkeye snuck up to his bedroom as a teenager.
He imagines a world where they knew each other at sixteen, where they smiled at each other across an English classroom instead of a broken body. Walking home together as the maple leaves fell around them, sneaking past his dad to steal kisses in his twin bed. Being happy because, not in spite, of their circumstances.
The woods behind the house thicken, and then spread thin again. Hawk guides him over roots and dips in the ground, occasionally stumbling and catching himself on the trunk of a tree. He doesn’t turn back to look at him once. He doesn’t let go of his hand, either.
BJ hears the sound of water lapping. A horsefly lands on his neck and bites before he can slap it away. He’s still rubbing the sore spot when the woods open up to a clearing. A massive, black lake stretches to the farthest points in his vision. The center is so still it looks like glass. A long, rickety pier juts out ten feet from the beach, splintered and weather-beaten from countless years enduring the elements.
Hawkeye leans against the last tree before the dirt becomes rocky and sandy. “Sebago Lake. Second deepest in the great state of Maine. Hold your applause.”
The wind is stronger with no trees and buildings to slow it down. BJ shivers.
“Well held.” Hawkeye says.
BJ lets go of his hand, walks to the edge of the water. “Erin sleeps through the night now. When I left she was up every forty minutes, screaming and crying. Peg says I’m lucky that I missed it.” The water darkens the toes of his sneakers. “When things get too quiet, too still, I start looking for snipers.”
Feet thud against creaking wood, and before BJ can piece together what’s happening, Hawkeye’s cannonballed off the pier, shattering the calm with a massive splash.
The cold water feels like an adrenaline shot in his thigh, instantly freezing every cell in his body, crystallizing his lungs mid-breath. He breaks up the surface, hair plastered to his forehead. It looks darker when it’s wet, like he's still young.
“You’re insane!” BJ shouts, smaller on the shore. He crosses his arms tightly, like just the sight of Hawkeye in the water makes the cold seep into his bones.
“You said you didn’t want stillness!” Hawkeye laughs, and quickly starts to backstroke, farther into the lake. It’s always been his strongest stroke, but he picked it because didn’t want to see BJ react to his words. A stupid joke, the clown who can’t let a moment lay there, kissed a married man and then jumped in a lake when said married man got too close. Fucking up on purpose involves just as much flailing as accidents. Who knew.
“What a prince you are,” BJ calls sarcastically. Hawk’s still wearing his Chuck Taylors, and he’s dimly aware his legs are coming up a little slower with each kick. He’s not exactly a Boy Scout, but his mom was feverish about water safety, taught him to swim and make a flotation device out of his jeans. He hears her now, reminding him that clothes triple in weight when they’re wet.
“Hey, Hawk–”
“I almost...drowned out here...once,” Hawkeye’s breathing is getting uneven, the cold really showing his lungs who’s boss. “My cousin pushed me in when I was little. Fully dressed. Only way to shut me up was to give me a mouthful of water, I guess.”
BJ’s words sound different now. “You know you’re not exactly in your birthday suit right now, right?”
Hawkeye rolls upright. His feet aren’t anywhere close to standing on the bottom of the lake now. Twenty feet away from the pier. How did he get so far out, so fast? Treading water, he feels tired, and drunk. His skin looks pale and dead, just below the surface. “Keep thinking about what would’ve happened if the curtain’d fallen on the Hawkeye Pierce Show back then.” Seven years old. Twice what some of the kids from Uijeongbu got.
“A lot more people would be dead.” There it is, that weird tone again. His best friend, patiently letting him stick his tongue down his throat. His best friend, maybe deciding he’s finally done with him.
Then again, maybe everything sounds different when you’ve sunk under the water.
BJ kicks off his own shoes, throws his jacket and mittens onto the beach before charging in. His legs are slow and useless as the water rises to his shins, then knees, nature resisting his desperate push towards the spot where he saw Hawkeye’s white face slip under the waves he created.
Second deepest lake in the great state of Maine.
Surely that means the center, not here. He gets deep enough to swim and paddles through the frigid water, hands going numb. Trying not to notice how far into Sebago he’s gone, how someone as tall as Hawkeye had to tread.
He goes under with his eyes open, choking a little as the water goes up his nose. It’s so dark, and black weeds, dead for the season, rise up from the sand and weave together. Another five feet, and he has to bounce to the surface to catch his breath. In the rush of bubbles, he sees a flash of white, the toe of Hawkeye’s Chuck Taylor.
Back down before he can even complete his inhale, BJ grabs his ankle, then the loop of his jeans, turning him right-side up. Breaking to the surface, Hawkeye’s head lolls against his neck. He wants to slap him, make him wake up, but he’s heavy, even in the water, and all BJ can do is kick madly, until they’re in a shallow enough place to drag him to the beach.
Another fact from med school floats through his head. Two minutes. That’s how long a drowning person can survive without oxygen, once they’ve passed out.
Had he gotten there in time?
“Come on, drama queen,” he says, laying Hawkeye out and climbing on top of him to begin compressions. “Dying when you have guests is very inconsiderate.”
Hawkeye’s throat burns as he spits up water, forcefully roused from unconsciousness for the second time in as many days. BJ isn’t crying, not like his dad. When he sees he’s awake, he wraps his arms around him and hugs him tightly enough to pull him upright.
“How dare you,” he says, and Hawkeye can feel his warm tears mixing with the cold lake water again.
“Boy, Sebago Lake, zero for two on taking down Hawkeye Pierce,” he cracks.
"A lot more people would be dead with you at the bottom of that lake, did you hear me? A lot." BJ pulls back, angrily shoving his own dry coat around Hawkeye’s shoulders. “Me among them."
"Beej–"
"I do have Erin. And I do have Peg. And the only thing that allows me to hold it together and provide for them, the thin gossamer thread, is knowing that you’re in my life. You can’t not be in my life.”
The last sentence comes out like an order. Beej should know he’s never been good at following those. “Yes sir,” he says in a goofy voice, and tries to shoot off a salute, but his hands are shaking too bad. “Really was gonna bring you here to fool around.”
It’s dark and he’s a little oxygen deprived, but he thinks he sees BJ’s face color a little. He busies himself, pushing off the nice, warm coat and pushing Hawkeye’s sopping sweater up.
“Easy, I think the mood has passed.”
“Pipe down, asshole. I'm not letting you get hypothermia–” BJ pauses, the sweater balled in his hand, looking down at the chain hanging off Hawkeye’s neck.
PIERCE
BENJAMIN F.
9711-0384
B POS
JEWISH
“You gotta get some new jewelry, Hawk,” he reaches down and fingers the dog tag gently. “This is a little 1950.”
He doesn’t understand; Hawkeye hated his tags, found them morbid and dehumanizing; physical proof he was nothing more than unwilling property of the United States Army. Second I touch down in San Francisco, I’m running these over with a trolley, Beej. He’d felt the same way, pulled his own necklace off the second the chopper passed over Mount Seorak and threw it into the void.
He thought it would make him feel lighter. For a long time, though, it just made him feel naked.
“Don’t–” Hawkeye cringes, lets his head drop back against the sand with a decidedly humiliated air.
Then BJ realizes there’s three tags on the chain, not two.
He turns over the second and finds its identical to the first. Standard procedure. One to take back to the base for the records, one to leave with the dead soldier. Then he reads the third.
HUNNICUT
BJ
9758-2346
O POS
PROTESTANT
His eyebrows knit together as he looks up at Hawkeye. “I don’t–”
“Sticky fingers.” He weakly lifts his hands, turning blue, and wiggles them. “Pulled one off you when I hugged you goodbye. Figured you wouldn’t miss it.”
BJ shakes his head dumbly, still pinching his own corpse marker between his fingers. To hold onto something so awful, because it meant holding on to him. “If you wanted something to remember me by, I could’ve just given you back your socks.”
Hawkeye laughs softly. Still flat on his back, he works on BJ’s jacket and buttons it over his bare chest. “Beej, near-deathbed confession here. I’m in love with you."
An owl hoots in the distance. The lake is still swirling, because of them, under thousands of stars.
“I know, I’m famously subtle, so don’t feel bad if you didn’t pick up on it.”
BJ pushes his wet hair back from his face and kisses him. It’s always easier to be brave, when he’s with Hawkeye. "So you don't want those socks back?"
Hawk, still shivering, wraps his arms around BJ’s back, claps a hand on the back of his head. “I’m so glad you’re here.”
Part of BJ wants to keep Hawkeye in his arms forever. Stretch out together on this beach, make love, find a creative way to warm up his best friend’s hands and legs and everything in between.
The other part of him is a doctor. “I’m taking you to bed.”
He feels Hawkeye smile against his neck. “You servicemen are all alike.”