Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

ACT ONE: THE VELVETEEN RABBIT

When Trapper got his travel orders, they came handed over from Frank in a sleek, white envelope addressed to Captain J. F. X. McIntyre, United States Armed Forces.

The first thing he thought was that he couldn’t wait to tell Hawkeye.

The second thing he thought was that he was absolutely, unequivocally terrified to tell Hawkeye. Hawk hadn’t been himself since Henry went home. He was muted, the color leached out of him like a leaf left floating in a pool over winter. He woke screaming every night, sometimes three or four times, from nightmares about freezing, roiling water closing in over his head. He went through a fifteen hour OR shift nearly silent except for mumbled instructions to the nurses and a few hummed, tired measures of Auld Lang Syne as the clock ticked past midnight. Every day he got worse, until even Frank knew that if something wasn’t done about it, Hawk was going to walk straight into the mine field.

They got him five days of R&R.

Trapper stood next to the Jeep while he waited for Hawkeye to finish packing. He shared a cigar with Klinger in one of his finest red dresses, and all they managed to say between them was when Klinger ashed his cigar into the dirt and mumbled, “You think he’s gonna be alright?”

Trapper watched Hawkeye stumble out of the Swamp and answered, “He’s gotta be.”

He hugged Hawkeye as tight as he could and helped load his bag into the Jeep. “I’ll see you soon, okay?”

Hawkeye stared back, not quite seeing him, and Trapper took him by the shoulders and pressed him into his seat. He could feel the sharp line of Hawkeye’s collarbone beneath his thumb and let his hand rest there for a moment, only a moment; he let the tips of his fingers skim Hawkeye’s neck as he pulled away, then clapped him more firmly on the shoulder, Hawkeye’s entire body rocking with the impact.

“You behave yourself while you’re gone, huh?” Trapper said. He took a step back and rubbed his hand on his fatigues. His palm tingled where he’d touched Hawkeye, even through the fatigues; his fingers practically burned where he’d brushed the smooth skin of his neck. “I don’t wanna have to come up there for a court martial.”

The barest edge of Hawkeye’s lip turned up. “Don’t kill Frank.”

“I make no promises.”

The Jeep snarled as Klinger put his pump to the pedal and disappeared over the hills in a cloud of dust. Trapper stood alone in the compound and watched until he couldn’t even see the dust.

It wasn’t much of a goodbye.

The travel orders came on the second day. Trapper stared at the name John McIntyre and wondered who the hell that was supposed to be. Then he got drunk enough that he remembered that bet he and Hawk had made, long before they had done anything more than try not to sneak peeks at each other over the shower walls, where Hawk had walked naked through the mess tent in only his boots and side cap. Trapper jerked off to the memory in the empty Swamp, finished draining the still, and decided he owed the people a repeat performance. He stood on his and Hawk’s favorite table and kissed Able, then Kellye, then Margaret, and as he cradled their cheeks in his hand he ached for the rough drag of stubble under his palm. He didn’t feel a damn thing when Baker knocked on the door of the solely-inhabited Swamp in the evening and asked for one last hurrah. He fucked her anyway, dancing over her skin in a way that was less intention and more the muscle memory of how to make a woman melt beneath his fingers and tongue. He lay in his bunk and stared at the canvas ceiling long after she’d left and tried to tell himself that he was going to see his girls again. It would be worth it. Hawk would come back the morning he left, they’d say see you later, and Trapper would write a ten page letter a day if it meant Hawkeye didn’t forget him. Eventually, Hawkeye would come home. Boston and Maine weren’t so far apart. Maybe he’d get a job in Boston. Maybe he’d get a job in New York, and Boston and New York weren’t so far apart either.

Trapper set the still working in the evening, fell into a fitful sleep, and woke to an empty Swamp long past the time Hawkeye should have been home.

Radar waited with them at the Jeep as Trapper and Klinger shared another cigar. Trapper didn’t think about Henry, about the freezing, roiling waters of the Sea of Japan closing over his head so that his son would never meet him. He didn’t think about the letter in the pocket of his dress uniform and how Louise would probably only cry at his funeral because she was expected to. He didn’t think about how Kathy would only remember him from his photo that might not even be on the mantel anymore, or how both of his girls would remember his goodbye and his funeral more than they remembered when he tucked them into bed, nursed them through fevers, and told them stories every single night until Uncle Sam had broken into their home and ripped him away from them.

He thought about Hawkeye and watched the horizon, waiting to see a cloud of dust rising over the hills.

“You’re gonna miss your flight, Sir,” Radar said. He stared at the same place on the horizon, brow furrowed below his cap, and ran his lip between his teeth.

They waited another ten minutes. Trapper stamped out the butt of the cigar and listened to the birds in the distance, desperate for them to fall quiet in the way they always did before a mortar fell, before the choppers came. He’d take any excuse to stay. Any excuse to take a later flight and say goodbye. Radar looked pointedly down at his watch and Trapper sagged against the Jeep, staring at the sky.

“Do you got anything you want me to give him, Sir?” Radar asked. “If you got a note, I can keep it safe from Major Burns.”

Trapper choked down the horrible, aching burning in his chest. “I thought he’d be here.”

“I know.”

“I thought I’d get to say it in person.”

“I know, Sir.”

How could he say everything he wanted to say? Anything he wanted to say? He couldn’t even imagine how he’d free the thrashing bird in his chest to Hawkeye. He couldn’t say anything to Radar or Klinger. They were good men. Kind men. They’d keep whatever he had to say a secret.

But he couldn’t say it.

He grabbed Radar by the shoulder and kissed him on the cheekbone, long and slow and with tears that made his eyes damp but didn’t fall. Radar gripped his hand as tight as he could and didn’t complain, though his cheek wrinkled beneath Trapper’s lips.

Trapper pulled away, wiped his eyes on the sleeve of his jacket, and miserably thought of the rough drag of stubble under his lips. “Give him that for me?”

Radar scrubbed off his cheek and said, “Yes, Sir.”

Klinger put his pump to the pedal, the Jeep’s engine snarled, and Trapper John McIntyre left the 4077th for the final time in a cloud of dust.

Kimpo was just as dusty and miserable as he remembered it. It should have been Mecca—a holy site ready and waiting for him to find deliverance. Even so early in the morning a sea of people roiled in the fog of dirt stirred up by Jeeps and jet engines. Klinger set Trapper’s bag in the dirt by his feet and stepped back, clicking his heels together and firing off a final salute.

Trapper squinted at him in the morning sun. “I ever tell you how much I like you, Klinger?”

“Yes, Sir,” Klinger said, relaxing out of the salute and offering one of those massive, megawatt smiles that Trapper wished he’d gotten to see directed at him more often. “I always appreciated your help picking out lingerie.”

They hugged under the Korean sun just too long for propriety. Klinger clapped him on the back and stepped away, smiling through the tears in his eyes.

“Thank you, Max,” Trapper said. He held out his hand and Klinger shook it, his needle-prick scabs lining up with the stretch of where too many hours of surgery had formed a rough mass of scalpel callus on Trapper’s fingers. “You take good care of ‘em for me.”

Klinger pulled away, gave one more curtsy for the road, and stepped back into the Jeep. A plane thundered overhead. Klinger watched with the strangest mix of emotion Trapper had ever seen on the man’s face, a cocktail of jealousy and fear and rage in his eyes. “Good luck, John,” he said. “No place like home, huh?”

Trapper waved goodbye. The Jeep snarled to life as Klinger put his pump to the pedal, and it disappeared over the hills in a cloud of dust.

Trapper watched it go until he couldn’t see the Jeep, hoisted his bag, and walked to the runway. He delayed the plane standing on the dirt runway, the churning idling of jet engines ticking down his last few minutes in Korea, like if he stared at the horizon for long enough a Jeep would come screaming to a stop in front of him and he could give Hawk the kiss himself. He would get to feel the rough drag of stubble under his lips and palms, whisper a promise into Hawk’s ear, and start planning road trips in his head as he kept his eyes pinned to the ceiling of the plane and ignored the freezing, roiling waters churning beneath him.

When they finally threatened to leave without him, he shifted his bag on his shoulder and clambered up the stairs. He sat in his seat on the aisle and touched his fingers to his lips, head swimming with the memories of a dozen different trips to the supply tent or the showers, a half dozen different double dates where they’d come back to the Swamp and teased each other about their technique because they couldn’t have looked away if they’d tried, the two times they’d weaseled a pair of three day passes to Seoul from Henry and only left their room for food and liquor. He clutched the armrest so tight his fingers were sore and focused on the motion of his lungs in his chest as the plane left the ground, felt every push and pull of his diaphragm and shook his head when the man in the seat next to him leaned closer to the window and tried to point him to look at the freezing, roiling waters of the sea below.

Dear Hawkeye, he thought, I hope Henry Blake was thinking about fishing in the Sea of Japan until the very moment the bullets tore through his plane, because I would hate for him to have been this scared.

Dear Hawkeye, I’m going home to my very-soon-to-be-ex-wife and I’m writing letters to you in my head instead of thinking about how I’m going to defend myself to her. She’s been signing letters from Becky and Kathy instead of her since a little while before I nearly got sent home with that ulcer, you know. I don’t know if she’ll even come pick me up from the airport. I don’t know if I want her to pick me up from the airport.

Dear Hawkeye, somehow I never thought about the fact that there was a chance we weren’t going home together.

Dear Hawkeye. I’m so sorry I didn’t get to say goodbye.

On the layover in Tokyo, all he could think about was the fact that Hawkeye had been there so few hours before. Hawkeye in that bright aloha shirt that matched the one in Trapper’s bag, Hawkeye in fatigues that didn’t fit either of them quite right, Hawkeye in a worn maroon bathrobe setting a hand on his thigh and kissing the lighter fluid taste of homemade gin into his mouth.

He sat in the restroom and gave himself three minutes to cry, teeth dug into his hand so nobody could hear him. Hawkeye was supposed to be there. They were supposed to lean against each other on the flight home, celebrating the fact that the war was finally over. That they were going home so Hawkeye could meet Trapper’s daughters. They were supposed to fall asleep breathing each other’s air, sharing each other’s heat, hearing each other’s hearts beat like they were stitched together.

He caught his flight to Hawaii and fell into a fitful sleep. He dreamed of Nurse Kellye and the view of the ocean from Honolulu that he’d never see, but that he’d traded her descriptions of the lights from the ships in Boston Harbor for on a lonely night Hawk had been at an aid station.

He bought two postcards in the airport, addressed one to her, the other to Hawkeye, and threw them both out before he got on his plane to San Francisco, unable to stomach the idea of gloating. He slept and dreamed of Hawkeye’s lips and skin and hands and woke to turbulence glad that he had a row to himself so he could cross his legs to hide what he’d been dreaming about. He stared at the ceiling instead of the freezing, roiling waters of the Pacific Ocean hurtling by beneath him.

He didn’t buy any postcards in San Francisco, just got on his plane and asked the flight attendant to tell him when they were over Iowa so he could watch out the window and say a prayer to nobody for Radar O’Reilly, who shouldn’t have been there any more than the rest of them but took to it like a duck to water. He begged the God he knew didn’t exist not to change Radar so much he died there. He promised his eternal soul to anyone who wanted it if Walter O’Reilly got to come home to his Ma and his Uncle Ed and his corn and his cows. He didn’t have anything valuable enough to promise to ensure that Hawk made it home.

With the layovers, his plane touched down about forty hours after he’d stepped out of the dirt at Kimpo. He lingered until he was the very last passenger on the plane and unloaded the duffle jammed full of the relics of the last year of his life from the overhead compartment. His aloha shirt. A set of fatigues. He’d left the parka he’d brought to Korea there, hoping someone, maybe even Hawkeye, would get some kind of use out of it when the cold weather came roaring back. A dozen different tchotchkes he’d bought in Seoul, Tokyo, Honolulu, or San Francisco, some more recently than others.

Louise was waiting at the gate, not a single blonde hair out of place, chin held high and powder blue dress shining under the lights, a backpack sitting between her white leather heels. Trapper looked at her and didn’t feel a damn thing. He hugged her because he was expected to. He kissed her to feel it one last time, next to her lips, and she made no effort to correct his aim. She handed him the backpack and he left the duffle at her feet while he disappeared into the restroom and traded his pinks for the turtleneck and real, civilian trousers she’d packed inside. They sagged around his waist, tailored for someone who hadn’t tried to box while dangerously underweight. He washed his boots in the restroom sink and watched red-tinted mud swirl down the drain until he could walk back onto the concourse to leave behind footprints that were wet with water instead of blood.

Louise picked up his duffle, walked him to the car, and didn’t say a single word until they were parked outside the South Boston row house he’d been aching to get back to for over a year. She drummed her fingers on the steering wheel, shoulders tight and lips tense, and wouldn’t look at him.

“Your daughters missed you,” she said.

The lights were on in the upstairs window, shining like a beacon in the growing dusk.

There was so much that had to be said that they couldn’t bear to talk about in the letters that twisted his given name to chalk in his mouth, the letter crumpled and worn in the pocket of his wrinkling dress uniform in the bag sitting on the back seat. He had always tried to be a good father. He’d found time for his dates and supply closet escapades when they wouldn’t interfere with anything the girls needed. He’d never hit them, never even been tempted to hit them. He’d listened and done his best to teach them how to be good, kind people, to treat others with the respect and love and decency he’d never afforded anyone until he needed to set them an example.

“Can I see them, Louise?”

“If you tell me the truth,” Louise said. She turned in her seat to face him. He’d been so struck by her beauty, once. The same blonde curls as his own pulled into a ponytail to keep it off her face while she worked, pale green eyes sharper than he’d ever given her credit for behind the glasses she was blind as a bat without, lips he’d been so desperate to feel against his own that he hadn’t bothered to think about the consequences. He ought to still be struck by her beauty. But everything was the wrong color. “How many women have you slept with since I married you?”

If he knew, he would have answered. Nearly a decade of a different temptation every other month. He’d been good for the first six months. Content. And then the itch in his veins had set in, desperate for the rush that came with seducing a girl into his bed, and he hadn’t been able to resist.

Louise huffed, knuckles white against coffee brown leather. “You don’t know.”

“I wasn’t keepin’ track.”

“How many in Korea?” she choked out.

Trapper looked down at his boots, still damp from trying to wash away a year of dust and blood and operating room muck. “Enough.”

A huff. Skin over skin as Louise dragged her hands down her face. Skin against leather when she slammed her hand into the steering wheel. “God damnit, John!”

Trapper felt the wool of his sweater beneath his palm, staring up at the window. “You wanted the truth.”

“You think this is what I wanted? What the hell made you decide to be honest with me now? Would you look at me when I talk to you?”

Trapper didn’t turn. He rolled the window down a crack and rested his forehead against it to see the house better, pressing his hand into the crank so hard it hurt. “Can I please see my daughters, Louise?”

She wrang her fingers into the wool and pulled at him. He was so tired. Here he was looking at the woman he was supposed to love and all he could think about was that with all the time changes, he didn’t know how long it had been since he’d seen Hawkeye. He’d been counting down the hours until Hawk came back from R&R, counting up the hours in the airport or on a plane, and he was left with a muddled number that couldn’t have been anywhere close to right.

“Why did you do it, John?” Louise asked.

“Because I wanted to,” he answered, too easily. That was the truth of it, wasn’t it? He did it because he wanted to. He did so many things because he wanted to. Even in Korea, when he hadn’t had a choice about whether or not he was going to go, he and Hawkeye did damn near everything because they wanted to.

Was Hawk going to be able to keep that up? Henry had been such a pushover. Frank wasn’t. If he was lucky enough to get a new CO, maybe he wouldn’t be, either. Or maybe he would, and Hawkeye could steal his desk and his liquor and another man’s heart.

Louise stifled a sob, and he thought about how he’d hold her if she was Hawkeye.

“Are you going back to your job?” she asked.

“If they still want me.”

What if they didn’t?

Louise nodded and pursed her lips. Her gaze drifted past him to the upstairs window glowing in the dark. “The girls and I are going to stay with my mother for a little while.”

“Louise–“

“I won’t keep you from your children,” she said immediately. Trapper thunked his head back against the window, vision swimming. “I promised you that. You’re a good father, John. You’re just a shitty husband.”

Distantly, Trapper wondered if he was still a good father.

“I know,” he said. “Always have been.”

He needed a drink. He was certain he would have upchucked all over the plane if he drank on board. How long had it been since he last went forty-some hours without a drink? When Frank tried to ban it, and he and Hawkeye had talked Margaret into sharing her brandy before she went back to her tent and they fell asleep trading fantasies of sharing her?

Louise wiped the tears off her face. “I loved you, John.”

“Past tense,” he murmured.

Louise watched him, eyes damp, and nodded. She hugged herself with one arm and tried to press the tears in with the other.

He didn’t like making a woman cry. He didn’t like making anyone cry.

“It’s okay, Lou. I loved you, too.”

They sat in all-but-silence, interrupted only by Louise’s hitching sobs, for a long time. Trapper held out his hand and she took it, chipped nails digging into his skin like a scalpel. It was the least he could offer for sending nearly a decade of a perfectly useful, good thing swirling into the roiling, churning depths.

He was probably supposed to feel something other than numb. He was probably supposed to think of something other than Hawkeye’s breath on his neck, on the insides of his thighs, against his lips.

“You got a fella who’s gonna take care of you?” he asked, running his thumb over the back of her hand.

Louise laughed and coughed the phlegm from her throat. “I got one in mind,” she said. She smiled, the barest of tilts at the corners of her lips, eyes still watery. “How about you?”

Hawkeye, reeling him back from the edge when he got so angry at the death and the fear and the injustice that he would have killed a man in cold blood. Hawkeye, not talking about it and not cradling him in his arms but sitting there with him anyway when he fell in love with a kid only to have him snatched away by the war finally showing a single person mercy. Hawkeye, playing stupid games and coming up with stupid pranks and telling stupid jokes to get him out of his head when he fell into that place where he started to lose the ability to tell if he was doing something because it was right or because he wanted to, because it made him feel good.

Hawkeye, who was all alone with Frank. Some poor bastard would get drafted to fill the spaces left behind by Henry, by Trapper himself. Of course they would. The machine would catch them by any loose strand of clothing and reel them in to tear them apart, the same as an oil rig or the churning cogs of assembly line equipment. If the war was kind, which he doubted it would be, Hawk would get someone else who knew when he was fraying, knew when he needed jokes, knew when he needed a distraction so badly that everything except for patients could wait. Maybe he’d get someone who could love him in the way his one-night nurses couldn’t—someone who knew him so well inside and out that they didn’t have to say a single word to determine exactly how they were going to run a scam. Someone who held him tight and let him cry without it changing the way they thought of him, without thinking him any less of a man. Someone who kissed him on the cheek and forehead and lips and came away loving him so much that when they went home, they could look at the woman they’d tried to make a life with and not feel a single thing.

Louise wiggled his hand back and forth, her smile tilting wider. “What’s that look for?”

Trapper took his hand out of hers, asked, “What look?” and stepped out of the car.

He clenched his hands so they didn’t shake while Louise got the duffle out of the trunk. Detoxing. It had to be detoxing. Forty-some hours was too long without a drink when they’d never once let the gin age that long.

It was only from detoxing.

The lights downstairs flickered on. Trapper held his hand to his mouth for a long moment so he didn’t start crying. “Can I take them somewhere tomorrow?”

Louise pressed the duffle into his hands. “I’ve already told their teachers they won’t be there.”

The door of the house creaked open. One of the neighbor girls stood in the doorway, hair mussed and an exhausted look staining her face. “Good evening, Dr. McIntyre,” she said, fiddling with the hem of her sweater. She was about seventeen, Trapper thought; she was the oldest of the Ryan girls from a few houses down. He’d flirted with her mother more times than he could could, and she’d never told him to stop. “I tried to put them to bed, but they were too excited.”

“We would have woken them up anyway,” Louise said. She smiled in that broad, passive way that was the only way she’d smiled at him for years. “You mind if I pay you after I get my tips tomorrow?”

“That’s just fine, Ma’am.” The Ryan girl glanced behind her at something just out of sight inside the house, then carefully shut the door as she stepped fully outside. She wrang the hem of her sweater in her palm, staring at the ground. “Thank you for your service, Dr. McIntyre.”

A cold, hard lump twisted in his stomach, the burning opposite of the ulcer that had taken to his guts with a knife and a vengeance. He needed to kill it with an entire quart of whatever liquor Louise was keeping in the house. “I don’t deserve that,” he said. “I ain’t even a soldier.”

“Oh.” The girl glanced around, then squeezed her eyes shut. “My mom told me to say it, Sir.”

The lump twisted tighter. Trapper clenched his hands around the duffle bag and tried to take a breath. He didn’t want anybody to call him that ever again. “It’s alright, honey,” he said, slinging his duffle over his shoulder purely for something to do with his hands. “Thanks for takin’ care of ‘em.”

The girl blushed. Trapper felt like he was going to vomit, though maybe that was only the DTs. When was the last time he’d interacted with a teenager? Every woman he’d spoken with over the course of the last year was a nurse he could flirt with, a local who didn’t understand what he was saying, or Rosie, who didn’t take his shit just the same as she didn’t take anyone else’s shit. He couldn’t go around calling seventeen-year-old girls honey like he’d call a nurse.

He really needed that drink. Only to dull the pain that was curling around his insides. If he didn’t know for a fact that it was all in his head, he really would have been worried about that ulcer making a reappearance.

Louise stepped forward to open the door as the Ryan girl scurried down the street to her own house. She glanced up from her doorway, a shy smile visible in the glow of the streetlamp, and disappeared inside. Trapper decided then and there that he was getting a different babysitter if he ever needed one.

Becky was waiting behind the door when Louise opened it, her fingers clasped around a stuffed rabbit she hadn’t had when he left hard enough to bulge the stuffing. She looked up with wide, wet eyes that were exactly the same color as his and sniffled. “Hi, Daddy.”

Trapper’s knees gave out from under him. He dropped his duffle to the pavement and knelt on the sidewalk, propping himself up with one hand and reaching out to her with the other. “Becky. Oh, Becky Bear, come here, honey.”

She took one step outside, glancing up at Louise with her brows furrowed and her lips pulled tight, the same expression he’d seen a hundred times on Louise’s face when he didn’t trust a lie he’d told her.

“Go on, honey,” Louise said, nudging her a bit. “It’s alright.”

Becky slammed into him so hard he nearly fell over. He wrapped both arms around her as tight as he could without hurting her, cradling the back of her head in one hand. She was so small. How many kids just like her had he not been able to help?

“I missed you so much,” Trapper said. He wiped his eyes on the back of his hand and dug his fingers into her hair, inexplicably straightened to within an inch of its life for some godawful reason of Louise’s. She was real. He wasn’t dreaming. He had his little girl in his arms. Everything was going to be just fine.

Dear Hawkeye, I wish you were here with me so you could meet my girls and tell me how it’s a good thing they take after their mother. You’d be joking, of course, because Kathy’s got my nose and my smile and Becky’s got my eyes and my hair when Louise doesn’t straighten it, and she sure as hell seemed to be picking up my sense of humor when I left. You’d like that, wouldn’t you? An eight year old girl grinning up at you and telling you where you can cram it.

Dear Hawkeye, my little girl had to look at her mother for permission to hug me, and I can’t even be angry about it because I know she’s got every right to be nervous when I up and left her like that. And you’ve got every right, too, which is why I’m drafting letters in my head and trying to convince Radar to kiss you for me.

Dear Hawkeye, nearly four months ago my wife told me we were getting a divorce when I got home, and I don’t think I’ll make a very good single mother. Feel like moving to Boston and filling the gap?

“You’re squishing me,” Becky protested.

Trapper let out a wet, gasping laugh and fought his fingers to let go. He kept his hands on her shoulders. Her eyes were whiskey gold, wet with tears. “I’m sorry, Bear,” Trapper said. He kissed her on the forehead and wiped the tears from her eyes with the backs of his fingers. “You were squishing me back, you know.”

Becky laughed, the smallest possible sound, and cradled her bunny to her chest. He could barely hear her when she spoke. “Are you leaving again?”

He was, wasn’t he? Trapper glanced up at Louise and saw the same expression pulled tight across her face: brows furrowed, lips thin, staring at the back of Becky’s head instead of at him. He wished he could hate her. They could have made it work. If she hadn’t insisted, they could have made it work. If he’d been willing to lie, or known how to lie better, they could have made it work. They could have spent another thirteen years together until Kathy was off at college and wouldn’t be seeing her parents all that often anyway.

“No, honey,” Trapper said. He wiped her tears again and rested his hands over hers, pressing down into the soft fabric of the rabbit. “I won’t leave you again. I’ve got all day to spend with you tomorrow, alright?”

It wasn’t a lie. He wouldn’t leave her.

Please, God, don’t let it be a lie.

“Why don’t we go inside and see your sister, and I’ll tell you all about the time Daddy and his friend stole–“ Henry was gone, dead and never-buried, so much fish food under the freezing, roiling waters of the Sea of Japan, oh God– “stole their boss’s desk to trade it for medicine?”

Louise laughed, just once, barking and unkind. “Why would you do that?”

For a moment, he was back there, standing in front of a general who had the power to decide the fate of dozens of boys with the flick of his wrist or lack thereof over a piece of paper unless Trapper and Hawkeye could convince him that they needed anything from hydrocortisone to morphine to an incubator. And there was no Hawkeye to temper and take the anger that latched in his chest and rattled against his rib cage like a clip-winged bird. “Because people are gonna die if we don’t!” Trapper snapped.

Becky had gone still. She stared at him with those wide, whiskey gold eyes, and the thought flickered through him that that was probably exactly what he looked like when he was scared.

“Were,” Trapper corrected. “They were going to get very sick.” He kept his hands on hers. He was in Boston. He was with his daughter. He didn’t need to worry about what was happening on the other side of the world anymore.

How many thousands of miles of rock were between him and Hawkeye?

Trapper took a deep breath. “And Daddy’s a doctor,” he went on, trying so hard to smile when he looked into Becky’s eyes. “So he couldn’t let people hurt just so Colonel Blake could have a nice oak desk, could he?”

Maybe some day, he and Hawkeye would go back to Japan and push a desk into the ocean. For Henry. They probably should have apologized for that one. He would have given anything for that taste of home.

“Let’s go inside, Bear,” Louise said. She was so soft with the girls, just the right amount of rough around the edges everywhere else. She wasn’t perfect. It was what John had loved about her, before the pregnancy scare and the hasty marriage and years of trying to be more than something that should have gently fizzled out after a few months of killer sex and emotional detachment.

He’d never wanted perfect. He’d just wanted enough.

Hawkeye was so much more than enough. He could commit all of himself to that.

Christ, he was pathetic. Lovesick for a man who couldn’t really fall in love with anyone more than he was already in love with his work, with his patients. Lovesick for a man, who he’d never have the same opportunities with as they’d had in Korea where everyone was willing to look the other way as long as nobody was doing anything that would hurt anyone else. Where the only person who really cared what two men did in the privacy of the supply shed was too dumb to notice.

It was terrible of him to wish he could have stayed longer, but he wished it anyway.

Louise tapped him on the shoulder until he looked up, hoisted his duffle over her arm, and led Becky into the house. Trapper stood and expected to see dirt and blood soaked through the knees of his trousers. He’d knelt in the hard-pack of dust tamped down by ambulance after ambulance, whipped to life by the beat of chopper blades, and packed into itself again by rain and boots and blood more times than he could count. He’d seen men bleed out into that same mud, his hands pressed to the bandages on their chests or stomachs or necks as the endless sluice of red over his fingers finally found the courtesy to stop so they could help someone who could really be saved. He’d watched Frank and Father Mulcahy grow flowers in sand that wouldn’t have held them if it wasn’t for the all-natural blood meal their patients kindly donated to the cause.

He grabbed the backpack with his dress uniform and pocketed Dear John letter from the back seat of the station wagon, carefully locked up, and couldn’t make himself move an inch closer to the door of the house.

It was like he was standing on the step of another man’s home. Dr. John McIntyre, devoted father, loving husband, thoracic surgeon and good little Catholic boy. Family man. Straight-laced, if quick with a dirty joke. Good at trauma work, occasional repairer of bullet wounds, completely ignorant of the damage a mortar shell or a landmine could do as shrapnel tore through every inch of flesh in its path to bury itself so deep in the heart it could never be removed. Ignorant of the way you could leave a thirty hour surgical shift so bone tired you didn’t remember any of the jokes you’d made but with the faces of every boy you couldn’t spend enough time on branded into your mind’s eye with a hot iron. Completely and horribly unprepared for the realities of losing the son you never had, the friend you would have taken a bullet or a lungful of water for, the Maine-made shard of shrapnel that wormed its way into your heart and healed over until it was a part of you as fundamentally as your bone marrow. The shard stood in the gaps between his veins, razor-sharp edges set against the fragile flesh, called him by the name he’d earned at Dartmouth, pulled him tighter and tighter until he was shrink wrapped taut over its cutting points and could do nothing but lean further in and watch as it tore him apart and stitched him back together with 3-0 silk and the kind of kiss that made promises it intended to keep.

John McIntyre had gone to Korea and Trapper was standing in his place in still damp Army regulation boots, a gaping hole in his chest where the shrapnel had been pulled free.

Trapper took a long, careful breath, and walked through the door directly into Kathy’s waiting arms. He swept her into a hug, crushing her against his chest for a long moment before threatening to tip her upside down over his back until she squealed.

This was home. It was good. He could hold Kathy in his arms and hear her laugh, he could feel Becky at his heels like a shadow, and he could bring them both down the hall into the living room and collapse onto the couch with Kathy trying to wriggle out of his grasp and Becky practically trying to climb his legs. Louise lingered in the doorway, that tight look pulled over her features, before she turned away and the creaking of her footsteps on the stairs echoed down the hall.

“Now, Kathy,” Trapper said, settling her on his lap. Becky leaned against his side until he cradled her under one arm and gently ruffled his fingers through her hair. “A little birdie told me you started school.” Christ, it hurt. He hadn’t been there to see his own daughter off to her first day of kindergarten. He hadn’t been there to see her off to her first day of first grade, an entire year later. He’d promised himself so long ago that he was going to be there for them, and how had that turned out?

Kathy wrinkled her nose. “I don’t like school.”

“Why’s that, baby?”

She looked up at him, all piercing blue-green eyes with her lip tucked between her teeth. “Nobody likes school.”

“I liked school,” Trapper said. Kathy narrowed her eyes. “I went to a whole bunch of extra school so I could be a doctor.”

“Yuck.”

Trapper gasped, desperately trying to hide the smile on his face even if he couldn’t hide it in his voice. “Are you ‘yuck’ing your own father?”

“Yeah. Yuck.”

“Well, it’s too bad I’m immune to yucks then, isn’t it? I’ve got all my vaccinations.”

“There’s not a vaccine for yucks,” Becky argued.

“Oh really?”

Becky shook her head with all the gravity an eight year old could muster. “Nope. Ain’t no vaccine for cooties, neither.”

“Well gosh, Bear, I think I’ve got a career goal for you. You’ll be world-famous if you develop the cure for cooties.”

Louise peeked her head around the corner. “You three behaving yourselves?”

Trapper took a breath as the cold, pooling dread came rushing back to his stomach. How much longer did he have with his girls before they were getting ripped away from him again? Tonight. Tomorrow. Visits and every-other-weekends and maybe a week at a time if he was lucky and could find the time in a surgeon’s schedule. And it was all his fault, not the draft board’s. If he could have just behaved himself, if he could have lied better, if he hadn’t been sleeping around every minute of the day he wasn’t in surgery, if he hadn’t met Hawkeye…

“I dunno, Ma,” he said, ruffling Kathy’s hair before dumping her off his lap onto the couch cushion. “I’m hearing a lot about how school’s yucky.”

“Plenty of kids don’t get to go to school,” Louise said. She set down a stack of blankets, a pillow, and a picture book on the floor next to the couch. Trapper fought to keep his breathing in check. Yeah, plenty of kids didn’t get to go to school, alright. He’d seen them bloody and mud-caked from the war and the dust and the bombs on his table.

Louise poked Kathy on the nose and Trapper nudged Becky closer to him, letting her burrow into his side. “You’re lucky, Kathy Cat,” Louise said. “You’ve got your mommy, you’ve got your daddy, you’ve got your friends at school–“

Food on her table, quiet skies, a goddamn roof over her head instead of a piece of canvas fabric. Not like all those kids in Korea. Not like Hawkeye, who didn’t even have a friend by his side anymore, just Frank and Hot Lips and Radar, who could only do so much when he was trying to run the entire camp and burning from the inside at the loss of Henry Blake at the bottom of the freezing, roiling waters of the Sea of Japan. They’d left Hawkeye all alone. Trapper hadn’t even left him a note. God, what if Hawkeye thought Trapper didn’t want anything to do with him anymore?

Louise flicked him in the shoulder. “John.”

“Hmm?”

She set the book in his lap. “I said your name three times.”

“Mm. Sorry. Long flight.” He rubbed his eyes, swiping away the wetness that was gathering in them before any of the girls could see. “And I’m not much used to hearing it anymore.”

“To your name.”

Kathy pulled the book out of his hands to flip through it. Becky seemed to be half-asleep against his side. It wasn’t exactly the best environment to have a conversation like this, but it didn’t look like Louise was in the mood for backing down.

“Nobody called me that,” Trapper said. Louise crossed her arms and motioned for him to go on. “I mean, Hawk–“

“Hawk.”

“Hawkeye, yeah. Hawkeye Pierce, my–“ What the fuck was Hawkeye to him? Friend wasn’t anything close to enough. Best friend still felt lacking. Lover wasn’t anything he could say out loud, not to mention that they had never so much as said I love you. “My bunkie,” he settled on. “My partner in crime, I guess. He always called me Trapper, and everyone else kinda… fell in line.”

“Christ alive, John. Nobody called you by your name for over a year?”

Trapper shrugged. He wasn’t opposed to introducing himself as John McIntyre, devoted father, loving husband, thoracic surgeon, not when Hawkeye put who he’d really been there back in his mouth only a few moments later. Trapper had been the one who suffered for a year in a tent with no running water, dreaming about kissing the gin off his bunkie’s lips.

He was supposed to be able to scrape Trapper off his boots the same as the blood and the mud, but John felt foreign in his mouth and his mind.

“It was what Hawk called me,” Trapper said.

“And you let him?”

“Why wouldn’t I? They called me that in college.”

Louise scoffed and stepped away. “You promised me you’d stop calling yourself that when we got married.”

Trapper gently bounced Kathy on his knee when she crawled back into his lap. “Then I don’t suppose it matters much now, does it?”

Becky shifted against his side. Kathy looked up at Louise with her lips half-parted, face scrunched up in a perfect mirror of her mother when she was confused.

“Sorry, Lou,” Trapper sighed. Kathy went back to flipping through the book, looking at the pictures more than anything. Trapper reached around her to gently turn it back to the first page, adjusting it in her hands so he could see the words. Christ, how was anyone supposed to read text that small? He squinted and pulled Kathy’s elbows closer until the letters formed into something manageable. He could find a pencil lead’s worth of shrapnel in a boy’s small intestine, but he couldn’t even read words a few feet away?

Well, the OR had been by feel a hell of a lot of the time. The lights were dim and nearly always flickering. The generator went out if the ground rumbled too hard from shelling half a mile away. Radar with a straw would have been more effective than the suction unit he so often got stuck with, unwilling to take the better ones away from Frank, who needed all the help he could get, or Hawkeye, who deserved everything good in the world. It had gotten so he could tell the difference between a bullet fragment and mortar shrapnel by only the way his forceps closed around them.

“It’s been a long war,” Trapper murmured.

Louise huffed. “Well, you had plenty of distractions, didn’t you? ‘Enough’ of them, at least.”

Trapper ignored her, tilted the book further into the lamp on the end table, and wrapped his arms around Kathy’s waist. “Right, what’s this? The Velveteen Rabbit. I got a friend who keeps a rabbit, you know. And a skunk, and a raccoon. Gosh, he sent a lamb all the way across the Pacific Ocean.”

That stupid Greek lamb had made it home. It would have made a stopover in Japan, passing over the freezing, roiling waters of–

“Why?” Becky asked.

Trapper blinked. “Why what, honey?”

“Why did he send it away?”

If Trapper was honest with himself, this particular story involved too much ouzo to tell his kids about. It also involved a drunken, sloppy, extremely public make-out session that he was fairly certain nobody commented on only because Hawkeye had taken a break in the middle to stick his tongue in Henry’s mouth, then a couple of Greek soldiers’, then Igor’s before making his way back to Trapper. Typical Hawkeye Pierce, that: drunk and lip-locking with every man he caught a glimpse of after the nurses had gone to bed.

“I guess because he loved it,” Trapper answered. “If he’d’a kept it there, someone would’a gobbled it up.”

“Read your story,” Louise told them. “This is Becky’s favorite picture book, isn’t it?”

Becky held her stuffed rabbit closer to her chest, a blush rising to her cheeks. “I only like it ‘cause Kathy does.”

“Well, we’ll read it for Kathy, then, won’t we?” Trapper said. “Let’s see… ‘There once was a velveteen rabbit, and in the beginning he was really splendid…’”

The story was sad in a way Trapper didn’t quite want to wrap his head around. A boy was given this stuffed rabbit for Christmas, but he ignored it in favor of more interesting toys—anything that buzzed and chirred and moved, clockwork or models or breakable things. But none of them were Real, as the rabbit’s mentor, the Skin Horse said.

“Real isn’t how you are made,” said the Skin Horse. “It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but really loves you, then you become Real.”

“Does it hurt?” asked the Rabbit.

“Sometimes,” said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. “When you are Real you don’t mind being hurt. Once you are Real you can’t become unreal again. It lasts for always.”

The Boy grew to love the Rabbit, eventually, but only when he lost a more favored toy and had the Rabbit thrust into his arms to replace it. The Boy played with the Rabbit. They went everywhere together, from his bed to the nursery and outside to play. It was only natural that the Rabbit changed. He grew patchy and threadbare, the paint rubbed off his nose, and the boy made him Real.

Then the Boy caught scarlet fever, and still carrying the germs that had made him sick, he and the Rabbit were torn apart.

“’That night the Boy slept in a different bedroom, and he had a new bunny to sleep with him,’” Trapper read. “’It was a splendid bunny, all white plush with real glass eyes, but the Boy was too excited to care very much about it. For tomorrow he was going to the seaside, and that in itself was such a wonderful thing that he could think of nothing else.’”

Kathy tugged on his wrist, breaking him from the spell. “Daddy?”

He sniffled, hands trembling. He needed a drink. He needed to stop the shaking. “Yeah, Cat?”

“You won’t be so sad when you finish the story,” she promised. “The Rabbit gets to be happy.”

She bunched the sleeve of her pajamas over her arm, reached up, and dabbed away the wetness beneath Trapper’s eyes. Why had he been crying? It was a stupid children’s book. There wasn’t anything there to cry about.

When the Rabbit was taken away from the Boy, the Rabbit cried a tear that summoned a fairy. She made him into a Real rabbit, flesh and blood and luck incarnate, and sent him to live with his new kin. And he visited the Boy again, as a Real thing. He said goodbye.

Trapper wasn’t comforted by the thought. He sent the girls upstairs to their beds with Louise, made up the couch as she set them to rest, and waited until the creaking of the floorboards had grown silent. None of them would be coming back downstairs tonight.

He went to the kitchen, drank whiskey straight from the bottle until the shaking stopped and his head felt less like an active gun range, and collapsed onto the couch. It wasn’t much more comfortable than his cot, but he’d make do. He always made do.

Tomorrow, he was going to give his girls the best day he could possibly give them.

The day after that, he’d put together a care package for Hawkeye, nuts and oranges and a copy of the book that had made Trapper cry in front of his daughters.

He drifted off to sleep thinking of the seaside—of the freezing, roiling waters of the Sea of Japan.

Chapter Text

Trapper clung to a pole in the trolleybus like it was his final lifeline, the ringing in his ears nearly drowning out the girls’ conversation at his side. There was so much noise here. Traffic and talking and trolley-sounds and the ticking in his mind of every single second he spent not knowing whether or not Hawkeye was alive. He couldn’t pull his thoughts away from it. Hawk hadn’t gotten there so long after him. Unmarried, no children, the Army was certain to try to keep him there longer than they’d been able to keep Trapper, but how much longer? Hawk had to come home some day soon, and Boston and Maine weren’t so far apart.

How long was he going to have to go on like this? He’d left his sense of humor—not to mention his sense—in Korea. The metal flask in his suit pocket spoke to that, but he couldn’t let his daughters see him shaking. He would ease himself off until he was a functional person again, ready and waiting to help Hawkeye do the same. By the time he had a job, he’d be back to drinking socially instead of to knock himself out so hard he couldn’t hear the shelling. He’d be able to put Trapper away with the pocket flask. Dr. John McIntyre, devoted father, formerly loving husband, thoracic surgeon.

He kept his daughters close to him. If he looked away for even a moment, they’d end up in the mine field.

Except there was no mine field, was there? Only cars and train tracks and sidewalks in poor enough repair they could stumble and break an ankle. People with bad intentions and people with knives and guns. Pestilence and famine and death. War might not have found his way to Boston, but the other three horsemen were waiting their turn to trample Trapper and everything he held dear. If he didn’t keep his head up, keep an eye out, he’d wind up beneath their hooves. Or worse, they’d steal his daughters away, leaving him with so much less than today and every-other-weekends and maybe a week at a time if he was lucky. He’d seen children smaller than them in his OR. He’d thought of them every time a child was dying on his table as he pressed a scalpel to skin and yanked out a shard of shrapnel that had lodged itself beneath the hypodermis, inside the intestines, against the heart. He’d taken every child he could into his arms to save them from Frank’s incompetence, Henry’s mediocrity, and the fear that if they never made it off Hawkeye’s table, Hawk would fall into that distant place he sometimes went when the going got too bad for even him to handle, and he’d never be able to climb back out.

Trapper hadn’t understood the first time Hawk went to one of those places. Not until he’d been forced to sedate the man to keep him safe from himself. He’d brought Hawk back to his cot, fetched a bedpan full of water, and stripped him down to wash the mud and dirt and fear-sweat from the places Hawk had been too far gone to get clean himself. He’d stepped back and taken in the naked body of Hawkeye Pierce, pale and dappled with the light filtering through the netting of the Swamp like an impressionist painting: a pond clotted with water lilies in the afternoon sun.

How had he not understood sooner? He’d taken every moment available to him to soak in the lines of Hawkeye’s body from his broad shoulders to the dark hair on his forearms and chest to the careful way his fingers moved inside a body, no matter if that body was a patient’s or a nurse’s. The first time they’d taken a woman apart together, Trapper had barely been able to keep his eyes on her face or her breasts as Hawkeye put those perfect fingers to use. How had he not realized? Most men wouldn’t invite their best friend on their date, not even with the promise that they didn’t need to touch each other. Most men wouldn’t put their hand on their best friend’s bare shoulder as they bent in to kiss the girl he was wetting his fingers inside. Most men weren’t thousands of miles from home trying to stay sane, feeling the things that made them a person slip away line by line unless they touched their best friend’s thigh beneath the mess tent table and sponged the sweat from his body when he went mad.

Who was going to take care of Hawkeye now? Why had Trapper agreed to go when Frank handed him the travel orders? They weren’t even addressed to him. When he got to the 4077th, he’d known exactly one thing: Trapper was supposed to stay in Korea. John McIntyre was supposed to go home. But here he was, feet planted on the rumbling metal of a trolleybus, soon to be planted again on American soil as soon as they got to the zoo. Trapper had daughters who existed in a nebulous sense, a promise that kept him thinking about making it home. These were John’s daughters. They didn’t know him, didn’t care about him, hadn’t seen him break under the pressure of the death and the fear and the injustice until he came inches away from killing a man in cold blood. They didn’t know who he was. Nobody here knew who he was. He was made from all the things that used to be John, but he wasn’t him.

Did he really want to go back to being John?

“Daddy?”

Trapper looked down. Kathy was tugging on his shirtsleeve. “Yeah-yeah?”

“We’re at the zoo,” Becky said. She looked at him strangely, like she knew he wasn’t really her father. Like she could tell that he’d taken shape in the hard-pack of dust tamped down by ambulance after ambulance, at Hawkeye’s side, until there wasn’t anything left but liquor in his veins and a determination to see Hawkeye through to the end of it.

He’d completely failed to uphold his end of that bargain, hadn’t he?

Maybe he’d feel less like this when he got back to work. If he had something to do with his hands to pierce through the fog in his mind, maybe he’d feel less like this. He needed to help people, to tear the shrapnel from their bodies and get them back on their feet so they at least had a chance of making it out alive.

Trapper led his daughters off the trolleybus, made sure they said thank you to the conductor, and didn’t hesitate to pick Kathy up and put her on his shoulders when she asked. Of course they were his; who else’s could they be? They had his hair and his eyes and occasionally his sense of humor, and that was proof enough.

He appreciated the effort that went into the Franklin Park Zoo. Most of the animals had soft ground to lay on, space enough to play instead of the tiny cages he knew were common in most places. They might have spent their entire lives stuck in one place, but at least they had the chance to be happy, some of the time.

“Right, whadda you girls wanna see first?” Trapper asked.

“The bears!” Kathy shouted from his shoulders at the same time as Becky made a request to go to the elephants. “We’re right by the bears,” Kathy complained, hands wringing in his curls.

“That means we have to come back past the bears,” Becky insisted.

“Everyone’s gonna get to see everything they wanna see, don’t worry,” Trapper said. He reached up to try to ease Kathy’s grip, wincing. “We’ll go see the bears first, alright?”

“I’m gonna go see the elephants.”

The panic began to set in the moment Becky turned to march off on her own, clenching Trapper’s stomach in a vice and refusing to let go. She was going to wander into the mine field. She’d end up on his table, broken and bleeding, and he’d have to explain himself to Louise if he couldn’t save her. She’d wind up the same way everyone he loved ended up, taken from him or thousands of miles away or rotting below the freezing, roiling waters of the Sea of Japan.

He grabbed her arm too hard when he stopped her. Becky winced and jerked out of his grasp to straighten the sleeve of her dress.

“Rebecca, don’t you dare go somewhere I can’t see you,” Trapper heard himself say. His voice was strained and panicked and seemed to come from somewhere outside himself. Or maybe he wasn’t there in the first place, but still back in Korea, and he was starting to wake up from the dream he was having of home. He’d feel the thrum of chopper blades in his bones any second now, the cold steel of the scalpel under the pads of his fingers, the slick slide of blood over his gloves against the sputtering of the suction unit.

“Fine,” Becky huffed. “We’ll go see your stupid bears.”

Trapper followed her when she stomped off to the bear dens. Kathy was quiet on his shoulders as they tromped off through the park. He didn’t know how to go about cheering her up, particularly when he didn’t want to talk much, either.

He set Kathy down next to where her sister had found a place to sit at the bars of the bear den. He didn’t like that the cage was made from nothing but open grating, prison cell bars wide enough for a man to reach his arm through. The polar bears were far enough away, in the pool with their heads resting on the edge, but he didn’t trust them. He still remembered the bear that had been there in his youth who had a habit of charging the bars hard enough to rattle them like the rumble of a mortar or the snarl of a Jeep engine, the putter and racket of a suction unit years out of date–

Dear Hawkeye. There’s something wrong with me. I’m back at home but everything reminds me of that place, of the things we saw in that operating room, of your ugly mug. I think you stole a piece of me and you’re keeping it there. I’d like it back, but I’m not gonna come back over there for it, and I don’t think it fits in the mail, so you’d better come and see me the minute you get home.

Dear Hawkeye, do you ever feel like you’re dead? Like you’re only still moving because the electrical impulses in your brain won’t stop firing? I think I’m dead. I think I died in Korea. Someone did, at least. Maybe that propaganda bomb wasn’t a propaganda bomb. Maybe I only dreamt the ulcer and it was a bullet wound in my belly, and I bled out before you could find me and save me. Maybe you tried and you couldn’t. That’s alright, honey. I don’t blame you. You save a lotta people, and I know you tried your best.

Dear Hawkeye, if I was there right now and saying the things I’m saying to you in my head, you’d be calling Sidney Freedman, and I think you wouldn’t be wrong to do it. I’d hate you, a little, ‘cause I’d never call him on you. I didn’t call him on you. I carried you in my arms and cleaned you up and watched you sleep so nobody could take you away from me, not even you. I don’t think you’re crazy, Hawkeye. I think you feel things for the both of us, because I can’t feel much of anything anymore. I’m sorry for making you feel things for me, because I know it has to hurt. I hurt and I don’t even feel anything.

Dear Hawkeye, do you think you could ask Sidney if you can get combat fatigue if you weren’t even in combat for me?

Trapper leaned his head against the cool metal of the bears’ grating. He didn’t think he believed the Skin Horse when he said things couldn’t be made Unreal again. He felt Unreal. The entire world felt Unreal. Maybe the only Real things were in Korea, where they colored red outside the lines on sheets of olive green paper. A polar bear’s pelt was the same color as their scrubs. Surely everything that color ended up red-stained, eventually.

If he stood here long enough, head against the cool metal grating and hands wrapped around the bars, someone would come and gobble him up. Falling into the maw of something linen-colored and blood-stained was a sure way to end up back in Korea, like a game of Snakes and Ladders. The endless work would make him Real again. There was no time to be Unreal when there was work to do, people to save, hands to hold as young boys died and hands to hold as he drifted off to sleep.

That would be nice. He wanted to sleep. They’d met his needs, the Army. They’d given him food and work and a lover and exhausted him until he could do nothing but collapse into his cot at the end of the day or be brought back to life by Hawkeye’s insistence that they needed to do something. Life hadn’t been easy, but it had been clear. Someone would have told him not to flex his fingers against the bars of the bear cage, waiting for one of them to come make the choice for him.

Kathy tugged at the hem of his jacket. “We can go see the elephants now.”

Trapper jerked away from the bars, heart rattling against his rib cage. What was he thinking? What was wrong with him? What had that place done to him, making him think there was anything worth going back for other than Hawkeye? He didn’t want to go back. He never wanted to go back. He wanted work that exhausted him to the point of easy rest, not to the point of a hole in his stomach. He wanted to pass his breath over Hawkeye’s neck, the insides of his thighs, against his lips in the privacy of their home instead of in a darkened tent, waiting for the sky to come crashing down on them. He wanted to tuck his daughters into bed, hold them close, and keep them safe from things that wanted to color them outside the lines.

They went to see the elephants. Trapper bought them hot dogs for lunch, struggling to remember what color scrip he was supposed to use. They sat on the ground and watched the things being kept there against their will, drafted into the never-ending war against the itch that collected in your veins when the world around you was nothing but concrete and trolleybuses. You needed natural things, Trapper thought. You needed to be able to take the people you cared about somewhere that wasn’t covered in blood and bear-colored linen and olive green fabric.

Dear Hawkeye, I know you’ve got an awful long list of things you want to do the minute you get home. See your dad, eat a bucket full of lobster, fly out to Chicago to compliment the head chef at Adam’s Ribs in person. All I ask is that you let me come with. I don’t care what we do, so long as you let me watch your face while you do it. I wanna get you through that list and then take you to the zoo, to Fenway, to anywhere you’ll let me just so I can see what it looks like when I show you something you haven’t seen before.

Dear Hawkeye, I really can’t wait for you to meet my daughters. You’re gonna be a huge part of their lives, you know, if you’re around any time I get to have a weekend with them. You’ll be another father to them, if I have my way. Is that gonna be good enough for you, Hawk? I know you want children of your own. It breaks my heart I can’t give them to you. But Becky and Kathy are everything to me. God knows I’ve told you so much about them you practically know them already. You told me you were looking forward to meeting them, but are you looking forward to knowing them? I hope you are. I think I need you to be.

Dear Hawkeye, I’ve got this peculiar condition where it feels like my heart’s about to fall out of my chest any time you’re not around. Kinda baffling, huh? I think you’re the only one who could figure out why, ‘cause I don’t really remember how to be a person without you. I don’t even remember what I did at the MASH before you showed up. A whole lotta nothing, probably. You aren’t capable of doing nothing, are you? You aren’t a hawk, Hawk, you’re a hummingbird. A big, noisy bastard of a hummingbird, but a hummingbird.

Dear Hawkeye, how the hell do I write a letter to you without sounding like I’m gloating? I don’t wanna make you feel like you’re missing out, though you are, of course. I want to make you feel like you’re here instead of reminding you I’m not there. I want to send a hug and a kiss and the promise I’ll be there for you all the way across the Pacific, but I can’t. How come Radar can send a lamb home, but not you? I want someone to pack you up in a crate so you show up on my doorstep in just a couple weeks. When I take you out the wrapping you’re all pink and perfect and clean like you’ve never slept in a tent a day in your life. I’d hold you close and never let them take you away from me again.

“Daddy?” Kathy asked.

“Huh?”

“What’s your favorite animal?”

Processing the question was like trying to pierce through a fog bank. Like he was drowning in the freezing, roiling waters of–

“The peacock, I guess,” Trapper said. “Awful showy, isn’t he? And he can’t even eat ya. You get too close to one’a those bears, he’ll gobble you right up.”

When they finished their lunches, they went through the aviary, where Becky fawned over the swans and Trapper stared at the peacock and thought uncomfortably of a green number Klinger had worn with a peacock-feathered hat. The dress had a slit that ran all the way up his thigh. For as good a friend as Max Klinger was, Trapper maybe shouldn’t have been ogling his thighs. But Hawk was a damn good friend, and Trapper had spent plenty of time ogling his everything.

Everything led back to Hawkeye Pierce, didn’t it? There was no escaping it. He was made out of Hawkeye, formed from scrap yarn and a calling to heel that practically everyone heeded but that Trapper had found himself drawn to most of all. He should count himself lucky to be Hawkeye’s favorite pet, he thought. He wouldn’t have survived over there if he hadn’t been. If Hawk had latched on to Klinger, or Radar, or anybody else instead of him, he would have drowned a long time ago. He would have sat in his cot every hour he had off until his skin fused with the matted blankets and his brain dribbled out his ears and down his cheeks. Hawkeye tore him to his feet, patched up the pieces that were sloughing off with bits of himself, and Trapper had tried to desperately to repay the favor. He’d stripped Hawk down and washed the mud and dirt and fear-sweat from his skin to make him whole again. He’d gotten him five days of R&R so he didn’t go walking into the mine field. He’d played Harpo for him, and they’d ratcheted each other higher and higher until they were at an apex and still found some way to outdo themselves. They’d been unstoppable. Hawk was unstoppable, and he’d been kind enough to take Trapper’s hand and show him things he never would have seen if they hadn’t met.

“I like the peacock, too,” Becky said from where she was standing at Trapper’s side. “But I bet he gets tired carrying around all those feathers.”

“Maybe he takes ‘em off at night,” Trapper said.

“That’s silly.”

“What, you don’t like it when I’m silly?”

His hands shook where he was holding the railing. He needed a drink. Maybe he could duck into a stall in the bathroom to take the flask out of his pocket. He was sure he looked strained, circles worn under his eyes like coal dust or eye black. Neither of his daughters could possibly understand why he looked so much older than he did when he left. He didn’t want them to understand. Neither of them were ever going to step on a land mine crossing the street, so what was the point in them understanding? All they needed to know was that their Daddy had gone to war and come back with other people’s blood soaked into him down to his bones. How red would his marrow if someone carved it out of him?

“Can we ride the carousel?” Kathy asked.

Trapper took them to the carousel. He bought their tickets, excused himself to track down popcorn from a cart, and leaned against the side of the reptile house while he took a long drag from the flask, waiting until his vision stopped swimming. He needed to stop. Nobody would hire him like this. He couldn’t take a break in the middle of stitching together a blown aorta to lean against a cool piece of stone and swill gin until his sutures were even.

This wasn’t the life he wanted for his daughters. He was supposed to be better than his father. Wasn’t that what everyone wanted out of life? You went along scraping the bottom of the barrel on decency so long as you were better than your father. And here he was, Unreal and exhausted with trembling hands, trying to hide something his daughters would be able to see exactly the same as he’d seen it in his own childhood.

Dear Hawkeye, I won’t tell you to stop drinking, because God knows that’s the only way I made it outta there alive, but I will tell you it’s gonna make your life hell the second you get back. The minute your blood alcohol content’s lower than a phone number, things get rough.

Dear Hawkeye, I promised myself I wouldn’t be like this. I wasn’t going to be like this. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. I drank too much in college, but everybody drinks too much in college. I’d stopped, you know. I’d promised myself I would stop. But I guess I know what my pop meant when he said he needed it, now.

Dear Hawkeye. I miss you. Drinking to forget wasn’t so bad when you were there by my side so I’d remember you.

Trapper took a last swig from the flask and brought the kettle corn back just in time to help Kathy down from her horse. Becky insisted she could do it herself and nearly twisted an ankle. They went to watch the zebras in their paddock, and Trapper lifted Kathy onto his shoulders again when she started to get tired but wasn’t ready to leave. They went to see the lions, and Trapper tried not to think about the fact that if it weren’t for the constant bombing scaring them away, they probably would have had to deal with tigers in Korea.

He found a seat on the trolleybus on the way home, held Kathy in his lap while she napped, and squeezed Becky tight against his side. He wished he could be Real for them. But he was leaving, soon. They’d see him on visits and every-other-weekends and maybe a week at a time if he was lucky.

Or maybe he could have the summers with them. They’d come up to Maine and Hawk would twirl whoever got to him first in his arms even while he complained about his back. They’d go down to the shore of the cove for picnics, fishing, lobster trapping. Trapper would watch as Hawkeye read them bedtime stories or made up new ones all his own, tales of dragons and princesses or cowboys and damsels, and they’d tuck their daughters into bed looking forward to doing it all again the next day. They’d have a big enough house to invite the girls’ friends to stay with them for a week or two. They’d have patients a few days a week and the rest of their time free to roast marshmallows in the backyard and cuddle on the couch even though it was too hot for it and dance to Sinatra records like any good couple should.

That was something to focus on. The future. Trapper had always been good at looking to the future, although for the past year and a half it hadn’t seemed like he had much of one at all. Hawkeye imagined his future all the time. He talked about coming home to see his dad and eating buckets of lobster and buying a house where he’d be able to collect seashells off his front porch. Trapper had closed his eyes and let himself fall into those dreams of a future that he couldn’t really believe existed while the world was ending over his head.

He could believe it now. When Hawkeye got home, they’d have that house he’d been dreaming about on the beach. They’d sit together with their toes in the ocean and kiss without the fear of being found out.

Some day, he and Hawkeye were going to get to be happy together.

He got the girls home just before five. It had been a long day for them. He could feel the thrumming of the choppers in his veins, waiting to wake him back up the moment he went to sleep. There was never enough time to sleep. He’d start something with the girls, a game or dinner or reading them a story, and the choppers would come and take him away again. It was inevitable, the same as the pulse of blood through his arteries or Hawkeye cracking dirty jokes to make Frank’s head steam. The choppers always came.

There weren’t any helicopters in Boston. At least, not Army ones.

Trapper found a package of ground beef in the fridge, tater tots and vegetables in the freezer, and put together a casserole. He hadn’t eaten dinner or breakfast. His first real meal on American soil had been a hot dog from a stand, and he’d barely even processed that he was eating it. Hawkeye wouldn’t have let him do that. They would have stopped at a restaurant downtown still in their Class As and worried about how much they were spending later when they weren’t strung out on forty hours of flight time. Trapper was supposed to have asked for a bite of Hawkeye’s lobster, let Hawk place the morsel on his tongue, and hope the look in his eyes said everything he couldn’t have said out loud when there was the chance they were going to die there.

He needed to think about something else.

He helped Kathy with her math while the casserole baked and jumped when the front door opened. Louise wiped down the front of her powder blue uniform, kissed Kathy on the top of the head where she was sitting in Trapper’s lap, and didn’t make a single move to touch him.

How often had Hawkeye touched him?

He needed to think about something else.

He needed to stop thinking at all.

Trapper nearly burned himself pulling the casserole out of the oven, poked it until he was sure the tater tots were cooked all the way through, and tried to ignore the jittering in his veins. The choppers were going to come. He’d carve through skin and sinew and crack open ribs to patch together someone’s heart, someone’s kidneys, someone’s hashed intestines spilling into their abdominal cavity like a slashed open haggis. He’d take a Gigli saw and ruin someone’s future to keep them from bleeding out on his table. He’d rather Hawkeye let him die than take one of his legs, one of his arms, but he imagined Hawkeye wouldn’t let him die for much of anything unless he truly couldn’t save him. If Hawkeye had his way, nobody who came under his knife would come away anything less than whole, but that wasn’t the way of things. You came away from the OR with blood soaked down your scrubs like a hungry bear devouring futures and limbs and changed your skin to green so you looked less like a ghost when you sat down in post-op to tell the soldiers what you’d taken from them. A piece of their liver, a piece of their leg, a piece of their life scraped away to rot in a hole somewhere until 5 O’clock Charlie came around to blow the damn thing up.

After a quiet, awkward dinner where Louise didn’t try to start a conversation and Trapper didn’t bother trying to put out the last embers of that bridge, he made popcorn, cleared his blankets off the couch, and sat down with the girls for a night of whatever the hell happened to be on the television. They didn’t have to leave early in the morning for school, only to go with their mother to their grandmother’s house where they’d start the process of potentially never seeing him again. He could have these last few moments with them. He could be the kind of father they deserved for one night, even as he mixed himself an old fashioned and considered dipping pieces of popcorn in it. He brought the girls upstairs, tucked them into their beds with a kiss good night, and borrowed a chapter book from Becky’s shelves that she promised she had already read. He needed something simple. Something that wasn’t like wading through a mud pit with how slowly his thoughts were churning. He could always talk about it with her, on one of his visits or every-other-weekends or weeks at a time if he was lucky.

He went back to the couch, didn’t say good night to Louise as she waited for him to get out of her way on the stairs, and made his way through the first half-dozen pages of a story about a man who lived in a hole in the ground until he stumbled across something that reminded him so alarmingly of Hawkeye that he had to put the book down. Wordplay and wishful thinking—of course Hawk would be the wizard in that kind of world.

It was too quiet to fall asleep. Soon there would be the thrum of chopper blades, the rumble of a mortar, the snarl of a Jeep engine, and Trapper would drag himself out of his cot to feel blood-slick viscera beneath his gloves as he tried to patch together someone who shouldn’t have been brought into Hawkeye’s OR in the first place. He cut and stitched and called for another unit of plasma but the blood didn’t stop; it spilled onto the floor, onto his boots, and there was always another hole, another piece of shrapnel, another body waiting in the wings. He pressed his back against Hawkeye’s and dripped penny-scented sweat that clouded his vision with red until–

Someone was shaking him. Trapper clutched at the arm, desperately trying to get his vision to focus enough that he’d be ready to scrub in. “Choppers? Hawk, where’s Hawk– where’s Radar?”

He rolled to the side, out of his cot, and cracked his forehead on the coffee table.

Boston.

“Fuck, Jesus, Louise, the hell did you wake me up for?”

“You were having a nightmare,” Louise said.

“Kinda thing that happens when you’re working in the Army’s necromancy department for fourteen months.”

Trapper watched from flat on his ass between the couch and the coffee table as Louise picked up the flask he’d left on the end table, tilted it to hear the half-empty slosh, and set it back down with that tight look on her face.

For a moment, he considered begging her to stay. He could try to be faithful even as Hawkeye burned bright in his memories. He could feel a soft body against his, curl against her to keep her warm in the night, and have someone to wake him when the nightmares became unbearable. He’d have someone to hold him accountable with that flask, to keep him from going the same way their fathers had gone, because they’d promised each other so long ago that they wouldn’t be like that with their daughters.

But then, when Hawkeye came home, where would they be? It would be exactly the same as it was in Korea: sneaking around, pretending Trapper wasn’t married, pretending Hawkeye hadn’t pressed fingers to the formless lump of clay that was John McIntyre until Trapper took his first gasping breath beneath his palms. He couldn’t turn away from the pulsating artery that connected them, not when that blood supply felt like it might be the only thing that kept Hawk’s heart beating until he was beside Trapper in their bed in Boston.

“You should go somewhere today,” Louise said, tracing the cap of the flask with a finger. “I’ll explain to the girls what’s happening.”

What was she going to tell them? Trapper could think of a hundred different reasons this was all his fault. It was all his fault. Louise hadn’t done anything except get knocked up and put up with him for far longer than she should have.

“What are you gonna tell them?” Trapper heard himself ask.

Louise sighed, sat down on the arm of the couch, and pressed her fingers to her eyes beneath her glasses. “The truth,” she said. “That neither of us were faithful.”

“You were foolin’ around?”

Louise scoffed. “Don’t you dare judge me.”

“Hey. I’m– I’m glad.” Trapper braced himself under the glare Louise shot him. He was a world-class expert at putting his foot in his mouth with women, these days. Something else he’d picked up from Hawk. “No, really. You– if I was doin’ whatever the hell I wanted over there, why shouldn’t you get to make do the same back here?”

“What, you think that makes this all alright?” Louise spat.

Maybe he did. How the fuck else was he supposed to keep from going insane? All he had over there to remind him that most bodies didn’t get cold the moment you stopped touching them was a nurse under him, Hawkeye’s breath against his skin, the rough drag of stubble under his lips. And what the hell was the harm, anyway? He came back from dates with the opportunity to seduce Louise all over again, to convince her back into his bed in a way that thrilled him more than anything else. He was good at that, the same way he was good at patching a bleeding boy back together with nothing but Klinger’s sewing thread and a dream. So maybe he couldn’t weave a wall hanging out of words the same way Hawkeye could, but that didn’t stop him from being the man who could get any goddamn woman he wanted.

“Of course I don’t think that makes it alright,” Trapper hissed back instead. “But you can’t let me be happy you weren’t all alone?”

“I don’t need protecting!”

Trapper finally hauled himself off the ground, braced one arm against the back of the couch, and tapped Louise on the chest with the other. “Oh, ‘course you don’t! Nobody in America needs protecting, do they? They sent us all to Korea for kicks!”

Louise tried to bat his arm away.

Trapper grabbed her wrist and held it still. “Lemme tell you somethin’, Lou, you do need protecting,” he said, close enough to her that he was sure she could smell his morning breath. “You just don’t know it. The whole world is filled with disease, and shrapnel, and people who hate you all ‘cause you’re on the wrong side of a line their governments decided on, and you’ve got all these little squishy things in you called organs. You know what it looks like when someone takes a sharp piece’a metal and drills it through your squishy bits at a couple thousand feet per second?”

“Stop it,” Louise said, trying to jerk her arm away.

Trapper pulled her closer. “I know what it looks like, Louise. And lemme tell you, you want protecting from that.”

He dropped her arm, snatched away the flask, and went to take a shower. Fuck her. She didn’t know how good she had it, staying home. She’d gone ahead and found someone to take care of her. All Trapper had were the endless nights taking care of other people. Hawkeye, patients, Frank, Hawkeye again, until he was nothing but a machine that took in broken people and spat them back out a little less broken than they were before so they could go back out and get ground to dust by the endless churning cogs.

Dear Hawkeye, he thought, water dripping out of his curls onto the tile in the darkened shower, the war did something to me I can’t fix. You know I used to be able to stuff all this shit down? I never woulda yelled at her two years ago. I woulda just fucked someone about it.

Dear Hawkeye, maybe you’re the one that broke me. Never gotten along so well with anyone else. Guess it’s frustrating to try to go back to talking with my mouth instead of you knowing exactly what I’m thinking.

Dear Hawkeye. I left the lights off in the shower today so I didn’t have to see that the marks you left me with are all faded.

By the time Trapper had washed himself off, shaved, and stuffed himself into a too-loose suit, the girls were up and eating breakfast. He left a kiss on each of their heads, accepted the plate of pancakes Louise held out for him, and tried to sound like his heart wasn’t falling apart in his hands. How was this fair? He’d said goodbye to his daughters once before. Now he had to say goodbye to them again, with the exception of visits and every-other-weekends and maybe a week at a time if he was lucky, and Hawkeye wasn’t even there to complain to about it.

He’d feel better when he had a care package on its way to Hawk. He had to feel better. The minute he knew something would be on its way to absolve him of the sin of not saying goodbye, he’d stop feeling like this. Hawkeye would forgive him. Wouldn’t he? There was so much to say, and he was supposed to have had the chance to say it in person. A letter and something to drink that wasn’t mess tent coffee and a couple of books to read would make up for not getting to say goodbye.

Trapper gave his girls a last hug, made them promise to be good, and took the subway downtown to Jordan Marsh.

The department store was overwhelming. How long had it been since he’d seen this much color in one place that wasn’t Klinger’s wardrobe? There were so many people, packed together like they were waiting for something to happen to them. Maybe Saturday had been the wrong time to do this. But he couldn’t wait any longer to send a package to Hawkeye, could he? Hawk would be getting more and more disappointed with him by the day. By the minute. He needed to start the process of saying hello all over again.

There wasn’t anywhere good to shelter during a shelling, not with this many people.

There wasn’t going to be a shelling.

Trapper found what he was looking for as quickly as he could. A variety pack of tea, a good bottle of vermouth, cocoa, candy that he hoped would make it overseas in one piece. Half-decent stationery so Hawk didn’t have to use sheets torn off a legal pad he’d liberated from Radar’s office. Trapper rifled through the Sinatra records until he stumbled across a copy of “I Dream of You,” tucked it in his basket, and hummed to himself as he headed for the childrens’ department. It was a good song. Trapper had sung enough Sinatra back and forth with Hawk over bodies in the OR that Hawk would have to know what it meant.

After a quick detour to find a couple of novels, Trapper found himself standing in front of a wicker basket full of plush rabbits. They were fat and bunchy, spotted brown and white, and Trapper couldn’t resist tucking one into his basket next to the Sinatra record and a copy of the childrens’ book that had made him cry in front of his daughters. If Radar could have his bear, why couldn’t Hawkeye have this? He needed something to hug. If Trapper couldn’t be there for him, he’d send a button-eyed rabbit in his place.

At the post office, Trapper carefully packed everything from his shopping bag into a box and addressed it to Benjamin Franklin Pierce, MASH 4077, Uijeongbu, Korea.

How the hell did he put everything he was thinking into words?

Straight to the point, that was it. All he had to do was sit down at the desk in the corner, prop the velveteen rabbit against the waiting box, and write.

Dear Hawkeye,

I’m sorry I didn’t get the chance to say see-you-later. I gave Radar a parting gift to hand over to you, but I know that’s not the same, if the little fink even went through with it. I worry that maybe you might have taken it as a goodbye, but that isn’t what I meant. It was just the only thing I had ready for you that Frank wasn’t gonna go ahead and get rid of if he found it.

Because here’s the thing, Hawk: I meant it every time I kissed you. And I was thinking a lot of things I couldn’t say out loud that whole time. Things I think you might not have liked because I was married.

Louise wants a divorce. I think she’s right to want that. I’ve never been great at being her husband, but she never really wanted to be my wife, either. Not that I don’t love my daughters, but life might have been a lot different and better if I’d gotten them some other way.

Anyway. From one soon-to-be bachelor to another: I love you. I guess I’m less scared to say it when I don’t have to look you in the eyes to do it.

Be safe, Hawk.

Yours,

Trapper.

It wasn’t exactly the grand confession he would have liked to pen. But he’d never been the one who was good with his words.

Hawkeye would understand.

He had to.

Trapper set the rabbit in the box, the letter on top, and taped it shut with the kind of intensity that would surely get it all the way to Korea unscathed. He watched until it had disappeared into a back room with the postal worker, decided there was no point worrying about it now that it was out of his hands, and took the subway back to the South Boston row house he’d been aching to get back to for over a year.

The house was silent.

Trapper set his keys on the table inside the door, settled in front of the television with an old fashioned to calm the shaking in his hands, and found a Western to watch that would distract him from the slim chance that he might never see his daughters again.

Tomorrow, he’d go to Boston General and ask if he could have his job back.

Tonight, he’d watch Westerns until he dropped off to sleep, lulled by the familiar rattle of gunfire.

Chapter Text

Boston General was like a dream, or like the visions of Heaven Trapper had been conned into believing in as a child. White walls, white tile floors, suits and ties and equipment that wasn’t fifty years out of date. It was like stepping into the future, so far removed that Korea might as well have been a hundred years ago.

In the three days since sending Hawk his care package, Trapper had kept himself busy. He felt better with it trundling across the freezing, roiling waters of the Sea of Japan. Less burdened. He’d called the hospital, identified himself as Dr. John McIntyre, former surgical attending, and gotten a job interview that he was certain was nothing but a formality. Who wouldn’t want to hire him? He might not have had the fancy chief surgeon title, but he’d played just as much a hand as Hawk in keeping their casualty percentage lower than dirt.

He’d made a trip to the optometrist and been informed that he did, in fact, need glasses for close-up work. Without the looming threat of Army standard issue frames, he’d been far more willing to cave and accept that fact. He could tell the difference between a bullet fragment and mortar shrapnel by only the way his forceps closed around them, but that wouldn’t fly in a hospital that wasn’t being held together by tape and willpower. If someone caught him squinting, caught him slipping, it wouldn’t be like cow tipping Henry. He had responsibilities that went beyond his patients, now, like making the hospital look good.

He’d started eating better. The re-found ability to cook his own food was practically miraculous. Eventually, his suits would fit properly again instead of sagging around the waistline. And when Hawkeye came home, Trapper would cook him anything he wanted. Lobster and french toast and lemonade and homemade ice cream, all at the same time if he asked. They’d have Becky and Kathy over for Christmas, and he and Hawk would kiss under the mistletoe while the turkey was cooking until the girls complained about PDA and they all went off to tear open presents like bears sinking into flesh with nothing but their claws.

He needed to find Hawk something for Christmas. At the rate the mail came at the 4077th, he shouldn’t have whatever it was on its way any later than the first of November. That day was already fast approaching. Only another couple of weeks. He had no idea what to look for. Something warm, maybe. Something that carried a taste of home. Something Hawk could torment Frank with, like the world’s ugliest sweater.

“John McIntyre?”

Trapper turned from where he was lingering at the nurses’ station waiting for someone to give him the okay to head up to the Chief of Surgery’s office. A man in a lab coat—dark haired, dark eyed, a good half a foot shorter than him, lines from both stress and smiling worn into his face—weaved his way around a gurney to join him.

The catch against his ribs was something else Trapper had gotten from Hawkeye. Dr. John McIntyre, devoted father, loving husband, fellow in thoracic surgery hadn’t had any damn clue about the blinding crush he had on his surgical attending.

“He-hey, Vern!” Trapper greeted, bowling him into a hug before Vernon could stop him. “How the hell’ve you been? Keepin’ busy? Women, girls, broads, stuff like that?”

“Married men only have one thing on their mind,” Vernon said with a roll of his eyes. He patted Trapper on the shoulder and flashed him a smile he didn’t think he quite deserved. “Most people aren’t exclusively driven by their basal urges, you know.”

Hawkeye’s breath on his neck, on the insides of his thighs, against his lips–

“Maybe most people better learn to take a cue,” Trapper said. He leaned back against the nurses’ station desk and propped his elbows on the counter, smiling like he didn’t have a care in the world. “Anyway, I’m back on the market.”

Vern snorted at him. “She finally found out, huh?”

“Finally got fed up with me while I was outta town, sure. Little place called Korea, maybe you heard of it. Been in the news a lot these days.”

It only took a moment for Vernon’s expression to soften. “The draft?”

Trapper could taste bile in the back of his throat. He ignored it and shrugged. “I didn’t exactly volunteer.”

“Christ, John. If I’d known–“

“Don’t worry about it, huh?” Trapper knocked him on the shoulder with his knuckles, trying to ignore the continued tightening in his chest. “S’all in the past, now.”

The look Vernon gave him was unsettling. Vern had only just gotten back from the last big dust-up when Trapper started his residency. If he was giving Trap that look all these years later…

No. It was going to get better. It was already better. Everything was fine. He’d get back to work and he’d stop feeling the horrible, pulsating itch under his skin. He’d stop thinking of Korea every time he heard the thrum of chopper blades or the slide of meat under his fingers in the kitchen or the whistling of birds that were sure to fall silent when the mortars came. He’d stop feeling the desperation for a drink and his hands would stop shaking because of it. He’d write a ten page letter every day if it meant Hawkeye didn’t forget him, and when Hawkeye came home—so very soon, because it had to be soon—Trapper would be able to help him. Hawk had always been the fragile one, not him. It was seemingly an inevitability that Hawkeye sometimes fell into places that he couldn’t climb back out from without a hand held out to him, and it was Trapper’s job to be that hand. It had been Trapper’s job to be that hand since the first few days in Korea, since their first OR session together, since they built the still, since he tranquilized Hawk to keep him safe from himself. What was Hawkeye going to do without him? He needed someone to hold him tight when the bombs fell, needed someone to joke with him over bodies that were barely keeping warm on their own, needed–

“John?”

The voice that spoke didn’t feel like his own. “Trapper,” he corrected.

The look Vernon gave him was even more unsettling. He knew something. He knew something and was keeping it to himself. What did he know about Trapper that Trapper didn’t know himself? “Trapper,” Vernon said gently. “They didn’t make you infantry, did they?”

“Christ, no,” Trapper said. “I was at a MASH. Did the same thing over there I do back here, except it was a fourteen month camping trip.”

The tent and the heat and the horrible, freezing nights in the middle of winter when they didn’t have enough fuel to burn; the hard-pack of dust tamped down by ambulance after ambulance and whipped to life by chopper blades; the never-ending blood dripping onto the floor and into the dirt and soaking through his scrubs to bond to his skin so that no matter how much time he took in the shower it never felt like it had all come off, no matter what he did it wouldn’t come off; Hawkeye cracking jokes about Lady Macbeth as the water in the showers pattered rose-tinted down the drains–

“Coulda been worse,” Trapper said. “Coulda been on the front lines. People didn’t come back from those aid stations the same, you know.”

“Nobody comes back from war the same,” Vernon said, and Trapper desperately wanted to shut the window over his soul that Vern was peering into.

He just had to move on. Change the topic. Vernon didn’t want to be talking about this either, surely. “The old man’s office still in the same place?” Trapper asked. “I gotta see if he’ll put me back on the schedule.”

“Same office, different old man. Sutton dropped dead, Art got promoted.”

Henry Blake, dead and never-buried, so much fish food below the freezing, roiling waters of the Sea of–

“Heart finally do him in?” Trapper asked.

Vernon shrugged. “Probably. But that’s not the sort of thing you ask a grieving widow.”

“Ah-huh,” Trapper conceded. He checked his watch, jostling it with a clunk against the metal flask in his pocket as he flicked the face upright. “Look, I’ll see you later?” he said, already starting backwards down the hallway to keep Vern in his line of sight. “Buy you a drink some time?”

“I’ll see you when I’m in the OR with you!” Vern shouted after him. “I’d better make sure my teachings kept!”

Trapper snorted, turned on his heel without stopping, and headed off to the Chief of Surgery’s office. The elevator clunked and ratcheted, so he took the stairs two at a time, bouncing around an unfamiliar nurse with a smile and a wink and a “Hi, honey,” just to watch her blush when she caught his eye. Maybe he couldn’t weave something unendingly beautiful out of words the same way Hawkeye could, but that didn’t stop him from being the man who could pull a girl to the side and whisper into her ear until her knees parted around his thigh. Trapper had been born out of that piece of John McIntyre. It seemed a shame to waste the talent just because he was waiting for Hawkeye to come home. Hawk would understand. Trapper didn’t exactly expect him to be celibate until he was back in Boston. They’d both flirted with women to stave off the boredom and the maddening, endless work, and when they were successful, they’d fuck their girls on either side of a shelf in the supply tent, feeling the rhythm of the other’s breath guiding them through their motions. Or they’d find one woman who wanted to feel them both at the same time and they’d touch each other through her, touch her the way they touched each other when they were alone, Trapper’s fingers running over the knobs of her spine as he kissed the side of her neck and watched Hawk’s gaze unerringly follow the motion of his hands.

The hall that led to the Chief of Surgery’s office had always been khaki green. Trapper took one look at it and felt the bile rise in his throat again. He was fine. There wasn’t anything wrong. It was just a color.

He turned on his heel, found the nearest bathroom, threw up, and knelt on the hard-pack of cheap linoleum with his forehead resting against the coolness of the toilet tank, taking sips from the flask in his pocket until the shaking had stopped. The porcelain beneath his fingers was grounding. Nothing had felt quite like it in Korea. If he just sat there, breathing deep, feeling the pits and pockmarks with his thumb, he would eventually stop being so afraid of a color.

Dear Hawkeye, it’s funny how much something can change in just a few days. How come I could live in a sea of khaki for more than a year and be just fine with it, but the minute I see it back here it’s like the whole world’s out to get me? Ridiculous. You ain’t supposed to throw up in the work toilets unless you had a hell of a good time the night before.

Dear Hawkeye, I’m sitting here thinking about running my hands through your hair while you puke instead of braving that hallway to get my goddamn job back. Maybe you don’t remember all the times I touched you at the nape of your neck when we had too much to drink, because I barely remember and you were sure as hell drinking a lot more than I was most’a the time. You probably touched me in the same way, some nights, even if I don’t remember them. But I got other memories of your fingers to bridge that gap.

Dear Hawkeye, when you get home you’d better take over as chief surgeon of this dump just so you can repaint the goddamn walls.

Trapper took a long, deep breath. There was nothing to be scared of. It was just a color. He wasn’t the kind of man who threw up in work bathrooms—not Dr. John McIntyre, devoted father, lover, thoracic surgeon.

He washed his face and hands, smoothed the curls that had come loose from his brushed-out hair, and stared at the brown carpet floor as he darted through the hallway. He popped a peppermint in his mouth at the secretary’s desk to hide the scent of whiskey on his breath and rolled it over his tongue, focusing on the menthol tang rather than the dull green of the wall behind her.

“Hi, honey,” he drawled, ratcheting the candy over his molars. “You wanna tell the boss that McIntyre’s here to see him?”

The secretary shot him a look that oozed disgust, tapping her wedding ring against her pen. Trapper smiled wider, turning the full force of his charm on her. He could play this game. He could imagine Hawkeye at his side, goading him on and teasing when she inevitably rejected him, clutching him by the forearm if he finally coaxed her into flirting back.

She buzzed the intercom and motioned him to the chairs on the other side of the room. “Dr. Mills will be with you in a moment, Dr. McIntyre.”

Trapper leaned further over the desk. “Friends call me Trapper.”

“Dr. Mills will be with you in a moment, Dr. McIntyre,” the secretary said more firmly.

Trapper went to sit down, looking anywhere but at the sickening walls, and filed the flirtation away to recount to Hawkeye. Hawk would want to hear all about it if he pulled a girl. Of course he would. Men had needs, and Hawk wouldn’t want him going without when they weren’t even on the same continent.

There was one thing he’d be saving for Hawk. One thing he didn’t think he’d ever want to try with anyone except for Hawk. He trusted Hawkeye to take him apart in ways nobody else could; he’d trust Hawk to carve through his skin, wrench him open with a rib spreader, and touch anything he wanted. He’d let Hawk hold his heart in his hands; the man was a thoracic surgeon, after all.

Arthur Mills was the kind of guy who would rather be working in private practice but didn’t have the charisma for it, Trapper thought. He’d crossed 55 while Trapper was overseas, wore suits that were a little too expensive for the work he was doing, and was so superbly terrible with people that Trapper couldn’t imagine how he would have possibly gotten promoted to Chief of Surgery without Sutton dropping dead out of nowhere.

Art stood in the doorway from his office, scowl etched into his face, jerked his head at Trapper, and retreated back inside.

Trapper stood, followed him, and awkwardly lowered himself into the too-short chair on the guest side of the desk.

“Where’s your resume,” Art said.

“Art, come on,” Trapper complained. He hadn’t even brought a briefcase. He hadn’t thought there would be a point, not when he thought he’d be talking to Sutton. Sutton had always liked him, though he’d told him to behave himself more than once. But Sutton had liked everyone. “You don’t need to see my resume when I spent five years workin’ here.”

Art pulled a legal pad out of a drawer. “You should be lucky I’m considering hiring you at all, McIntyre. There have been budget cuts.”

The anger rushed in like a tidal wave, drowning him beneath it. Who the fuck was he to tell Trapper there were budget cuts? Hawkeye wasn’t even here to help, to talk the man into getting them anything from hydrocortisone to morphine to an incubator in the way Trapper had only ever been able to play wingman for. “You need me,” Trapper snapped. “You know what our survival rate was at the MASH? 97.8 percent. Outta every hundred kids that come in bleeding and broken, we put 98 percent of ‘em back on their feet. You know what an ordeal that is when half of ‘em are bleeding out their goddamn brains? When they got shrapnel in every inch of their bowel and thoracic surgeons are the ones doing transfemoral amputations? You know that it’s like to do that on three hours of sleep, four hundred patients straight with only three other guys to help? On food from World War I?”

The thrum of chopper blades in his bones, the cold steel of the scalpel under the pads of his fingers, the slick slide of blood over his gloves; a flickering light bulb over his table that pattered out endless, incomprehensible messages in the Morse code they’d taught him in basic; Hawkeye cracking jokes about Lady Macbeth as blood pooled in his boots and dripped down the polar-frost white of his scrub linens, tinkling into the same bedpan at his feet that collected water from a leak in the roof when it rained; the crash of a bottle of whole blood and a darkened tent and Hawkeye watching him like his namesake because Trapper couldn’t be trusted anymore, not after it got to him and tried to tear him apart, the death and the fear and the injustice until–

“I take it you left Boston General to serve as a combat surgeon.”

Trapper gasped, yanked back to the present like there was a hook dug into his cheek. He tucked one hand between his knees to hide the shaking and set the other on his abdomen, below the desk where Art couldn’t see it. Diaphragm contracts, intra-thoracic pressure reduces, lungs expand. Breathing: a miracle that a single well-placed hole in someone’s chest could completely prevent. No vacuum in the thoracic cavity, no lung expansion, and you slowly choked to death on your own flesh.

Trapper licked his lips. “We were only a few miles from the front, yeah.”

Art noted something down on the legal pad in front of him. “I take it you’re in the market for something quieter.”

He didn’t know quiet anymore. There was never quiet. He was always waiting, sleepless and tense in the starting blocks waiting to hear the telltale crackle of the PA system or Radar knocking on the door or the thrum of the chopper blades jackknifing through his brain. How could he sit still when the choppers came? Every moment he wasn’t helping was a moment people were dying. He could save them, just like he and Hawk had saved them, like he was going to keep saving them. “Put me in Trauma,” Trapper answered. “I can handle cases nobody else can. Get me a couple good nurses to work with, ones who aren’t gonna shy away from the rough stuff, and I’ll get your casualty rate lowest in the entire theater.”

Art sighed and wrote something else on the pad. “You’re very self-aggrandizing, McIntyre.”

Trapper flashed his best and brightest smile. “I’ve earned it.”

He came away with a five percent raise from where he’d been before they dragged him off to Korea and a graveyard shift that he’d be starting two days out. It was going to be a struggle to finagle time to see the girls, but it wouldn’t be too bad. He’d worked worse hours, in residency or elsewhere. And worse things happened to people at night than they did during the daytime. He’d be able to help. It was harder to see a landmine in the dark.

Everything was fine.

He found a lawyer. Louise already had papers drawn up. She’d been planning things for a while. Trapper didn’t know what the hell a good deal was supposed to look like, but he was set to keep the house and his station wagon and he’d see his girls every other weekend, or the equivalent of every other weekend if he was too busy with work to see them Saturdays and Sundays in particular. He couldn’t find anything to argue about in the agreement other than not knowing what the hell he was supposed to pay in alimony and child support, but that was the lawyer’s job.

He went to the Common, drew a sloppy picture of the ducks in lieu of having a camera to take photos for Hawkeye, and dreamt of taking him there for a picnic or down to Carson Beach with the girls.

He went home, took a shower, and managed to leave the lights on, looking down at where the lines of his ribs showed through his skin rather than only feeling the rough edges of bone in the dark. Maybe he’d take up boxing again. He’d had muscle left from his football days this time a year ago. He’d had the kind of physique that caught women’s eyes. It seemed a shame to let it get siphoned away.

He sorted through his duffle bag, traded the bathrobe hanging in his closet for the one that still carried the lingering scents of gin and dust and cigar smoke, and sat with his back against the headboard in the bed that no longer felt like his, sorting through the pictures he’d brought home with him. They hadn’t often had the chance to buy film, much less develop it, and Trapper hadn’t been willing to take the good ones away from Hawkeye. In his hands were the ones that were unfocused, odd, or nearly incomprehensible. The photo of the latrines Hawkeye had planned on sending to North Korea when he went mad. Henry Blake, barely in frame and scowling at them during a VD lecture, clearly flushed bright red even in black and white and despite the fuzzy photo quality. Klinger in a nearly floor length gown, shouting at the Jeep driver who had splashed him with mud. Hawkeye half-asleep in the mess tent, drool shiny at the corner of his mouth, squinting against the flash of the camera.

And one that Trapper hadn’t felt bad taking home with him, not when Hawkeye had another just like it. They’d been sure to get a copy when they got it developed in Tokyo. Him and Hawk, sitting hip-to-hip on one of the cots before a poker game, so close they were breathing the same air with Trapper’s hand on Hawk’s as they read from the same book. Trapper remembered when Sidney had taken the photo, not so long before Trap had finally worked up the courage to make the move on Hawkeye he’d been aching to make for ages. It seemed so long ago now, years in the past rather than only a handful of months.

He tucked the photo in his wallet, behind the one of Becky and Kathy he’d put there before he left, and took a trip before work to pick up the wire-framed glasses that were ready at the optometrist.

Vernon was in the locker room when Trapper made his way inside, leaning against his locker to tug a pair of tennis shoes on. “You’re awfully cheery looking,” he said. “And early.”

Trapper checked his watch, noted that he was an entire forty-five minutes early for his shift, and shrugged. “Didn’t wanna risk traffic. ‘Sides, what if someone gets hurt?”

Vernon snorted. “You’re not the only doctor in the world, you know.”

“Sure am the cutest, though,” Trapper drawled. He tested an unlabeled locker near the end of the row, found it stuffed with extra lab coats, and took one for himself before moving on to find an empty place to put his things. “Or I will be, once I get my figure back.”

“Like you ever lost it.”

Trapper glanced over at Vernon. His expression was the same as ever, thin lips tilted up at the edges, warmth in his eyes that he directed at just about everyone from patients to nurses to coworkers. It didn’t give anything away. But he couldn’t possibly mean what it sounded like he meant when he said that.

Hawkeye had said things like that all the time. He almost always meant them, except when he said them just to torment Frank.

It wouldn’t hurt to feel it out.

“Been checkin’ me out, huh?” Trapper teased. He could take his cues from Hawkeye. Make it a joke, make it obvious to anyone who wasn’t in the know that you couldn’t possibly mean it, you could get away with anything. “Good for you. Pillar of American masculinity, right here. Hawkeye says I’m butch.”

Vernon laughed, stamped his shoe into place, and joined the search for an empty locker. “And who’s Hawkeye?”

“My bunkie,” Trapper answered. Something constricted in his chest at the words. It was unfair he couldn’t tell the truth, or at least not the whole truth. Women whose husbands were away at war got sympathy, caring hands, compassion. Why couldn’t he have that? He deserved that. He deserved to have someone hold his hand and lie to him that everything was going to be alright.

The burning passed as quickly as it had come on. Dr. John McIntyre, devoted father, well-adjusted veteran, thoracic surgeon. He wasn’t the kind of man who threw up in bathrooms over the sight of khaki green, tucked a flask in his briefcase just in case the shaking got too bad, flirted with his former fellowship advisor in the hopes of getting to talk to someone, anyone, about his overseas lover.

“Close friends?” Vernon asked.

Trapper found an empty locker, set his briefcase in the bottom, and felt Hawkeye’s pale skin beneath his hands, the rough drag of stubble under his lips. Holding Hawkeye tight late at night when the shelling in the distance drew closer, one hand resting in Hawk’s hair while they breathed together instead of breaking the rain-patter barrage with words. Laying on his back in a soft bed in a Tokyo hotel room, Hawkeye looming above him, bangs dark against his eyes as he set a hand on Trapper’s bare stomach and made him Real.

“Best friend I’ve ever had,” Trapper said. His voice was too raw. If he was wrong, if Vernon didn’t have a similar interest in secrecy as him, his voice was too raw. He and Hawk had been so careful. If he came home, messed it up the very first day he had a job that wasn’t butchery…

Vernon took a measured breath. “Say what you will about war,” he said, face tight, “but it’s a hell of a lot easier to make best friends there than it is at home.”

Trapper licked his lips. It was worth the risk. It had to be worth the risk. “Do you–“

“Right, you’re clocking in early?” Vernon patted him on the back hard enough to jostle him, closed his locker for him, and started ushering him out into the hall. “We’ll get you a name tag for that locker, alright? You’ve got two critical cases in the ward—one from the shift before mine, one I handled. I’ll show you where they’re bedded.”

“Vern–“

“Not now, John,” Vernon muttered.

Trapper let himself be pushed into the hall. It was quiet this late at night. It would be quiet until Trapper finished his shift. Nobody wanted to come to the hospital near or after midnight if it could wait until the morning. He put his pilfered lab coat on over his suit, frowned at a wrinkle in the fabric that didn’t want to come out even after carefully smoothing it down, and followed Vern to get the scoop on the patients he’d be looking after.

His suit chafed around his waist. The trousers were too loose. They’d be too loose until he got back to working out, rebuilt the muscle and plumpness everyone had lost. Maybe he could find a couple of new pairs, better fitted to the new way his skin fit, in case he could never claw his way to regaining that muscle. Maybe Korea had completely stolen his ability to ever be healthy again. It stole limbs and hearts and fat reserves until one bad tumble would crumble you to dust. Or maybe he could get out the longitudinal pinstripe suit he’d pulled from his duffle. It fit him properly, tailored to the man who had been dangerously underweight by the time Hawkeye conned him into boxing for the honor of the girl who had first let them touch each other through her. Had Margie known? Had she talked to Hawkeye, known exactly how badly he was pining after Trapper even so early on? He wouldn’t be surprised. Not with the way she’d coaxed them close, guided them so near to each other that Trapper couldn’t help but feel his gaze pulled to Hawkeye’s lips even before he’d been able to recognize that the right man stirred him just as much as the right woman.

Trapper’s scrub nurse for the night couldn’t have been much older than 23, the kind of ginger you only saw on women his parents would have applauded him for marrying to keep his children pure Irish, and had picked out a uniform so tight it might as well have been painted on in all the right places. Trapper’s fingers twitched in his pocket when she smiled at him, when he watched her gaze flick down his legs and over his curls.

Vern introduced her as Miss Foster, but Trapper shook her hand and leaned close, looking down at her through his eyelashes. “Dr. McIntyre,” he said, low and inviting, close enough to her that he had to bend his elbow to shake her hand. “Friends call me Trapper.”

The nurse smiled, flushed, and re-introduced herself as Annie. “Ann just sounds so mature, doesn’t it?”

“You don’t wanna be mature?”

Annie smiled wider, shook her head, and snuck out from where he’d boxed her against the wall. “I think I could spend a little more time being free-spirited.”

“That’s good,” Trapper purred, following her to the nurses’ station. He was buzzing. It was like the burn of alcohol trickling down his throat, the adrenaline of a tackle, the surge of blood to the surface of his skin as he pressed his body against another. “I like a woman who takes charge. Good in the operating room, you know, to be ahead of the game.”

Vernon cleared his throat as Annie’s blush darkened. “Ah, Trapper–“

Trapper waved him off. He had to keep going. He had to do this. It was impossible to stop. He needed it the same way he needed air. “I got an offer for you,” he said to Annie, pressing closer when she propped an elbow on the desk. “You wanna exercise that free spirit? Huh? Try a little somethin’ you’ve never tried before?”

Annie grinned, nervous and shy, and Trapper was sure he had her. “I take it you aren’t taken, are you, Dr. McIntyre?”

Hawkeye, whispering the only name that felt right anymore against his lips, threading fingers into his back pockets to pull him close, chuckling when he felt Trapper’s blood surge through his body. Hawkeye, eyes like ice chips even in the dim light of the supply tent, kissing down his neck as he undid the buttons of his fatigue jacket single-handedly, breathing heavy and arching into Trapper’s careful touch. Hawkeye, looming above him as he lay on his back in a soft bed in a Tokyo hotel room, bangs dark against those sea ice eyes as he set a hand on Trapper’s bare stomach and made him Real.

“Who’s gonna take me?” Trapper murmured. He tapped Annie on the hip with the backs of his knuckles, flashing the crooked smile that always made Hawkeye’s breath catch in his throat. “They don’t call me ‘Trapper’ for nothin’.”

He had her. He had her. She was probably about half a second away from jumping his bones. He was still the man who could wrap a woman around his finger with a few well-placed words, broad smiles and gentle encouragement and a surgeon’s hands. He’d take mental notes while he was knuckle-deep inside her and recount the entire damn event to Hawkeye. That was always the way it had gone after they came back to the Swamp after a date, and he didn’t see why it had to stop just because he needed to write it down instead of fumbling over his words.

A siren.

Blink, and he was snapping on gloves, latex familiar and cold against his fingers.

Blink, and he was standing over a young man who couldn’t have been more than 25, skin ashen pale and struggling to breathe even as the medic held an oxygen mask over his face.

“Car accident,” the medic said. Trapper fumbled to take Vern’s stethoscope as it was held out to him, wiped the ear pieces on his lab coat, and pressed it to the man’s chest to listen for what he was already certain he was going to hear. “Few broken ribs, reduced chest expansion. Pressure’s 80 over 60 even with a unit of blood in him.”

The dullness of percussion in the chest cavity was there, just as expected. Trapper tossed the stethoscope back to Vern. “Kid’s got a hemothorax, probable cardiac tamponade. OR, now, let’s move it!”

Blink, and his suit was half off, scrubs laid out in front of him on the locker room bench.

Blink, and he was standing in front of the scrub sink, glasses taped to his face so they wouldn’t go tumbling into a chest cavity, grinding the tips of his fingers raw with the nail brush.

Blink, and he was staring at a severely lacerated liver, clamp in his hand and suction machine gently puttering along in the background, a bottle of whole blood hanging from the stand next to him. There was no pressure against his back, no chatter of the other surgeons, no sniveling, thorn-in-his-paw Frank. Just him, a certified anesthesiologist, a good nurse snapping instruments into his hand, the surgeon on the other side of the table carefully monitoring and holding fascia and flesh out of the way.

Blink, and he was tying off the final bleeder, watching for any new dribble of blood into the kid’s chest cavity. There was nothing, only the thrumming, steady beat of the heart, the gentle expansion of the lungs, the warmth of a body that he’d prevented from going cold with his own two hands.

He sewed the kid up himself, stitches careful and even, slow because there was nobody else waiting in line. He could take his time, prevent scarring and soreness as best as possible the way he always did with the last kid to hit his table. If he could do something extra for even one of them, that made up for all the kids he had to butcher to keep alive. Of course it made up for it. It had to.

“Whadda you think, get a drink after this?” Trapper asked, gaze fixed to his sutures. “Radar’d give us the keys to Henry’s office, get at the good stuff.”

“I might get a drink,” the other surgeon said. “You’ve got hours of shift left.”

Trapper snorted. “Since when has that stopped us?”

“Trapper.” The voice was soft, measured, careful and even. “You remember where you are, don’t you?”

The other man wasn’t Hawkeye. Blink, and Vern snapped into place in Trapper’s mind, brow furrowed in concern beneath his surgical mask and cap. “Sure,” Trapper said. “Good old Boston, Massachusetts.”

He closed. He scrubbed out, leaned against the wall in the locker room, and felt the familiar twist in his gut that had started coming when even drinking himself unconscious had stopped being enough the ignore the burnt-in, color-negative spatter of blood behind his eyelids. He needed a distraction. He needed to do the same as he’d been doing for the last fourteen months; find a girl who wanted to take advantage of the burning need snaking through his veins, find a quiet spot to take her apart, leave her with a kiss on the cheek and the knowledge that she’d be coming back to him the next time she found herself wanting.

He tracked down Annie at the nurses’ station, grabbed her by the elbow to pull her off to the side, and leaned in close enough that she could feel his breath on her cheek. “You were damn good in there, honey,” he said, taking her by the wrist and turning her palm face up, gently playing with her well-manicured fingers. “You’re a certified professional.”

“Thank you, Dr. McIntyre.”

“Ah-ah, none’a that. You and me, I think we can be on a first name basis, don’t you?” He pulled back, only a few inches, to see the way her pupils had dilated. “Whadda you say you and me do some inventory, Annie?”

Her eyes went wide. “We’re still on shift until–“

“Live a little, huh? Where’s that free spirit?”

Annie flushed, glanced around, and murmured, “There’s a supply closet nobody ever uses on the fourth floor.”

Blink, and he had her pinned against a shelf, her lips hot and wet against his as he slithered his fingers over the straps of her garter belt, hiking up the skirt of her tight little uniform to reveal the tantalizing inches of skin beneath the tops of her stockings and the simple white cotton panties that wouldn’t show through the thin uniform fabric.

“Don’t mess my hair,” Annie panted as he dipped his fingers under her waistband.

Trapper laughed, low and sultry, and kissed her again, running his tongue over her chapstick-tinged lips. “What, down here?” He brushed two fingers down her mound, dragging them through her pubic hair, and pulled her closer when her entire body jerked at the touch. “I think I gotta to show you a good time, doll.”

“You know what I mean,” she giggled. Her chest heaved as Trapper threaded his fingers down, down, down, slipping them into the warm cleft between her legs to trail the pads down either side of her clitoris, not quite touching. “Oh, John…”

“Trapper.”

Down further still, feeling carefully until he found the dampness that he was certain he’d started soaking into her panties before surgery. He didn’t dip inside, not yet. Just a teasing touch, running over her slit, feeling the velvety flesh beneath his fingers. She rested her head against the shelf behind her, closing her eyes with a hum, and Trapper descended on her neck, pushing the limit of where he could leave marks as he pressed his forefinger into her heat, swirling around the sensitive nerves at the entrance. He kissed down, down, down—light pecks over her clavicle, her breast, her waist as he dropped to his knees and tugged at her panties until they rested just above her stockings.

Natural redhead. Good for her.

Eating a woman out was a science. Surgically precise. Hawk tried new things every damn time, but that seemed unnecessary. Showy. Why worry about it when the girl wasn’t even going to be in front of him often enough to ask for something new? It wasn’t like the girls compared stories, talked about the difference in how Hawk would suck at a clit like he was nursing one day and lave his tongue over her labia like a grooming cat the next. Trapper always took the same tack. Tongue over her entrance, wait until her legs start shaking around you. Work up to the clitoris, weave circles around it until she grabs your hair and presses your mouth against her mound. Suck there until she’s overcome, loosens her grip, and you can dip down to plunge your tongue as deep into her as you can go, drinking up her fluids like you’re a dying man in the desert. Replace your tongue with your fingers, again find her clit with your lips, thrust and suck and devour until you’re slick to your third knuckle and she bites down on her hand to muffle herself as she comes. Hold her up with your free hand and work her until she’s come down, until she pushes your head away because she can’t take a moment more. Look up at her with eyes that say exactly how you’re aching for her, leave one last kiss just above her clit, and settle back on your haunches to wait.

Annie looked down at him, pulled her panties up, and sank to her knees to wipe the juices from his lips with her thumb. “You’re very good at that.”

Trapper smiled, wide and crooked, and grabbed her wrist to kiss her thumb before she pulled it away. He caressed down his own thighs, drawing her attention to the awkward hang of too-loose pants around where he was straining against his boxers. “You gonna help me out, nurse?”

She giggled, kissed him again, and said, “I’d love to get my hands on your instrument, doctor.”

The punched-out noise Trapper felt pulled from his throat as she groped him was only half from her touch. Hawk had said something so much like that the first time he opened Trapper’s pants, as he lay on his back in a soft bed in a Tokyo hotel room. Maybe it was just the obvious joke to make. But as Annie rucked down the waistband of his boxers and made a nervous noise low in her throat, Trapper couldn’t help but press his forehead to her neck, hoping that not being able to see her would help him remember what Hawk’s hands had felt like around him before she wrapped those manicured fingers around his length.

“Fuck,” Trapper breathed. “That’s it, honey, that’s good.”

The hand left him. A rustling sound as Annie shifted under him, shoulders straining. The crinkling of a package opening.

Trapper lifted his head for just long enough to see her carefully wadding up a length of gauze, tongue sticking out between her lips in focus, before he laughed and pressed his forehead back down. “Clever,” he said, laughter shaking his entire body. “Less to clean up that way, huh?”

“I follow scrub procedure very closely, doctor,” Annie joked.

The hand wrapped around him again. Trapper sighed and sank into the feeling, the thrumming in his bones, the need writhing in his veins. Fuck, he’d been needing this. He needed to drain his brain out his ears, out his cock, until he felt like a person again instead of a machine that took in broken bodies so they could take another bullet, another mortar fragment, another helicopter trip to the 4077th. He was human, he was Real, he was more than just the arm that moved his scalpel.

He came with a grunt, digging his fingers into Annie’s waist as she gave him a few more strokes and carefully cleaned him up with the gauze. It was an inexpert handjob, but what the hell did he care? It had gotten him there. Every time he saw those manicured nails, he’d remember that all it had taken was a few words to coax her onto the floor of a supply closet with him. He’d remember the taste of her well enough to find his way out of the dark of an abdominal cavity where you could barely tell one mashed organ apart from the next. He’d remember the feel of her heat around his fingers, enough to distract him from the slick slide of intestine beneath his gloves.

Annie tucked him back into his pants, did up his fly, and patiently waited for him to stand and help her up. He gave her a last kiss and tucked a loose lock of hair behind her ear, then cradled her cheek in his palm.

“I’ll see you later, honey?”

“You’ll see me the moment someone else needs those fingers, doctor,” Annie said, grinning. She kissed him on the chin, squeezed his hand, and vanished into the hall.

Vernon was leaning against the wall when Trapper left the closet. “I underestimated you,” he said, rubbing between his eyes. “How the hell did you manage that?”

Trapper punched him in the shoulder, just hard enough that he winced. “Why, you lookin’ for tips?”

Vernon rolled his eyes, but Trapper didn’t miss the tinge of red on his cheeks.

Hawk would probably appreciate a good story about a man, too.

Trapper stuck his fingers two knuckles deep into his mouth, sucked the lingering fluids off of them, and patted Vernon on the shoulder with his clean hand. “Tell you a secret,” he said, leaning in nice and close. “They don’t call me ‘Trapper’ for nothin’.”

Chapter Text

March 24, 1951

The thing about Hawkeye Pierce was that he always got what he wanted. He could convince just about anyone to sign a piece of paper that would get them a brand new shipment of hydrocortisone or morphine, bandages or booze. And now, with his sights set on an incubator, nothing was going to get in his way. Trapper was sure of it. Not a man who said they couldn’t have it because they didn’t deserve it, not a man who said they couldn’t have it because he’d rather keep something pristine than useful in a goddamn war zone, not a man who said they couldn’t have it because he’d rather wring them for every cent they had instead of being kind to the hundreds of kids who hit their tables every single week.

The noise Hawkeye made as he sank into his bed in their hotel room was the sort that had been haunting Trapper’s dreams for the last three months, ever since the rumored ceasefire. He’d been… processing, since then. Since he’d had some very particular realizations about exactly what he wished his relationship with Hawkeye was like. The ache in his chest at the idea that Hawk might be leaving him was different than just about anything he’d ever felt, even if Boston and Maine wouldn’t be too far apart for a weekend trip when they got back home. It was the same way he’d felt about leaving his daughters behind. It was so much more than the way he’d felt about leaving Louise.

So that settled it, maybe. He was in love with Hawkeye Pierce. And it wasn’t the fraternal, buddy-buddy kind of love, because he’d had friends before even if they hadn’t been quite this close and this didn’t feel anything like that. It was the kind of love that led him to wake up in the middle of the night to stare at Hawk’s sleeping form across the tent and fantasize about crawling over to him to keep him warm against the winter air. It was the kind of love that made his eyes catch on Hawk’s broad shoulders in the shower or when his shirt clung to his back with sweat as the scrubbed out of a too-long surgical session. It was the kind of love that made him realize exactly how long he’d spent not looking at the other guys in the locker room because he’d known in the very back of his mind that if he had looked for too long, he would have made these realizations forever ago.

It was the kind of love that had made him promise himself that the next time he and Hawkeye got R&R together, he’d lay his cards on the table. He’d always been shit at bluffing, anyway. He’d admit that he sometimes looked at Hawk the same way he looked at a woman and that he’d sometimes caught Hawk looking back, they’d laugh about the fact that John McIntyre was a queer when he didn’t look an ounce like it, and then Hawk would show him how two men were supposed to figure out being in love. Because Hawkeye had to know how to handle that. Meeting Tommy Gillis had been proof enough for Trapper, even before he’d had the proof about himself.

Hawkeye sighed, squirming deeper into the mattress. “How long until our press conference, Trap?”

Trapper shrugged, ran his hands through his hair yet again to try to fix the way he’d combed it church-flat for their meeting with the colonel who wouldn’t give them a goddamn incubator, and checked the bedside clock. “What time’s it at?”

“Noon, right?”

“Then we got sixteen hours.”

“Make it fourteen. I won’t put up with anything less than front row seats.”

Trapper wound the alarm for nine in the morning, set it back on the table between the beds, and sat on the edge of the mattress to kick his dress shoes off. They almost made him miss the clunky combat boots. At least those had been broken in within just a few days, even with all the lazing around he did before Hawk came to the 4077th. He was never going to wear these enough to stop them from pinching his toes, given he fully planned to chuck them in Boston Harbor the minute he got back.

Hawk rolled onto his stomach with a grunt, letting his head and arms dangle over the side of the bed and kicking his feet in the air behind him. The smile he aimed at Trapper made his stomach flutter. “Any plans for the evening, sailor?”

Trapper shrugged again, took his socks off, and stuffed them in his shoes before tucking them half under the table the alarm was on. “We paid for the hotel room; I wanna use the damn beds.”

“You’re no fun,” Hawk pouted. He rolled onto his back again and started to undo the buttons of his dress jacket single-handedly, resting the other behind his head as he stared at the ceiling. “Fourteen whole hours in Tokyo all to ourselves? We’ve done more with less.”

Trapper lay down, shifting his head against the plush pillow until his curls weren’t bunched up beneath him. “I’m still your bedtime minder,” he reminded Hawkeye. “Or don’t you wanna listen to dear old Dad?”

“Oh, nice to know my father got remarried. He’ll be good for Henry.”

The laugh that was pulled out of Trapper crinkled his eyes at the edges. Trust Hawkeye Pierce to have a joke about homosexuality that would make anyone who didn’t have their head three feet up their own ass chuckle. “Think they’ll go double-barreled?”

“Well, then I’d have to change my name—to be a good son, you know—and I don’t think we can have two Dr. Blake-Pierces on one military base.”

“Sure, but he’s Colonel Blake-Pierce. You’re just a captain.”

“Don’t remind me.” More shifting from Hawk’s side of the room. Trapper turned his head to watch as Hawk stripped off his jacket and lay face down in the pillow, mumbling something.

“What’s that?”

Hawk lifted his head. “I said that I’d rather be Dr. Blake-Pierce any day over Captain Pierce.”

Trapper shrugged. “Could be worse. Could be Major Pierce.”

“Yech.”

“I know, right?”

“You know what’s even worse?” Hawkeye asked, smile twitching the corners of his lips.

“Lice? Dysentery? Ooh, let me guess: Frank Burns.”

“Major McIntyre.”

“Oh, that’s disgusting!” Trapper wiggled his toes against the blankets as he laughed. It was impossible not to be happy around Hawk. In a real bed, with real heating, in a real city instead of in a canvas mortuary, there was nothing that could stop the joy circulating in his chest. “I ever get promoted, I’m blamin’ you for givin’ the universe the idea.”

“I’ll expect a personal commendation and a dismissal from the United States Armed Forces.”

“Only if you make up some horrible disease that gets me disqualified from service.”

“Done. Pleasure doing business with you, Major McIntyre.”

“Yech.”

Even the silences with Hawk were comfortable. Trapper shimmied out of his uniform jacket and dropped it on the floor, happy to let it wrinkle. They’d stand out too much if they wore anything other than their button downs and slacks at the conference tomorrow.

“Hey, Hawk?” Trapper called, fingering the top button of his shirt.

“Yeah-yeah?”

“You mind if I strip? We gotta wear these undershirts again tomorrow.”

Nobody else would have noticed the moment of hesitation. But Trapper was so well-tuned to Hawkeye’s resonance that they had barely been out of harmony since the first few weeks in Korea. “Why, planning on putting on a show?”

Trapper sat up, put on his best smile that he reserved just for Hawkeye, and started the work of undoing his buttons. “Only if you want me to.”

Hawkeye looked away, at a point somewhere over Trapper’s shoulder. “But then I’d have to tip you, and all I have are nickels for the jukebox.”

“What, you don’t wanna leave bruises?”

“Knowing my aim, I’d knock out a tooth. I wouldn’t want to ruin your best feature.”

Trapper laughed again, watching the color shift on Hawkeye’s face.

He had to make a move at some point. He knew that. It was never going to be Hawk who took the first shot. He carefully folded his dress shirt, set it on the nightstand, and tugged his undershirt out of his pants but didn’t yet take it off. Hawk was just laying there, face half-buried in the pillow, watching him without watching him.

“Hawk?”

“Mm?”

“You sure you don’t mind?”

Hawkeye laughed, muffled by the fabric of the pillowcase. “Trap, I’ve seen you naked so many times I could scream. I’ve changed in front of you. I’ve– I’ve fucked Margie with you. Why would I mind?”

“’Cause you look like you got somethin’ on your mind, that’s all.”

Hawkeye shifted, propping himself up on his elbows with his head in his hands. “Maybe you seem like you’ve got something on your mind.”

Trapper always needed to turn away when Hawk looked at him like that. It was like Hawk could read his mind with how in sync they always were. No matter if it was in the mess tent, at a poker game, in the OR, the force of his gaze was always so much. Trapper stared down at where his hands were dangling between his knees and licked his lips. “You’d be the one to know, wouldn’t you?” he said, forcing lightness into his tone.

Hawk shrugged, turned over onto his back again, and sprawled out as far as he could. “So tell me.”

In every version of this playing out that Trapper had imagined, he’d been the one leading. He’d broached the question quickly, efficiently, and hadn’t given Hawkeye the time to take control to weasel out of answering. He felt off-footed, now, commanded to do as Hawkeye told him.

But he always did what Hawkeye told him.

“I got a question I wanna ask,” Trapper started. He clenched his hands into fists, feeling the bite of nails against his palm instead of the worming anxiety in his stomach when Hawk turned onto his side to watch him. The man was practically acting like a rotisserie chicken. “But you gotta promise you ain’t gonna get upset by it, alright? I’m not– I’m not askin’ this ‘cause I’m Frank Burns or nothin’.”

Something shifted in Hawkeye’s gaze. Careful, calculating—the kind of look he got on his face when he was trying to evaluate how best to deal with someone he didn’t trust. “How can I promise when I don’t know what the question is?”

“Hawk, please.” Trapper dug his nails further into his flesh, hating how whiny he sounded. He bit his cheeks before he went on, trying to recenter himself with the pain. “I wanna ask you a question, and you gotta answer it honest, alright? It ain’t gonna leave this room.”

Trapper glanced up.

Hawkeye was still watching him with that look, like he thought Trapper was a bomb about to go off.

“You gotta promise, Hawk.”

Maybe he wouldn’t promise. Maybe Trapper would never get to ask the question. Would he be okay with that? They could go on the same way they’d been going on for months, best friends until the end even though Trapper was fanning a bonfire in his chest. Hawk didn’t have to know about the flames, not if he turned Trapper down for even asking the question.

“Go ahead,” Hawkeye finally said.

Trapper licked his lips, patted his thighs, and took a last breath before plunging directly into the deep end. “Are you a homosexual?”

The expression on Hawk’s face didn’t change. “No, I’m not.”

“Oh.”

There was a curious sort of buzzing in Trapper’s brain. A few minutes from now, he was pretty sure it would sink in that this was the stupidest thing he’d ever done in his entire life. But he’d been so certain. The way Hawk looked at him, touched him, didn’t shy away from making jokes about things that would get him arrested if the wrong person took him too seriously… but he wasn’t. He just had a curious sense of humor about the whole deal, maybe the kind of thing that you picked up being raised a backwoods yokel in a town that was practically populated the same as Trapper’s childhood tenement block. Maybe nobody beat it out of him when he said that kind of thing, and by the time he’d moved on to Chicago for college or Boston for med school his mouth was skilled enough that he always had exactly the right words to say to get out of the sticky situations he got himself into.

Trapper had never learned that skill. If he just used his size to his advantage, most everyone backed down. If he just stayed quiet, nobody told him to shut up. He’d probably said more words to Hawk in the last half a year than he had to any other single person in his private life back at home. The feeling of Hawk laughing at his jokes was like nothing else he’d ever felt. But Hawk wasn’t–

“’Homo’ implies only,” Hawkeye said.

Trapper looked up at him. Hawk had rolled to a seat, cross-legged in the middle of the bed. “Huh?”

“’Homo’ implies–“

“No, I heard ya.”

Hawk tilted his head, fiddling with his fingers. “What you should have asked is ‘are you interested in men.’ Because that has a very different answer.”

Trapper licked his lips. “Are you?”

“Am I what?”

“Interested in men?”

“Yes. Are you?”

Somehow, Trapper hadn’t gotten to thinking through the fact that the question would inevitably come back to him. That he’d have to answer it before Hawk did anything about it. “I never, uh… never really thought about it before, you know?”

“Until?”

“What?”

“Until?” Hawkeye insisted. He waved his hand in a circle, eyes wide and frantic. “you never thought about it ‘until,’ right? Because otherwise, you wouldn’t be asking. You wouldn’t care, I know you. You don’t ask if your best friend is a homosexual unless you’re having a few very particular thoughts about yourself.”

Trapper’s vocal cords seemed to have bit the dust. He flapped his mouth a few times, struggling to say anything, to make any sound at all. That wasn’t something you said. Nobody ever said anything like that. He couldn’t say it. How the hell was he supposed to say it? Hey, Hawk, I’ve been thinkin’ about feeling you inside me the same way you’d feel inside a woman for months?

“Take your shirt off.”

Trapper laughed. “What?”

Hawkeye clenched his grip around the hem of his slacks, rocking slightly. “You said you wanted to take it off. So you can wear it again tomorrow. Nothing’s different between us, right? You’re no Frank Burns. Take it off.”

“Hawk–“

Hawkeye rolled forward, crossed the gap between the beds, and planted himself between Trapper’s spread knees. He was beautiful like this: bangs dark against his eyes as he looked down, the cinch of his dress uniform around his waist accenting what was already a perfectly respectable figure, lips half-parted with anticipation.

Trapper dug his toes into the carpet. “Hawk.”

“You have to be the one to say it,” Hawkeye murmured.

“I can’t.”

Hawkeye laughed, swiping his hands down his face. Trapper tracked every shift of muscle, every red inch of his skin from how hard he pressed down on his cheeks. “You want me to risk my life on ‘I can’t?’ My job, my career? My right to continue existing outside of the military prison Frank would put me in?”

Trapper set his jaw. “I’m no Frank Burns.”

If he didn’t say something, Hawkeye was never going to give him what they both needed.

Hawk wasn’t going to hit him for this. Not when he was standing there, legs only inches away from being trapped between Trapper’s thighs, staring down at him with rosy cheeks and hope carved into his features.

When Trapper opened his mouth, he let the first thing that came to his lips tumble out. “I wanna kiss you.”

The smile that split Hawkeye’s face was like the sun coming out. Hawk slipped even closer, pushed on Trapper’s chest until he shuffled back so his legs were flush with the edge of the bed, and slung a leg up to saddle over his thighs. He was so close, one hand coming to rest on Trapper’s back. Trapper had to grab onto him before he fell, feeling the heat of Hawk’s skin at the small of his back even through his dress shirt.

Hawkeye grabbed Trapper by the chin, tilted his head up, and thumbed over his bottom lip. “Is that all you want to do?”

“No,” Trapper breathed. He was trembling. He wanted to stop trembling. No, I wanna– ah, I w-want…”

How was he supposed to choose? His mind was roiling with possibility. Even a kiss seemed impossible to ask for while Hawk was still holding him in place with those long, perfect fingers wrapped around his chin. Trapper wanted them to stay there forever, gently stroking over his lips or his stubble. The idea of Hawk moving them to do anything else, no matter how good it was, was agonizing.

Hawkeye grinned even wider. Trapper felt tiny under his gaze, about to be snapped up by a great big bird of prey. “Look at you,” Hawkeye purred, eyes wide and dark like he could soak up every second twice as much if only he opened the camera lens as far as it could go. “Blushing like a virgin.”

Trapper’s cheeks were boiling under Hawk’s touch. He clenched his fingers in the fabric of Hawkeye’s shirt. “I ain’t never done this before. W-with…”

Hawkeye dug his hands into Trapper’s hair, leaned forward, and kissed him.

The noise Trapper made had to be embarrassing. He let his lips fall open, pinching his eyes shut so tightly that his muscles burned. Maybe it was a dream, the kind he had when he and Hawk drank too much and fell asleep pressed against each other. Because he shouldn’t get to have this. Dr. John McIntyre, devoted father, loving husband, thoracic surgeon wasn’t supposed to get hard thinking about the man saddled over his lap, slowly pressing his tongue into his mouth. He was supposed to go home, slip back into John like a selkie donning its skin, roll with the punches and fuck a new girl every fortnight to keep himself from going insane, ignore the way his blood heated in the locker room after racquetball because it was only adrenaline—of course it was only adrenaline; how could it be anything else?

Hawkeye tasted like the sushi they’d had for dinner, the fruity tinge of sake, the cigar they’d shared outside the restaurant even though Hawk choked slightly on the smoke. If Trapper delved deep enough, maybe he’d taste the gin on the back of his tongue and he could be grounded by something familiar, come down from the stratosphere. He desperately pulled at Hawkeye’s shirts until they came out of his trousers, until he could slip his fingers beneath the hems and make another humiliating noise into Hawk’s mouth at the slide of skin beneath his fingers. Hawk’s breathing hitched against him and he spilled a hungry noise back before pulling away.

“What do you want?” Hawkeye asked, fingers back on his chin.

There wasn’t a single ounce of brain left in Trapper’s skull. “I want you inside me.”

Hawkeye blinked, so many emotions flitting through his gaze that even Trapper couldn’t parse them before they’d settled into confusion and amusement. “What?”

Trapper’s fingers trembled against Hawkeye’s skin. He couldn’t back down, not now that he’d said it. He wanted it so badly, more than he’d ever wanted just about anything else. Why did he want it so badly? It was wrong, it was unnatural, but everything about this was unnatural, and it didn’t feel wrong against his skin or pressing against his heart. There wasn’t anything holding him back. What was the point in denying himself something he wanted? He’d never done that before.

“I want you to sodomize me,” he insisted.

Hawk’s gaze sparkled. “You know, that’s normally the kind of thing you have to talk a guy into.”

With Hawkeye’s hand on his chin, Trapper couldn’t look away. His cheeks burned. He licked his lips, tongue dancing tantalizingly close to Hawk’s fingertips. “I ain’t gonna be a pussy about this,” he said.

“No, you just want me to fuck yours.”

Trapper whimpered. What the fuck was wrong with him? Why did he want that so badly? He’d never felt like this before, burning up with the need not just to have a good time but to sit back and let someone else take the lead for once. He wanted to be good for Hawkeye. He wanted to be the thing that made Hawkeye feel good, no matter how that meant Hawk had to use him. He barely gave a shit about how he was straining against his boxers. If only he got to make Hawk forget about everything for a while the same way his one-night nurses did, everything would be perfect.

“Soon,” Hawkeye promised, dipping in to leave a gentler kiss on his lips.

“Why not now?”

“Because, dear Trapper, contrary to popular belief, I don’t keep lube in my saddle bags. You want me up your ass, you’ll have to wait until we can steal a little something from Supply.”

Hawkeye leaned back, jutting out his chest like a calendar girl as he started to undo the buttons of his dress shirt, and all chance of coming up with a witty retort went out the window. Trapper kept his hands firmly on Hawk’s back, holding him upright as he stripped first the button down, then his undershirt. He was so pale beneath it, winter-white and bony, iliac crest showing against his skin. The dark lines of his body hair stood out starkly in contrast, completely unlike anyone Trapper had ever felt beneath his bare hands in a bedroom or behind a bar or in a disused supply closet.

Trapper lifted his arms when Hawkeye tugged at the hem of his shirt and let it be pulled over his head. He felt horribly exposed under the scrutiny of those bright eyes, under the way Hawk pressed a hand to the center of his chest and gently ruffled the sparse hair there. Under the way Hawkeye leaned forward to press their bare skin together, craning his head back with a breathy moan, showing off the long, stubbled line of his throat.

Like there was a fish hook yanking in his mouth, Trapper found himself drawn forward. He pressed his lips to the side of Hawkeye’s neck and barely resisted sucking a dark hickey into his skin where someone would be able to see. They had to go to the press conference tomorrow. They needed to look at least a little professional.

As he moved lower, dipping his tongue into the hollow of Hawkeye’s clavicle, he decided it wouldn’t matter when they got back to the 4077th. Everyone knew he and Hawk spent every free moment with the nurses. A love bite high on Hawkeye’s neck somewhere everyone could see wouldn’t arouse even a moment of suspicion. All the nurses would wonder who’d been so bold as to claim him for herself. Henry would ask after the lucky lady. Frank would sneer and avoid looking while being blindingly jealous. Hot Lips would chide him, tell him to stay away from her nurses, and yet none of them would know who was really making Hawkeye feel this good.

Hawkeye threaded his fingers into Trapper’s hair, used his curls like a handle, and dragged until his mouth was firmly planted over his nipple.

Trapper always did what Hawkeye told him. He tightened his lips and sucked hard, like he was trying to start a siphon, earning a gasp and the hands tightening in his hair. He swirled his tongue around the hard peak, clasping desperately at Hawkeye’s hip and ass, trying practically to tug Hawk inside himself. He needed this. Needed to feel Hawk’s low hum reverberate through his chest and into his mouth, needed to feel one of those beautiful hands moving to stroke between his shoulder blades, needed to feel the tug against his scalp as Hawkeye tried to hold him in place instead of letting him freely shift to suck and lick at his other nipple. He closed his eyes and sank into the sensation of being filled with Hawkeye. Nothing else mattered. They had all the time in the world.

The pressure in his hair grew stronger. Trapper whined when Hawkeye pulled him away, lips slack as he looked up to wait, bringing one hand up to circle the way he’d made Hawk’s nipples puffy and red.

“Lay down,” Hawkeye ordered as he slipped down from Trapper’s lap. But Trapper could barely move. He watched, transfixed, as Hawk opened his belt and slipped out of his slacks, leaving them in a crumpled heap on the floor. He stood there in just his boxers, aching inside of them if the wet patch on the front was anything to go by, patiently waiting for Trapper to do as he was told.

“You want me to…?” Trapper asked, gesturing at his own belt.

“Mm-hmm,” Hawkeye hummed, a bright and predatory smile spreading across his face. “Let’s see it, Trap.”

With shaking hands, Trapper undid his belt as quickly as he could and shimmied out of his slacks before laying back on the bed, hoping his face wasn’t quite as red as it felt. He shouldn’t have been embarrassed. It was just Hawkeye. Hawk had probably seen his dick before, just because they changed in the same room. But Hawk had probably seen plenty of dicks in his time. Who knew if he’d be impressed the same way so many of the nurses were? When Trapper got to most of them, they’d only been with a few men before him, if that. Universally, they were intimidated. But he made it good for them. He always made it good for them, even if they argued at first that they didn’t know what to do with something his size.

He needed to make this good for Hawk. It was the only thing that mattered.

“I’ve seen you in the showers, you know,” Hawkeye confirmed as he again saddled over Trapper’s thighs, the fabric of their boxers touching. He rubbed at Trapper’s inguinal grooves, creeping towards his pubic region, digging his fingertips into the flesh hard enough to burn. “Let’s be honest, I’ve seen you. Even with your pants on, you’re not hiding much.”

It was just Hawkeye. They could joke around. This didn’t have to be a big deal. “Real burden on my soul, that is,” Trapper drawled. “And the broads are still surprised when they get their hands on him.”

“Show-off.”

“What, like it’s my fault?”

“Maybe. When you’re dead, someone’s probably gonna grind up your bones and snort them like rhinoceros horn.”

“You’re ridiculous,” Trapper said with a laugh. “And someone’s gonna siphon your brain outta your skull and make it into soup.”

“Probably the same person. My smarts and your cock: that would make the perfect man, wouldn’t it?”

“Ain’t that what we told Hot Lips Captain Tuttle looked like?”

Hawkeye’s laugh had to be the single best thing in the entire world, or at the very least the whole Korean Theater. His entire face scrunched when Trapper got him to laugh hard enough, or even when he laughed hard enough at his own jokes. Trapper wanted to kiss every line next to his eyes until he could remember the feeling of them under his lips for the rest of his life.

“We’ll make that our married name,” Hawkeye joked. “But that’s going to make our firstborn John Tuttle Jr.”

The joke was barely out of Hawkeye’s mouth before he clearly regretted it. Trapper flexed his fingers against Hawk’s hip, completely lacking the cold metal of the wedding ring sitting in his footlocker back at camp. It was a hassle to wear it more than anything, these days, when Louise wasn’t around to police him. He’d never gotten used to the way it felt on his finger, not when it so often ended up tucked in his pocket or resting on top of a pile of worn nudie mags.

“Good idea,” Trapper said. “That way we don’t gotta worry about still havin’ our fathers’ names when they disown us for bein’ queers.”

“I’ll have you know Tommy and I went to my father for his blessing to run away together, thank you very much.”

“I knew it!”

Before Trapper could go on, Hawkeye smirked and palmed him through his boxers. Trapper dropped his head to the pillows with a gasp at the heat of Hawk’s hand on him, against his straining cock. It shouldn’t have felt better than it did with a woman—Hawk wasn’t even touching his skin—but Christ. Maybe it was just that everything Hawk did with his hands or his mouth was perfect. Trapper couldn’t imagine feeling this good with anyone else, man or woman, and they weren’t even fucking yet.

“Knew what?” Hawkeye purred. Those gorgeous fingers dipped down until he could fondle Trapper’s balls through the fabric, humming in delight. “About me and Tommy?”

“I’d guessed,” Trapper said, struggling to keep his voice from shaking too badly. “Come on, Hawk. The guy called you a sissy and made it sound like a pet name.”

“Mm, maybe it was.” Hawk’s fingers moved lower until he could press his knuckles against Trapper’s perineum, making him gasp. “Maybe I am.”

“And proud of it?”

“You bet I am. And I’ll show you, how about that? I’ve wanted to get my hands on your instrument for a long time, doctor.”

The fingers hooked in the waistband of Trapper’s boxers. There’d be no going back. Not that there was any going back now, not when Hawkeye was perched above him, hard and waiting, impatient and hungry.

How could he possibly say no?

“What are you gonna do with me?” Trapper asked.

How many times had he seen that smile turned on a nurse? It was the look Hawkeye got out when he knew he had someone. When he knew they were about to say yes to whatever the hell it was he wanted to do because they knew he’d make it some of the best they’d ever had. “I’m gonna make you feel good, pal,” Hawkeye said. He rose up on his knees, pulled Trapper’s boxers down just enough to let his cock spring free, and took a shaky breath. “So why don’t you stop worrying about it? Stop working that pretty head too hard—all your curls will fall out.”

“Oh, we can’t have that,” Trapper fired back. “Then you won’t have anything to tug on.”

“No?” Hawkeye gestured to Trapper’s dick, eyebrows raised. “You don’t want me to tug on that?”

“Well, if you insist.”

That was, apparently, all the permission Hawkeye needed to close his hand around Trapper’s cock. Just the simple pressure of his fingers sent pleasure shooting down Trapper’s spine. He had to close his eyes. He couldn’t look directly at the way Hawk’s fingers were just as beautiful around him as they were on the cold steel of a scalpel. He couldn’t look too long at the way Hawk’s pretty lips parted, even if he couldn’t block out the breathy sound of anticipation. Not if he didn’t want to shoot off like a college kid finding his first real pleasure in the washroom of a Boston and Maine railcar.

“The hell do you need this thing for?” Hawk asked, slowly sliding his hand from where it was wrapped around Trapper’s base to his very tip, then thumbing over his slit in a way that made Trapper’s leg twitch. “You oughta donate some to the needy.”

“Like who, you?”

“Mmm, I’m very needy.”

“I bet you are.” It was impossible to buck his hips with the way Hawk was resting on his thighs. Trapper was forced to lie there and take whatever Hawk gave him as the hand slid back down his length before Hawk spread his fingers to card through his pubes. “Bet you want me all the way inside you, huh? Buried so deep in that t-tight little cunt you can’t think’a anything else, yeah?”

It was the best dirty talk he could offer. Formulaic, the same he used on everyone else. From the strangled noise Hawkeye made, the words were just as effective with him as they were with a woman.

“You’d fuck me?” Hawkeye teased, stroking him faster, shooting the buzzing in his head even higher. “After you were practically begging for me to sodomize you?”

He wasn’t going to last long, not when Hawk had to go ahead and remind him of that. What would it feel like? It would be so tight. Hawk would stretch him until he was shaped perfectly just for him. He’d feel Hawkeye buried inside in a place nobody except the goddamn Army doctor had ever gotten to be. He needed Hawkeye to blot out the fear of the draft board examination by fucking him so hard he’d never be shaped by anyone else.

“Turns out I go both ways,” Trapper joked. “’Course I’ll fuck you back. I-If– if you want me to.”

“Jesus, Trap, you think I don’t want this monster inside me? I’ll be sore for days. I’ll think of you every time I sit down.”

“That’s a good thing?”

The hand suddenly left him. Trapper whined and opened his eyes just in the time to see Hawk get his fingers in the waistband of his own boxers and shimmy around to pull them off.

“Jesus, Hawk,” Trapper breathed.

Hawk looked up at him, the barest hint of fear crinkling his eyes, but Trapper could barely pay attention to his expression. He was perfect. Small, slim, gorgeous, pre beading at his tip and slowly seeping down his length. Beautifully colored, so hard he was a wonderful shade of red, painfully eager for touch.

Trapper reached out his hands, waggling his fingers for Hawk to come close enough for contact. He bit his lip when Hawk slid forward, dragging himself over Trapper’s cock before settling straddled over his stomach. If Trapper lifted his knees, shifted around a little, he could probably rub the head of his cock against Hawkeye’s ass.

Maybe later. There were more important things to worry about than his own pleasure, like the way a new drop of precum welled at Hawkeye’s tip and dripped hot onto Trapper’s skin. He swiped one thumb through it, moaning softly at the stickiness spreading over him, and brought it to Hawk’s lips.

The look on Hawk’s face was nothing short of reverent, brows lifted and lips parting to take the offering held out to him. He stroked Trapper’s thumb with his tongue the same way he’d been stroking Trap’s cock, careful and slow, savoring every moment of it.

It was like he thought he might not get another chance.

Trapper had never been more glad for the way they’d trained his hands not to shake. He wrapped his fingers around Hawkeye and felt the answering moan vibrate around his finger as Hawk sucked it deeper and rocked forward. He’d never touched another hard cock before. It was the same, in some ways. The velvety skin, the boiling heat, the way Hawk’s entire body twitched when he craned his wrist to thumb over the glans in the way that always shot him to the edge when he was jerking himself off. But Hawk was so much easier to fit in his hand, so slick and wet without even spitting into his palm.

“Christ, Hawk, you’re gorgeous,” Trapper said. He couldn’t hold back the words any longer, particularly not after the low noise Hawkeye made against his thumb. “It– it tastes good?”

Hawk rolled his eyes back in his head with a moan, fluttering his eyelashes, dramatic to the end. “Mm-hmm.” He pulled back just enough to slip Trapper’s thumb from his mouth, leaving a kiss on the pad before he spoke. “You keep that up, you’ll have plenty to taste.”

“I’m gonna make you come?”

“Fuck. Yeah, Trap, yeah you are. Come on, baby.” Hawkeye rocked his hips slightly, thrusting into where Trapper’s hand had stilled. Trapper returned his attention to the task immediately, stroking down on every thrust so Hawk didn’t have to work quite as hard. “You’re so– hah, you, you know how badly I’ve wanted this?”

Hawk moved faster. Trapper tightened his grip, breath shaking when Hawkeye moaned. “How bad, Hawk?”

“Thought about it when I, when I jerked off. Fuck, Trap, almost every time I jerked off. The first time after I got here, I was thinking about taking you inside me.”

Trapper laughed, trying to hide how overcome he was. Hawk had known for so long. He’d come to the 4077th knowing. He’d dated Tommy Gillis as a kid instead of desperately trying to hide his blush in the locker room. “We gonna have to flip a coin every time to figure out who gets fucked?”

Hawk nearly collapsed in a fit of giggles. “Call that ‘getting some tails.’”

This felt right. Holding Hawkeye close, pleasuring him, laughing while they did it. It felt more right than anything else in Trapper’s life, particularly since Korea had started taking to him with a butcher knife. He couldn’t hide the tears that welled in his eyes. Maybe he could be okay with not wanting to hide them. Hawk had seen him cry before, the few tears that he couldn’t hold back when he couldn’t give that boy a better life.

The way Hawk was looking at him…

“You really are beautiful,” Trapper said, blinking hard to clear his vision. “I mean it, Hawk. If you were a woman, I’d knock you up.”

Hawkeye came with a gasp, spilling hot onto Trapper’s chest and abdomen. He arched his back, eyes pinched closed, jerking slightly with every spurt. Trapper stroked him gently through it, enraptured by the way his slit twitched, by the thick strand that connected his tip to Trapper’s stomach.

“Don’t say things like that,” Hawkeye panted, a smile tugging at the corners of his lips as he sagged forward. “What will my father think?”

“Guess we’ll just have to run away together.”

Hawk laughed and gestured around them. “We haven’t already done that?”

“Ah, but we’ll go back to dear old Dad once we’ve got our incubator.”

“Maybe we’ll grow our baby in it.” Hawkeye shimmied back, rocking his ass against Trapper’s aching cock hard enough to make him groan. “Of course, then we’d still have the problem of sending our samples to Tokyo.”

Trapper snorted. “Think we’re gonna leave plenty’a samples in Tokyo.”

Another beat while Hawkeye laughed, eyes crinkling at the corners, before he dismounted Trapper’s pelvis and shuffled further down the bed. “Sit up, Trap.”

Trapper did as he was told. “What are you gonna do?”

Hawk smirked, lay down on his stomach between Trapper’s legs, and pressed a kiss to his dripping tip. “What I’ve been thinking about for months.”

The first touch of Hawkeye’s tongue to his shaft was the kind of thing that might have made Trapper a religious man if he didn’t already so thoroughly disbelieve in God. Hawk’s flesh was so hot, gentle but firm as he licked from the base to just below the head, dark hair half-obscuring his eyes as he looked up for approval. Trapper nodded with a shaky moan and Hawkeye repeated the motion on the other side, slower and with a soft noise of pleasure of his own, before he latched his lips on the tip and began to suckle.

There was no chance of Trapper lasting. How could he? Hawk wasn’t only the most gorgeous man he’d ever met but skilled as all get out, swirling his tongue over the glans and applying just the right suction to make Trapper squirm and dig his nails into his palms so he didn’t try to grab Hawk and tug him deeper. He could feel his balls tightening, feel the pressure as he tried to hold back to make this perfect moment last longer, feel the beautiful heat of Hawkeye’s mouth around him.

Then Hawk took a deep breath, smirked around the cock stretching his lips, and plunged inches deeper in one smooth motion.

Trapper came with a shout, startled into shooting directly down Hawkeye’s throat instead of having a chance to warn him. Hawk pressed all the way down until he was nuzzled into Trapper’s pubes, gagging only slightly, swallowing around Trap’s head to work every last drop out of him. Trapper could feel tears welling again in his eyes. Had anyone ever taken him to the base before? He couldn’t remember, not with the pulsing of Hawk’s throat working him past pleasure and into a different sort of ache as he softened.

“Get off,” he murmured, pushing Hawk away.

Hawkeye gasped, red-faced and practically hypoxic. He trembled slightly as he wordlessly swiped up a thumb-full of his cooled release and brought it to Trapper’s lips, brows arched and lips slickly red and parted.

Trapper opened his mouth, leaned forward, and let Hawk smear his cum over his tongue. He gagged slightly, but it was a taste he could get used to, especially when they were home and weren’t eating what wasn’t much better than decades old hard tack.

He wanted to bring Hawkeye home with him.

He needed to bring Hawkeye home with him. Hawk could meet his daughters. They’d keep working together. They’d do… something about Louise, and Trapper could learn how to control himself a little better, and they’d live together in the South Boston row house he’d been aching to get back to for more than half a year.

Things would be perfect. They’d figure out some way to make an excuse for all of it. They had to. Hawk would know what to do.

“Come take a shower with me,” Hawkeye purred, dragging his fingers through the tackiness on Trapper’s chest.

Trapper always did what Hawkeye told him.

Chapter Text

October 23, 1951

There was a package waiting on the step. Trapper sighed and kicked it a little while he unlocked the door. Stupid fucking Army. He could see the note taped to the top from this distance, and though he couldn’t read it without his glasses, he was certain he knew what it said. Oh, sorry, they bugged out and we can’t be bothered to look up where they settled down. Why don’t you try again in three months when they’re back in Uijeongbu? Fucking assholes, making Hawkeye wait even longer when the man barely had two weeks of patience to get ribs shipped halfway across the world.

It was daytime in Korea, if Trapper remembered his time conversions right. He’d stick the package on the kitchen counter, pull a chair over to the phone, and plant himself by it until he could get through to Radar, no matter how long it took. He’d worked longer shifts than the one he just came off. He could stay awake. Maybe he’d even get the chance to talk to Hawkeye, if they weren’t in surgery.

Trapper bent to pick up the package and squinted at the note on the top.

It is with deepest regret that–

No.

He went inside. He set the package on the counter, exactly where he wanted to put it, even though his hands were shaking. He took down the first bottle his fingers made contact with in the liquor cabinet and took a long pull. Scotch.

It is with–

No.

He took the bottle upstairs with him, hands trembling as he undid his buttons, and changed into the plush golden robe that still carried the lingering scents of gin and dust and cigar smoke. Those scents would be gone, soon. Everything would be gone, soon. All he had left was–

No.

He went back downstairs.

The package was hunched on the counter like an animal waiting to eat him alive. He was going to plunge his hands inside and come away bloody and stained and Hawkeye would crack a joke about Lady Macbeth and–

Trapper tore the note off the package.

It is with deepest regret that you are informed that the recipient was killed on Active Service. There was no signature, only a stamped first initial and last name in smeared red ink.

Trapper turned the note over. There was nothing on the back.

Hawkeye was–

No.

They had to be wrong. They had to be wrong, because Trapper couldn’t have left Hawkeye all alone with nothing but Frank Burns and a kiss that probably hadn’t even made it to its destination. Because Hawkeye couldn’t have died hating him. He couldn’t have.

Trapper was never going to see him again, and Hawkeye had died hating him. Everyone there probably hated him, because Hawkeye would have made it clear that he didn’t leave a note, he hadn’t left a note, why the fuck hadn’t he been able to make himself leave a note?

Jesus, no, he can’t be–

Trapper took another long swig from the bottle. It burned on the way down, clawing at his throat and stomach. Maybe the ulcer would come back. Maybe he could bleed out on the floor and nobody would know why he was laying on his kitchen tile with a still heart until they opened him up. Maybe Hell was real and if he drank himself to death right now, he’d catch up with Hawk and they’d walk the rest of the way together. They’d kiss on the lips one last time before they put him in some kind of pit for homosexuals and leches and all-around terrible people.

Dear Hawkeye,

God, he can’t be–

you can’t be dead. I know you can’t be dead. You can’t be dead, please, God, don’t let him be dead–

Trapper dug his nails into the tape and ripped until the top flap of the package came up, corrugation like muscle fibers beneath its smooth, blemished flesh. Like tearing open– how had he died? Had it been quick? It must have been quick. It needed to be quick. A bullet to the brain, please, God, it must have been a bullet to the brain. You wouldn’t let him suffer. Not him. Didn’t he suffer enough?

His hands trembled as he pulled the plush rabbit from its warren. Pristine and perfect. It was supposed to be Hawkeye’s. It was supposed to–

Trapper held the animal to his chest and pressed his lips between its ears. If he focused hard enough, could he feel the blood roiling through its veins? Hawkeye would have made it Real. He would have put it in pride of place on his shelf and thought of Trapper every time he saw it until eventually it would have become Real, he could have been Real, everything was achingly, horribly Real and he wanted it to stop, he needed it to stop, if it didn’t stop, he’d–

He’d…

Dear Hawkeye. Do you have any fucking idea what you did to me? You broke me, Hawk. I used to be fucking normal and you broke me and I’m never going to stop being Real because you can’t go back but I need to go back and I can’t I can’t I–

He was on the ground, nestled into the corner beneath the phone, sitting in the hollow between the cabinets and the wall. He cradled the rabbit against him and dug his fingers into its fur.

Hawkeye Pierce was dead.

Trapper sniffled and wiped his eyes with the heel of his hand. He hurt. Everything hurt. It was never going to stop hurting, even though he needed more than anything for it to stop hurting.

He did this. This was his fault. Of course it was his fault. He left Hawk with a promise and couldn’t even wait until the first care package got there before he was fucking girls in supply closets like he didn’t have a care in the world. Like he’d forgotten what Hawkeye was going through. He did this. He did this, and–

No.

The rabbit’s fur was wet. He wiped his nose with the cuff of his robe and it came away tacky and disgusting. He couldn’t wash it, even though he couldn’t even smell it—the lingering scents of gin and dust and cigar smoke. He’d never smell Hawkeye again. He’d never taste him again. He’d never– oh, God, he’d never feel someone that deep in his heart ever again. He was going to bleed to death with the shrapnel ripped free. He was going to die, and it would stop the pain. Everything would stop hurting if he just…

He took another swig from the bottle and rested his head against the wall. He needed to stop thinking. It had been so easy to stop thinking in Korea before Hawkeye lit him up with ideas that they could be together forever. If he just closed his bulbs, the whole world went away.

If he just closed his bulbs, it would all go away.

Blink. Snap. Gloves on. Carve through skin and sinew and crack open ribs until you’re wrist-deep in someone’s mangled insides, excising the rotting, throbbing core of them. The ulcer that would have brought you home in time to say goodbye if only it had burst instead of festering.

Blink. Snap. Gloves off. Don’t let them smell the alcohol on your breath. Touch your patient on the shoulder and smile like you mean it when you tell him he’s going to be okay. He’s going to be okay. It’s going to be okay. Everything’s going to be okay.

Blink. There’s broken glass on the floor. You step over it and give up drinking anywhere except for straight from the bottle.

Blink. Your daughter is in the mine field. You’re drenched in blood. You could save her. You’ve done it before. You held onto a helicopter and rescued a little boy from certain death in the mine field and he still got taken away from you. Maybe even died in a shelling. You never would have heard about it if he did. Hawkeye isn’t here to drag you off to the O Club and ply you with drink so you do it yourself.

Blink. The rabbit sits on the coffee table across from you while television Westerns rattle out Morse code gunfire. You decide it needs a name. What better one than John? You aren’t using it.

Blink. It hurts.

Blink. Snap. Gloves on. He’s got a bullet in his shoulder and maybe someone who isn’t Trapper John McIntyre, half-present father, traitor, thoracic surgeon could take the case, but they wouldn’t handle it as well. They didn’t carve bullets out of hundreds of kids just like this one halfway across the world, keeping them safe from the things their own government sent them to do. They didn’t fall in love with the only man who ever mattered and promise themselves to him and fuck a girl just to get karmic justice rained down on their head for not being able to change a single thing about themselves unless the man did it for them. New wife, same old habits. Hawkeye didn’t deserve that, so the universe killed him. Of course it did.

Snap. Gloves off. Vernon asks if you’re okay. Of course you are. Everything’s okay. Everything’s going to be okay.

Everything was just fine.

There was a rabbit sitting in Trapper’s cot. Maybe it had gotten away from Radar. Fat and bunchy, spotted brown and white, with a little twitching nose and blood soaked into its fur. Of course it was covered in blood. Everything was, from Trapper’s boots to Hawkeye’s scrubs strewn across the Swamp floor to the drip, drip, drip as the blood filtered through the canvas cot to collect in the bedpan underneath.

Hawkeye sat in the dentist’s chair, watching the rabbit. A long y-incision peeked out from between the flaps of his robe. His fingers pattered on the arm of the chair in time with the drip-drop of blood.

The rabbit rolled over. Hawkeye stood, sat on the edge of the cot, and rubbed its belly before digging his fingers in and carving out a swath of flesh, uneven and lumpy where the meat had tried to seep between his fingers. There was no sound except for the squelching, the rattle of gunfire, the rain-patter tap of distant artillery and the gush of blood into the bedpan. It didn’t hurt the rabbit. Hawkeye wouldn’t hurt the rabbit.

“There, see?” Hawkeye cooed, circling his fingers around the open, pulsing wound. “You like me inside, don’t you? You want more?”

He wanted more. It was okay if it hurt. What was a little bit of hurt? Nothing so wrong with that when it was Hawkeye.

Hawk pressed his hand to Trapper’s stomach, circling his fingers around the open, pulsing wound. “I’ve got you, baby,” he promised, one blood-slick palm on Trapper’s shoulder as he eased his way inside. “I’ve got you. Do you like that?”

“Yes,” Trapper gasped. “Yes, Hawk, I do.”

“Good. Good job, John, just a little more. You can take it.”

The arm pressed deeper. Hawkeye was up to his elbow, now. Trapper wanted the pain. It made him Real.

“Hawkeye!”

“It’s okay, sweetheart. You’re doing so good for me.”

Hawkeye’s fingers danced over the throbbing, rattling pulse of his heart.

“Don’t stop, Hawk,” Trapper begged. “Don’t leave.”

The incision on Hawkeye’s chest was weeping blood. When he tilted his head into the light, Trapper could see the lines of his skull through his flesh. “I won’t, John.”

Blink.

His head hurt.

He took a drink.

Chapter Text

November 26, 1951

“Junior’s on Broadway, how can I help you?”

There was a moment of silence on the other end of the line. The man cleared his throat. “I’m sorry, Ma’am, is Louise McIntyre there? I know it might have changed, but this was the number listed on the emergency contact form.”

The girls. God, if something had happened to the girls… Louise clutched the phone tighter and rounded the corner into the kitchen, where at least the customers wouldn’t be able to see her if the worst was happening. “It’s Louise Healy, but yes, that’s me, Sir.”

“Oh– of course. I’m sorry, Ma’am. I just didn’t know who else to call.”

The bell at the kitchen window rang. Louise let Ed’s glare slide off of her. He’d learn to deal with a thirty second delay in service if it killed him. “Um, look, Mister…”

“Michaels, Ma’am. Dr. Michaels.”

Louise squeaked. She cleared her throat to cover it up. “Something hasn’t happened, has it? I–I mean, if a doctor’s calling? I’m at work right now, but I could give you my mother’s number and she can come to the hospital–“

“Ms. Healy, the problem is just about anywhere except for the hospital. He didn’t show up for his shift today.”

The panic ran out of her in a rush. Becky and Kathy were fine. Of course they were fine. What could have happened to them? There was a reason John had been sent overseas, and it was to keep children at home safe. There wasn’t anything wrong with her children or their family.

“John isn’t my responsibility, Dr. Michaels,” Louise said coolly.

“I know he’s not,” Michaels said, a tight edge bleeding into his tone. “But I’m concerned for him, and no matter what he’s done to you, I’m hoping you might be, too. He’s been…” A sigh. Louise hated talking on the phone. She wished she could see if he looked angry or sad or just plain worried rather than trying to read his tone of voice. “I know what it’s like, coming back from that place. I spent my time in France, but I don’t doubt he saw the same sorts of things as I did. It is very, very hard to keep going when you realize that the world’s moved on without you. And whenever I try to talk to him about it, he brushes me off. Now he’s no-showed without so much as calling in to say he’s sick. Please, all I’m asking you to do is check on him.”

The bell at the window rang again.

She was running out of time. And if John was hurt…

The only thing they’d ever promised each other was that their children would get to grow up with a proper family. She’d promised her children a father. She couldn’t go back on that. “I’ll stop on my way home from work.”

“Thank you, Ms. Healy. If you need to reach me I’m–“

She hung up. Ed glared at her when she finally took the plates from the window. “The hell was that, Lou?”

“Ex-husband,” she said, and left before he could open his mouth to question her.

It was easy to stop thinking about these sorts of things when she found her rhythm. Take an order, hand it to Ed, smile pretty so the men tipped her. Gossip with the retired stay-at-home moms at the end of the counter. Make friendly with the ones who knew her from the school, who knew she had committed the ultimate sins of wanting to work and leaving her husband. They couldn’t understand. They’d chosen the lives they were leading. They hadn’t been brave enough to try to escape, to press their way into college even if they’d had the chance to finish stolen from them.

And yet here she was, not escaping.

She didn’t regret Becky and Kathy, not an ounce, but she hadn’t planned for them the same way she’d so carefully planned for everything else. Cheer squad, valedictorian, college. And then one ridiculous, impulsive night…

It didn’t matter now. She was leaving that part of her life behind her except for the bare minimum she needed to ensure the promises they’d made to their children were kept. She’d leave that part of her life behind her as soon as she’d done as Dr. Michaels asked and made sure John hadn’t run off somewhere without a word or dropped dead or reenlisted.

She went to the bathroom, redid her bun, and touched up her lipstick. It wouldn’t do to look a mess, particularly not if she was going to see John. He’d always been kindest to her when she looked pretty, and she wouldn’t let him use her coming there straight from work against her. He was so good at turning the tables. He’d use it to try to weasel out, asking her if she was sick just because her makeup was a bit smudged instead of answering a single question about himself.

Take an order, hand it to Ed, smile pretty so the men tipped her. Earn a compliment or two for her trouble. The compliments had always been the best part. The compliments were what had let John win her over, back when people still called him by that awful nickname and he had only just started his medical residency.

She’d thought she’d fixed him, at least to the extent anyone was ever going to be able to make a decent man out of John McIntyre. If she was going to be stuck with him, at least she could make a plan to give their daughters the life and family they deserved. Maybe she couldn’t stop him from sleeping with a different woman once or twice a month, if the cycles that made him hungry for her were any indication, but she could at least make him presentable so their daughters wouldn’t be frightened of talking about their parents. They could be Doctor and Missus McIntyre for the children and for the PTA. She could tell him that Trapper John was not welcome in her bed until he’d eventually started to correct people when they called him by that name.

He’d said nobody called him John in Korea.

She had done such a good job, but the moment she let him off his leash, he had backslid to being the man he was when she met him. She’d known it was happening as his letters became less and less frequent, as he stopped talking about the horrible things happening around him and more and more about the eccentric roommate he pulled frat boy pranks with. He’d sounded so excited. More excited than he’d ever sounded about anything she’d given him.

So it had been time to cut her losses. Eight years down the drain, and she wouldn’t give him a minute more except for when she needed to give the girls time with the father they loved so much they’d hate her if she took him away from them.

And yet she was expected to keep giving him more time.

She sat in her car outside the little South Boston row house John had been so pleased to buy her, carefully fixing her hair in the rear-view mirror. Everything would be just fine. She’d make sure he wasn’t dead, which was really just a service she was doing for the girls, and she’d be on her way. It would take five minutes. Then she could go back to Mom’s and to the girls, get ready for her date with Floyd, and leave all this behind her for another week until she needed to drop Becky and Kathy off for their weekend with him.

The lights were off inside. Louise checked her shoes, brushed a speck of dirt off the left one, and rang the doorbell.

There was a clatter. Someone inside had dropped something glass that knocked against something else glass before it presumably bounced against the carpet.

She was so familiar with that sound.

John wobbled when he opened the door, dressed in a matted yellow robe over his lounge-wear. The whiskey in the half-full glass in his hand sloshed over his fingers. His curls were flattened on one side, eyes dull until he sucked the liquor off his fingers and swept his gaze over exactly the right places to make her feel dirty.

She remembered how charming she found that smile, once upon a time. How he could light up an entire room with one twist of his mouth, every woman’s attention turning to him in the blink of an eye. How the moment he’d introduced himself to her as John McIntyre, she’d been so grateful that, for once, a man she thought was attractive was Irish enough to bring home to her mother.

How wrong she’d been.

“He-hey, Louise, baby!” John shouted, far too loud for the quiet street. He leaned against the door frame, one hip cocked out to the side, smile as blindingly brilliant as ever even around the sour edges. “Finally realized what you’re missin’, huh?”

She barely recognized this man. The only things she could pull from him that had once belonged to the thing she’d turned into her husband were that smile and the way he stood like he was ready to pounce. But she knew that if she stepped close enough to read them, the dog tags jangling around his neck would read “John McIntyre.”

If her father taught her nothing else, she’d certainly learned how to make a drunk, angry man go to his job.

“Come on, come in,” John said, stepping to the side and waving her through the door with the hand holding the glass, sending another splash of whiskey over his fingers. “You want a drink? I got drinks around, hang on.”

When Louise followed him through the door and into the living room, it looked as though a tornado had torn through a liquor cabinet. The dropped bottle on the floor had rolled most of the way under the coffee table. Several more were scattered over its surface, rings of condensation damage worn into the wood she’d picked out nearly a decade ago. John stumbled as he bent over to rifle through them, then sat down heavily on the rumpled couch, cradling the only half-full bottle between his knees.

Louise glanced into the kitchen, saw a torn-open package sitting on the counter, and had her attention ripped away just as quickly.

“Siddown with me,” John said, voice low and inviting.

It was the sort of thing that would have been charming at a college party, or maybe if he was even a smidge less drunk. If the couch he was sitting on wasn’t filthy from sleep and spilled liquor. If he could focus his gaze on her instead of a point a few inches behind her head. If she didn’t already know he’d never be good for anything other than a one night stand.

All she wanted this to take was five minutes. “John.”

John twitched. He looked up from where he was fumbling with the bottles, looking for any others with a drop of liquid left in them, that same beautiful smile stapled onto his face beneath a whiskey-blurred gaze. “Hey. Call me Trapper.”

The anger that flared behind her eyes burned her. She had worked so hard for this, and yet he couldn’t keep himself presentable to be a father to his children even if he’d stopped pretending to care about her. He couldn’t respect that she couldn’t stand when he acted like the man who had gotten caught with wet fingers in a train car washroom to earn his name. People came back from war changed, she knew that. She’d seen it happen just like this in her childhood home. But John had always been able to put things away so neatly. Despite their arguments, he’d never once let it slip around the children that he was unhappy, or frustrated, or falling out of love, if he’d ever been in love in the first place.

This new man in front of her, he didn’t even feel like the “Trapper” John McIntyre she had met when he was only a few months away from graduating med school. He was angry, jaded, and whiskey-sour. He seemed to have very few goals in life other than buying the entirety of Boston out of bottom-shelf alcohol and tempting her into his lap.

She wasn’t about to let him start walking all over her just because he’d decided he wanted to. “You didn’t show up for work today.”

John grunted and took a sip from the glass. “I didn’t have work today.”

“Dr. Michaels said you did when he called me at the diner.”

No reaction. Not an ounce of guilt for the way he was trying to force his presence back into her life.

“What’s it matter?” John sighed, moving to lay down on the couch and setting the bottle against his hip. There was a plush rabbit tucked near his head. He yanked it out of where it was stuck between the seat and back cushions and kissed it between its ears, stroking it like he would a pet. “They’ll teach someone else to tell the difference between bullet fragments and mortar shrapnel. Ain’t gonna stop anything if I don’t go.”

“John–“

His fingers tightened on the plush toy, divoting the fabric. “Trapper.”

Louise crossed her arms. “I told you I wasn’t calling you that a very long time ago, and I don’t have any intention to change my mind.”

John smiled suddenly. It was too straight. He held up the rabbit. “His name’s John. Ain’t that right?” He turned the rabbit’s face back to him, stroking its cheek like he would a lover. “Dr. John McIntyre,” he murmured. “Devoted father, loving husband, thoracic surgeon. You wanna take him home with you, Lou?”

Louise tried to swallow down the feeling of dread rising through her chest. It pounded against her throat as she watched him cradle the rabbit to his sternum, tears in the corners of his eyes.

“You’re sick,” she said.

John smiled again, the big and crooked kind she recognized. “That’s what all the broads tell me.”

This wasn’t her responsibility. She didn’t need to help this broken, battered man.

The girls would never forgive her if she went back on her promise. If she let their father drink himself to death, no matter how little he resembled their father at the moment.

She’d certainly never forgiven her own mother.

“I mean it,” she said more softly, hoping to coax him into listening rather than staring at a point a few inches behind the rabbit’s head. “You’re sick, John, and I want–“

The bottles clattered again as he whisked to his feet and knocked his shin against the table. The sudden anger in him was so familiar. It had been turned on her so many times before, though a different man had worn it.

“Would you stop calling me that?” John snapped. He stood in the middle of the room in his rumpled, whiskey-stained robe, teeth bared and eyes aflame, gesturing with the stuffed rabbit and holding his glass in his other hand. “I’m not him! I haven’t been him! You know what it’s like to come back and have everyone try to fit you into a dead man’s clothes? I ain’t dead, Louise, I’m right here, I’m right here and I’m–“

Louise’s back hit the wall. She hadn’t realized she was backing away. “John, please–“

The glass shattered against the wall, spraying the room with shards and liquor like shrapnel. She didn’t scream. “I ain’t John fuckin’ McIntyre, you understand?” John snarled. “He died in Korea! Same as Henry, same as Hawkeye, ‘cause there ain’t nobody who makes it outta that place alive! He gave his life saving those boys and I came back, do you get that?” He was so close now, boxing her up against the wall as he beat a hand to his chest with a sound she thought should have been hollow except for the clinking of his dog tags. “Me! I’m here, and I’m alive, and I can’t fuckin’ bring him back, so you gotta learn to live with that!”

Louise licked her lips and breathed shallowly, trying to keep the scent of the alcohol on his breath out of her nose. “You aren’t John?”

“Trapper,” he insisted, suddenly shaky. “Trapper, I’m Trapper. I-I’m– he died, Lou. There was– the– the freezing…”

She took his dog tags between her fingers and held them up, craning her elbow to reach his face so far above her. His eyes were wide, staring at a point a few inches through the wall above her head. “These don’t say ‘Trapper.’”

His expression crumpled as he took the grip on the tags from her. “Where’d you get these from?” he asked, voice wet.

“Around your neck.”

John traced his fingers down the chain, chin wobbling, until his hand came in contact with his skin. “Hawkeye said we were gonna throw ‘em in the harbor when we got home.” His voice was choked and desperate. He took a rough breath and pulled away, tucking the rabbit beneath his chin. “We were gonna do it together.”

Hawkeye. His buddy who he’d barely ever named in his letters home, but had certainly never stopped talking about. The one he called Hawk and talked about like most men would talk about someone they loved.

John had gone back to the couch to lie face down and silently cry into the rabbit’s fur.

Louise could deal with that problem later.

She went to the kitchen. The package on the counter was ripped open along one of the top flaps, exposing a Sinatra record, a pack of stationery paper, and a bottle of vermouth. There was a patch of glue on the remaining intact flap and a note card lying face down beside the package.

She picked it up. Turned it over.

It is with deepest regret that you are informed that the recipient was killed on Active Service.

The package was addressed to Benjamin Franklin Pierce, MASH 4077.

John took a sobbing breath in the other room.

It wasn’t so hard to put the pieces together. This man, this Hawkeye, had given John something over there that nobody else had been capable of giving him. Maybe Hawkeye had been the one who kept John from doing this to himself. He’d always gone to dark places when things went poorly, even if he pretended he didn’t. Louise had found him staring blankly at the wall in the dark bedroom more than once in the early days of their marriage.

Maybe Hawkeye had given him more than that. John had barely reacted when she spoke to him in the car his first day home except to plead to see his daughters. He’d been so numb.

He wasn’t numb about this.

Was that it? The problem at the heart of their marriage wasn’t that John had never loved her, but rather that he’d never been capable of loving her. He’d let her into his bed when she flirted with him all those years ago for the purposes of… covering something up, maybe that was it. And maybe the nights when he went out and didn’t sneak back into their bed until three in the morning weren’t spent with women like she’d always believed, though he’d certainly smelled of women’s perfume often enough.

John wasn’t broken because of the war. Or if he was, that was only part of it. He was broken because he was this Hawkeye’s grieving widow.

Louise wiped her eyes and set the note card back in its place. Maybe this made it all better. She hadn’t wasted eight years of her life on a man who could have loved her but didn’t, she’d wasted them on a homosexual. It wasn’t her fault. None of it had ever been her fault. Maybe she should have known—she could place a few times where he’d said strange things about his residency advisor or men he remembered from his football days, things she would have expected to hear from a woman’s mouth—but it wasn’t her fault. Everyone knew they were manipulative and… and perverted. He probably enjoyed having her at his beck and call to protect him from prying eyes. He probably enjoyed seeing how she wanted his attention when he could only ever be bothered to dole it out after he’d been out on the town with some man.

He’d wasted eight years of her life. Eight years. He’d used her, and he didn’t seem to have felt an ounce of shame about it. All while, what, he went out and found some other man to– to– How many times had she given him something he said he wanted when he couldn’t have possibly wanted it? Christ, she’d had him inside her, some nights right after he came home because he acted like he was going to devour her anyway if she didn’t spread her legs. It was bad enough to only be separated from some other woman by a single shower, but a man? He’d probably– he’d put it inside–

And here he was, sending sweet things to a man. Things that should have been hers all along. He’d never bought her presents out of the blue. Never. Christmases and birthdays and anniversaries, exactly as expected of him, and nothing else. But he could send a care package halfway around the world to some man. They didn’t even love each other. Homosexuals couldn’t love, they could only take, and they’d taken everything from her–

She ripped the package the rest of the way open, popping the tape and seams until the torn flap came all the way off and she could throw it to the ground. There was more hidden inside. A couple of trashy novels and a couple of not-so-trashy ones. Butterscotches.

The record was so tempting. Breakable.

Louise yanked it out of the package.

“Don’t.”

John was standing in the doorway from the hall, barely propping himself up, the rabbit tucked under one of his arms with his dog tags wrapped twice around its neck to jangle against its fur.

He swiped his hand down his face. “No, you know what? You go on ahead. Maybe it’ll make you feel better.”

He set his back against the door frame, slid down, and settled on the ground with a pained noise, cradling the rabbit in his lap.

He looked so young. And so much older than he had when he left.

It was like the plug had been pulled out of her anger. It was so hard to be angry at this nothing of a man when he seemed like he could shatter at any moment.

Louise set the record on the counter. “John.”

He flinched, running his fingers over the tags to make them clank together. “Stop callin’ me that.”

Louise licked her lips. “Trapper.”

Another sob hitched his body. He pressed his lips to the top of the rabbit’s head and squeezed his eyes closed, tears running down his cheeks. “Yeah, Lou?”

She looked down at the record, the tea, the children’s book tucked at the bottom of the box. All the domestic things that should have been hers. The things that would be hers when the divorce went through and she and the girls could move in with Floyd.

John kept crying, knees raised as close to his chest as they would go, squeezing the rabbit so tightly that it looked close to bursting.

“This… Benjamin—your Hawkeye,” Louise started, crinkling the packaging of the butterscotches. “What was he to you?”

“He was my friend,” John choked out.

She didn’t want her children to grow up with this as their father. She couldn’t stand the idea of them hating her because she let them grow up without a father, even if he couldn’t love.

Louise knelt down beside him, placed a hand over his on the rabbit, and gave him a squeeze. As softly as she could, she asked, “Was that all?”

The tears started in earnest. John grabbed at the front of her dress to pull her closer until he could hold her tight, their hands clasped together over the rabbit trapped between them. He reeked of alcohol and sweat, the golden robe was crusted in places—with snot or maybe something else—and he wept into her shoulder like a scared little boy.

“He made me real, Lou,” he said between sobs, sniffling messily into the fabric of her dress. “We were gonna– we–“ Another hitching, horrible breath that turned into a coughing fit as he clung to her even tighter. “I never even told him I loved him.”

She didn’t know how to respond to that. He couldn’t have loved him. That wasn’t how it worked. They used each other for– for the things men normally used women for. Their minds didn’t work properly, corrupted with…

She hadn’t believed in sin since she was about sixteen.

A man who couldn’t love wouldn’t be weeping over the partner he’d only used to get off.

“You really loved him?” she asked.

John froze, breath coming shallowly. “He was my best friend. We were– we were at war together. ‘Course I did.”

As gently as possible, Louise rubbed his back and waited for him to relax into something more resembling a coiled snake than a block of marble. “If I promise you this stays between us, would you tell me the truth?”

The sobbing started again. It was as good an answer as any.

Eight years down the drain of giving him everything he wanted, and he had never wanted any of it. Would he have cried like this for her? Would he have lost his mind down a bottle to drown out the pain? She doubted it. They’d barely spent time in the same room when they didn’t have to. And when he was finally halfway across the world, she certainly hadn’t tried to make the gap any smaller. She’d never sent him care packages. Only the occasional letter and things the girls wanted to give to him.

He could love. Just not her.

For the girls’ sake, she needed to make him capable of loving them without hurting them.

“He was my first,” John murmured.

“What?”

“I’d never… with a man. He was my first.”

He’d never stop being like this if he didn’t have someone to talk about it with. He’d never pull himself out of the pit all on his own. He’d refused to talk to Dr. Michaels.

She was all he had left.

God damnit.

“Tell me about him.”

“You don’t wanna hear about that, Lou.”

He’d finally loosened his grip enough that she could slip out of his arms to settle across form him, leaning against the other side of the door frame. He didn’t look at her, only stared down at the rabbit in his hands and slowly ran one of the tags between his thumb and forefinger, thumbnail occasionally catching on the raised letters.

He was acting like a child, so maybe she needed to treat him like a child. Like this was one of Becky or Kathy’s tantrums. If she gave him the opportunity to explain himself, maybe he could think it through and calm down a little. Wasn’t that what they were doing in those new kinds of psychotherapy? It was certainly better than letting the girls lose their father to drink or commitment.

“He was important to you.”

John’s breath hitched. “He was the only thing that mattered.”

He didn’t look like he wanted to talk anymore.

She had to keep him talking. “John.”

“Stop it.”

“Okay,” Louise murmured. “Okay. Trapper? Let me make something clear. We made a promise to each other. Just because– just because you’re a homosexual” — he flinched again, curling tighter into himself — “that doesn’t mean I’m going to keep you from your daughters. You know the only thing that would force my hand.”

John licked his lips. “Yeah. I know.”

“So you’re going to stop.”

He clenched the tag in his hand, pulling his legs even tighter to himself. “It hurts.”

“You don’t think you’re hurting them? You don’t think you would have hurt them if you’d hit me with that glass?”

“I didn’t mean it!”

“Then stop the fucking drinking! You want to turn out like my father? Like your father?”

John snapped up, stalked over to the package, and yanked out the bottle of vermouth. “Don’t you fuckin’ dare, Louise.”

Drastic measures. She had to force his hand. “You open that, you are never seeing your daughters again, do you understand me?”

His hands slipped. The bottle clanked back into the package, crunching the butterscotches beneath it.

The only sound was his ragged breathing as he tightened his hands on the torn cardboard.

“I ain’t my father.”

“I know you aren’t,” Louise said. “So you’re going to stop.”

John tightened his lips, stared down at the package, and took a deep breath. “I’m gonna throw up.”

She took him upstairs to the bathroom, rubbed his back while he heaved nothing but liquor into the toilet, and hated herself for doing it. She shouldn’t have given him the time of day. The minute she saw him killing himself in that bottle, she should have turned around and left.

But then where would Becky and Kathy be? They would hate her. They’d spent the last year asking after their father, so much more invested in his well-being than she’d ever been. Maybe they’d noticed when he spent nights away from their bedroom and sometimes didn’t even talk to her, but it hadn’t stopped them from loving him with their entire hearts. He deserved it. As terrible a husband as he was, he’d always been a good father to them. He read them bedtime stories, loved helping Becky with her homework, and had been so thrilled when she offered to teach him how to tie braids and properly straighten the frizz they got in the summers. The only things he’d ever asked her about from that place were his daughters. Never her. Not unless he wanted something like another child that she’d been too cowardly to say no to.

If he’d brought that boy home, would it have changed anything?

John McIntyre had always wanted nothing more than to be a good father. It couldn’t possibly be so different just because he insisted he was a different man. However much they’d broken him down, they couldn’t take away the love for his daughters he’d always carried so close to his heart, and they couldn’t have taken away his hatred for how he’d grown up. How both of them had grown up. Those were the things at the very core of him. Even… Trapper, when she met him and let him into her bed, had wanted to be a good father.

John was still in there, somewhere, beneath the soiled golden robe and the liquor-scent and the borrowed anger. Louise would be damned if she let him vanish from his daughters’ lives.

But she was no psychotherapist.

Maybe if she went back to college.

In any case, she wasn’t going to be the one who spent all that time on him when he could never give it back to her.

“I want you to call your friend who asked me to check on you,” she said when John leaned back against the bathtub and wiped his mouth with a wad of toilet paper.

John chucked the wad in the toilet. “What friend.”

“Dr. Michaels.”

John scoffed. “You ain’t concerned about what I’m gonna do with an innocent man?”

“I never made a fuss about what you did with innocent women, did I?”

“What are you so fuckin’ concerned about me for?”

“You know why.”

“Yeah, well, I ain’t the guy who promised to be good for your kids, am I?”

“I don’t care what you promised,” Louise snapped. “I care what the man with your mouth promised, and that’s a father! Just because the Army took you from them doesn’t give you the right to abandon them!”

John practically growled at her. “What are you tryin’ to do, huh? Tryin’ to make up for the fact that your daddy was never there for you? Tryin’ to make that my responsibility?”

“Oh, what, like you don’t hate yourself because you’re just like yours?”

He slammed the toilet lid closed. Louise flinched. “You take that back.”

“Only if you stop throwing yourself this– pity party!”

“I’m not my father!”

“Then stop acting like it!”

Maybe she shouldn’t have been so concerned. Maybe she should turned and left the moment she saw what he was doing to himself. Maybe, if she tried hard enough, she could crush down the fear of letting her children grow up ashamed and afraid of telling their friends about their parents.

John shook when he wiped his eyes. “I was gonna introduce him to them.”

“I know.”

He picked up the rabbit, set it in his lap, and leaned over to flush the toilet.

He looked so tired.

“If I… if I stop. I can see my girls?”

Louise nodded, lips pinched together. “And if you don’t, I’ll be making adjustments to the custody arrangement.”

“Don’t,” he said immediately. “Please.”

“Then you’ll stop drinking.”

John closed his eyes so tightly it must have hurt. “Okay. Okay, Louise. I’ll try.”

Chapter Text

Trapper went into the hospital just long enough to make up a medical emergency for Becky that would get him excused from duty for a couple of weeks, steal a bottle of phenobarbital tablets and a dozen ampoules of paraldehyde so he maybe wouldn’t have a seizure and choke to death on his own tongue during the DTs, and promptly get stopped by Vernon on his way out.

The look of concern on Vern’s face was so genuine. It made Trapper feel like a rat bastard with the carefully wrapped glass ampoules rattling around in his briefcase. “You’re feeling better?” Vern asked.

It was hard not to feel guilty; Trapper had looked up to Vern since the first couple weeks of his thoracic fellowship. Sure, he knew now that it was because he had a truly ridiculous crush on the man, but it hadn’t only been that. Vern was clever, a damn good surgeon, and had a good head on his shoulders. He’d been kind to Trap even in those days, when he hadn’t yet become who he was.

If anyone wasn’t going to spill the beans on what Trapper was up to, it would be Vernon.

They were too out in the open for that particular conversation. Maybe Vernon would understand if they were in private and Trapper could admit how bad the drinking had gotten without someone around who would report him for operating under the influence, but not here. Vern had been the one who asked Louise to check up on him, after all, and it had probably saved his life, if he made it to the other side of the detox. He had to know something was wrong, and he wasn’t pressing for the sake of being polite.

God, Trapper needed a drink. It was in his bones. His marrow probably had an ABV. He could go back to the supply closet where he’d gotten the phenobarb and take a bottle of rubbing alcohol to replace what Louise had dumped out. They’d made the gin out of whatever they could get their hands on, after all, and about 90% of the time it wasn’t something that was labeled safe for consumption.

Dear Hawkeye, I need your help, here. I want to stop thinking about you so bad I’m honestly considering drinking myself blind, if not to death. The detox might kill me anyway, and if I let the hospital help me out, they’d fire me the second I was better. Why not do it under my own terms, you know?

Dear Hawkeye, you remember when Father Mulcahy told us all about that guy who stole fire from the gods? How he got chained up to a rock and had an eagle eat his goddamn liver every single day? I kinda feel like that, but I guess the bird is different. Was different. Whatever. My brain’s about to melt out my ears and I’m not about to let you fuck off to the afterlife by agreeing you’re dead yet, so I think I oughta have permission to get my tenses wrong.

“Trapper?”

“Shit, sorry, Vern. I, uh…” He brushed the loose curls out of his face, felt the flutter of his trembling fingers against his forehead, and stuffed them in his pockets. He needed a haircut. He hadn’t had one since the last time Hawkeye did it for him three or four months ago. He’d had to check the calendar in the doctors’ lounge to find out what day it was. Last he’d known, it was the end of October. It had been more than a month since then. Almost December. He needed to figure out Christmas presents for the girls and Hawkeye–

“Guess I’m still getting’ used to real food and hot showers,” he settled on. “Rushed back into things too fast, you know? Got a couple weeks off from Art ‘til I’m not so frazzled.”

The way Vernon looked at him was like he could see straight through him. Like he could see the empty place in his heart, or maybe the whiskey he’d used to replace his blood. How was he going to keep living when he didn’t have anything left in his veins?

“Give me a call on Sunday.” Vernon gave Trapper an awkward pat on the shoulder, reaching up to do it. “I don’t want to have to send your wife over there again.”

“Ex-wife.”

The smallest of smiles tugged at Vernon’s lips. “Better change your emergency contact, then.”

The trolleybus home was so loud. Traffic and talking and trolley-sounds, nothing like a bus in Korea. Everything was muted, there. It had to be when there were wounded—when transporting wounded was the only way you ever got on a vehicle that wasn’t a Jeep. You didn’t disturb them as a matter of course, unless you were Frank Burns or trying to get Frank Burns to shut up.

Trapper had never gotten motion sick before, but he sure seemed to be getting close. He needed to sit down, but there weren’t exactly open seats. Maybe he’d just lie down on the floor of the trolley if he kept feeling like the nothing in his stomach was going to wrench its way out of him. If he fell asleep, maybe he’d wake up in the back of an ambulance in Korea, the snarl of a Jeep engine and the rumble of mortars ringing in his ears. Maybe he’d just hit his head and all this had been a bad dream. He wouldn’t lose Hawkeye, not in the real world. That wasn’t fair.

Nothing had ever been fair. The only things that mattered had come to him accidentally—the football scholarship that let him go to pre-med, his girls, Hawkeye. Each of those things had come with a hell of a caveat—the name sutured into his heart, Louise, and the horrible, twisting sensation that came with the thing that was keeping him going getting torn from his veins.

Trapper John McIntyre, devoted father, dedicated partner, thoracic surgeon, was Hawkeye’s. He’d been Hawkeye’s since the minute Hawk called him by his name, even if he didn’t know it.

He couldn’t go back, not even if he tried. John McIntyre was dead. He had to keep his heart pumping on his own.

He could barely get the key in the lock. How the fuck did it get this bad? He was a surgeon. He couldn’t operate like this. He shouldn’t have been operating at all for the last few weeks. He’d crammed himself with more and more alcohol to stop the shaking, and now it was coming back to bite him in the ass.

“Dr. McIntyre?”

Trapper dropped the key. “Fuck!”

The Ryan girl—the babysitter Louise had liked—was standing a few feet behind him at the bottom of the steps. She smiled at him, though she was looking at his feet rather than his face with pink cheeks, shy in that way he remembered every high school girl being while she wrang the hem of her sweater in her palms. “Oh, I’m sorry. I just– I thought that if– if you ever wanted to have some help, I could, um… I like babysitting. I’m real good with kids.”

The sick feeling came rushing back. He wanted anything other than to be having this conversation. He wasn’t– Jesus, he slept around, but how the fuck had he given a seventeen-year-old girl this kind of idea when he hadn’t even seen her in fourteen months? “Look, Katie–“

“Sadie.”

“… Sadie. I can take care’a my kids just fine, alright?”

“But–“

“No buts,” he snapped. “You go on home. And tell your momma I ain’t pickin’ up where I left off.”

It took far too long to get the key back in his fingers. At least there wasn’t any snow yet, only cold pavement, but it looked like the first frost would be coming soon from the dark clouds hovering over the downtown skyline. But he hadn’t bothered to check the weather, so how could he be certain? That would mean turning on the radio or buying a newspaper, and Korea might very well be lurking between the pages or caught tangled in the airwaves like a Yangtze sturgeon in Henry Blake’s net.

Trapper dropped the house key on the counter beside the package hunched there, reflexively went to the high-up kitchen cabinet he and Louise had always used for the liquor, and ran his twitching fingers over the bare, unfinished wood. He and Louise and dumped it all out the night before. Or rather, he had, under her supervision. Even the vermouth that was supposed to have made it into Hawkeye’s hand. That bottle sat empty beside the package, where Trapper had insisted Louise leave it. He couldn’t remember now if he’d been furious or miserable when he snapped at her for trying to throw it away with the rest of them. He could remember so little of the last month. Only flashes—surgery under the influence, a couple of shattered bottles, and the nightmares.

He pulled a Dartmouth stein down from the glassware cabinet—the largest drinking vessel in the house—and filled it with water. He popped the first of the phenobarbital tablets, went to the living room to change back into the robe that had stopped lingering with the scents of gin and dust and cigar smoke, and set his alarm clock for eight hours later so he wouldn’t sleep through the right time to take the next dose. He was going to be okay. It was all going to be just fine. The phenobarbital would reduce the chance of seizure, there wasn’t anything he could possibly get drunk off in the house, and as long as the delirium tremens he was certain was coming wasn’t completely awful, he wasn’t about to try to leave the house. He’d save the paraldehyde for deeper into the withdrawal, for when the DTs came on. It would knock him out harder than the phenobarb.

Dear Hawkeye, you remember that time Frank got Henry in trouble with some bigwigs and put the whole camp under martial law? Well, put us under martial law, at least. Locked us up in the Swamp without our clothes for some fuckin’ reason, gave me a whole hell of a lot of ideas I put to use pretty soon after that. Anyway, you never saw the note I gave Klinger to “give the guard a fucking gallon of phenobarbital,” did you? You were probably too busy looking at the way some nurse had marked up my back the night before. Ginger, probably. She always did wear her nails just as long as she could get away with.

Everything was going to be just fine. He’d wake up every eight hours to take a fresh dose of whatever, eat and drink something, take a piss, and the dose would be kicking in by the time he was done. He’d like to think that maybe he wouldn’t even get the DTs, but they had to be coming. He’d been at least a little tipsy damn near every second he was awake for the last fourteen months. Drunk enough he couldn’t remember much of anything at all from the last few weeks. If anyone was a prime candidate for the DTs, it was him.

Dear Hawkeye, did you know that about 25% of people who experience delirium tremens die if they don’t get treatment? Better odds if you’ve got some kind of drug in you that keeps you from having a seizure, which is why I told you about the phenobarb. Much better odds if you’ve got a care team in a hospital, but they’d fucking fire me if they knew how much I’d been drinking on the job, and then what would I do? Fuck, Hawk. Only things I’ve got left of you are my name and my profession and those couple photographs, and I don’t wanna be down another point.

God, he needed a drink. It would kill the aching behind his ribs and the wetness in his eyes if he drank enough to forget again that Hawkeye Pierce was dead. He was never going to feel Hawkeye’s skin hot against his ever again—Hawkeye’s breath on his neck, on the insides of his thighs, against his lips. He was going to feel like this forever, aching and empty and waiting for a man to come home who didn’t even make it to plunging down into the freezing, roiling waters of the Sea of Japan.

Trapper grabbed the rabbit from the coffee table as he lay down on the couch. It had been new barely more than a month ago, and now it was crusted with snot and tears, John McIntyre’s dog tags wrapped to jangle around its neck. He’d give it a wash if he didn’t go to join Hawkeye.

He wasn’t scared of dying, not really. The girls would miss him, but they’d been missing him for more than a year just fine. Everything would stop hurting if this killed him. They’d find him wrapped in the last things he had of Hawkeye Pierce. Maybe Daniel would hear about it and know. Hawk had always told his father everything. Maybe Trapper would get to be buried in the plot beside the man he loved. They wouldn’t see each other again, because the afterlife was just what they told you about in church to keep you from fucking other men, but the worms would eat pieces of both of them and maybe that was all Trapper could have ever hoped for.

Just a little while longer and the phenobarb would take him under. Trapper rolled far enough to a seat to drink as much of the water in the stein as he could, holding the rabbit tucked under his arm. He felt heavy. He didn’t know how to tell if it was the sedative or the weight of being the last thing keeping Hawkeye alive.

Probably both.

He lay down on his side, crossed his fingers that he wouldn’t throw up and choke to death in his sleep, and let his eyelids slip closed.

A spotlight, bright and blinding.

Hawkeye’s hand on his shoulder, the other on his waist, tuxedo fabrics brushing against each other.

Hawkeye pulling him closer.

The slide of their feet over the floor as Hawkeye took his hand and tugged him closer to dance.

Hawkeye’s breath, hot and blinding against Trapper’s neck.

The stick of the soles of his boots to the blood-bearing floor of the operating room. The rough drag of stubble under his palms as he brought his hands to cradle Hawkeye’s cheeks, smearing the redness dripping from the bullet hole in his temple across his face.

The taste of iron on Hawkeye’s teeth and lips.

The rattle of an alarm clock.

On his feet. Bathroom, drink some water, eat an apple, take the phenobarbital

Set the alarm for another eight hours.

Sleep.

In Trapper’s honest opinion, the imagery in his dreams was a little heavy-handed. Blood and mortars and bits and pieces of everyone he loved strewn across his operating table so he could stitch them back together as best he could. Victor Frankenstein in Korea, his monster in the shape of Hawkeye Pierce with a y-incision running from his sternum to his groin. He’d reverse their roles, if he was the one writing it. Hawkeye’s hands had shaped him far more than the reverse.

The rattle of an alarm clock.

Christ, he was freezing.

Bathroom. Throw up. Drink some water, eat a few crackers, mix the paraldehyde with apple juice and down it as quickly as possible while ignoring the feeling that something very, very bad was going to happen if he didn’t get alcohol on his tongue.

Set the alarm for another eight hours.

Sleep.

How long was he going to keep having nightmares? This time he was standing in front of that kid, so angry at the death and the fear and the injustice that he couldn’t think of anything other than the white-hot, blinding rage rattling against his rib cage. He was a hell of a surgeon. The boy on his table—in his care—would have lived, if not for this man. If he’d been a few minutes earlier the second time around, he would have lived.

Hawkeye wasn’t there to stop him. He knelt over the man’s thighs and felt the column of his throat hot beneath the skin of his fingers. He didn’t hesitate.

The rattle of an alarm clock.

Hawkeye’s ghost was sprawled on his back over the armchair, head dangling upside down over the arm to make eye contact with him.

“How’s it going?” Hawkeye asked. The carpet beneath where his head was hanging was soaked with the blood dripping from a hole in his temple. “Save any lives lately? I haven’t.”

Trapper’s entire body hitched. He scrambled up and barely made it to the bathroom in time to throw up again.

Hawkeye was leaning against the sink, wearing nothing but his blood-damp red robe and army-issue boxers, legs crossed at the ankles. “I can hold back your hair, if you want.”

“Go away.”

“Come on, Trap, is that any way to speak to your wife?”

It felt like his entire body was on fire, now that he’d had a minute or so to come fully out of sleep. He was so cold. His hands were shaking badly enough it was a struggle to get them on the flush handle.

Hawkeye tilted his head to the side and the blood dripped faster until the shoulder of his robe was slick. “You want to know something? It didn’t hurt. I mean, I’m sure there are ways to die that do hurt, but a sniper bullet? Not that bad in the grand scheme of things. Just– just thwip, on the ground. You should try it some time. You’ve got kitchen knives.”

A sudden temptation curdled in his gut. If Hawkeye wanted him to–

“Christ, Hawk, I’m not gonna kill myself.”

Hawkeye tilted his head further, an angle that reminded Trapper of a confused puppy. “What if I said I wanted you to?”

Trapper barked a laugh, shifted to lean against the bathtub, and pulled his knees to his chest, feeling his muscles fluttering. He’d left the rabbit downstairs. He ached for it. “Now why would you say a thing like that?”

Hawkeye shrugged. “Because I miss you.”

The grief threatened to choke him. It was an animal living inside his throat, pressing against the sensitive flesh of his esophagus and getting ready to tear its way out with whatever it had available, claws or teeth or time. “I miss you too, Hawk.”

“You should join me. It’s really not so bad.”

“I got my girls,” Trapper argued. “I’ve been tryin’ to get home to them for months, and you want me to ignore them just like that?”

“You’d get to see them again.” Hawkeye sat cross-legged in the middle of the floor, just barely not touching Trapper’s outstretched legs. Either one of them could close the distance so easily. But it was Trapper’s job to do it. “I’m here. You could come back. Any time you wanted.”

It was so, so tempting to close the distance. He’d eat Hawkeye alive if only he put his hands on him.

He needed to take another dose of the paraldehyde.

Downstairs. Drink some water. If he ate something, he wouldn’t be able to keep it down, and he was all too aware of the fact that something was lurking in the pantry just waiting to attack him. If he didn’t open it, he wouldn’t wake it up. Mix the paraldehyde with apple juice, down it as quickly as possible while Hawkeye’s ghost burrowed into him with eyes that had all but lost their luster.

Set the alarm for another eight hours. Pick up the rabbit and cradle it close.

Sleep.

The cycle was never going to end. Nightmares. Wake up. Hawkeye staring at him. A rust-stained polar bear sleeping on the floor in the kitchen. Trapper took the paraldehyde without mixing it into anything and nearly choked on the burn in his throat. Back to sleep. Again and again and again.

Dying had done something to Hawkeye’s mind. The Hawkeye that Trapper knew wouldn’t have been pushing for Trapper to join him. Hawk had always seen life as something sacred, though he didn’t use those words for it. If he was still himself, he wouldn’t have been poking and prodding and encouraging and begging like he was. The bullet that killed him destroyed some part of his brain that made him him. Or maybe that was just how it went when you died: you stopped caring so much about the living.

When Trapper woke, the house was quiet. Either the nausea had gone down or his body had finally realized it didn’t have anything left to give.

He sat on floor of the tub while he took a shower, head and back against the cool tile wall, and thought about the time he’d sedated Hawkeye so he could hold him close to wash away the mud and dirt and fear-sweat until he was something resembling himself again.

The Hawkeye who’d been there the last few days wasn’t real.

Trapper needed to feel someone real.

He dragged himself out of the shower, put on a pair of boxers, and started heating a pan for grilled cheese while the operator put him through.

“Vernon Michaels speaking.”

“Vern, hey,” Trapper said, voice rough. “It’s, uh– it’s McIntyre.”

“Just in time for your welfare check. You’re feeling alright, Trapper?”

“I’ve been better.”

Butter bread. Slice cheese. Rote, easy actions, holding a kitchen knife in his hand like the cold steel of a scalpel.

He was aching for a drink.

“I’ll bet,” Vernon said, something like sympathy in the low tone of his voice. “It was bad?”

Trapper snorted and set the raw sandwich in the pan. “I was fuckin’ tipsy every time I was awake for fourteen months.”

“That’ll do it. If you want–“

Trapper couldn’t quite name the emotion that caught in his chest, but that didn’t stop him from letting it speak for him. “I’m not goin’ to a fucking AA meeting. I’m better than that, alright?”

“I won’t make you.” Trapper hated the way Vernon was talking to him, like he was fragile. He wasn’t fragile. He was doing just fine. “I was going to say I could bring you takeout. What’s your address?”

The words wouldn’t come, this time. The entire house was a mess, from the living room where Trapper hadn’t yet bothered to clean up the broken glass he’d shattered to the conspicuously neat master bedroom. The package meant for Hawkeye was still on the counter, empty bottle of vermouth beside it. He didn’t have anywhere near enough energy to begin tidying things away. He couldn’t touch the package. If he got rid of it, he’d be losing more than he’d already given up.

It hurt less than it had a few weeks ago. Maybe all the liquor had started killing the part of him that felt pain. If he went out and got more, couldn’t he kill the rest of it?

“Look, Vern. It’s kind of a mess over here, so–“

“I’ll help you clean up.”

“Why the hell would you do that?”

Vernon hesitated. Trapper choked back the bolt of nausea that pierced through him. Vernon was the only one who was being kind to him—at least the only one who wasn’t being kind out of obligation or promise. If Trapper chased him away…

“Call it being the change I want to see in the world,” Vernon said. “What can I bring you?”

Trapper flipped the grilled cheese, squinted at the charred bread, and relented. “Anything but Korean.”

Eating the sandwich kicked Trapper’s stomach into high enough gear that by the time he’d found clean clothes, brushed his teeth and hair, unlocked the front door so Vern could get in, and thought about raiding the girls’ room to see if there was any makeup to mute the circles under his eyes, he was impatient for Vernon to get there. How long had it been since he’d looked forward to something, even if it was just takeout with a friend? He’d looked forward to coming home, sure, but that was a beast all its own. There were so many things it had hurt to leave. Coming home wasn’t all that great when Hawkeye hadn’t been coming with him.

In another world, the war had ended and they’d gotten on the plane together. Seoul to Tokyo, Tokyo to Honolulu, Honolulu to San Francisco, San Francisco to Boston. Trapper would have taken Hawkeye to board the train he’d earned his name on and said goodbye only for long enough for Hawk to pack his clothes and books and tchotchkes and redeem his return ticket. It would have been long enough for Trapper to talk in person with Louise, agree that she was right that their marriage was over, and get everything ready to welcome Hawk home. They would have kissed just inside the front door. Made love in the bed that used to belong to someone else. They could have taken it slow; they had the rest of their lives to love each other.

It was a fantasy, Trapper knew. He could imagine buying matching wedding bands and kissing Hawk under the moonlight on the Common, but it could never have happened even if Hawk had come to be with him. They would have spent the rest of their lives hiding the most important piece of themselves behind the idea that they were nothing more than war buddies who needed each other’s support, the same way they’d had to hide what they were at the 4077th. Radar might have covered for them, but that wouldn’t have held forever. Frank might never have noticed, but Hot Lips would have. It couldn’t have gone on forever.

Hiding for the rest of their lives still would have been better than this. Trapper couldn’t even tell anyone what he was grieving for. It was a goddamn miracle that Louise didn’t give a shit about what he did as long as he fulfilled his end of the promise they’d made for their children. She might have been willing to give him a pass on the source of his pain, but she certainly didn’t want to let him talk about it, the same way she didn’t want jack shit to do with him outside of negotiating the terms of the divorce and to drop off the girls.

It was just him, now. It was going to be just him for the rest of his life. There was something so different about the way Hawkeye had left his mark on him compared to anyone else. He’d go back to what it was like before: pulling anything that moved and didn’t argue too strongly against it into his bed and giving them exactly what they were craving. It would feel good enough. It had felt perfectly good with that nurse he fucked the first few days he was back, and it would feel good enough again.

A paper bag thwacked to the counter. Trapper looked up from where he’d collapsed into one of the kitchen chairs to fall half asleep. Vernon produced a clamshell container and started rifling through drawers. “Is Chinese dissimilar enough from Korean for you?”

Trapper shrugged, rubbing the sleep from his eyes. “They woulda shot us on sight if they caught us with chow mein. Or borscht.”

Vernon laughed, finally found the forks, and caught his gaze on the package sitting on the counter. “I wouldn’t call borscht a loss.”

“Hey, I’d’a defected for good borscht. Long as it wasn’t the shit they were serving us in the mess tent.”

“I’ll find somewhere that serves it takeout and test that theory. Chow mein?”

Trapper took the container and fork Vern set in front of him. How long had it been since he’d eaten, other than the grilled cheese? He didn’t know. He didn’t even know what day it was. He could figure it out, if he counted the doses of phenobarb and paraldehyde he’d taken, but there was an easier solution. “So, uh… how long’s it been since you saw me last?”

“Tuesday morning,” Vernon said around a bite of some kind of chicken. “It’s Saturday afternoon.”

Trapper poked at the chow mein in his container. He couldn’t tell if his mouth was watering from hunger, nausea, or both. “Guess I ruined your weekend, huh?”

“Hardly. All I would have been doing was sitting at home. I’d rather spend time with a friend.” Vernon poked at his food for a few moments, brows scrunched. “I should have stepped in sooner,” he said. “I should have– pushed.”

Another jab of some emotion Trapper didn’t want to identify. No matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t see more than fits and flashes of the weeks since he came home, but he remembered Vernon asking how he was doing. He’d brushed him off every single time. If he’d just let Vern help him, maybe it wouldn’t have ended up this bad.

“I’m still alive, right?”

“You might not have been.”

“Yeah, well.”

Vernon froze, fork halfway to his mouth. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Huh?”

“Trapper, look.” Vernon shuffled forward on his chair, hesitated a moment, and took Trapper’s hand. His palms were warm and soft, moisturized like a surgeon’s usually were to keep the skin from cracking with constant scrubbing. Trapper had kept a small tub of lotion in his footlocker and done his best to keep Hawkeye from bleeding by talking him into a massage. Hawk always did need pestering to remember to take care of himself.

How long was it going to feel like there was a rubber band tying him to Korea?

He snapped back.

“I can’t say I went through everything the same as you did,” Vern said. He squeezed Trapper’s hand tighter. “Hell, I think that what’s going on right now is plenty different from what it was like coming home for me. But I can promise that whatever it is you need to tell someone to start getting your head on straight, it can stay between us.”

Despite how open Hawkeye had been about his proclivities, he’d drilled it into Trapper time and time again that no matter how much you trusted someone, you never gave them proof unless it would incriminate them, too. You didn’t tell them unless you knew for certain—if you could slip in enough references to getting knocked up or the Wizard of Oz until they responded in kind and you could open your heart.

Trapper trusted Vern. Not only because Vern had taught him damn near everything he knew about thoracic surgery pre-Korea, but because he’d been kind so often that Trapper had lost track of the frequency. How many times had he covered when Trapper had been distracted in a supply closet? He’d listened to Trapper’s rants about Louise back in the day and had done his best to offer compassion even if he’d openly admitted that he didn’t see what the problem was. But then again, Vern had never gotten married himself, so he couldn’t know how much of a pain in the ass it was to have a wife to please. He’d put up with Trapper following him around like a lost puppy the entire time they were working together and never said a bad word about him with him in earshot.

It felt strange to look back and know how badly he’d wanted to fall in bed with Vern before Korea, even if he never would have realized without Hawkeye. He wasn’t Dr. John McIntyre, devoted father, loving husband, work-in-progress thoracic surgeon anymore, but he still carried that man’s memories and desires. And Christ, John had wanted Vern to turn all that easy, practiced confidence on him. Vernon was just like Hawkeye in so many ways.

Vernon had said he’d made a best friend in the Army, too.

Trapper grabbed his wallet from the counter, sat back down, and produced the photo of him and Hawkeye at a poker night, pressed entirely together so they could read from the same book. “That’s Hawkeye,” he said, fingers still trembling as he handed it over. He had to say the goddamn words if he wanted Vernon to help him. If he just gave enough clues, Vern could pick up the other end of the conversation. “He was my best friend.”

Vern’s gaze softened as he took the picture. “You two had a falling out?”

How was he supposed to answer that? He’d left without a note in a cloud of dust over the Korean hills, and Hawkeye had probably hated him for it. He hadn’t said the words, not then, and he hadn’t really had the words he’d wanted when he sat down in the post office to try to send Hawk a bottle of vermouth and the children’s book that had made Trapper cry in front of his daughters.

Even if the package had made it there, would it have made up for anything?

Hawkeye wasn’t supposed to die. The Boy had caught scarlet fever, but he’d made it out the other side alive. And sure, he and the Rabbit had been separated, but the Rabbit had come back. He’d gotten to say goodbye properly, if nothing else. That luxury had been stolen from Trapper by the man who pulled the trigger that put Henry Blake’s plane in the freezing, roiling–

“He’s not comin’ home,” Trapper answered. “Not in the way I was hopin’ he would.”

Vernon’s voice was so gentle. “You can still be friends.”

When Hawkeye was there, it had been so much easier to say things in the way they were said best. If Hawkeye was a scalpel, and Trapper had done everything he could to be the retractor that went with him, he was a hammer all on his own. “You want me to go ask his gravestone if we’re still on speaking terms?”

Vernon’s gaze flicked back to the package. “I’m sorry, John.”

He sounded like he meant it. But one of the few things Trapper could remember from the last few weeks was Louise calling him that name. It stood like a lightning rod in his mind. John wouldn’t have gotten so angry at the death and the fear and the injustice that he could have killed a man in cold blood.

“Trapper,” he snapped.

Vernon nodded, absently poking at his chicken. “That’s what they called you over there?”

“S’what they called me in college,” Trapper deflected.

“But he called you that.”

Trapper licked his lips and shoved against the ache in his mind. “Yeah. Told him I wouldn’t let him be the only one with a stupid nickname and it stuck.”

Vernon stabbed harder. “I called him Tug.”

Trapper’s breath trembled. Hawkeye was supposed to introduce him to this side of things—the carefully placed words, the concealed invitations. It felt wrong to be feeling it out all on his own.

“He had this fantasy,” Vernon went on, staring through the table. “When he’d done his time in the Army, he was going to captain a tugboat. I couldn’t tell you where he got the idea from, but he never gave it up. Talked about it a couple times a week, any time he was the one who had to say something so we weren’t thinking about what was outside the foxhole.” Vernon scrubbed his hand down his cheek, wiped his eyes, and still had to take another moment to collect himself. “I called him Andrew when we were alone. Nobody else ever called him that, not after… a lot of men cycled through that unit. Most of them didn’t know he had another name, after a while. Just us.”

Trapper couldn’t stop his chin from wobbling. He didn’t want to throw up again, but he felt like he was going to. “He only called me John before he knew what else to call me.”

Maybe things could have been different if Hawkeye had come home. He could have started to peel away the layers that belonged to Trapper until John was a person again instead of a memory. Hawkeye had stopped him when he wanted to put a hand on an innocent kid’s throat just because he was angry. Without the war thundering on around them, maybe Hawkeye could have coaxed John back to life.

Vernon got a piece of chicken on his fork, held it up, and said, “To the good ones we left behind.”

Trapper dropped half a forkful of noodles onto the table when he toasted.

He’d clean it up at some point.

Thirty minutes later, Trapper was laying on the couch with his head in Vern’s lap while What’s My Line? rattled on in the background. “Your Tug,” Trapper asked, tracing Vernon’s extensor tendons with his thumb, “what happened to him?”

The motion of Vern’s breath was a slow pulse against the back of his scalp. “Shelling.” Another deep breath as he squeezed Trapper’s hand in return. “There wasn’t anything to do except hold him.”

Would it have been better or worse if he was there for Hawkeye? He didn’t know. All he knew was that “I wish I coulda been there. So he wasn’t alone.”

The feeling of Vern’s slow sigh was completely different. It was something to focus on other than needing to cry. “I’m going to give you the one piece of advice I wish I’d gotten when I was in your place. Is that alright with you?”

“I think you’re gonna tell me even if I say it’s not.”

Gentle fingers in his hair, catching on the curls. “Don’t end up like me, Trapper. Don’t let him keep you from loving again.”

Maybe Trapper didn’t quite know how to handle this, the way it was with a man, but he knew an invitation when he heard one.

He turned onto his back, grabbed Vernon by the collar, and pulled them together.

“No.”

He hesitated, lips only inches from Vernon’s. “You don’t gotta take me,” he said, voice trembling. “I’ll– I like it just as good–“

Vernon was so gentle when he pried Trapper’s fingers away from his shirt. “Maybe some other day,” he said. “When I’m not your rebound.”

“You’re not my fuckin’ rebound, you’re–“

“John.”

“Would you stop callin’ me that?”

Vern only raised his eyebrows.

Trapper let his head drop.

He was never going to be able to let go of Hawkeye Pierce, and he knew it. If anyone deserved to live forever, it was Hawkeye. That made it Trapper’s duty to keep him alive, in the little ways he could. He’d practice the things he learned from Hawk and keep the name Hawk had re-christened him with. If he got rid of anything, it would be like killing Hawkeye with his own two hands.

Once someone made you Real, you couldn’t become unreal again.

Autumn would pass to winter, and in the spring, when the days became warm and sunny, maybe Trapper would go to Maine and look at the place where the Boy who had made him Real was buried.

Or maybe he never would.

If he never saw the gravestone, maybe he could pretend Hawkeye Pierce was still alive somewhere, on the other side of the freezing, roiling waters of the Sea of Japan.

Chapter Text

ACT TWO: THERE AND BACK AGAIN

August 8, 1953

As much as he hated lying to his friends, the truth of the matter was that Hawkeye Pierce could not, would not, and probably should not ever go back to Crabapple Cove. It just wasn’t tenable. What would someone like Hawkeye Pierce, M.D., be able to do in a tiny town like that? Nothing. He’d waste away treating bunions and stomachaches and twisted ankles and migraines and children.

There was a kid on the plane from Chicago to Boston. Two rows in front of him, maybe three or four years old. Crying, always the crying.

Hawkeye sat in the bathroom, trembling, and counted to ten over and over again until he could convince himself that he didn’t need to ask the stewardess for a drink. They hadn’t let him have a drop at Bedlam in Korea, which meant they’d spent the first few days of his treatment working him through the mother of all detoxes. It was for his health, they’d said. Always for his health. They’d put him away for his health and hadn’t let him touch a drop of alcohol for his health and then sent him right back to the 4077th for his health. For his health, so they could pretend like they ever thought about anything other than the best way to put children back in the meat grinder.

He sat in his seat, drummed his fingers on his thighs, and turned to the man in the window seat next to him so he could stop thinking about how Sidney had been right to put him back in the meat grinder. “Going to the end of the line?”

The man’s entire face creased when he looked up from his newspaper. “Pardon?”

“Well, I was thinking of getting off somewhere over Lake Erie. Take a pit stop in Toledo, you know, one of my friends is from there. Was from there. He lives in Korea now, but he’s probably still from there. Got married. Are you– are you married? Some of my best friends are married. Or I could just take a parachute and hope there’s an island somewhere in the middle, if I’m feeling optimistic, wouldn’t that be nice? I’d start my own country, except for the fact that a country needs a military, and I don’t want the responsibility that comes with being a five star general.”

The man was staring at him.

Hawkeye looked down at where his fingers were drumming against the pink-tinted cotton over his thighs. “Just because– because I wouldn’t want to be invaded, you know. Have you seen what invasions do to a country? They pack everyone full of shrapnel and bullets and grenades and more shrapnel, and– a lot of them, they don’t even make it to an aid station, you know, much less a MASH unit. They get an unofficial burial along the side of the road in a country they couldn’t point to on a map before the Army made them learn, because they’re going to be living and dying there for the next three years.”

The man was still staring at him.

“I just think–“

A touch on his arm. Hawkeye barely fought off the instinct to duck. “Sir?” the stewardess asked. “Are you feeling alright?”

If he wasn’t in his pinks and greens, she wouldn’t have called him Sir. She would have taken the opportunity to do exactly what he deserved: dump him overboard so he landed somewhere in the middle of Lake Erie.

He hoped he landed on the Canadian side. He’d rather drown in Canadian waters than American ones.

“Ah-hah, fine,” he said, forcing a smile. “Do you have ginger ale? I’d love a ginger ale. Where are we over, by the by? Canada?”

“Syracuse, Sir. I’ll get that drink for you.”

Three years or maybe two decades prior, Hawkeye hadn’t been able to take his eyes off the stewardess’s legs when she walked down the aisle on his connecting flight to San Francisco and the end of his life.

He felt like maybe he should have been leering. He was home. He was the same man with the same interests, which really ought to have included sex, and anything else was completely unreasonable to believe. The war, the war, the war, it hadn’t taken as much from him as it would have liked to believe. He was still Hawkeye Pierce, medical doctor and all-around certified party-enjoyer, and that meant he was going to get off this plane and go straight back to being the man he was the last time he lived in Boston, with the notable exception of Carlye.

If Sidney Freedman was on this plane, he’d be kicking Hawkeye in the skull, and Hawk would thank him for it.

Hawkeye drank his ginger ale, thanked somebody other than God that the kid’s parents had finally quieted her down, and felt the burning prickle on his neck from his neighbour staring at him when he wasn’t looking.

When he got off the plane, things were going to be simple. He’d called ahead from Bedlam in Korea, talked to Dad. He could not, would not, and probably should not go back to Crabapple Cove, because there was absolutely nothing for him there. He didn’t want to stop, didn’t want to slow down, and didn’t want to treat the children of the people he’d grown up with when they’d only ask him about children and girlfriends and children. Carlye had left him and Trapper had left him and BJ was settling back in on the opposite coast with his comfortable, blonde, picket fence wife and daughter. He’d have another kid, soon. Oh, sure, there wouldn’t be as many babies generated after this war as there were after the last war, but there would be enough. BJ Hunnicutt would go home, reaffirm himself with his wife, and GOODBYE and a bright yellow motorcycle would be the last things Hawkeye ever saw of him.

“Dad, come on,” Hawkeye said, tapping his fingers against the desk where they kept the phone so nobody could strangle themselves with it, the watchful eyes of Sidney Freedman leaving a burning prickle on his neck. “How am I gonna see a play in Crabapple Cove? I missed three years of culture. How many– how many good movies do you think came out while they were showing us The Tramp a hundred times? Not that that’s not a good movie, you know, it’s a wonderful movie, but–“

“Why Boston?” Daniel asked. Straight to the point. Hawkeye admired that about him. They both gabbed a mile a minute when they got going, but Daniel had always been able to shut it off when he needed to. “If that’s your worry, why not New York?”

“Boston’s closer, Dad. I can take the train to New York, stay there a night or two, see some shows. And, you know, the theater scene in Boston is pretty good. Cheaper.”

“You’re not worried about that. You could take the train to Boston.”

“No, I could take the train from Portland to Boston. You’d have to– you’d have to drive me to Portland, and I’m not about to put that on you.”

“But you’ll ask me to drive down to Boston and find you an apartment?”

Hawkeye rolled the telephone cord around his finger, trying not to catch Sidney’s gaze out of the corner of his eye. “Well– yeah, I think– I think it would be good for me. To be in Boston. You don’t have to do it, I’ll find a hotel for a week or two–“

“You don’t want to come home at all?”

“I just– I want to get back to it. Sidney says I should get back to it. I mean it, if you don’t want to–“

“If I don’t bring you some clothes, you’ll be apartment hunting in fatigues.”

“There are department stores.”

Daniel sighed, long-suffering, though there was a smile audible in it even thousands of miles away. “Don’t say I never did anything for you.”

The kid had started crying again by the time the plane landed. Hawkeye understood. His ears hurt, too. If he hadn’t lived an entire life with worse aches and pains and bumps and bruises, if the worst thing he’d ever experienced was being stuck in an approaching supersonic metal tube for a couple of hours, he would have been crying, too.

He couldn’t, wouldn’t, shouldn’t go back to Crabapple Cove, because the first time he’d cried in Korea was when he couldn’t do a damn thing to save one of the only good eggs that had ever come out of that town. Tommy Gillis, the new Emily Dickinson, turned into a war correspondent who went the way of all good, kind-hearted people in a war: they went sour, they left you, or they died on your table.

And so, and so, and so, Hawkeye Pierce was staying far away from Crabapple Cove, or at least as far as he could get that was still within a day’s drive. He didn’t want to call Dad, but maybe he would have to. Maybe he wouldn’t be able to find a hospital job and he’d slowly go insane in a clinic in South Boston treating bunions and stomachaches and the like until a baby started crying in his exam room and he could feel the sniper’s crosshairs on his neck.

He had other reasons for picking Boston, aside from the fact that it was the closest proper, cultured city to Crabapple Cove. Portland and Portsmouth didn’t count, not really, and Bangor was further away from all things good and wonderful and creative even if it was on the train line. Charles was in Boston, or would be in Boston in a couple of weeks’ time, and if all else failed and things didn’t go as well as Hawkeye believed they were going to, he could always go crawling to the Emerson Winchesters. He patently refused to work at Boston Mercy, even if Charles offered him a job—it would only mean getting reminded every single day that Charles Winchester was in charge of him in a way that mattered rather than only by rank—but he was still a safety net. If everything went cockeyed, Hawkeye would track down the Emerson Winchesters, knock on the door, and beg Charles to convince Mother and Father to let him sleep with the guard hounds until he was back on his feet.

On the other end of the spectrum of people who lived in Boston that Hawkeye had a chance of running into: John McIntyre. At least, he had lived in Boston. Maybe he didn’t anymore. He hadn’t left a note and never bothered writing, so maybe he did what he’d always joked about doing when he was elbow-deep in the still: took his girls and ran. Maybe these days he was somewhere with a scene more adept for what Hawkeye had so kindly opened his eyes to—New York or San Francisco, where he could pick up some nameless man to never fall in love with in five minutes flat.

Of course, if you knew where you needed to be, you could pick up some nameless man in Boston in about fifteen minutes. Hawkeye had done it plenty of times.

Trap wouldn’t leave Boston, not without a damn good reason. Hawkeye couldn’t imagine it. The man had been grown like a bacterium in the streets and subways and culture of the city whose harbor gave him a taste for tea, and he wouldn’t survive for long outside the environment he was bred for. He’d barely survived Korea, and that was two years ago.

It was a bad idea to be thinking about Trapper, but Trapper John McIntyre had never quite left Hawkeye’s mind. He’d left his mark on damn near everything. He was still in the way Hawkeye caught himself shifting to the right to catch a shoulder against his—though he’d redirected plenty of that affection onto BJ. He was in the memories Hawkeye busied himself with in the night when the nurses were less interested in him if he didn’t have that blonde behemoth at his side to catch just enough of their fancy to open them up to what he had to offer. He was in the still, right up until BJ broke it and they had to build a new one, and then they’d left that one behind, anyway. Hawkeye had dried out at the Bedlam in Korea. He didn’t need a still in his living room.

Hawkeye drummed his fingers on the pink-tinted cotton of his uniform pants and couldn’t help but wonder what Trapper was up to, these days, because he had to still be living in Boston. Hospital work, probably. He’d always wanted hospital work. As much as Trap liked kids, liked taking care of them, it had never been his goal to graduate residency and a thoracic fellowship to take cases that could wait. He liked getting his hands dirty, so long as everything else was sterile. He liked having a ticking clock and the invitation to show that he was hot stuff inside the operating room the same as he was out of it.

Hawkeye wasn’t about to rot away in clinic work, either.

He managed to keep his mouth neatly shut as the plane deboarded, not even getting out a ‘thank you’ to the stewardess when she took his glass. If he unlocked his lips, he’d only get asked if he was alright again. Nobody wanted to listen to him, and that was alright. They’d only listened to him in Korea because they had to. He probably wouldn’t be friends with BJ, now that he was home. BJ wouldn’t want to listen to him even when he got to do it with his eyes instead of his ears and on his own schedule.

The gate at Boston Logan was so loud, the same as the rest of the airports had been. The buzz of airplanes and the hubbub of reuniting families, none of the rest of them in ill-fitting pink and green and red-stained boots, only returning from business trips or vacations or secret wives or funerals.

Hawkeye stood on the tarmac, battered duffle slouched at his side like a body bag, and waited for the happy families to start to get out of his way until the man unloading the checked bags told him he had to move out of the area, Sir.

“Oh, what, I suppose you’re about to thank me for my service?”

The man jolted. Then glared at him. “Thank you for your service, Sir.”

“Oh, no. No you don’t. You don’t get to do that. My service? A hundred and thirty hours a week of patching up children so they can go back out and die is service? I suppose you think Genghis Khan was a fair and just leader, am I right? Now, maybe if I’d been given a cavalcade of wives for my service, but–“

A hand on his shoulder.

Hawkeye rounded on whoever was trying to hurt him, hands already halfway to his shoulders so he could at least protect his face if not surrender.

Daniel Pierce was tall, gray-haired, and had worn round-rimmed tortoiseshell glasses since Hawkeye was a little kid. He slouched. He was lanky, but broad in the torso—the sort of stature that made him look like a toy cat made out of an egg carton and some loose bits of string had wished to be a real boy.

In short, he looked pretty much exactly like Hawkeye expected to look in thirty years, or maybe right now except for the fact that his eyes weren’t likely to go green any time soon and he liked to think his nose was better.

Hawkeye dropped his bag and sagged into his father’s arms. He felt like he was going to be sick, but maybe that was just the tears that started forcing their way out of him. Maybe he could throw up down his dad’s back; wouldn’t that be a wonderful welcome home?

“I know, Hawk,” Daniel murmured.

“You don’t know.” Hawkeye scrabbled at his back to pull him even closer, burying his face in the shoulder of the ragged, forest green flannel shirt he’d brought home as a present the first winter break of college. “You don’t know. How could you know? You’ve got asthma and a trick knee, they never wanted you. They only take people who have trustworthy knees. Reliable knees. The Abe Lincolns of knees.”

“Still nursing that old crush, huh?”

Hawkeye felt the laugh burble out of him rather than giving it permission, wiped his nose on the cuff of his uniform shirt because it felt like the right thing to do to get snot all over something Army, and struggled to get his bag over his shoulder without falling over.

Daniel let his fingers linger on Hawkeye’s shoulder, jerked his head, and tucked his hands in his pockets. “You’ll be okay on the bus?”

Hawkeye made it halfway to the exit before he lied about needing a bathroom to go wash his boots in the restroom sink until the water stopped running pink, except it wouldn’t stop running pink. Young boys’ lifeblood swirling down the scrub sink where it would drain into the Korean dirt with the amputated limbs they buried outside camp and the medical waste Frank thought they ought to be making a profit from instead of burning.

Frank had gone crazy. They sent him away because he went crazy. Promoted him because he went crazy. Let him see his home and his family and his children so far ahead of schedule because when he went crazy, all he did was try to assault some woman who looked a little like Margaret instead of killing–

The last time Hawkeye was on a bus, it hadn’t ended well. He was sitting at the front of one now, forehead rumbling against the window, socks damp and arms freed from the sleeves of his green-tinted jacket where it rested over his shoulders.

He wasn’t going to think about the bus. Sidney had made him think about the bus and he hated him for it.

He wasn’t going to think about the bus.

“It’s this cute little place on Dwight Street,” Daniel said, one hand on Hawkeye’s back as he guided him down the stairs to the bus stop. “One of those brownstones–“

“These aren’t brownstones,” Hawkeye argued. “They aren’t made of brownstone. They’re only brownstones when they’re made out of brownstone, otherwise they’re just made out of brown stone.”

“Row houses, okay. Well, someone converted a few of them in a little group into apartments, and I didn’t figure you’d be much for an apartment building, so I found you the penthouse suite. One bedroom, one bathroom, you know. Pet-friendly. I thought you’d like the neighborhood. Close to the train, South End–“

Hawkeye stopped, set his duffle bag down on in the middle of the dirty sidewalk, and waited for his dad to notice he’d stopped so he could loop back.

“What?” Daniel asked.

“You got me an apartment in South End?”

“I thought you’d like it.”

There had to be something wrong. “You know, most people wouldn’t think their sons would like the South End.”

“I’m not most people. I asked around, you know, found out what neighborhood had a flavor that would pair best with your bouquet.”

“Asked around? Who did you ask?”

Daniel tried to pick up the duffle bag. Hawkeye snatched it away from him. “I thought it would be good for you, Bird,” Daniel said, following him when Hawkeye started down the street in a huff. “If you don’t want to come home–“

“I’m not–“

“–then that’s just fine with me, but at least you can have some community–“

“I’ll have community when I start work!”

“–that isn’t just your coworkers.” Daniel grabbed his arm. “Are you listening to me?”

“Oh I’m listening, alright.” Hawkeye tried to yank his arm away, found he couldn’t, and cursed that what he’d been eating for the past three years wasn’t much better than chalk and had left him practically without a single muscle in his body. It was a wonder he didn’t collapse into a pile of bones and skin.

He didn’t like the anger that had clamped around his heart. It was a different kind of anger than he used to have. It didn’t always hit the right target.

“You want me to go back to Crabapple Cove and sit around doing needlepoint like I’m keeping my fingers nimble when really all I’m going to do is sit there forever!” he snapped, fingers tight around the strap of the duffle bag. “You want me to waste away in some tiny, backwater town in Maine–“

“Hawkeye.”

“–when I’ve been wasting away in some tiny, backwater nothing in Korea for the last three years! You want me to– you want me to do nothing? Just sit there and think about the days when I used to be a surgeon, because maybe if I do that enough, I’ll start behaving rationally again? No, no, I won’t– Tommy didn’t get to go home, you know that? Tommy Gillis, he died, I watched the life drain out of his goddamn eyes and you want me to go home?”

Daniel wouldn’t let go, not even when Hawkeye tried to pull away again. “You’re being unreasonable.”

“Me? Me, Hawkeye Pierce, king of reason, being unreasonable? How dare you, sir?”

“You don’t need to come home.”

“Good, because you can’t make me.”

“But I want you to call your friend Dr. Freedman–“

Hawkeye scoffed. “Sidney’s not–“

“–and you’re going to ask him who to talk to in Boston, and I’ll call you once a week to make sure you’ve called him. That’s the deal we’re going to make if you won’t come home.”

Hawkeye could feel the fight draining out of him by the second. What was he doing? This was his dad. He hadn’t fought with his dad since he was in middle school, at least not about anything big and life-changing.

“We used to be on the same page,” Hawkeye complained as Daniel shifted his grip and started encouraging him down another street. “What happened to us? Why am I fighting with you?”

Daniel loosened his grip. Moved his hand to the small of Hawkeye’s back to give him one last gentle push to keep him walking. “They taught you to fight.”

“They taught me, but they couldn’t make me. I wouldn’t have fired a gun to save my own life, do you know that?”

“I wouldn’t expect you to.”

The row house was red brick, nothing even close to a brownstone. The kind of building Hawkeye had always thought of when he thought about Boston. The kind of building he’d imagined Trapper living in when he’d let himself imagine home—something with plenty of bedrooms for the kids that were so important to him and a guest room for when he came back smelling like another woman’s perfume.

“I bet Trapper had another kid,” Hawkeye blurted, watching Daniel unlock the front door. There were buzzers installed in place of the doorbell. He’d have two neighbors—one on each of the other floors. “Everyone comes home from a war and has more kids. That’s what happens when you think too hard about your own mortality, you know. Someone should do a study on that. Near-death experiences and the evolutionary compulsion to expand your potential genetic lineage.”

“How is he?”

“Who?”

“Trapper John.”

“Well, y’know. Wife and daughters. Maybe a third daughter. Maybe a son, maybe he finally figured out how to shoot Minie balls instead of .38s.”

Daniel snorted. “I don’t think the caliber has anything to do with it. And you call yourself a doctor?”

“I wouldn’t say that,” Hawkeye said, letting Daniel lead him inside and up to the top floor. His duffle bag clanked against every step as he dragged it behind him. “Butcher, maybe. Murderer, maybe, I mean, what else do you call someone who gets a wounded kid delivered directly to his doorstep and puts him back together so he can go out and shoot other children instead of sending him home? No, no, I’ll be a doctor again once I’ve treated my first patient stateside.”

“And that’s why you’re staying in Boston?”

The apartment wasn’t exactly decorated. A sparse kitchen with only one stool at the counter. A ratty couch against one wall, the ugliest rug Hawkeye had ever seen in his life in the center of the wood-slat floor, and a floor lamp. A table just large enough for the phonograph sitting on top of it, something like three dozen records Hawkeye recognized from his bedroom stacked precariously against the wall beside it.

And a massive, fluffy, irritated-looking gray cat in a bed in the corner, face sleep-scrunched aside from annoyed.

“His name’s Gandalf,” Daniel said.

Hawkeye jumped on the opportunity to drop the previous topic. “What-now?”

“Gandalf. It’s from a book. Your Aunt Patricia lent me her copy, and I liked it.”

Hawkeye went to rifle through the records. He didn’t much like the look of the classical pieces. He’d only heard the story secondhand, but there was too much Mozart. What if he invited Charles over?

He wasn’t going to invite Charles over. It was a ridiculous notion.

Still, he started moving them to the bottom of the pile. “When did you see Aunt Patricia?”

“Oh, some time in the last three years. As for the rest of your questions: it’s good, it’s a children’s book, and I left it on your nightstand.”

Hawkeye looked up from the records to see Daniel petting the cat. There was a quiet purr in the air like the buzz of a plane engine. It was supposed to be soothing. Why wasn’t it soothing?

“I don’t want a cat.”

“Too bad, I already bought him food. It’s in the pantry.”

“Dad, I can’t–“

Daniel sighed, used the arm of the couch to haul himself up from his crouch, and wiped his eyes under his glasses. Then his nose, then his cheeks. “Call him a present. Someone to keep you company until you can find a human to do that.”

“In a one bedroom apartment?”

It didn’t get justified with an answer. Hawkeye understood why. He’d brought plenty of humans back to plenty of other one bedroom apartments, and some of them weren’t even his.

“Let me make you dinner,” Daniel said. “French toast?”

Hawkeye gave up arguing. With any of it. He didn’t have the energy, and wouldn’t until he’d gotten some sleep and some food to make up for the too-many-flights it had taken to get home.

Maybe he should have found somewhere further away from Crabapple Cove. San Francisco, where he could watch the best friendship he’d ever had disintegrate in real time rather than with a week-long delay as letters went back and forth. Because it wouldn’t be long before BJ stopped wanting anything to do with him, and that would be right and true and good. Nobody ever wanted anything to do with Hawkeye Pierce, major downer, at least not for longer than they had to. He’d contributed plenty to Frank’s little breakdown, after all.

He sat at the single stool at the counter, put his head down, and closed his eyes to the sound of batter whisking.

“So what was he like?”

“Who?”

“You know who, the man who slept here before me.”

“Trapper was… Trapper, I guess. He didn’t do much sleeping in that cot, if that’s what you’re wondering, Mr. Peg Hunnicutt.”

BJ lifted his hands from Trapper’s blanket and grimaced at his palms like he expected them to come away sticky. Hawkeye wished he could laugh at the sight—this clean-cut guy who’d had his fingers in someone’s bare guts on the side of the road not twenty-four hours ago acting like a little bit of another man’s spunk was the worst thing he’d touched since touchdown in Korea.

“I guess what I’m wondering is if he was more like you or Major Burns.”

“Would I have been friends with someone like Frank?”

“You were friends, then?”

“Pierce-and-McIntyre, ménage à deux. Go ahead, ask around, they’ll all tell you the same thing. Especially the nurses.”

“I guess you did everything together, huh?”

“Yeah, well, all the stuff you can do with best friends, considering the circumstances. We didn’t even have supplies to make friendship bracelets.”

BJ turned over and put his chin in his hands like he was at a slumber party. “What did you do together, then?”

“Why do you care?”

“Because I want to know what I have to do if I want to be your best friend.”

“This isn’t high school, Beej. Just because I’m the most popular girl in camp doesn’t mean I need cronies.”

“What if I want to be your crony?”

“Well, then I’d have to ask you to fill out a crony application form, and you have to go through Radar for that.”

“I wouldn’t want to go through him. We’d only have to operate.”

Hawkeye looked over at the man in Trapper’s bunk, tried to forget anything was different, and laughed.

A hand in his hair. The choppers. He jerked up, scrambling to find the floor next to his cot, and only didn’t tumble over because someone grabbed his shoulder.

French toast in front of him. Real bread, real milk, real eggs, real syrup, the faintest hint of vanilla when he brought it to his nose to sniff it. His dad watching expectantly.

More syrup. Then he savored the first taste, sweet and custardy with just the right bite to the outside even as the syrup began to make it soggy. Perfect.

Home.

“You should be a professional chef,” Hawkeye said around the next bite, tucking it into his cheeks like one of Radar’s whatevers. “This is– mmgh, God, this is wonderful. Ambrosia. You could sell this out of a cart on the corner and make millions.”

“Well, good. I’ve been practicing.” Daniel paused to ruffle Hawkeye’s hair, then went back to the stove and the rest of the waiting, prepped toast.

“French toast is easy,” Hawkeye argued. “You don’t need to practice French toast.”

“Surgeon’s hands.”

“Well, maybe you do need to practice French toast. Or at least make it with real eggs. Did I tell you– I– I was mess hall officer, once. And– and I tried to have our cook make French toast, you know, the way you make it? But all he ever had were these huge bags of powdered eggs and milk–“ Another bite stuffed into his mouth, syrup nearly dripping from his lip before he caught it with the side of his finger. “And, you know, all the bread was from the war for independence. He cooked it, alright, but it was still powdered on the inside.”

“See, that’s why you think my French toast is so good,” Daniel said, waggling a spatula at him. “You’ve been given a blanding.”

Hawkeye nodded, shoved another bite in his mouth, and closed his eyes to taste it better, kicking his feet against the backside of the kitchen cabinets. “Mhh. You know, right now, I’d probably think ketchup was spicy.”

“Ketchup is spicy.”

“Alright alright alright, I’d think– I’d think clam chowder was spicy. We should get some, do you want to get some? We’ll go right now. I’ll change out of–“ he paused, took his dog tags off, and dropped them on the floor. “I’ll change out of this, and there’s this place I used to go to with Carlye that’s not far from here, I think–“

“And ignore the product of my blood, sweat, and tears?”

“I have tasted, masticated, and consumed said product, and now I would like to go for a walk along the Riviera. However, as I am woefully unwed, I believe I require a chaperone so as to preserve my modesty.”

“What you need is sleep.” Another piece of French toast was deposited in front of him. Hawkeye cut off a piece, sniffed it, and decided it wouldn’t hurt to eat another one, not when he was still so hungry. Clam chowder could wait. Clam chowder would still be there even when the rest of the world had fallen to pieces, so long as there were clams and Bostonians. “I want to see you well-rested before I leave,” Daniel said.

“I don’t think I’m ever going to be well-rested again. I’d have to sleep for a year, and I’ve got too much to do. Job interviews to schedule. Surgery to do!”

Daniel drummed his fingers against the counter and bit his lip. “You know I wouldn’t mind if you slept for a year at home. If that’s what you need.”

The unfamiliar, bubbling anger caught at his lips again. It used to be so much easier to point his anger at things that mattered. Political injustice, wars, young boys just like him getting beaten up on the subway because someone had decided they looked a little too queer. He’d watched BJ hold anger inside of himself until there was nothing for it to do but take out everyone in the vicinity in the explosion.

He didn’t want to have BJ’s anger. It scared him.

Best to let it trickle out instead of festering.

“Would you drop it?” Hawkeye snapped. “I’m not wasting any more of my life treating– treating twisted ankles and bunions. What do you want me to do, surgery on the kitchen floor? I wouldn’t call that sterile, and I spent three years of my life in some of the least sterile conditions you could possibly imagine. We got rats in the OR, do you know that? All the time, rats. In the OR, in the showers, in the cots. And we couldn’t get rid of them, no matter what we did. Now, there wouldn’t be rats at home, but I’d rather not get blood in the carpet, and I don’t think it would come out of that grout in the kitchen. I’d also rather not get sued for malpractice, which I think would come rather quickly when I felt the need to check for shrapnel in someone’s guts and you were off at an appointment and couldn’t stop me.”

He was shaking. He wasn’t supposed to shake. He couldn’t be a surgeon if he shook. That would definitely get him sued for malpractice.

Tap, tap, tap against the kitchen counter. “You don’t have to.”

“Good. Great.”

“But you could visit Tommy. If you came for a few days.”

Tears welled to his eyes just as quickly as the anger. It made his sinuses hurt. He wiped the dampness away with the back of his hand. “I don’t want to visit Tommy. Can you imagine that? Showing up– showing up to his grave and running into his mom and having to tell her to her face that I killed him.”

“You didn’t kill him.”

“I didn’t save him.”

“That’s not the same and you know it.”

Coming home was supposed to feel like something. Something other than whatever this was—hollow enough that if he rapped a fist against his chest it would make the same sound as an empty footlocker.

Hawkeye bent down, picked up the dog tags so Gandalf would stop batting them around, and threw them so they landed with a rattle on the counter next to the sink.

He wanted to go home, but home wasn’t anywhere. Home was a tent smaller than this apartment in Korea that he’d shared with two or three other guys who had things they wanted to go home to.

“I’ll come for a visit some day,” he mumbled into his French toast.

Hawkeye wasn’t about to let his father sleep on the couch. He didn’t feel much like sleeping, anyway, so he set Daniel up in the sparse bedroom with the quilt his mother had made that still brought back the fuzzy warmth of sick days and heavy cloth wrapped around his shoulders at a campfire and repairing torn stitches with a steady soon-to-be-surgeon’s hand. He took the children’s chapter book the big gray cat was named after out to the kitchen and sat in the corner between two cabinets to watch him hork down canned tuna like it was the first French toast he’d had in two years.

He wasn’t going to think about the bus.

It would be easy to suffocate a cat in your sleep. They slept in the bed with you. Cleopatra, the dull gray tabby Daniel had found him when his mother died, had slept in Hawkeye’s bed. Usually directly on the small of his back. She’d been old already, sluggish when she woke. If she’d been asleep, and he’d rolled over, he would have broken her.

He wanted to stop thinking about the bus.

He followed Gandalf to his bed, sat cross-legged in front of him, and opened the book. “Not that I don’t trust Dad, but I bet you’re named after someone awful. That’s always how it goes in fantasy books, and this looks like a fantasy book, because there has to be one Hero and one Villain. There are only so many character archetypes, and, you know, Dad, he’s not really a cat fan even though he knows I like you guys. More of a dog fan. More of a wild animal fan, actually, because those don’t rely on you and he already had one ravenous beast trying to eat him out of home. So if I had to guess, he named you after the villain, because he thought it would be funny.

“Right, here we go. Are you listening? I’m nothing without an audience.

“Okay. ‘In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.’ Well, I’d hope so, given that’s the title of the book. I lived in a hole in the ground. The next line here says it wasn’t a nasty, dirty, wet hole, but mine was nasty and dirty and wet, not even considering my personal hygiene. The Swamp was nasty and dirty and wet because that was one of its primary features. Also stinky and annoying, but maybe it was just my roommates who were stinky and annoying and there was some bleed-through. Okay, ‘it was– it was a hobbit hole, and that means comfort.’ What I wouldn’t have given to have lived in one of these,” he said, waggling the book. “Margaret, you would have liked her, her tent was a hobbit hole. It was– she made it really pretty, do you know that?”

The cat didn’t answer.

“Fine, be like that. You know, if you don’t show any interest, I won’t tell you any more about… Mr. Baggins, apparently. I’m reading ahead, don’t worry about it.”

The cat yawned.

Hawkeye scratched it between the ears, got up to lay on his back with his head resting against the arm of the couch, and read.

“You know somethin’, Hawk? You act like you’re a fairy tale character, sometimes.”

“I think it would be just as applicable if you stopped after the word ‘fairy.’”

Trapper threw the ball he was tossing at Hawkeye’s head. It hit, but at least it was soft and rubber. “Stop that. What if my mother hears?”

“What do you think you’d be? If you were something that wasn’t real.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You know, if you were some kind of– of creature of the night.”

“Think that’s just vampires.”

“You can’t be a vampire, I’d be a vampire.”

“We couldn’t both be?”

“No, no, that wouldn’t make any sense. It would be a hell of a coincidence if we were both vampires and were living together, wouldn’t it? You have to pick something else. And if you say werewolf, I’m getting my revenge. You’re not hairy enough for that.”

Trapper barked a laugh, eyes crinkling at the corners. “Give it your best shot, hon.”

A plate rattled on the counter. “You’re lucky, Hawk,” Daniel said, wiping his hands on the one and only kitchen towel. “Early birds get worms, but it’s afternoon.”

“What time is it?” Hawkeye mumbled. The book had been neatly set aside on the floor next to the couch, crumpled pages showing where it had fallen on his face the night before. Gandalf was using it as a pillow.

“Two. I thought you’d want to sleep.”

“I guess you’re leaving soon.”

“I could stay another day.”

The very idea of it put a rock in Hawkeye’s gut. Wasn’t all this embarrassing enough? He was a surgeon, he was competent; he didn’t need his father making him grilled cheese at two in the afternoon and supervising so he didn’t think about the bus. He wanted to be alone so he could finally get around to some proper misery-wallowing.

“No, no, you should go home,” Hawkeye said. He was still in his uniform. Why the hell was he still in his uniform? He started peeling it off, starting with the rumpled jacket he couldn’t remember putting his arms back in. It had already spent plenty of time on filthy hotel room floors, so it ought to feel right at home dropped in the middle of the room where Gandalf could make some kind of use of it. “I wouldn’t want to keep you.”

“It’s not an inconvenience.”

“Maybe it’s an inconvenience for me. I mean, I’ve gotta start looking for jobs, you know? Getting dates, making you grandchildren?”

What the hell was wrong with him? Christ, if he could just think without having to open his ridiculous mouth–

Hawkeye pressed his fingers to his eyes. “I’m sorry. I’m just– I don’t need this. I’m not a kid.”

“I know you’re not.”

He dropped his button down on the floor with the jacket. Then his pants. Maybe it wouldn’t help his point to have this conversation in only his undershirt and boxers, but he didn’t want to keep wearing the things that were recognizable as Army. Not when he didn’t have to.

He wasn’t a kid anymore.

“One time, someone had to call Sidney because I was sleepwalking,” Hawkeye said, picking at the ragged hem of his army-issue boxers. “I– I got up in the middle of the night and was playing marbles in the compound. And I thought– I thought to myself that that’s good, you know? Some part of me was still living at home, playing stupid kids’ games with Tommy. But my hair’s gray and I’m not fit to be around children, so–“

“Don’t say that.”

“It’s true, do you not want me to say things that are true? Here, fine, we can do that. I really love the color of these walls, they’re a wonderful shade of cigarette-stained. And that rug is marvelous. If only it was the same color as the walls, I loved seeing that color in the Bedlam.”

“So we’ll buy you some paint.”

“I’ll buy me some paint, with money that I make at my job. And in order to get one of those, I need to live somewhere other than Crabapple Cove! What– what happens if I slow down, Dad? What happens if I stop? Do you think I’ll ever get going again? Because I don’t. I’ll just churn and churn and churn and churn and I’ll never do anything ever again. And then you’ll send me back to a mental hospital, because what's there to do with a former-surgeon who does nothing but stare at the wall thinking about The War all day? No, no thank you, Trapper told me enough about his father that I know I don’t want to be like that. I won’t be a veteran. I’m going to go out there, and I’m going to get a job, and I’m going to be normal.”

Daniel snorted.

“What?”

“Kid, one of the many things I love about you is that you aren’t normal.” Hawkeye opened his mouth to argue. Daniel put up a hand to stop him. “Do you really think you could go a day of being normal without driving yourself out of your skull?”

He didn’t have an answer for that. He didn’t want to prove him right by pointing out that he’d tried it once and nearly gone insane earlier.

Daniel rounded the counter, pulled out the stool, and patted it. “Come eat lunch.”

For a moment, Hawkeye considered saying no. He could establish himself as his own person. Make a stand for something he believed in, which was really quite a lot of things and happened to include life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, all of which were increasingly being threatened by the idea that maybe there was some sort of sedative in the grilled cheese and he’d wake up back in Crabapple Cove so he could get a head start on decomposition.

He ate the sandwich. He was too hungry not to.

“I’m gonna have to start feeding myself again,” he told Gandalf while Daniel went into the bedroom. “I didn’t feed myself for three years. The Army did it for me. Told me stick out my tongue and say ‘aah’ and filled me up with sawdust and leftovers from the last three wars.”

Gandalf purred, nuzzled Hawkeye’s leg, and fell over trying to lick his own belly.

“Good job, big guy.”

He grabbed the book from where Daniel had moved it to the floor. “So, how do you feel about more of this?” he asked the cat. The rug had a lighter stripe around the outside. He decided to follow it, carefully tightrope-walking until he reached the corner and pivoted as he opened the book. “Where’d we leave off? Riiiiight, right, ‘An Unexpected Party.’ So Bilbo, that’s Mr. Baggins, is at home, and all these strangers come knocking at his door asking him for things. Including you. They want him to go on a great big adventure. Let me tell you something, cat: adventure is just another name for being drafted. ‘Hello, Dr. Pierce and/or Mr. Baggins, we’d like you to go on an adventure to Korea. Oh, it’ll be wonderful, won’t it? You’ll make all sorts of new friends when you’re wrist-deep inside of them.’ Not that some of them minded me being wrist-deep inside of them. The nurses, mostly, huh-huh-huh?”

He made it three more paragraphs before Daniel came out of the bedroom, a fawn-colored sweater and pants draped over one arm and the duffle bag he’d brought from Maine slung over his shoulder. “I suppose I should let you get to it.” The corner of his lip twitched up, eyes sparkling. “You’ve got a cat to educate.”

Hawkeye had to hold out his arms for a moment as he stumbled to stay on the tightrope. “He’s already educated, he’s a wizard.”

“You’re keeping him, then?”

“I wouldn’t want to throw him out, he’d only invite dwarves. Do you like this rug, is that why you picked it out?”

“It came with the apartment.” Daniel threw the clothes at him. He barely caught them. “Get dressed so you can walk me down to the car.”

“You can find it on your own.”

“Hawkeye.”

Hawkeye nearly tripped on the cat. “I’ll be fine.”

“You’re walking me down to the car. And you’ll call me?”

Hawkeye looked up, balancing on one foot as he turned the corner again, and stopped fooling around the moment he made eye contact.

It was wrong that people got old, especially when they were parents. But he’d gotten old, and he wasn’t even a parent. He’d gone gray from the roots to the tips somewhere between a year and a decade ago. He had wrinkles that weren’t smile lines. He’d looked in the dingy, soot-stained mirror over the stove in the Swamp and sometimes wondered why his dad had taken off his glasses.

If he stayed in Boston, Daniel Pierce was going to keep getting older without him.

Hawkeye hugged him as tight as he could, pages of the book crinkling against a Maine-scented flannel shirt. “I’m sorry.”

A hand in his hair, the other on his back, cradling him like he’d been cradled so many days of his childhood. “You’ve got nothing to be sorry for.”

“I called you an inconvenience,” Hawkeye sniffled.

“Maybe I am an inconvenience.”

“No. Never. You can– you can bother me any time. Starting a month from now.”

“I’ll be waiting abandoned on your doorstep in a wicker basket in exactly twenty-eight days. And you’ll call me Friday.”

“And I’ll call you Friday,” Hawkeye agreed, pulling back to get dressed. “And I’ll walk you to the car so no old ladies jump you.”

Daniel laughed, handed over his duffle bag once Hawkeye fought his head through the neck of the sweater, and tossed out, “You make it sound like I don’t want that,” as they headed down to the curb.

“I don’t want that. You need to find a widow back in Crabapple Cove who isn’t about to try to convince you to move to the city.”

“And you need to stop being so right about things, or it’ll go to your head.”

Hawkeye set the duffle in the passenger seat of the faded baby blue pickup he’d learned to drive in. He’d evidently done a rather poor job of learning if he could manage to put a Jeep through the wall of the O Club. A building was supposed to be a hard thing to miss.

He had to be responsible. An adult. Worry about adult things, like taxes and jobs and rent. “Uh, the apartment–“

“First three months of rent are paid,” Daniel said as he settled in the driver’s seat. “And the lease is in my name, but we’ll change that the next time I come to visit. Alright?”

“Yeah, yeah, alright. You know which roads to take?”

“Got here alright, didn’t I?”

“Well, yeah, but, you know, that changes day-to-day. I just want you to be safe.”

Daniel’s expression softened around the edges. He reached over and patted Hawkeye’s hand where it was still resting on the doorjamb. “All I have to worry about is city drivers and loose chickens.”

The best Hawkeye could manage was a smile. A horribly strained smile that Daniel clearly saw straight through.

He wasn’t going to think about the bus.

“Love you,” he said, giving Daniel’s hand a squeeze back.

“I love you too, Hawkeye.”

“Call me when you get home?”

He didn’t need to say the rest of it. Call me so I know you’re safe, so I know a mortar didn’t find you, because I’m never going to stop worrying about that for the rest of my life. From the worry in Daniel’s eyes, he could pick up the problem well enough.

The baby blue pickup rumbled away down the street, got honked at when he didn’t turn a corner fast enough, and disappeared behind a not-brownstone.

Alone.

The last time Hawkeye had been alone was Bedlam in Korea. The times before that had all been solo R&R, cheap hotel rooms in Tokyo or Seoul. The time before that was three years ago, packing to go to Korea.

He could really go for something from the gin still, right about now.

Instead, he went back upstairs to his apartment, drank orange juice straight from the carton, and read a children’s book to a cat.

Chapter Text

The Hobbit was a book about war. Not A War, although Hawkeye didn’t doubt that the man who wrote it had been in one. World War I, given the copyright date in the front matter. It wasn’t even about the war on the pages—the battle between all the people of Middle-earth—but War, the dragon breathing fire and smoke and destroying cities with one sweep of its massive claws, its jeweled underbelly the ever-churning engine of profit that had led Hawkeye to finding himself wrist-deep in chest cavities until his fingers were pruny from sweat beneath on-again-off-again rubber gloves.

There were no Great Eagles in the real world. There was no man with unerring aim to slay the dragon. There was no wizard to collect Hawkeye at the end of his quest and safely guide him back to Bag End, Maine, where he could retire with the spoils of a quest successfully quested. There were no spoils; there was only the unending churning crawl of doom through his veins, because the dragon was real and it was still out there laying waste to something, somewhere, someone. It couldn’t be killed, only driven back. It needed to eat to stay alive and there wasn’t a damn thing in the world that could stop it from feeding.

Some day it was going to come for him again. It had tasted his blood like it had tasted the blood of so many young boys he couldn’t save or couldn’t entirely save, their amputated limbs festering in the dirt outside camp like so much kimchi.

It wasn’t just that the dragon was still out there, of course, but that he couldn’t stop thinking about the dragon. So many people went about their lives completely unaware it was there, except for in the nebulous, unaffecting sense. Their lives had been upended by the dragon back in the ‘40s, but they had beaten it back, which meant it couldn’t possibly ruin them ever again. Of course it couldn’t. They’d won. Meanwhile, it was devouring whole towns and nobody cared just because they weren’t European towns. Even the people who’d been taken up in its jaws the last time around didn’t care. They refused to call it by what it was and pretended like that meant it wasn’t killing children.

Gandalf begged for his breakfast. Hawkeye got up from the couch to feed it to him.

There were groceries in the fridge and the pantry. Enough for a week and a half, if he cooked his meals right and maybe went out for lunch once or twice. Enough cat food for three weeks. But that was just cheap tuna, so he could always make use of that if something went wrong and he entirely failed to make it to both the bank and the grocer’s in the next ten days.

Of course, it would all last longer if he kept forgetting to eat.

Breakfast. Easy. Pancakes, because those made sense to eat for breakfast and French toast once in a week was enough French toast. He needed to savor the things he’d been craving rather than burning himself out on them all at once, like French toast and real fruit and steak and butter and lobster.

“Have you ever had lobster?” he asked Gandalf while the cat ate, sifting flour mostly into a bowl provided he ignored the white cloud slowly settling over the counter. “I should have asked Dad where he found you. I’ll have to wait until I hear you meow, I’ll be able to tell from the accent whether or not you’re Bostonian.”

Baking powder, sugar, salt. Start the pan heating. Crack egg directly into the dry ingredients. Turn to start butter melting in the pan, although he’d have to pour it back into the batter.

There were skull fragments in his soon-to-be-pancake. No blood, but a worryingly liquid texture beneath the white shards of bone. Cranial fluid seeping from a wound hidden beneath. There was no instrument tray within reach, no nurse to call, just Hawkeye in a derelict operating room with a head wound presented to him in a metal mixing bowl.

His heart was pounding out a samba in his throat. “Okay,” Hawkeye murmured as he grabbed a paring knife from the block. It was the best he could do on short notice. He couldn’t freeze, couldn’t flag down a nurse with properly sterile instruments when there was nobody who would even hear him if he shouted. He couldn’t afford to freeze, not if he wanted the kid to make it out alive. “I’ve operated without gloves before. It’s fine. Just touch a brain and get out of there before I contaminate anything, right? Boy, you never know you need a neurosurgeon until he’s transferred to Tokyo.”

Sleeves rolled up. Sink and soap next to him, so wash his hands and the knife—not a proper scrub, but the best he could do because there wasn’t enough time. There was never enough time, when it came down to it. You triaged as best you could and some boys still died, because there were always boys dying and even though he tried every single day he couldn’t stop all of it.

Slowly, carefully, don’t disturb anything, reach into the gooey mass and extract the fragment, cranial fluid smearing over the tip of the knife and slowly dribbling back down into the bowl.

Something nudged against Hawkeye’s ankles.

He was standing in an unfamiliar kitchen with bile in his throat, a pounding heart, and eggshell on the end of a knife.

He washed the knife, then his hands, surgeon steady, until there wasn’t a trace of egg white left unless it was in the bowl. Butter and milk added to the dry ingredients. Whisk. Pancake on the hot pan.

“I wonder if the first one always coming out funny applies to other things,” Hawkeye said to Gandalf. “Loves, children, jobs, stitches, letters, gin stills, patients. Although maybe that last one was just Frank’s problem. His first patient of the day always came out a little funny, but then again, so did his last patient. And I’ve got plenty of proof that first-born children come out a little funny, just look at me and Beej. He was probably a first-born child, but I wouldn’t know because he thinks it’s funny not to tell me anything, so he never tells me anything. Told me anything. I guess I don’t expect him to tell me anything at all now that he has to write a letter to do it.”

Flip the pancake. Underdone. That was fine, it wouldn’t matter. He could always flip it back over. “He tried not to say goodbye, you know. Went to Guam and didn’t even leave me a note, just a conversation where he reminded me that I shouldn’t get anywhere near him until Erin’s old enough to defend herself. That’s good, you know, that’s great. That’s a great idea. I wouldn’t want to hurt her, but I wouldn’t want to hurt anybody and I still manage to do it. I must have done something to him if he didn’t want to leave a note. I’d like to know what it was, but I’ve got a better chance of running into Trapper and making him tell me than I do with Beej. And then I did something to him all over again, right? He felt like he had to leave a note. How many hours do you think it took to move all those rocks? He’s a fit guy, I saw him shirtless, but those were big rocks. Not boulders, but I’ll still call him Sisyphus if I ever see him again.”

Flip the pancake back over. Let it cook a little more on the first side, the second perfectly golden-brown and beautiful despite the wobbly border. Move it to a plate, find the syrup that Dad must have either made himself or gotten from one of the neighbors, pour a new pancake and eat it.

“Dad and I used to tap maple trees,” Hawkeye said around the first bite. Soggy in the middle. Probably from flipping it too soon. Gandalf trailed around his ankles, staring up at the gooey mass on his fork. “We’d go out, just the two of us all alone in the woods for a couple of hours with some buckets and some spigots. It was a lot nicer alone in the woods in Maine. Lately when I’ve been alone in the woods it’s because my Jeep broke down. No wood elves in either place, though, just Koreans. In Korea, not Maine. Although I guess there were some Koreans in Maine for a little while, but Ho-Jon found his own room and board, so it’s just my dad again.”

Pancake, in mouth. Then another, because he needed to make up for forgetting dinner. Then a third just for fun, telling Gandalf all about winter in Maine. “It’s beautiful. The snow’s perfect until you walk on it, unless a deer gets to it first.” Maybe next time he’d make silver dollar pancakes instead of plate-sized. “That would be fun, wouldn’t it? Silver dollar pancakes? Better syrup coverage when you don’t need to cut pieces off. Plus, nobody’d believe you if you told them you ate a dozen pancakes, which means you have a nice excuse to invite them over for breakfast. You’d have to stay out of the bedroom, mister, I don’t think anyone wants a wizard watching them make love.”

Pancakes eaten, Hawkeye went rifling around in the closet and dresser in the bedroom for something to wear. He’d slept in nothing and dressed in nothing but the navy blue bathrobe he’d bought back in college that was an unfortunate color after his stay in Bedlam in Korea, so he hadn’t yet done any investigating. Everything was laid out exactly the same as it had been in his bedroom back at Dad’s house. Underwear and socks and neckties in the top drawer, undershirts in the next, slacks in the one after that. Everything exactly where it was supposed to be.

Everything. Hawkeye yanked the drawer with the undershirts out of place, set it on the bed, and found the handful of girlie and not-so-girlie mags he’d stashed in the same drawer at Dad’s house before he’d even left high school. The idea of making use of them now was repugnant. Who wanted to jerk off? Who wanted to have sex? Sex was for people who had something to offer.

Back in the drawer they went.

Clothes, on. Every pair of pants he held up looked too big around the waist, so he settled for the one that bunched the least awkwardly under his belt. Maybe he’d go buy suspenders to fix the problem rather than finding an entirely new wardrobe in case he never got back to healthily skinny rather than effectively skeletal. The button downs in the closet weren’t much better, hanging off him like draping a grain sack over a crucifix. Hawkeye briefly considered layering undershirts to fix the problem, but a quick test by opening the window and peeking out of it told him he’d only sweat through them in the August heat.

There were only so many options for hospitals. Boston Mercy, where Hawkeye absolutely would not be submitting himself to an interview. Mass General, where he’d done his residency and fellowship and would inevitably be congratulated and questioned and poked and prodded and harassed by people who had known him before he’d ever had the chance to perform 24/7 meatball surgery.

And Boston General, whose halls John McIntyre had been drafted from.

Hawkeye found a pen and a notebook in the old wooden crate in the closet with his books and a few choice items, exactly where they would have been if he was in his childhood bedroom, and went to get on the bus to Boston General.

The only seat on the bus was at the back. Hawkeye stared out the window as they trundled along the Boston streets, digging his nails into his palm. It hadn’t been that long since the bus, really. Barely more than a month. So much less than that since they’d sent him back to the 4077th. It was so loud. He could barely breathe for the fear they’d hear him, so why was everyone being so loud? Didn’t they know there was a war on? Didn’t they know something terrible was going to happen if they couldn’t be quiet?

He hadn’t meant for it to happen. All he’d done was ask her to keep the baby quiet, and how was he supposed to know that she wouldn’t be able to? He wasn’t a mother. He’d never be a father, at this rate, because he could look at the tall blonde across the aisle from him and not feel a single thing other than a dull ache at the back of his skull when he thought about a couple of other tall blondes. Three years or maybe a decade ago, he would have been tilting his head in just the right way to try to get clocked. There was no familiar tug in his gut to get his hands on anyone and everyone he could, only the memory of how it used to feel.

So he couldn’t have known that she was going to hurt her baby, because he didn’t have his own and he was never, ever going to. Because if he could make someone else hurt their baby, what was stopping him from hurting his own? He had to live with that. He’d never have kids, because that would be for the best. Because he didn’t deserve it. Because he’d only hurt them, and he’d always promised himself he’d be just like his father.

“Hawk, come look at this.”

“I thought you told me to stop looking at your mail.”

“Yeah, well, I’m tellin’ ya, so get your butt over here before I put it in a sling.”

Hawkeye left his letter from his dad on his cot, paused to warm his hands by the stove for just long enough to get a little bit of entertainment out of Trapper tapping his foot in impatience, and finally plopped down hip to hip with him.

“Look at that,” Trapper said, bumping their shoulders together as he held up a picture. Two little blonde girls smiled at him from the photo paper, matching dresses and matching straightened hair and matching strained looks like it had taken years off their lives to make pretty faces for a professional photo. “You ever seen two cuter kids?”

“You aren’t about to throw a fit and hit me again, are you?”

Trapper’s fingers tightened on the photo, near-invisibly creasing the shiny surface. Hawkeye knew him too well; it was the closest thing he’d ever get to an apology for Trap nearly concussing him with a duffle bag. “Why’d I wanna do that?”

“Why’d you do it last time?”

“’Cause you were in my way!”

“I was only in your way because you were thinking with your heart instead of your brain, dummy. Not that there’s much brain in there in the first place.”

“Like you’re so much better. Call you the Cowardly Lion.”

Hawkeye rolled his eyes, snatched away the picture, and was immediately tackled down to the cot. Trapper straddled him, careful to keep his weight on his knees so he didn’t crush anything, and deftly plucked the picture of his girls back out of Hawkeye’s hands. “You tryin’a rile me up?”

“Is it working?”

Trapper glanced at the door, darted in for a kiss, and collapsed next to Hawkeye in a way that nearly knocked them both out of the cot and made the damn rickety thing threaten to collapse. “Be serious for a minute, huh?”

“You’ll have to amputate my funny bone for that, fella.”

Trapper jostled their arms together. “I want you to meet ‘em when we get home.” He held the picture over their heads so they could both see, but it was impossible for Hawkeye to focus on it. Trap’s smile was as beautiful as always, crooked at the corners and bursting with love. He was so good at hiding everything else, but not love. Never love. It poured out of him the same way blood spilled out of a wound, soaking everything in the vicinity and staining it irreparably. Given their present circumstances, it made Hawkeye nervous. Even Frank and Hot Lips couldn’t be oblivious all the time, and Trapper wasn’t good at making eyes only at the appropriate moments.

Trapper turned to face him, smile faltering. “You wanna meet ‘em, right?”

Hawkeye linked their fingers in the complete lack of space between them. “Of course I do.”

The bus jolted hard enough to shake Hawkeye out of his thoughts. What the hell had it jolted on? Hawkeye clenched his fingers around the back of the seat in front of him and caught a flash of tall-and-blonde across the aisle. “Whadda you think, Beej, we hit a Korean national?”

The man didn’t answer.

Neither did anybody else.

“Fine, good. Don’t answer the guy talking out loud to himself on the bus, that’s sensible. I wouldn’t answer a guy talking out loud to himself on the bus, especially not when he thinks he’s talking to someone who isn’t even there.”

People were starting to turn their heads.

Hawkeye barely stopped himself from saying I’m not crazy out loud. That was what crazy people said, and he wasn’t crazy, despite the fact they’d committed him. He’d just had a very long string of off days that were only made worse by 24/7 meatball surgery and an awful lot of people leaving him up a creek without a paddle, or sometimes a swimming hole if they didn’t have access to a creek.

He needed to focus on something else. He needed to stop thinking about the bus, or things like the bus, Billy and Tommy or BJ and Trapper who had both left him and betrayed him, which really made them a whole lot worse than either one of the former.

Hawkeye took out the notebook and pen and tried to wrangle his thoughts into something other than his mouth.

Dear Mr. Tolkien,

Given the fact that you haven’t immediately thrown this letter in the garbage, or maybe the waste bin, because that little blurb on the back of the book said you’re British, I take it you’re open to fan mail. I wouldn’t necessarily call myself a fan, except for the fact that The Hobbit is the first new and good book I’ve read in about three years and been able to get to the ending of. Also, I’ve recently acquired a cat named after one of your characters through no fault of my own.

Seeing as how I’m not a fan, I’m not writing you out of some misplaced idea that you’ll see a young admirer in these pages and take me under your wing, despite the fact that I once asked my dad to help me send a particularly effusive letter to Oscar Wilde. No, I’m writing you because I think we have something in common. A friend of mine A psychiatrist I knew once upon a time used to write letters to Sigmund Freud. Maybe he still does, but I wouldn’t know because that kind of thing isn’t really within the bounds of a professional relationship. More of a thing you tell your friends. Well, more of a thing your friends dig up about you and then you have to explain to them, but those are about the same thing when it comes to friends.

The bell rang. Hawkeye got off the bus, paced in circles at the bus stop until the one that would take him to Boston General came, and found a seat comfortably far away from anything that would remind him of anything else.

See, I was in a war. Little place called Korea, maybe you’ve heard of it? Then again, maybe not, because everyone over here was calling it a police action and the good old U. S. of A. were the ones who were really keen on getting involved just to get one over on the Commies. I served at a place called a MASH unit, where me and only three other guys by the end of it received hundreds of cases per week who all required things like being put through a sieve to take the shrapnel out of them or pulling skull fragments out of their brains so we could send them right back up to the front lines to keep on fighting. That makes a guy go crazy after a while, or at the very least it tends to exacerbate preexisting mania. Especially when you’ve been there from the very beginning and you start to think they’re upping the points every time you get close to going home because of a personal vendetta. Other people got to go home when they went crazy, do you know that? But I guess they needed chief surgeons too much to do anything but drop me right back into the dragon’s maw.

That’s why I’m writing you, you know. Sure, other people probably think it’s a cute story about a little British man who goes on an adventure with what, Russians? Are the dwarves supposed to be Russians? I was born a couple of years after that war ended, and I’ll be the first to admit I spent most of history class daydreaming about painting Betty Atkins’ toenails instead of doing my due diligence. But you write about war with the kind of metaphor that I don’t think you can grasp unless you’ve been there. You’re sent on a journey by someone who tells you they have your best interest at heart even though they have powers entirely beyond your comprehension, you find something there that nobody at home is ever going to believe, and a dragon comes and knocks down peaceful villages all because it’s angry at somebody else. We treated a lot of civilians at my MASH unit. Not as many civilians as soldiers, but I saw a Korean face on my table most shifts. Sometimes a very little Korean face. A friend of mine once tried to adopt We saw children as young as five in our operating room, completely filled with shrapnel. I saw babies die, J. Nobody ever tells you that when they send you off to war.

So I guess I’m writing to ask “how the hell do you deal with it?” I’m not really the type to write a book, but I like to consider myself an optimist when I’m not being a pessimist, and I’m optimistic about doing something with myself that isn’t moldering in my childhood bedroom and never doing anything ever again. Which is where you come in. I’d like to get a head start on being a person again, and you seem like the sort of guy who would have some advice. Or if not, maybe you can point me to another children’s author (or, God forbid, a young adult novelist) who would be of more use.

Also, I’d like to suggest that you include fewer dwarves if you write a sequel, or at the very least give them distinct personalities.

Yours,

Hawkeye Pierce, maladjusted draftee

Hawkeye reread the letter. It was a good letter. A great letter. Maybe he’d even send it. Maybe the guy would actually have something useful to say in response, if he could find an address to send it to. He didn’t exactly expect wherevershire, England to be in the Boston telephone directory he still needed to buy.

Real life was complicated. Things had been consistent at the MASH, even if they were consistently terrible. You saved young boys and fought like hell to save children and rinsed off the blood that had soaked through your scrubs in the too-cold shower when you finally got a break and it was crusted to your skin. You took the critical cases first even when Frank or Charles argued because they weren’t the right color. You buried a little bit of yourself with every piece of a person you had to pull out and put in the biohazard dump outside camp. Hawkeye had known what was in for him at the MASH. They fed him and clothed him and told him where and when and what to do. Sometimes the orders were stupid, but there was a very simple and straightforward solution when that happened: break them. But most of the time? Stop this bleeding, set this bone, cure this infection. He could do that. There wasn’t any choice because there was always more that needed to be done, and he couldn’t, wouldn’t, shouldn’t ever turn his back on anyone who needed help. Not then, not now, not ever.

There was always more that needed to be done here, but it was different. On top of the things that actually needed to be treated by a surgeon of his caliber, he was going to be asked to fix bunions and twisted ankles and migraines, and on top of those pointless tasks, he had to do things like feed himself and purchase phone directories and take the bus between work and the little apartment his dad had found him in the corner of the city specially suited for queers. Maybe even date instead of just offering a nurse a couple glasses of gin and hoping she was in a receptive mood, which had been less and less common as he’d gotten grayer and skinnier and everyone knew he was insane instead of just Trapper and Radar and dear departed Henry. He’d been a lech to Hot Lips and a sympathetic martyr for Margaret Houlihan to turn her nursing smile on. He’d never entirely understood why things had changed. He hadn’t stopped trying to get with her nurses, he’d just started failing more consistently.

Boston General, when he finally escaped the bus, was like something out of a science fiction novel. The floors and walls were actually white instead of depressingly olive drab. You could tell where the dirt began and ended on a white floor. Unless, of course, it got too dirty and ended up Bedlam-cell gray. But there were maintenance workers for that, provided they were paid well and showed up to work. You could clean paint, unlike canvas.

There were signs that pointed to the Chief of Surgery’s office so Hawkeye didn’t have to talk to anyone. “It’ll be easy,” he said on the elevator, turning his notebook over and over and over in his hands. “’Hello, I’m Doctor Benjamin Franklin Pierce, and I’ve spent the last three years saving approximately 97.8 percent of our brave boys in blue who had the fortune to make it to my table. I’d like you to consider me a ready and willing candidate for anything up to and including ‘enthusiastic research subject,’ provided it comes with benefits and pays for my wizard’s tuna.’”

The elevator opened on an army camp in Korea.

Hawkeye stepped out, blinked, and ran his fingers down the canvas green plaster wall as the elevator doors clanked shut behind him. “That’s some sort of miracle,” he said, scuffing his boots in the dirt. “Here I thought I had to go down to get back to Korea.”

“Excuse me, Sir?”

Hawkeye was standing in a waiting room. A very, very green waiting room. The checkered carpet was an unfortunate shade of brown. “I guess it’s good to have dark carpet in a hospital, huh? Someone throws up, you don’t have to work so hard at cleaning it up.”

The receptionist nodded, smile strained and brow furrowed. “Do you have an appointment?”

“No, no. But I’m an eligible bachelor and a very good catch. Is, uh…” A quick scan of the nameplate on the door, “Is Dr. Mills in, could I see him?”

“If you don’t have an appointment–“

“Oh, please, it’s my Christmas wish?”

The receptionist pursed her lips. “It’s not Christmas.”

She clearly thought she was hilarious. Two could play at that game. “Considering Santa forgot about me the two years I was in Korea, I’d argued I’m entitled to a little Christmas in July and/or August.”

She gave Hawkeye a strange look of a different flavor than the sort that was usually leveled at him. He turned his notebook over in his hands and gamely resisted the urge to go stand on one of the chairs so he had an advantage if she came after him.

She picked up the phone. “Name and business?”

“Benjamin Pierce, and I’m offering my services.”

Another strange look. What was she giving him that look for? He wasn’t being any stranger than usual.

He sincerely missed being charmingly strange instead of concerningly strange. He didn’t even know what had changed. “Surgery, uh– I’m a surgeon. I’m qualified to be a surgeon, not that I’m doing surgery right now. A job interview? I’ll fix hernias for tuppence.”

“I’ll see what I can do.”

Hawkeye sat down in one of the chairs, couldn’t stop tapping the heel of his shoe against his thigh when he crossed his legs, and did his best to be patient while he waited. He should have brought a book. There were books back at the apartment, why hadn’t he brought a book?

He needed a resume.

He happened to be holding a notebook.

Benjamin Franklin (call me Hawkeye) Pierce

Chief Surgeon and General MacArthur’s Personal Punching Bag, MASH 4077, Korea, 1950-1953

Thoracic Surgeon, Massachusetts General, 1948-1950 (certified in thoracic and general surgery, by the way)

Did they really need to know where he’d done his fellowship? His residency? Definitely not school, aside from the fact that he’d happened to be top five in his class if not the valedictorian every single graduation from kindergarten onward. He jotted that down, but Androscoggin was a hell of a lot less impressive than Harvard or Dartmouth or Stanford, so who was really going to care about that?

No, there were things that mattered more than that. School was ridiculous, anyway. It was a means to an end.

For character witnesses, please contact Colonel-Doctor Sherman T. Potter, Hannibal, Missouri, or Dr. Charles Emerson Winchester III (I’m sure you know him), as they have been unfortunate and repeated witnesses to my character.

Good. Saddle Potter with the problem of making Hawkeye look like a fine and upstanding member of society if someone needed to check and make sure he was that sort of thing, do a little bit of name-dropping, and everything would turn out hunky-dory. All he had to do was keep himself from looking like a complete and total idiot, which he could usually manage provided nobody was around who needed to be made a fool of, which was usually best accomplished by acting like a fool, himself.

The walls were making him uncomfortable. He could practically taste gin on the back of his tongue. Why wasn’t he drinking? It was the Swamp, and there wasn’t anything to do, so he really was supposed to be drinking.

Where the hell was BJ? He needed to find BJ, because drinking together was significantly more acceptable than drinking alone in just about any circumstance other than the ones where you were trying to drink yourself unconscious instead of only into a stupor, and BJ was the kind of friend who agreed with that assessment, so–

“Excuse me,” a man in a suit said, suddenly standing in front of Hawkeye’s cot.

“Yeah-yeah?”

The man sighed. He was maybe a little younger than Colonel Potter, was wearing the most expensive suit Hawkeye had seen in three years (since Korea, he reminded himself. He wasn’t in Korea,) and had the distinct look about him like he’d rather be golfing. “Miss O’Neill said you’re a combat surgeon.”

“I don’t like those words, combat surgeon. I prefer to describe myself as an unwilling weapons repair technician with a previous certification in thoracic surgery who would really like to be getting back to surgery.”

The man invited Hawkeye into his office. Hawkeye followed him, tore his good-enough resume out of the notebook, and handed it over as he sat in the too-short chair on the guest side of the desk.

The man—Dr. Mills, given they were in his office and the desk had his nameplate on it as well as the door—squinted at it. “The 4077th?”

Hawkeye’s bowels felt like they’d made a permanent move to somewhere in his shoes, but other than that, he was wonderfully numb. It was normal to be asked about his military service when he’d served in the military. “Mm-hmm.”

“Since ‘50?”

There was dirt under his fingernail. That wasn’t professional for someone who was hoping to get to be a surgeon again. It hadn’t even been professional when he was an Army butcher. He scraped it away, wincing, then kept running his nail over the sensitive flesh of his nailbed. “I think you’re trying to ask me a question.”

“You must have known Trapper John–“

“John McIntyre and I worked together, yes.”

Mills’ eyebrows lifted. “If you call him that and he punches you, you don’t get worker’s comp.”

The numbness was starting to leave. It was slowly replacing itself with a buzzing that started in Hawkeye’s brain and threatened to make his skull cave in. Trapper was here. Trapper still called himself Trapper after all the times he’d said he was going to go home and go right back to being John McIntyre and leave everything that was Trapper behind (“except you, of course. You’re comin’ home with me, honey”), and he hadn’t written? Hadn’t done anything. Not even sent a couple of dirty pictures for Margaret like he’d always joked about. He’d come home, and he was apparently punching or threatening to punch people for calling him John, and he hadn’t written.

Hawkeye really needed to stop falling in love with blondes who didn’t have anything even vaguely similar to his qualifications for what made a long-term relationship work. Either they expected too much from him and wanted him to pay more attention to them than the real, important work he did saving people’s lives, or they understood that his work was always going to have the top priority but they were cheating on their wives while they were several thousand miles away from them and promptly went right back to their happy, domestic lives with the exception of punching or maybe-punching people who called them John.

“He’s a good surgeon,” Hawkeye said over the buzzing in his head. “Great surgeon, fantastic surgeon. I’m sure he’d say the same about me if you asked him, which you don’t need to do because I provided you with better references. In fact, I think if you hire me, you should put us on entirely separate shifts so you don’t waste the time of two really wonderful surgeons by having them work on all the same emergency patients.”

The man kept staring at him.

Hawkeye tried to smile. He was pretty sure it came across like a prey animal trying to appease a wolf.

He walked out of the office twenty minutes later after half a dozen questions about what he’d do in various emergency situations with a probationary position and the promise that someone would call him in the next few days to give him his initial schedule. Who needed to worry? Getting a job was easy. All you had to do was look polite and insist you knew things and not give away that you were completely insane with the certificate to prove it.

Hawkeye walked past the locker room when he left.

What would a little bit of snooping hurt?

In a sea of last names, printed in familiar, massive block letters in permanent marker: TRAPPER.

Hawkeye opened the locker.

On the shelf any sane man would put his hat, there was a plush rabbit wrapped in dog tags that read John F. X. McIntyre.

Hawkeye closed the locker.

At least he wasn’t the only one who’d gone crazy.

Maybe he’d mail that letter.

Chapter Text

The war being over didn’t make a fuck-ton of difference in Trapper’s day-to-day life, but it had been a nice thing to think about when he saw the headline in the morning paper, and it had been a nice thing to think about in the couple of weeks since. There was a good chance that at least a few of the people he’d known over there hadn’t kicked the bucket. Hopefully Radar was back in Iowa milking cows and shearing sheep, wandering naked through the corn or whatever. He hoped Klinger had finally realized how skilled he really was and was coming back to get some money from an uncle or two so he could open up a boutique. Hot Lips Houlihan, despite Trapper’s hopes that maybe she’d get her head out of her star-spangled ass some day, was probably headed for some stateside hospital where she could find another general to take advantage of her.

He didn’t plan on writing any of them to find out. Writing someone he cared about had killed the guy, after all. For all he knew, Radar and Klinger and Hot Lips were doing exactly the things he expected of them, and he wanted to keep it that way.

Try as he might, he couldn’t completely ignore the war. For the first time in almost two years, he stopped at a liquor store, bought a bottle of cheap gin and some cranberry juice, and went out to Castle Island to sit on the dock and pour out the liquor for Henry and Hawkeye, sipping on fruit juice with his legs dangling over the sea and John the Rabbit tucked between his thighs. Wherever those two bastards were now, they were gonna want a stiff drink when they heard the war was over. Trapper knew he could use one, but the cranberry juice would have to be good enough.

Things hadn’t been so bad for Trapper, for the most part. They were sure as hell better than they’d been for anyone who was still in Korea. He’d kept himself clean, except for the cigars. He spent every other weekend with his girls, sometimes a week with them when he’d worked too many weekends in a row and could swing some shifts during the school day from Art, and Louise seemed to be doing well enough without him. She and her boyfriend had started talking about getting married, or at least that was what she told Trapper the last time she picked up the girls. Trapper didn’t think he was jealous of that. Sure, it stung a little to see her with someone who cared about her for more than one night when that was all he was ever gonna get again, but the girls deserved to have one happy couple in their lives and he sure as hell wasn’t headed for that. He took a lot of care in making sure Kathy and Becky never met any of his one-night stands, no matter which flavor they came in.

‘Cause cruising wasn’t that hard, when it came down to it. Scollay Square was kind of out of the way, but once Trapper made it to one of the bars Vernon had showed him to it was damn easy to pick someone up, same as it was with a woman. The guys he could pull didn’t want anything a woman didn’t want. He complimented them, showed off a big, crooked smile, made a couple of references to what he was packing, and they were off to the races. Trapper was never going to catch up with the number of women he’d gotten with, particularly not when he was still bagging nurses, but these days he was feeling the rough drag of stubble under his lips just as often as he came away with makeup smeared into his fingerprints. Sometimes both from the same guy, which was always cute. He liked those guys a lot, and they sure as hell seemed to latch onto him, even though sometimes he fantasized about getting one of the other strong fellas to take him out back like they did with the skinny fuckers who reminded him of Hawkeye.

He thought about Klinger, sometimes, when he fucked a guy in eyeliner and women’s panties. He woulda taken Klinger, if Klinger’d had any interest, but he’d been as heterosexual as they came except for the dresses and the makeup.

Trapper had been too busy with Hawkeye then, anyway.

All in all, life was fine. He got his girls over often enough, he saved a dozen people’s lives every week and made improvements to a dozen more, and the longest he’d gone without getting any in about a year was ten days. He had dinner with Vernon once a month, just as friends, and poker with some of the other surgeons just as often. He got as much time alone as he wanted. He couldn’t think of better metrics for success.

So that was it. Work, the girls, find a piece of tail to chase. Think about Hawkeye at least once a day when he saw the photo in his wallet or moved the rabbit between his bed and his briefcase and his work locker. Do it all over again week after week with a slightly different work schedule, familiar and comfortable-enough.

Of course, everything being mostly fine meant the floor really dropped out from under him in early August when he stopped by the doctors’ lounge to take a look at the thoracic department schedule for the week.

McIntyre, J. F. X.

Michaels, Vernon L.

Pierce, Benjamin F.

Trapper stared at the name and tried to remember how to breathe. Diaphragm contracts, lungs inflate, air rushes into the lungs. Oxygen absorbs and goes to the brain so maybe he could manage to stop hallucinating just because the war was over and his neurons had all been firing on overdrive for the past couple of weeks.

He looked away.

He looked back.

The name was still there: Pierce, Benjamin F.

The ghost wasn’t scheduled for any of the same shifts as Trapper. Whoever had played the sick fucking prank had been clever about it. He wouldn’t see Pierce, Benjamin F. at all if he just showed up for his shifts on time and didn’t go more than an hour overtime. Pierce, Benjamin F. might as well have been Johnathan Tuttle. He was nothing more than a filler on the schedule, for all Trapper knew. A filing error that had grown into something more. Hawk hadn’t worked here before the war, but he’d worked at Mass Gen. He’d… crept over from their employee records, somehow, when someone exchanged some patient files.

Try as he might, Trapper couldn’t convince himself this was anything other than malicious. Someone who knew him knew the war was over, knew about Hawkeye, and had decided he needed to learn how to take a joke.

Vernon tapped his elbow to Trapper’s as he sipped his coffee and squinted at the schedule. “Don’t like what you see?”

Trapper pushed up his glasses and turned to him, forcing a smile. “You think this is a fuckin’ joke?”

“Mmm, Art shaft you on time with your kids again?”

Trapper set his finger on the paper, right next to Pierce, Benjamin F. “Nah, Vern. I wanna know why you think this is funny.”

Vernon gave a hell of a side eye. “Trap. I can honestly say that I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

If Trapper didn’t do something to let out the anger at all of it—Hawkeye, the fact that Hawkeye was on the schedule, the fact that he was dead in the first place—he was going to start drowning. He could taste bile hot on the back of his tongue, dark and bitter and furious. He shouldn’t even try to hold it in.

The temptation to grab Vern by the collar to slam him against the wall curled his fingers. Scare the shit out of him a little and he’d admit it, right? He’d cop to being a bastard, apologize, and they’d be able to move on from the whole issue. Everyone did shitty things sometimes; that was the nature of friendships. Trapper had done his share of shitty things he was never going to get to make up for, like whacking Hawk over the head with a duffle bag or not leaving a note so he died hating him.

Trapper stalked to the kitchenette and grabbed an empty mug. “Vern, answer me.”

“I don’t–“

Trapper whipped the mug into the wall. It didn’t shatter like a glass, only clunked lamely against the drywall and tumbled to the linoleum with a thwack.

He stared at it for a moment.

He kicked it as hard as he could.

The damn thing refused to break. It rolled into the foot of the couch on the other side of the room and sat there mocking him, handle suspiciously still intact.

Vernon joined him in the kitchenette and watched him carefully while he drank his coffee. “Are you finished?”

Trapper stared at the mug-shaped dent in the drywall and waited to feel something other than anger. When all that came was a burning in his chest and a vaguely sick feeling: “No.”

“You’re sure?”

He slid down the cabinets, took off his glasses, and thunked his head back hard enough to hurt. “You know somethin’?” He scrubbed his hands down his face, the metal temple tip of his glasses dragging a long, angry line down his cheek. “I’m gonna hurt whoever put his name on the schedule.”

Vernon leaned against the wall next to the dent. “Benjamin?”

“Hawkeye.”

“Oh.”

This wasn’t the kind of reaction he ought to be getting out of Vernon for figuring out what he’d done. All he had was a man staring at him, soft pity long-gone and hardened into insistent and inarguable support.

Vernon wouldn’t have done this.

Knowing that didn’t stop the anger in Trapper’s throat that curled his lips like a lemon wedge had been pressed against them. “You wanna tell me why his name’s on the schedule when you’re the only guy who knows about him?”

Vernon shrugged. “Maybe it’s a different Benjamin Pierce.”

Trapper choked on a laugh and wrapped his arms around his stomach, trying to calm or at least distract from the awful feeling like he was about to hurl. He could really use John the Rabbit or his wallet right about now, both of which he’d left down in his locker—something to squeeze or the picture of him and Hawk at poker night that was already worn from how often he slipped it out to look at it.

Some day he’d die and his girls would find that picture in his wallet, tucked away behind old school photos or maybe wedding pictures and crinkled at the corners. Thirty or fifty years down the line, he was certain he’d still be clinging to a man who had been his friend for less than a year and a half and his lover for barely more than half of that. They’d know exactly how long he had Hawk; they knew how long he’d been away, after all. They’d be able to guess what Hawk had meant to him.

Vernon sat down against the other wall, hissing at the crick in his back he so often complained about. “Talk to me.”

“I think you’re wrong.”

“How so?”

Trapper wiped his glasses on the inside of his suit jacket and gestured at the offending schedule pinned to the corkboard. “All due respect, Vern, but I kinda doubt there are two assholes out there who would name their kid ‘Benjamin Franklin Pierce.’”

Vern snorted. “I see why he went by Hawkeye.”

“Yeah. I would, too.”

As much as he wanted to, he couldn’t sit around being pathetic forever. Trapper dragged himself to his feet, fetched the kicked mug, and set it on the rack to dry. He couldn’t exactly fix the dent in the drywall on his own, or even with only Vern’s help, but Vern wouldn’t narc on him and even if everyone figured it was probably his fault, who could prove it? Some maintenance worker would patch it up and he wouldn’t have to keep worrying about it.

Everything was going to be alright. He was headed home for the day. He’d have the chance to cook dinner, calm down a bit, read a book or something.

Then again… he had a day off tomorrow. The first day Pierce, Benjamin F. was set to work. Maybe late in the evening tonight he’d go up to Scollay Square—the Half Dollar or something, somewhere he’d had success before—and find some guy to take his mind off things. It was never hard to find a guy who wanted him, especially when he paid for the drinks. He’d wake up in the morning and maybe eat breakfast with the guy, treat him to something nice on a surgeon’s salary. He’d keep busy. When he came back for his next shift on Wednesday, someone would have noticed the ghost and taken the name off the schedule. If it was still there, he’d go down to the administrative offices and fix the goddamn problem himself.

If he stayed home, he wouldn’t be able to focus on a single thing all day. It would be him, all alone in the South Boston row house that felt so empty without the kids he’d been damn firm about needing plenty of space for, and he wouldn’t be able to take his mind off the fact that Boston and Maine weren’t so far apart. If Hawkeye wasn’t dead, if he wanted to get right back to work when he came home, he’d come to Boston. Maybe New York if he wanted to get a little further from home, but Hawk had always talked about Crabapple Cove with the kind of reverence most people only had for holy sites, so he wouldn’t end up more than a day’s train ride away from the place. New York was probably out of the running. Portland and Portsmouth might have been closer to Crabapple Cove, if Trapper remembered where Hawk had shown it to him on a map right, but they didn’t have the kinds of things Hawkeye needed: culture, distraction, good food, and a thriving boy bar scene.

Trapper went home, made baked chicken, and for the first time in a year and a half settled in on the couch with the velveteen rabbit cradled to his chest and waited to fall asleep to the familiar rattle of television Westerns so he didn’t have to think.

He needed to remember the facts.

One: Hawkeye Pierce was dead. He’d died in mid-October, 1951, and he wasn’t coming back. Even if he did manage to claw his way out of the grave, he wouldn’t have come back right. Trapper knew that from every time he’d ever seen him in a drug-addled haze or lurking in his dreams. The angry, hungry man with a hole in his head wasn’t Hawkeye anymore, wherever it was he’d ended up, just like Trapper had stopped being John a damn long time ago.

Two: Hawkeye had died hating him for not leaving much of anything behind to prove they were more than just a fling. He’d never said I love you. He’d never told Hawk he was getting divorced. He’d done as best he could, but fucking him and holding him close when he was scared wasn’t enough for a relationship back in the real world and Trapper knew it. He couldn’t have promised anything while they were still there, not when he was still trying to leave everything behind.

He hadn’t been able to leave any of it behind. So he’d written a letter that said I love you and the universe had killed Hawk before it could get to him.

He needed to remember the facts.

Three: considering how long it had taken to get anything done through Army channels, whether that was an incubator or new boots or just stopping them from getting shelled with their own artillery, Hawkeye couldn’t have possibly made it back to Boston already if he’d risen from the dead. He’d have to fill out forms for that, and probably pay the Army necromancer out of his own pocket.

None of the facts were reassuring enough to make it easy to fall asleep. The Westerns rolled into game shows, then into the test pattern, so Trapper turned off the TV and opened the front window curtains so he could watch moonlight glint off the beginnings of a summer storm.

The rain had been cruel in Korea. Storm clouds usually brought wounded, either because one side decided to use lightning and rainfall as cover for a push or because landmines came loose from their moorings and slid into the road. There was no room inside the hospital for triage, so they were forced to let rainwater and mud soak into chest wounds even as they tucked patients under the ambulances and did everything they could to make sure nobody drove off without checking they weren’t about to crush a skull like a beef-filled watermelon with the snarl of the engine.

Trapper could still remember one kid, barely twenty, who’d taken grenade shrapnel to the stomach and tumbled down an embankment into a rain-filled ditch. Only didn’t drown because he’d landed face-up. When his buddies finally got to him twenty minutes later, yanked him out so he could get sent to the MASH, it was already too late for him. Trapper pulled out the shrapnel. Amputated a couple of frozen fingers that were only going to go necrotic. Debrided every square centimeter of the wounds and stitched him closed himself. Loaded him full of so much penicillin it was a wonder he didn’t start producing spores. None of it prevented the infection that ravaged his body until his immune system turned his organs medium-well.

There were moments when the rain hadn’t been bad. Days where it sprinkled just like it was now, trickling down gutters to pool starlight on the pavement, gentle and warm rather than fierce and freezing. A few times, Hawkeye had managed to prod Frank into heading over to Hot Lips’ with just the right words about fireside romance. They’d waited half an hour to make sure he wasn’t getting kicked out before huddling together in one cot to listen to the rain pattering on the canvas while Hawkeye told stories about camping in better days.

Trapper had never been camping for pleasure. He supposed he’d never get the chance. The only way he ever would have gone after spending more than a year in a tent in Korea was if Hawk wanted to pitch somewhere by the ocean in Maine. They would have brought a cooler full of something other than beer and sat hip-to-hip on a cliffside, fishing lines dangling in the roiling surf below as their jokes spiraled through the air, going nowhere except the place they were. Maybe they would have caught something, maybe they wouldn’t have, but they would have brought hot dogs just in case. Trapper would have valiantly tried to light the campfire before giving up and letting Hawkeye take over, his Maine-made stubbornness in the face of adverse fire-lighting conditions always better than Trapper’s, who had only ever lit fireplaces and the camp stove in the Swamp. They would have stayed up far too late, lying on a blanket beneath the stars, fingers tangled together as Hawkeye pointed out constellations with both their hands. When Hawkeye started to drift off, Trapper would have put out the fire, carried him into the tent, and fallen asleep with his ear pressed to his chest to listen to the thrumming pulse of his heart.

Trapper woke with a hell of a crick in his back from the couch, forced himself up, and made breakfast while he stared at but didn’t read the paper. He’d left his glasses on the end table, anyway.

Right about now, Pierce, Benjamin F. was starting his first shift at Boston General. If he was real, of course. Trapper watched the blurred crackle of bacon grease and hoped that someone had shown up to work, even if it wasn’t the man on the schedule. It was good they had another thoracic surgeon, if he happened to be real; he and Vern and a guy named Byrd he’d never met had been the only competent ones in the department for far too long. It seemed to Trapper that prospective surgeons were either heading into other specialties—oncology or the like—or getting snapped up by the better funded Boston Mercy or Mass Gen. It was lucky Pierce, Benjamin F. had ended up on staff. He could have had a better salary at any other major hospital in Boston if he was even a half-decent surgeon. Trapper didn’t know why he stuck around at Boston General, if he was honest with himself, other than out of some misplaced sense of loyalty to the institution that used to employ John.

Who was giving the guy a tour, if he existed? It probably wasn’t all that different from wherever he’d worked before, but a bad introduction to a work environment could give a guy the impression that everyone around was as bad as the man giving the tour. Trapper had certainly gotten that impression from Frank Burns. It had taken Hawkeye showing up and pestering the shit out of him 24/7 before the mood had lightened enough that Trapper was willing to give a shot to Henry and Ollie and Ugly John.

Trapper didn’t want someone he had to work with to end up with a bad impression, whoever he was and if he was real. He didn’t have anything to do today other than think about Hawkeye, anyway. Maybe meeting some other Pierce, Benjamin F. would get him out of his head. And if the guy turned out not to be real, Trapper could put a boot through someone’s skull.

Good impressions weren’t exactly his forte, but he could do his best.

He ate his breakfast, put the waistcoat he’d gotten in Korea that went with that ridiculous fucking pinstripe suit on under his usual brown number, and barely remembered to grab his glasses on the way out the door.

Everything was going to be fine. He’d avoid running into any pedestrians, he’d get to the hospital, and he’d prove to himself that Hawkeye Pierce was dead and buried. He’d be able to stop the feeling like he was going to cry or vomit that was rising in him just like the old ache for a drink. He’d be able to get back to his usual routine of sleeping somewhere other than the couch, whether that was in his own bed or a pretty nurse’s or that of a man he’d picked up at the Half Dollar.

It was a little after eleven when he made it to Boston General. He tapped along with the radio for three songs until he managed to make himself get out of the car. The wood panels were filthy. Christ, how had he let it get that bad? The fuck kind of surgeon was he if he couldn’t keep his own shit clean?

He hadn’t felt this afraid, so bad it was like his stomach was staging an escape plan, since the last time he heard a bomber whiz by with only the canvas roof of the Swamp as cover. Sweat from more than the August heat had curdled on his brow and made his glasses slide insistently down his nose as he jerked himself away from the car and went inside.

There wasn’t anything to be afraid of. So someone with Hawkeye’s name was on the schedule. It was a prank or ill fortune and that was all.

He’d fucked the girl working the nurses’ desk. Violet or Viola, something like that. She’d been a chicken about taking him and he hadn’t made a second pass. “Hey, honey, you seen a new guy in thoracics today?”

Violet-or-Viola barely looked up from the pen she was chewing on while she did the crossword. “He’s on break.”

“You know where?”

She finally looked up, eyes narrowed and not even making it all the way to his face, just staring at his waistcoat. “How am I supposed to know?”

Trapper ignored her snickering as he turned to leave. There weren’t that many places a guy would go for his lunch break. Trapper checked the doctors’ lounge and found nothing except the dent in the wall, took a sweep through the similarly empty locker room, and went to the cafeteria.

All he had to do was look for a new guy, like the gaunt, slouched, salt-and-pepper haired gangly fucker at a table where he could sit with his back to the wall wearing a suit fitted for someone who hadn’t spent the last three years starving half to death in an Army camp in Korea.

There were spots in the corners of his vision. Trapper checked his pulse on his wrist to make sure he wasn’t dying, found it appropriately fast for the way something in his chest was trying to tear itself free, and watched Hawkeye Pierce slowly pick apart a pre-made sandwich to sniff every ingredient before he put it back together.

The facts:

One: the Army had told Trapper that Benjamin Franklin Pierce died in Korea, but they hadn’t told him how, and he’d certainly never followed up.

Two: Hawkeye had every right to be pissed at him for never following up.

Three: they’d probably kept him there the whole damn time, because dead men didn’t accumulate points, and Trapper would bet his bottom dollar they stopped them right away and took a hell of a lot of pestering to start them again.

And four: Hawkeye was alive, sitting across the room, and doing exactly what Trapper had always imagined him doing back in the real world: still sniffing food but devouring a book like there was nothing better in the universe.

What if this wasn’t real? The Hawkeye with a hole in his head Trapper kept seeing in his dreams had felt so real when he was standing across from him in the bathroom telling him to kill himself.

He’d never tried, but he was certain he wouldn’t have been able to touch that Hawkeye if he had.

Someone shoved him from behind. Trapper took the cue, got into the lunch line just to get out of the way, and desperately tried to figure out what the hell he could say that wouldn’t send Hawkeye running. He’d never been good with his words. Hell, that was why he hadn’t left a note. It was exhilarating to try to keep up with the way Hawkeye ran a conversation, but it relied entirely on give and take. Trapper set up jokes and Hawk hit the punchlines; he wasn’t nearly so funny or fast on his own. He couldn’t match the way they spoke in writing and he probably wouldn’t be able to do it now, not when he was so out of practice and Hawk probably hadn’t been back from Korea for more than a couple of weeks, if that. He sure as hell hadn’t been in a joking mood for a long time when he came back to Boston.

All he had to do was say something. He could start slow. He’d ease into “the Army told me you were dead and there’s been nobody who mattered since you.”

Trapper took the turkey sandwich he’d managed to buy while lost in his thoughts, crossed the room before he could think better of it, and grabbed the back of the chair across from Hawkeye so tightly it made his fingers burn. “This seat taken?”

Hawkeye’s gaze caught on the ridiculous fucking vest, then his glasses, then slammed back to the book. “By all means.”

Trapper sat down. He reached his legs out under the table to bump their feet together, ready to tangle his ankles with Hawkeye’s gray-suited legs like always when they sat across from each other instead of beside, but Hawk pulled away before he could do more than graze.

Hawkeye was here. He was real. Tangible. If Trapper wanted, and if Hawkeye wouldn’t give him another look like the one he’d just given him—like Trapper was covered in something unpalatable—he could reach across the Formica expanse between them to hold his hand.

Hawkeye was studiously ignoring him, eyes flicking back and forth over the same section of text again and again.

It hadn’t been like this when they met. Hawkeye had talked and talked and talked until Trapper finally joked back just to maybe earn a few seconds of quiet and they’d been inseparable until they weren’t. He used to be able to read Hawkeye’s moods like the newspaper. Sure, “the Army” was usually the answer to why he was angry or miserable or pent-up, but when that wasn’t it, Trapper could always tell why.

He’d also never been the one who had to start the conversations, but Hawkeye seemed to be pushing him to change that.

What if he scared him off?

“When’d you–“

“If you say one word about Korea, this conversation is over,” Hawkeye said, not even looking up from his book.

Trapper mentally scratched “they told me you were dead” off the list of possible conversation topics. It was an excuse and that was all, anyway. He could have called Radar or written Klinger or Margaret, maybe even Frank, and they would told him Hawk was still alive. He wouldn’t have wasted two years without the man he cared for most if he hadn’t been a coward.

“The hell are we s’posed to talk about then?”

Hawkeye finally looked him in the eyes, took a long sip from his coffee, and leaned back to feign nonchalance that he couldn’t possibly believe he was successfully feigning when his foot wouldn’t stop jiggling. “You tell me. Cute glasses.”

Trapper forced aside every single problem ahead of him and let the compliment soak through his skin until he was smiling the best he had in months. “Thanks, Hawk.”

“You’re welcome, John.”

He wasn’t as good at pushing things aside as he used to be. Trapper dug his nails into his palm and waited for the tide of anger to go back out. This mood of Hawk’s, he still recognized. It had carved a wildfire blaze through generals and Franks and assholes with guns who thought they knew better than Hawkeye Pierce. He was testing the waters. If he didn’t get a reaction, or didn’t get the reaction he was charging for, he’d up the ante.

Every conversation with Hawkeye was a game that was played entirely by his rules. Those rules happened to include a place for Trapper to improvise, to add his own qualifiers, but that was only because Hawkeye liked him. He’d hold true to what he said: the conversation would be over if Trapper mentioned Korea.

He was being set up to lose. He could taste it.

“You never called me that,” Trapper said.

Hawkeye shrugged, picked up the purposeless fork on his tray, and started twirling it in his fingers. “People call you something else?”

A new rule: Hawkeye was going to act like they’d never met before this moment. Maybe Trapper deserved that. Or maybe he didn’t, but he was sure as hell going to do what he’d always done and play by the rules of Hawk’s little game. It was how you operated around him. The people who didn’t, like Frank or Hot Lips or sometimes Henry, always lost.

Trapper turned on the smile for meeting new people. “You know, I get the feelin’ I forgot to introduce myself.” He shuffled up in his chair, held his hand out for a handshake, and waited for Hawkeye to hit him with the kind of limp-wristed bullshit he always graced people with. “John McIntyre. Y’can call me Trapper; everyone else does.”

“Hell of a nickname,” Hawkeye said, shaking his hand like it was a dead fish. His skin was so warm, scalpel calluses thick and misshapen from endless hours in a Korean operating room. It took every ounce of Trapper’s will not to keep him from pulling away. “Wanna tell me where you got it?”

“Ah, college, you know how it is. Dropped it for a while, but the best friend I ever had never called me anything else, so it kinda stuck.” Playing by the rules of the game. There had to be ways to sneak in the information he needed Hawkeye to know. “’Specially once the ex-wife was outta the picture, ‘cause she was the one who really hated it.”

Hawkeye didn’t react. Trapper was going to hurt his face straining to keep the smile going. He had to play the game. Hawkeye wanted him to earn his way back into friendly conversation or even a touch on the shoulder and he was damn well going to succeed.

Hawk took another sip of his coffee. “You must talk to this friend of yours a lot.”

Bastard. “We had a bit of a falling out.” Trapper picked at the bread of his untouched sandwich, nails digging hard into his other palm to keep him focused. It had been such a mistake not to write or call anyone, but how could he have? He’d killed Hawkeye with the letter he wrote. He would have killed them, too.

Every reason he came up with was nothing more than an excuse. “I’d give just about anything to get to know him again, though.”

Hawkeye’s foot was tapping so hard he was going to get a workout. “Have you told him that?”

“I’m tryin’ to, Hawk.”

“An apology would be a good start.”

“Ain’t this an apology?”

Hawkeye hummed, tilting his head from side to side and gesturing with his coffee mug hard enough Trapper was worried liquid would slop over the side. “I’m pretty sure apologies involve the words ‘I’m sorry.’ And then a reasonable explanation for your behavior. And then penance, but I don’t think any number of Hail Marys are going to improve your case. That’s what you get for being ex-Catholic, you know, you have to actually work for forgiveness like Martin Luther wanted you to.”

Trapper licked his lips. He could feel success slipping farther and farther away from him. “But you’re still gonna leave if I talk about Korea?”

The fire in Hawkeye was so different than it used to be. It was jagged rather than crooked, a butcher knife instead of a scalpel. “You’re on thin ice even mentioning it.”

“Then how am I s’posed to–“

“Figure it out,” Hawkeye snapped.

Deep breath. Trapper waited for the anger to fade back into a dull buzz. “You get that you’re being unfair, right?”

Hawkeye smiled, but it wasn’t anything Trapper recognized. It was hard and cold and reminded him of the way Frank had looked at them when they finally got in trouble for something they deserved to get in trouble for.

The war had changed all of them. John had died in Korea and maybe Hawkeye Pierce—the theatrical manic with a heart of gold Trapper had fallen head-over-heels in love with—had too.

Hawkeye leaned in. “I’m entitled to unfair,” he hissed. “Do you think it was fair that you left me? Do you think anything that happened after you left was fair? Oh, the official numbers aren’t out yet, and maybe they never will be, but do you know how many innocent people died because we put the guts back in soldiers so they could go on shooting? How many children died? How many are orphans? Go ahead, tell me I don’t deserve a little bit of unfairness.”

Trapper couldn’t stop his voice from cracking. “I think you deserve everything you want.”

He could see Hawkeye reaching the edge of his patience, jaw tight and eyes blazing. He was going to lose. Hawkeye was going to leave if he didn't apologize. He was going to leave if he mentioned Korea. There was no way to abide by both the rules. They’d chalk down another win for Hawkeye Pierce and his silver tongue and Hawk could go right back to hating Trapper like he had for the past couple of years.

How many times had Trapper saved Hawkeye from himself? This was no different. Hawk was trying to sink into his misery and it was up to Trapper to extend a hand and yank him out.

After all this time and all the anger soaked into Hawkeye’s bones, maybe he’d still leave room for Trapper to play.

He had to test the waters.

“Who gave you a tour this morning?”

Something flickered through Hawk’s eyes, there and gone too fast to parse.

Against all odds, the tension ran out of him, recollecting in his fluttering foot. “Some psych who tried to bum a cigarette off of me.”

“Sandler?”

“Mm.”

Trapper reached out, bumped his knuckles against Hawkeye’s shoulder before he could jerk away, and forced the smile to come back. “Nah, I bet he didn’t even show you where the best supply closets are. C’mon, honey. Ol’ Trapper’s gonna take you under his wing.”

Hawkeye raised an eyebrow. “Just like Korea?”

Trapper hissed a breath through his teeth. “I wouldn’t say that. Not if I wanted you to come somewhere a little more private with me.”

For a moment, he doubted it was going to work. They might have still had rules, but they were sharper rules than they used to be. The fierce, angry side of them had never been turned on Trapper before, only the jokes that spiraled higher and higher until they were rocking each other with their laughter. Generals never won. They always got their incubator.

Hawkeye tilted his head, stuffed his half-eaten sandwich in the pocket of his lab coat as he put it on, and tapped his fork against his tray. “Only a tour, and if you touch me I’ll scream.”

“Hoo. Gonna be tough. You’re quite the looker.”

Trapper still recognized self-consciousness on Hawkeye’s face. Maybe Hawk was skinnier than was any kind of healthy, but he was a novelty in clothes made for humans instead of toy soldiers. He was cute as hell with his hair more salt than pepper. If Hawk was willing to give him this grace, let him bring his own rules to the table, maybe there was still a chance to touch him.

The last couple of years, Trapper had only been surviving.

He had a new goal: trace every new wrinkle on Hawkeye’s face until he’d memorized them like he used to know every bump of every rib.

Hawkeye jerked his head, turned to leave, and made Trapper scramble to catch up.

Chapter Text

September, 1950

John figured he’d give it six months before he killed himself. That was a reasonable waiting period. He’d wanted to do it ever since the first moment he set foot on Korean soil—combat boots sinking half an inch into the mud runway, storm clouds overhead threatening what looked like yet another downpour as John tucked himself further into his parka, a kid named Walter who couldn’t have been more than twenty (and even that was a stretch) waiting to drive him to the butchers’ shop he’d been assigned to—but he had his girls to think about, nestled safely into an 8x10 frame in his duffle bag. He had plans to put the picture somewhere he’d see it every single night. He’d remember the promise he made, that way: no matter how bad it got, the girls came first.

Standing in front of a dingy operating table twelve hours later, only a flickering bulb lighting the mirror ball sparkle of shrapnel soaking a young boy’s intestines, John decided that he was earning the right to make some adjustments to that promise. The girls came first, sure, but he had some leeway when Hell had finally caught up with how he’d left the Church. He wouldn’t make it more than six months anyway, so why not set that as his goal? He’d get out at the end of it, one way or another. He just had to make it six months of Major Burns dropping instruments just so he could blame it on his nurse or the Koreans. Six months of Lieutenant Colonel Henry Blake’s incompetence in just about everything, including the ability to dress himself, except that he could resect a bowel in less time than it would take to skin a cat. Six months of fellow-Captain Spalding strumming away at that goddamn guitar all hours of the night in the next tent over.

Running into Oliver Jones trapped in the same nightmare was a breath of fresh air, or at least a single huff of ether. It dulled the dullness, but not for long. John had only met him a few times, back when they were both playing college football on the East Coast, but he’d always been a friendly face even when Dartmouth crushed him.

So they got their hands on a football, tossed it around, and tried to pretend like it was just another college game, excepting the fact that it was just the two of them, John had stopped playing even for fun right about the time he started his residency, and Louise had made him drop the name everyone called him in those days.

John fucked up his shoulder the second time he and Ollie tried letting off some steam, winced in the operating room for three days straight, and found it was hard to have much of anything to talk about when he was exhausted and miserable and wet all the time.

Jones shoved at John’s knees until he tucked them up in the parka he’d decided he’d hide from fucking everything in, not just the weather, then sat down on his cot with him and held out a beer. “You just gonna sit there and do your log impersonation every time you’ve got nothing better to do?”

“Think that’s the definition of ‘nothin’ better to do.’” John took the beer anyway, fighting through the static in his head to find the multi-tool he kept on the crate next to his bed with the picture of his girls. Five months, two weeks, and three days from now, maybe he’d use the little knife to kill himself. It would send a statement; he had access to ether, morphine, scalpels, bombs, guns, and Jeeps, and he was going to put himself out of his misery with the Dartmouth-branded Swiss Army knife he’d kept in his pocket since his college days. “Y’know, the Major’s gonna put us on report if he catches us drinkin’.”

“Major Burns can kiss my ass.” Jones took the knife when John handed it over, opened his can, and cheersed it against John’s before taking a long drag. “You know he’s been on Blake’s case about sleeping in the same tent with me?”

John rolled over and pressed his face to his pillow, beer dangling from his fingers, his parka hood blotting out the world. “Blake don’t sleep in our tent,” he said, voice muffled even to his own ears.

Jones whacked him in the back of the head. “You know what I mean. No co-ed bunks back in the States.”

Though he knew the answer: “What’s it got to do with me?”

“I figure you might back me up, if it comes down to it.”

John lifted his head. Jones was built enough to defend himself if Burns’ hissy fits turned physical, but he wouldn’t get away with it, just like Bayliss and Kellye got slapped with more reports from Burns than any of the little blonde nurses, even when they sassed back the least. John wouldn’t hesitate to defend either of them if something turned physical. Maybe he’d even get some points in their books for it. Make it easier to get off his ass and find a nurse to take for a roll in the supply tent when everything that wasn’t sleeping or eating or surgery was an exhausting prospect.

He rolled over, looked up at the genuine worry etched into Ollie’s face, and sat up with a sigh. “Tell him he’d be sleepin’ on top’a you in a foxhole.” He took a swig of his beer—tasted like shit, just like everything else that wasn’t from a deal with the locals—and scratched at his steadily matting hair under his hood. “He wants to be like the rest’a the soldier boys he looks up to so much, he better put up with it.”

Jones rolled his eyes. “You’re a real help. Might as well be a foxhole, anyway. Blake says we’re getting a warm body in that cot a few days from now.”

“Draftee?”

“According to our lord and master Colonel Blake, thank God.”

John took another sip of the beer. At least he wouldn’t get hooked on the shit if it tasted this bad. “Long as he ain’t noisy.”

“As long as he plays football.” Jones bumped his hip against John’s knee, sending a quick-fading jolt through him at the point of contact. Less than two weeks and he was already aching for someone to touch him. A few days more and it would be longer than he’d gone without a new hand on him pretty much since he’d let Louise make him marry her. But there didn’t seem much point to it when he was gonna be dead in five months, two weeks, and three days, not to mention that he was constantly exhausted because on top of all the damn time they spent in the OR, he was struggling through dealing with Blake or Burns or the bitch Houlihan on a day-to-day basis.

Sleep. Eat, barely. Walter O’Reilly went off to Seoul for a couple of days, so John pressed twenty bucks into his hand and asked him to buy as much tea as he could, because spending five minutes making a cup of tea was five minutes he got to spend thinking about something other than the next time the choppers would come. Sift through a seventeen-year old kid’s guts ‘cause she got caught in the crossfire, pull out the bullet, break into Henry Blake’s liquor cabinet to stop thinking about the fact that she’d never have another child to make up for the one he’d found torn to shreds inside her.

He knew he shouldn’t turn to liquor, but what the fuck else was there to do?

“That new surgeon had better be a proper surgeon,” Burns tutted when John had collapsed into his cot a few hours later. He sat on his own bunk, lacing his boots so tight that there was hope they might cut off the circulation to his feet. “Not like– Spearchucker over there.”

Jones rolled his eyes, turned over, and put his pillow over his head. John was pretty sure he had the right idea, but Burns had made eye contact with him, which meant he wouldn’t shut up even if John turned the other way and ignored him.

He was drunk enough that he couldn’t keep his mouth under control. “The fuck do ya mean by that?” John demanded. At a glare from Burns, he hastily appended, “Sir.”

“You football players are all alike,” Burns groused, undoing his laces just to tie them even tighter. “Oh, I know how it is. You sail through medical school because everyone grades you with kid gloves just so they don’t lose their star player, am I right?” He raised his voice to shout at Jones through the pillow: “Some people worked for their degree, you know!”

Jones only stuffed his pillow tighter around his ears.

Deflection was probably the best option, or at least the one that would avoid John needing to get any more involved than he already was. He pulled his hood up over his head to quiet the shouting. “How ‘bout we cool it with the superiority, Major?”

Burns scoffed. “Frank Burns does everything wrong, is that it? I didn’t even mention that he’s un-American!”

Jones stirred, peeking out from beneath his pillow to meet John’s gaze. John shrugged and looked back to Burns. “’Scuse me, but the fuck do you think ‘Spearchucker’ means?”

Burns looked disgusted that he even had to ask. “Quarterbacks, what else?”

For the first time since he’d sunk into the Korean mud, John laughed. It was like it was wrenched out of him, straining his throat and his jaw and his eyes. Maybe he was having a breakdown, but the idea that someone could be so bigoted against football players that they looped right back around to racism—much less that said person could be a surgeon—sent him into hysterics.

Fuck it. He’d rather be crazy than bored. Maybe he’d start seeing things if he leaned into the crazy, which would definitely alleviate the boredom.

“You’re all alike,” Burns sneered. “Football players.”

“Oh, go to Hell, Frank!” John managed between bursts of laughter.

He got put on report for that one, but at least Burns stopped acting all buddy-buddy with him like he was ever going to take the same side as a guy who was too stupid to realize he hated blacks.

Try to sleep. Try to eat. John started calling Ollie Spearchucker because it made both of them laugh every damn time, even though it made him look like an asshole to everyone who had any common sense. The way he figured, it was making fun of Burns, and Ollie thought it was funny, so who gave a shit? Who the hell cared if he looked like an asshole? Ollie was the only guy who spoke more than a couple of kind sentences to him per day, anyway, and most of that had been because they needed to stick together if they wanted to avoid Burns’ bullshit. Adding a little bit of genuine camaraderie to his daily routine was just enough to get John out of his bunk sometimes when he didn’t have anything else to do, though his passes at the nurses were falling flat. He blamed the fatigues. If he was in a proper suit, like the pinstripe numbers he liked to wear back at home, they’d be fighting to get on their knees for him.

Five months, one week, and four days before John was going to kill himself, he was making the trudge from post-op to his cot when O’Reilly pulled up with a lanky guy in an officer’s dress uniform in the passenger seat. The guy had his legs slung up onto the dashboard, was talking a mile a minute, and wore a broad smile that even John could tell was only to hide that he was scared shitless.

John pivoted and made for the Jeep as the guy failed to open the door and started climbing up over the side, still babbling at an overwhelmed-looking O’Reilly. “… and if you go up on the cliffs, you can see– just, miles and miles out to sea, I mean, it’s never-ending.” He hesitated straddling the door, squinting up at the overcast sky like he wasn’t going to hurt his eyes doing it. “And the stars!” He threw his arms wide, grinning like a maniac at the clouds. “I lived in New York for a little while, and Boston, and Chicago, and all those lights, you can barely see the stars. I mean, do you know when we got electric lights in Crabapple Cove? 1932! I was twelve, can you believe that? I spent my formative years reading Oscar Wilde by candlelight.”

The guy’s side cap fell on the ground as he finally heaved himself the rest of the way out of the Jeep. He picked it up, left a long streak of mud down the front of the uniform when he wiped it off, and stuffed it into his back pocket. “Then again, Oscar Wilde by candlelight is atmospheric. Really gets you in the mood. Makes you understand why all those people wanted to put him in prison.”

O’Reilly made a desperate sort of eye contact with John. John didn’t give him anything in return. At least the new guy was entertaining, even if there was something wrong with him.

“Oh. Why’s that, sir?” O’Reilly asked.

The new guy moved just a little too much. It was like his body was being pulled along by his extremities when he turned to look at the dirt past O’Reilly. “Well, you understand why some people would want to put him in prison. Symbolism is too much for them, except for when they understand it.”

O’Reilly made another bid for help, eyes wide and every muscle tense as he made operating a Jeep door look like something a man could do in his sleep.

John decided to take pity on him. He clipped the kid’s shoulder with his knuckles and grabbed him by the collar to put himself in the auditory danger zone instead. “This the new guy?” he asked O’Reilly.

“Oh, yes, Sir. Captain Benjamin Franklin Pierce, and don’t yell at me ‘cause he’s bunking with you, ‘cause it ain’t my fault!”

“What is this, a pirate ship?” Pierce nearly fell over yanking his duffle bag out of the back seat, then again when he let it shift his center of gravity. “If I’m a captain, do I get to throw people in the brig? Make them walk the plank? Contract scurvy? Not that I’d make them contract scurvy, that would be their own fault, but I’d be happy to take credit so long as they’re my enemies.”

A glance back showed that O’Reilly had the look on his face where he was about to start chewing on his own shirt unless he got to have a little peace and quiet. John patted him on the shoulder and shoved him towards the office. “Go get some rest, huh, Corporal? I’ll give Anne Bonny over here his tour.”

“What, Sir?”

“Captain Pierce,” John clarified. “I woulda thought you’d know pirates with all those comic books you read.”

“Oh, I only like the superheroes, Sir.” O’Reilly graced him with a tiny smile, directed a worried look at Pierce, and scurried away like a wild animal was after him.

Pierce was worrying at the weather stripping on the Jeep door. “Hawkeye,” he said.

“Huh?”

“None of this Captain-Corporal stuff, alright?” Pierce looked down at where he’d accidentally let his duffle rest in the mud, grimaced at the water slowly seeping up the sides, and stumbled again as he heaved it over his shoulder. “My dad, he always said his favorite book was Last of the Mohicans, have you read it? Not that it’s a good book, nothing like The Good Book, but quality’s never stopped him.”

Pierce rounded the Jeep, gaze flitting anywhere except for John’s face. He plowed on before John could so much as open his mouth; “The main character, for some god-awful reason he’s called Natty Bumppo. Ridiculous name, sort of like Benjamin Franklin Pierce, because who names their son after a president and the man who invented the urinary catheter? Well, my dad, apparently, but even he thought that was ridiculous, so he started calling me Hawkeye, because that was what people who didn’t want to be embarrassed by what came out of their mouths called the good Mr. Bumppo.”

John took Pierce’s duffle from him when he nearly fell over again. “There a point to this story?”

“No, no, not really. I’m trying to get to know you, can’t a guy get to know you? What was your old man’s favorite book?”

The familiar jolt of shame arced through John’s gut. He’d answered the question plenty of fucking times at Dartmouth, and it had always ended the same way: with guys looking down on him not just because he was from Southie, but because he was exactly the kind of guy they all expected to come out of Southie. “He don’t read.”

“What, at all? Not even the newspaper? Not even–“ Pierce hissed through his teeth when he nearly lost a boot to the mud, looped back to the Jeep hopping on one foot, and sat on the hood to adjust his laces. “Not even– I dunno, your report cards?”

Pierce would be just like the rest of them. Entitled, classist, forming opinions of him based entirely on what other people had made him into. Like Burns, except with a mouth on him that wouldn’t quit. “S’pose you think everyone knows how to read,” John scoffed.

Pierce hesitated, fingers curling and uncurling before he switched to his other boot. “Not everyone. I’d hope you can read more than an x-ray, if you’re a doctor, but I don’t– I’m aware of the literacy problems in this country–“

“Korea?”

“Are there literacy problems in Korea?”

“You think there ain’t?”

“I think we’ve gotten off on the wrong foot,” Pierce lilted, dropping back to the mud. “Hi there, I’m Hawkeye Pierce, certified in general and throacic surgery, and I’d appreciate it if you took me to bed, but only if you introduce yourself. I might be easy, but I do have self-respect.”

John didn’t realize he was laughing until Pierce smiled and fluttered his eyelashes. Of all the times to make jokes about being a homosexual, the Army was just about the worst place to do it. If Pierce was willing to make a point of bucking that particular reg…

Maybe he wasn’t as bad as his first impression made him out to be.

“John McIntyre.” John futzed with Pierce’s bag enough to get his hand free for a handshake, but that only made it dig into his shoulder as he led Pierce to their tent. “The fuck’s in here, anyway?”

“Oh, just the essentials. Fatigues, medical journals, a tuxedo.”

“A–“

“What if someone gets married? I wouldn’t want to wear my dress uniform to a wedding, that’s classless.”

Pierce left an odd feeling in the air, like he was waiting for someone to fill in a gap.

John licked his lips. “They ain’t classless, they’re Class A.”

Pierce stopped dead, grabbed John by the duffle strap to pull him back, and finally looked at him. Finally made eye contact rather than keeping his gaze fixed on the ground or the sky or sliding off everything green. His eyes were shockingly blue, crinkled at the corners as a smile slowly spread across his face like the buzzing steadily coiling in John’s brain. “Is there anywhere for a guy to get a drink around here?”

O’Reilly hadn’t said anything about incoming casualties. There’d be no harm in getting a little drunk instead of sitting around doing nothing, as long as they kept it under control. John sure as hell wished he’d had someone to take him through the first days when he showed up, rather than only Burns telling him he needed to salute every time a superior officer rolled over in his sleep.

Pierce looked at him entirely differently than John could remember anyone else ever looking at him. Then again, he acted differently than anyone else John had ever met, so maybe it was a side effect of abnormality.

“Drove past the bar on your way in,” John said, pointing with his chin. “Rosie’s. I ain’t been over there, but, uh– our bunkie, the good one, he says she’ll kill ya if you put a toe outta line.”

Pierce honest-to-God giggled, laced his arm with John’s like he was a girl being courted, and kept them moving towards the tent. “You know, I get away with a lot.”

“How’s that?”

“My masculine wiles?”

John gave him a more thorough look—gangly, playing up acting like a queer, stuffed with all the energy of a vaudeville actor—and burst out laughing as he opened the door to the tent. Burns shot them both a glare from over the edge of his Bible as Pierce disengaged and swept inside.

“How’s it going?” Pierce asked, rifling around in Ollie’s things as John dropped his duffle on the unoccupied cot.

John flinched when Burns slammed down his Bible. He nearly tripped over his own boots as he stood, supposedly-menacing squint aimed at Pierce. “You will address your superior officers in the manner approved by the Army, Captain.”

“Oh, sorry,” Pierce drawled. He brushed his shoulder against John’s as he maneuvered around him in the cramped tent to get at his duffle bag. “How’s it going, Major?”

Burns spluttered, frantically turning to John. “Captain McIntyre, as you are the senior low-ranking officer in this tent, I demand you keep this man in line!”

“Pardon me, Major,” Pierce sniped back as he dumped out the contents of his bag, “you know what they said to me when they told me they were sending me to a MASH unit? They said I was going to see more patients in two years than I would in two decades back at home. Now, considering I received this information immediately before being sardined into a sorely-boozeless Army transport, I would like to be rip-roaring drunk right about now, and saluting you until my hands go AWOL would result in me drinking from a doggy bowl, which would make a very poor impression on my new friend John. Isn’t that right, new friend John?”

It was the way Hawkeye looked at him like he already trusted him, Trapper figured later on. They’d known each other for barely five minutes, but was obvious that Hawkeye trusted him more than Louise or his parents or any of his girlfriends ever had, or had ever had reason to. Hawkeye wanted to trust. He had a heart too big for his ribcage, or even for his whole torso.

Right then, John figured that he was better off cooperating with Pierce than he was putting up with Burns. Burns was a dumbass and a fink besides. Seeing where Pierce ended up, considering he’d already snapped his leash and taken off flying, seemed like a far more entertaining prospect than sitting and bearing whatever bullshit Burns would throw at all of them for Pierce’s antics.

“Guess it depends what kinda puppy you are,” John answered with a shrug. “I ain’t a big fan’a purebreds.”

Pierce flashed that crinkled smile again, jostling their shoulders together as he started changing into his fatigues. “Looks like it’s this mutt’s lucky day.”

Fifteen minutes later, they had a bottle of Rosie’s best whiskey—cheap shit, not Irish, but John wasn’t about to complain—and had found a table in the corner where nobody was going to bother them. Pierce cracked the seal and poured far more than John thought was sensible, but he didn’t have a concrete argument against it other than that someone drinking that much at once made him queasy. It was probably for the best to blot out what was happening around them with drink, if he was honest with himself. He knew he’d be better off if he could ignore that he was already getting the phantom sensation of blood squishing in his boots.

Pierce raised his glass. “Here’s to the United States government. Inefficient, cruel, and dominating, she has sent us to crush the citizens of Korea beneath Lady Liberty’s spike heels.”

John let the laughter bubble out of him as he met the toast, but he only took a sip while Pierce tossed back two fingers of liquor in one gulp. “Little birdie told me you were drafted.”

“They plucked me from my mother’s bosom and spirited me away to the far-off land of Fort Benning, Georgia to be taught how to tell people to shoot other people. A nice sterile procedure, or so I’m told. I don’t know which Hippocratic Oath they make high-ranking doctors swear, but it’s certainly not the one they told me about in medical school.”

“Try explainin’ that to Burns,” John scoffed. “He’d tell ya the Koreans are already red, so there’s no point in stoppin’ ‘em bleeding.”

“He seems like a real treat.” Pierce scraped his non-regulation bangs away from his face, downed the rest of the whiskey in his glass, and poured himself another. John slowly swirled what was left in his own, the temptation to give in and catch up twitching his fingers.

He’d gotten drunk out of his mind a few times since he touched down, and he’d never felt the need for it in his blood, only the want when another twisted, shattered kid followed the weft of fate to his operating table. Keeping Pierce company wouldn’t send him back to his college days, so long as he didn’t keep overindulging.

He slammed his drink and slid the tumbler over so Pierce could refill it. The burn in his throat quickly settled to a comfortable warmth in his stomach, trickling down his veins and into his fingers like the tingle of a saline drip. “I don’t wanna fuckin’ talk about Korea,” he complained as he took his refilled glass.

Pierce snorted. “What else is there to talk about?”

“Hell if I know. ‘Less you wanna hear about my girls, all I got are football stories.”

That smile came back, seeping into John’s blood like a shot of whiskey. There was something about Pierce—maybe those eyes, because John had seen pretty eyes before, but nothing like this—that kept drawing him back. It was no wonder he said everyone called him Hawkeye. John felt like he was pinned by a predator—like a mouse in the grass, the bird of prey circling above him able to see more of him than he ever could of himself.

“Cheerleaders?” Pierce asked, grinning.

John took another sip to pull himself out of the feeling and did his best to refocus. It had been a hell of a while since he told the first story that came to mind—Louise had made it damn clear she didn’t approve—but she couldn’t stop him from a few thousand miles away.

Besides, it didn’t seem fair to make Hawkeye the only one around with a stupid nickname.

“There was this one time, headed from Dartmouth to, uh… you know where Androscoggin College is?”

Pierce slammed his hand to the table hard enough to make John flinch. “I did my first year of pre-med there!” He practically glowed with excitement, warmth trickling out of him and into John’s veins. “Moved to– moved to Chicago, after that, but– boy, yeah, do I know it.”

John ran his finger around the rim of his glass and did his best to ignore just how different talking with Hawkeye felt from talking with anyone else. He wanted to… impress him. To tell the story in a way that would keep him engaged. The idea of losing the chance to have all that energy focused on him felt like a scalpel in his throat.

He shifted in his seat and wet his lips. “Yeah, well, we were headed there for a game. Took the train, ‘cause that was better than packin’ a bunch’a stupid kids into a bus or whatever. And there was this girl. Androscoggin cheerleader who was headed back from… I dunno, visitin’ her family, or somethin’. And we– y’know, guys ribbin’ each other like ya do, they noticed I’d got my eye on her, ‘cause she was… Christ, looked like Bettie Page, ‘cept this was better ‘cause it was before Bettie got all famous.”

He paused. Took another sip of his whiskey to wet his throat and ease the tension in his mind. He hadn’t spoken this much at once since he touched down in Korea—maybe hadn’t spoken this much in total since he touched down in Korea. But he couldn’t stop; Pierce still had that unwavering attention fixed to him, lips slightly parted and barely blinking even as he fiddled with his glass or his buttons or his dog tags.

“Anyway. Our QB, he tells me she’s lookin’ at me, too. I don’t got a clue why, ‘cause there are better lookin’ guys on the team than me, y’know—Cary Grant, Hume Cronyn types? So the QB, he, uh, he bets me, when she goes to the powder room, that I oughta follow her and see if she’s up for... takin’ a roll in the sleeper car, as it were.”

Pierce smiled so wide it was a wonder he could see out of his delighted squint. “You’re telling me I’m bunking with the infamous Trapper John?”

John chuckled. “Just don’t let my wife here ya say that.” It was practically a reflex to deflect; he caught up with the conversation a moment later. “The fuck do ya mean ‘infamous?’”

Pierce honest-to-God kicked his feet as he leaned in, elbows braced on the table. “You started a long-term college rivalry, fella. Your Bettie Page, her name was– Patti something-or-other, I can’t remember anymore. That story takes to campus like wildfire, and turns out she’s–“

“Their captain’s girlfriend!” John could feel his cheeks flush with the reminder. It had felt so fucking good when he found that little fact out. He’d never quite come back from the thrill of being so good in the sack that he could pull good-looking gals like that away from their husbands or boyfriends. “Y’know, she wouldn’t’a said I’d trapped her in there if she weren’t goin’ steady.”

“Could be a fun game,” Pierce chuckled. “You both know she wants it, but she pretends like she doesn’t.”

John shifted to keep his blood where it was supposed to be. “Maybe with one’a the nurses, huh? Louise’d never go for it. She hates that nickname.”

Pierce drew back, head tilted as he looked down at his glass. “Louise is…”

“My wife.” John watched Hawkeye’s gaze flick down to where his bare finger was pressed against his whiskey glass. Something else behind those bright eyes shifted—a recalibration that John wasn’t sure what to make of. “You got a problem with that?”

Pierce jolted. “What, that you’re married?”

“What I do with my spare time when the ladies don’t know I’m married.”

“No, no, no problem. Everyone needs a hobby. You don’t have someone to remind you you’re alive, maybe you don’t stay that way.”

The silence stretched like a tendon between them. John didn’t have much to say to that. If he wasn’t home in five months, one week, and four days, they’d be shipping him home in a pine box. He’d barely even managed to make passes at the nurses. Felt pointless, when he didn’t have jack shit to look forward to.

Maybe he oughta change that. Back in his days as Trapper John, he wouldn’t have let something like imminent death get in the way of having a good time—boozing with friends or pressing himself against a girl he barely knew in a train car bathroom. And Hawkeye… the thought of him getting worn down by the endless tide of wounded, being woken up all hours of the night by choppers or mortars or shouting made John nauseous to think about. He was so bright. The idea of him dulling…

Maybe he needed a Trapper John.

John tapped Hawkeye on the knee with his foot beneath the table. “Tell ya what. How about you and me, we take the rest’a this bottle, borrow a Jeep, then find a couple nurses and head for the hills?”

Maybe there was something wrong with Hawkeye other than his obvious strangeness, because he jarred into a smile at the suggestion like he hadn’t just been ankle-deep in melancholia. “Trapper John, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”

Maybe there was something wrong with John, because he’d barely known the guy for an hour, but he couldn’t wait to have that proven right.

Chapter Text

August 20, 1953

Running into Trapper was supposed to be something that happened later, not halfway into Hawkeye’s very first shift attempting to repair his reputation as a surgeon. He hadn’t made plans that involved meeting Trapper later, no, but he’d expected it. He would have made plans eventually, and that was as good as having a plan, not to mention that he deserved to have his expectations met after three years of wanting only the occasional good night’s sleep, the occasional good food, and the occasional legitimate goodbye from a friend that didn’t involve them blowing up, leaving without a note, or attempting to leave without a note.

Given he’d had none of these expectations met, he was rather overdue for a change. He’d accrued more than enough good karma to deserve the occasional thing he asked for. Even the occasional big thing, like not having to deal with Trapper John McIntyre halfway into his very first shift back in the real world.

If he didn’t hate Trapper, he’d be inclined to say he looked good. Ridiculous, because he was wearing the pinstripe vest he’d had tailored in Korea, his hair was brushed what he’d always called “church-straight,” and he’d taken to wearing navigator-framed glasses that covered half his face—but good. He’d roast nicely if you put him over a spit with the stateside meat on his bones. He’d gotten blonder as his hair paled with age. Someone had etched smile lines so deep into his flesh that they were visible even when he was making an expression Hawkeye would describe as the opposite of a genuine smile: strained and miserable and hungry.

Hawkeye knew exactly what Trapper wanted. He wanted what he’d always wanted: someone else’s bed rather than his own, warmed by an easy lay he’d forget all about when he left before breakfast or intermission. It was so habitual that it came across as instinctual—a species-specific trait of Trapper-Johns. It was how he survived, sucking up nutrients from girls who deserved more than his eyes on them right up until Hawkeye had made the mistake of broadening his palate into something other than girls.

It had been funny when they went on double dates with the new nurses, before they knew John McIntyre had a wife and kids back home. It had been funny to watch him put the stars in their eyes with a chaste kiss on the cheek before he invited them to the supply tent to make time with Hawkeye and his girl of the week. It had been particularly funny to watch them find out about the wedding band tucked away in Trapper’s footlocker only for him to shrug and ask Henry when they’d be getting fresh meat rotated in.

Why the hell had it been funny?

Trapper stuffed his hands in the pockets of his pants, flaring out the flaps of his suit jacket with a cock of his hips. He still rested all his weight to one side—a long-standing effect of pulling a tendon back in high school that he’d never worked to correct. It was useless knowledge for Hawkeye to have. If he didn’t know that Trapper John McIntyre had pulled his Achilles tendon playing high school football, he’d have room to stuff something necessary in the gaps between his neurons, like a new surgical procedure of half an ounce of booze or the contents of a dozen more children’s books about how even if you won, War could still crack you across the head with a polo mallet from atop his mighty thoroughbred.

Trapper was staring.

“Are we starting our tour with the hallway outside the cafeteria? I hate to tell you, but I couldn’t have been in there without being out here, first.”

It was easy to spot a forced smile on Trapper’s lips. It was perfectly even rather than looking like a failed recovery from facial palsy. “You don’t like the digs?”

“I’d prefer to take my shovel elsewhere.”

Trapper’s gaze lingered at the place Hawkeye’s belt was digging into his hip bones. Hawkeye was all too aware he looked like a skeleton who’d put together a particularly convincing costume instead of like a person. If Trap put his hand on his chest, he’d be able to feel every single rib, minus the ones Tommy, Carlye, Kyung-Soon, BJ, and Trapper himself had been carved from. Trap had been able to feel the sharp relief of bone back when he ran away, but that was in the days before Hawkeye worried that if he scrubbed too hard at his torso in the shower, he’d end up with cuts down his palms.

When Frank was still the by-name governing body of the Swamp, Hawkeye had occasionally lulled himself to sleep with the thought of Trapper sending a package just like Peg did for BJ. Trap wouldn’t apologize—because if his lips weren’t capable of it, his fingers weren’t either—but he could send a noteless box filled with sugar and spice and everything nice and it would be like an apology for ignoring the man he’d tricked into loving him for months.

“I would have taken anything,” Hawkeye said, arms dangling off his cot as he watched BJ open the latest cookie tin from Peg and Erin. “A postcard!”

“You’re awfully melancholy today.” BJ passed over the tin, voice muffled from a full mouth. “You can’t eat a postcard.”

“But I’d know he was alive.”

“Why are you worried he’s not?”

“Because he doesn’t write!” Hawkeye rolled to a seat and took two cookies from the tin, accompanied by a soft smile from BJ. “If I went home without a goodbye and never wrote you, wouldn’t you be worried?”

“I’d walk to Maine myself.”

“So you understand my concern.”

“I understand that you are concerned.”

“What’s the difference?”

BJ sighed, twiddling with the letter in his hands. “When I hear people talk about Trapper John, they tell me he was a womanizer, an adulterer, and an all-around cad. I understand that you’re concerned, but personally, I wouldn’t want to work in a hospital with the man. I certainly wouldn’t want him around anyone I cared about.”

“Well, you don’t even want the handyman coming over.”

The touch on his wrist was like a phosphorous burn. Hawkeye flinched away from the concerned furrow of Trapper’s brow only a foot away from him. “You good, there, Hawk?”

“Fine.” He tucked his hands in his pockets so Trapper couldn’t try to get a grip on him. Maybe Trap could grab him by the elbow, but that was through his clothes, which would hopefully feel less like someone was squeezing every single one of his nerves. Through the clothes wouldn’t remind him of the fact that the last time he’d touched someone the way Trapper wanted to touch him, she’d gone wandering into the mine field. He was toxic, caustic, unpalatable for more reasons than the fact he was scared of children crying, and Trapper had to know that. Trapper did know that, because he’d run away once, and whatever he was doing right now was nothing more than a way to reassure himself that he’d made the right decision the first time around. Hawkeye could help him make that decision. It was the right thing to do, to protect Trapper from him, because Trapper had daughters even if he didn’t have a wife anymore, and Hawkeye made people he loved only physically, much less romantically, go wandering into mine fields. He had to keep both of them from getting burned all over again, and the best way to do that was to make it clear that he didn’t want anything to do with Trapper John McIntyre for both their sakes.

Co-workers. Professionals. More like Margaret than BJ, their relationship soured by a heat-of-the-moment romance they’d only stumbled into because there was nobody else to cling to when the threat of death was so much more real than it had ever been before. Hawkeye had tumbled out of a Jeep into Rosie’s bar and Trapper’s arms the same as he’d tumbled into a rundown Quonset hut with Major Margaret Houlihan, and he’d come out of it both times with a scar that hurt if he pressed on it too long, which was really rather unfortunate when one of those scars was in the exact right place to make sitting in a metal folding chair one of the more unpleasant experiences in his day-to-day life.

Trapper bumped their shoulders together, soft-eyed smile familiar but two years out of date beneath his glasses. “I got just the thing to cheer you up.” He turned to lead the way down the hall, pedaling backwards to keep Hawkeye in his line of sight like he thought he was going to get away if he didn’t. Hawkeye followed him only because there was nothing better to do. He’d agreed to let Trapper give him a tour. It was unfair to go back on your promises, whether that was taking advantage of your best friend’s growing paranoia to prank them or upping points again and again until nobody ever got to go home, not ever, not unless they went crazy or someone died or they promised to abandon you the minute they wrenched themselves free.

“You seem like you’ve had a good couple of years,” Hawkeye said, leaning against the wall of the elevator, hands tucked firmly where Trapper couldn’t reach them. “From what I hear, Boston cuisine is the finest in the world. Caviar and uncanned pheasant and champagne by the bucketful.”

Trapper snorted, one side of his mouth pulling higher than the other. “Wrong side’a Boston for that. You been makin’ house calls in Beacon Hill?”

“Rather far away from that, actually.”

“Oh? Where?”

Bastard. Trapper stared up at the floor indicator, rocking back and forth between the balls and heels of his feet like another six-foot-plus blonde maniac who was currently eating casserole with his picture-perfect blonde wife and daughter behind a picket fence on the other side of the country. BJ wore red that had faded to pink and paid Klinger to make him a fishing vest out of a fatigue shirt. Trapper brought his lucky jersey on R&R and collected aloha shirts like they were going out of style and bought a tailor-made pinstripe suit because he missed what it had felt like to dress like a real person. Apparently Hawkeye had a type, except Trapper was standing in front of him looking like he’d fallen out of a Sears catalog for lunatics with just enough time to brush his hair straight before someone told him he’d be occupied as a surgeon.

He could still read Trapper like an open book. Concern wasn’t a good look to be fixed with, particularly not from the man who’d once sedated him out of concern. “Who told you you oughta be holdin’ your tongue?” Trapper asked.

“Nobody, grabbing it would break the sterile field.”

Trapper still laughed like he was desperate to. Like anything Hawkeye said was the funniest thing in the world, same as it had always been. BJ had laughed like that, but he’d also laughed like he knew something Hawkeye didn’t, or like he was humoring something he shouldn’t have been, or like he was waiting for someone to pack the laughee into a rubber truck where all his jokes would bounce off the walls and rattle around in his insides.

Trapper was coming closer. He was a big man. Not broad, exactly, but tall and wide-palmed and grabbing Hawkeye’s shoulders to press their foreheads together, glasses digging into the wrinkle Hawkeye knew he’d acquired above his eyes.

“It’s still you,” Trapper murmured, breath puffing across Hawkeye’s lips as he held him in place like a rib spreader. He was so hot, the width of the epi- and hypo- and -dermis away from wrapping a bare hand around Hawkeye’s heart or reaching inside his skull to pull the eggshell out of his brain. “Still you, Hawk. I missed you so fuckin’ much.”

The only question Hawkeye could possibly ask died on his lips when the doors pinged open and Trapper pulled away.

The crooked smile was back, paired with the tiniest glimpse of Trapper’s tongue between his teeth. “I bet I know your problem,” he said, backpedaling out of the elevator like he hadn’t been trying to climb inside Hawkeye’s ribcage.

“Enlighten me.”

Trapper caught him with an arm around his shoulder. He smelled different than Hawkeye remembered, wreathed in laundry detergent and patchouli-scented soap beneath the familiar tang of cigars, unblemished by the sour burn of alcohol that Hawkeye had tried to suck from his mouth every time they kissed. His breath smelled good. He was warm every place they touched.

“You ain’t been gettin’ laid,” Trapper whispered into his ear. He kept on grinning when he tilted his head to meet Hawkeye’s gaze. Predatory, like a tiger lurking in the bushes with those stripes. “I’m gonna solve that.”

If Trapper believed in God, or even if Hawkeye did, Hawk might have said his charms were miraculous. Trapper had left. He had taken what he wanted and left the man he’d fooled into falling in love with him rotting like the endless pieces they carved out of children, the lifeblood swirling down the scrub sink or fertilizing Father Mulcahy’s flowers so they could grow in the nutrient-poor dirt they were nonetheless stealing from the farmers who owned the land. Trapper John McIntyre was an unkind man masquerading as someone who cared enough to have the kind of bedside manner that would get a man laughing two hours after he’d amputated his leg. He was tall and handsome and used those charms on any nurse who came within spitting range, and Hawkeye knew better than to let himself fall for them before he’d even fully recovered from going nuts. He knew better than to listen to any voice in his head while his entire world was in the process of turning upside down, because that was how he kept getting his heart broken by people made from ribs that would have been better off barbecued.

If they’d given him a lobotomy in the Bedlam, he wouldn’t have to listen to the voice in his head that was insisting he could afford one roll in the hay with the man who’d used his heart for stitching practice. He’d survive it. He had energy to let Trapper siphon away, and he knew it because he’d barely been able to sleep for the anticipation of finally becoming something other than a butcher again. Trapper could drain him all-but-dry. He’d survive it. He’d survived before.

“What’s wrong with me?”

Trapper tilted his head the other way, like a dog that couldn’t understand unless you used the words he’d been trained on. “Never been anything wrong with you.”

“You can’t think that,” Hawkeye said, wriggling out from Trapper’s vice grip on his shoulders. “And don’t tell me you do, because you don’t. And what’s wrong with you!?”

Trapper scoffed, rubbing his eyes beneath his glasses. He looked so good. How did he still look so good? He was supposed to have died of alcohol poisoning by now so Hawkeye didn’t have to worry about the fact that he looked so good. “What is wrong with me, Hawk?”

“Well, for starters, I don’t think you’ve ever had a genuine friendship with a woman in your life.”

Trapper pinched his lips together. Glanced around. Lowered his voice as he grabbed Hawkeye through the sleeve to yank him into an empty patient room. “You think you’re better than me, don’t you? Just ‘cause Hot Lips wanted me more than you don’t mean–“

“Margaret–“

“Don’t you fuckin’ dare pretend you’re better than me,” Trapper spat, slamming the door behind them. “You gave her that name, same as you named Radar, same as you named me, so don’t you dare pretend you’re better than that!”

“Margaret Houlihan is a damn good nurse! And if you’d ever taken one measly second to see her as something more than– than a bed warmer you wanted to steal from Frank–”

“Like you thought any better!”

“I learned!” Hawkeye ignored the bile in his throat, the memory of a kiss that he’d made last as long as it could for both their sakes, because the second it ended, they were both going to leave the only people who understood who they were now, given they weren’t the people everyone had known back home. It had been a kindness to grant both of them that extra time. A favor. He was right to grab her and give her what she wanted, even if she didn’t know she wanted it. “I learned, and you didn’t, because you’re–“

“What?” Trapper grabbed the IV stand, ringless fingers white with the tightness of his grip. “You gonna call me names? Gonna tell me I lost your little game? Huh, Ben? Fine! Maybe I wanna talk about Korea ‘cause the last thing I heard, they told–“

Hawkeye barely touched the door handle before Trapper’s hand was on his shoulder, slamming him back into the door. “What is your goddamn problem?”

“You said it’s that I’m not getting laid.” The last time someone had put a hand on him like this, it had been because he’d put a Jeep through the side of the Officers’ Club, which was really an impressive feat with how easy the building should have been to miss. There was a different kind of fear on Trapper’s face than there had been on BJ’s, but then again, Hawkeye wasn’t bleeding from a head wound onto the cuff of Trap’s fatigue jacket.

“You’re gonna listen to me,” Trapper panted. Hawkeye had forgotten the color of his eyes. They were hazel instead of the deep brown he remembered, flecked with sparks of green that were brilliant even in the buzz of fluorescent tube lighting. “You are gonna sit here, and you’re gonna listen to me say I missed you ‘cause–“

Trapper’s lips had always been soft. Hawkeye had bought him a tin of lip balm laced with ginseng in a market along the Ginza the first time they went to Tokyo together and he still tasted like it. He was softer, now, unchapped by the constantly fluctuating humidity and temperature that were only natural when you lived in a thin-canvassed tent and barely ever had the flaps down so people didn’t suspect you were up to anything inappropriate with your married bunkie. The fabric of Trapper’s waistcoat under Hawkeye’s fingers was just as he remembered it: softer than it ought to have been for how cheap he’d gotten it, because it wasn’t like the tailor was giving him premium fabric on a discount just because the stripes went the wrong way.

Trapper groaned into Hawkeye’s mouth, pressing closer, one hand resting on the small of his back so he could make their body heat the same.

Hawkeye could feel the door hit Trapper as he slammed it.

He’d walked straight into a warzone.

Triage. Easy. One patient laid out on a stretcher, no choppers in the air. Bruising around his navel, breathing like he couldn’t catch it. No reason to make him wait when he’d be a red in any situation.

“Dock worker,” one of the medics said. “Artie Franklin, 24. Says a piece of machinery fell on him.”

Blink. Snap. Gloves on. Rigidity in the abdomen. “The Navy must have surgeons.”

“What?”

“Am I gonna be alright, Doc?”

Trapper, pushing his glasses up his nose, hands inches away from Hawkeye’s as he gave the hyperventilating kid’s abdomen another probe. His lips were still kiss-bruised from the supply tent. “Lemme spot you.”

He couldn’t. Trapper couldn’t help; there was some reason he couldn’t help and Hawkeye couldn’t remember what it was. He needed to do this alone. If he didn’t do it alone, something terrible was going to happen to him; he knew it so deep in his gut he’d never stop knowing it. “I can handle it.”

“Hawk–“

“Go back to the Swamp, I can handle it!”

“Hawkeye, look at me.”

“I’m giving you an order.” It smelled wrong, disinfectant rich in the air rather than the familiar rotten scent of the blood-soaked dust in the compound that the choppers or even an ambulance ought to have stirred up. “I’m Chief Surgeon, I’m giving you an order, so go back to the Swamp!”

A touch on his wrist. Hawkeye yanked his hand away before it could burn him again.

Trapper, his hair brushed church-straight, eyes wide and concerned behind huge-lensed navigator glasses, dog tags failing to dangle on his chest.

Boston.

“Prep him for OR,” Hawkeye snapped to the medics. Artie was staring at him, eyes wide and terrified, so he added, “You’ll be just fine, Artie. You fractured a rib or two and you’re bleeding internally, but I’ll have you dancing the Charleston in two hours’ time, never mind that you couldn’t before.”

Blink. Snap. Gloves off. Scrub sink, so wash his hands to the elbows, because this wasn’t a piece of eggshell meandering through a bowl of pancake batter. Trapper behind him, stripping out of his suit jacket–

“Go home,” Hawkeye insisted.

Nail brush. Scrub scrub scrub, always scrubbing. It never stopped. You washed your hands and dirtied them and washed them again and again until you ran out of gloves and had to pour alcohol down your nail beds only to pick flaked skin and children’s blood out of the creases of your knuckles for days, even after more scrubbing, more patients, more blood in your boots than you’d ever had in your body.

Trapper was next to him, shoulder pressing against his as he leaned in. “I’m tryna–“

“Go home. You think they’d be happy to learn you’re trying to do surgery off the clock? You aren’t even on call, I made sure of it.”

“You made sure of what?”

“We don’t work together.” A nurse. Hands, drying. Gown, on. Trapper with a scrub cap in his hands, shoving the nurse aside so he could tuck it over Hawkeye’s hair himself. “I made it very clear in my interview, I will not work with John McIntyre.”

“Then you don’t gotta worry.” Mask, pressed over Hawkeye’s face, fingers he’d expected to never feel again deftly tying the strings behind his head. “’Cause I’m your old pal Trapper.”

Trapper’s breath on his face, the press of his lips still burning beneath the touch of the cotton. Why had Hawkeye done that? There must have been better distraction techniques somewhere in his repertoire that didn’t involve remembering how Trapper had kissed like he was starving but always chased it with a chaste peck on the cheek and a broad, crooked smile that felt like the sun coming out.

Trapper was going to hurt him again.

“We were never pals.”

A smile, completely straight; a tiger baring its fangs. “No, we weren’t.” Trapper leaned in, so close he could have kissed him again through the cotton of the mask and Hawkeye wouldn’t have been able to stop him before it was over anyway. “You get one smart-ass comment. That was it.”

Snap. Gloves on. “Or what?”

Into the operating room. Don’t let Trapper follow, don’t let him talk, don’t let him say a single further word about how he used to be the only person who mattered. Look down at the kid on the table.

Deep breath.

“Well, would you look at this?” Hawkeye grinned beneath his mask, sidling between the anesthesiologist and the circulating nurse to get closer to Artie Franklin, 24, dock worker. “What a wonderful welcoming committee, and all for me! No, no, don’t stand, you’ll only tire yourselves before the ovation. I’m Dr. Pierce, what we have here is a simple case of crush-induced internal bleeding, likely thanks to fractures in the eleventh and twelfth ribs, and today, I will be performing a wonderful trick known as effective, up-to-date, modern sterile surgery. Unlike a modern major general, whose only purpose is to induce both internal and external bleeding. My scalpel, if you please, I’m a wonderful singer but I do prefer an instrument.”

Scalpel, in hand. The air felt thick, and not only because Hawkeye was sucking it in through a surgical mask. The humidity, it had to be. BJ was probably leaving a mustache-print of sweat at his table on the other side of the room. Cut through skin and flesh and fascia to find the punctured kidney, ribs fractured just the way he’d expected from a Jeep accident or a nasty tumble down a hill some bastard wanted the kid to capture. It wasn’t enough of an excuse to send him home, no matter how Hawkeye fudged the numbers.

“Retraction, Mr. Kwang.”

“I’m sorry?” the kid across the table from him said, deaver retractor falling into place.

Boston.

The kidney would be easy to fix. A stitch here, a stitch there, not quite as good as new but close enough for jazz. There was nobody else waiting in the wings; even if they were, there were other surgeons. People other than him and Frank who could lay a bleeding kid on their table and scrape the dust stirred up by chopper blades from their insides.

He had all the permission in the world to take his time.

“Why don’t we introduce ourselves?” More bleeding; another unit of blood hung by the circulating nurse. “I’d go first, but I already went first. Then again, I’d prefer Hawkeye over Dr. Pierce, rolls off the tongue a little easier.”

“That’s not your real name,” the scrub nurse said.

Hawkeye shrugged, rolled out his neck, and found one of the piddly little veins that was causing so many problems to clamp off. “No, it’s Benjamin Franklin. You can imagine how well that pairs with Pierce. And Ben, do I look like a Ben? Not likely.”

The nurse’s eyes crinkled beneath her mask. “I suppose I can’t judge. My parents named me Hortense.”

“Preferable to Hor-relaxed.”

Hortense snorted when she laughed. She nearly dropped a pair of forceps as she passed them over. “That’s only what they call me when I’m not at work.”

It was easy to smile at her. This was home: real surgery, the familiar patter of flirting with a nurse across the operating table and being met in enthusiasm rather than shied away from because everyone in the hemisphere had heard too-tall-to-be-true tales about Hawkeye Pierce. No nurse would trust a butcher who drove a Jeep to the peace talks or through the wall of the Officers’ Club, but a nurse could trust a surgeon who held a kidney in his hands and carefully stitched together the oozing gash in the pretty pink organ enough to introduce herself as Hortense Delores Gardner, which in Hawkeye’s esteemed opinion might have crossed into the territory of worse than Benjamin Franklin Pierce.

Blink. Snap, gloves off. Patient, repaired and safe and being wheeled off to a room he’d be surprised to wake up in. “Ready for his undercoat, don’t you think?” Hortense helped him with his gown at the scrub sinks, cute as the dickens beneath the sterile cotton, long nose and deep brown hair and eyes and a wonderful little overbite.

Hawkeye would go back to the Swamp, get a drink, and return for his post-op shift in a couple of hours when Charles or Henry had finished their work. For now: “Your parents must have known French, or that’s one hell of a coincidence.”

“How so?”

“Hortense means gardener.”

Her front teeth poked over her bottom lip when she smiled. “I’m aware. How much French do you speak, Doctor?”

“Un petit peu. Enough to know they certainly have a way with poetry.”

“I’ve always wanted to go,” Hortense sighed. “Not to Paris. My mother was born south of Lyon. Have you been?”

“No, no. I’d never even been out of the country until–“

Hawkeye’s throat clicked on the word, blood rushing in his ears with the water swirling down the scrub sink. Most of them had never set foot off United States soil before the Army forced them to, except for Charles, who boasted landfall in several major European cities, and Colonel Potter, who boasted landfall in several different major European cities for differently unpalatable reasons.

“Until?”

“Until recently,” Hawkeye recovered. He turned to watch the gaunt man reflected in the window brush his hair out of his eyes, fingers not quite trembling. “A mandatory vacation, followed by a mandatory vacation from my vacation. Less interesting than you’d think, unless you think I spent the last three years lying in the dirt.”

Hortense flicked off the taps. There was water pattering against something metal, but it was the wrong season for the rain to be starting, wasn’t it? “Where on Earth did you find the time for a three year vacation?”

Boston. It was so hard to remember. How long would it be before he stopped going back there every time he heard something whistle over his head? “Oh, a little northwest of Tokyo and across the Sea of Japan.”

Hortense bit her lip as she dried her hands. “I wouldn’t call that a vacation.”

She knew someone. That was the only explanation. Someone she knew had died over there and she’d hate him for it, because if the man who’d died to give her that look in her eyes had made it to the 4077th, Hawkeye should have been able to save him. “Sure it was. A three-year involuntary camping trip.”

He must have forgotten his bedside manner in Korea. “Who– I mean, you knew–“

“My baby brother.”

“Ah.”

She shrugged, watery smile plastered to her face. “It’s been two years. I’ve learned to live with it. And don’t you dare blame yourself, Benjamin, I know how you surgeons get.”

“Benjamin?”

“If I call you Benjamin instead of Hawkeye, you get to call me Hortense instead of Lottie.”

Nobody called him Benjamin. The only people who called him Benjamin were generals and reporters and jerks who didn’t know any better but wanted to pretend like they had an interest in being personable. Benjamin was a man who didn’t exist, couldn’t exist, and would never exist.

Trapper kept a stuffed rabbit in his locker wrapped in John F. X. McIntyre’s dog tags and threatened to punch anyone who called him that name.

Hawkeye tried another smile. Like the rest of his clothes, it was ill-fitting. “As long as you don’t call me Benjy.”

Either he was particularly charming, or Hortense snorted every time she laughed. “I think I can manage that. Has anyone shown you around, Dr. Benjamin?”

“Are you offering, Nurse Hortense?”

“I would say so.” She held out her arm, inviting him to link elbows with her. “I should show you the supply closet–“

“I’m not Trapper.”

She blinked, letting her arm drop. Hawkeye was dangerously close to throwing up; at least the scrub sink to his right was convenient for the purpose. Of course all she wanted to do was play doctors and nurses. He should have wanted it. It should have been easy to want it, because she was bright-eyed and looked nothing like any of the blondes he’d been head-over-heels in love with except for the overbite that made her teeth stand out against her pink lips like bone inside the flesh of an amputated limb.

Hortense brushed out her skirt as she stepped closer. It took everything Hawkeye had not to back away and embarrass himself by running into the scrub sink. “I want you to understand that I’m only telling you this because I happen to find you both extremely charming and particularly adorable.”

It was proving increasingly difficult not to do something that would chase her away, like sniffing her hair. Trapper had smelled like cigars and patchouli and Hortense smelled like sandalwood and powder beneath the hospital’s disinfectant soap—the remnants of a perfume she must have put on in the morning, pleasant and nothing like the lye-scent of every single woman Hawkeye had touched for the past three years.

“What are you telling me?” he asked.

“I’m saving myself for marriage, though I’m not opposed to kissing after a few dates.”

Trapper’s lips on his, soft and ginseng-laced, fabric of the suit he’d bought to pretend like he wasn’t in Hell beneath Hawkeye’s fingers–

“Are you asking me out on a date?”

“That wouldn’t be very lady-like of me. Though I would be partial to breakfast, if you’re to make the invitation?”

“I can’t say I would deny the suggestion.” Hawkeye took her arm. It was only a date, if he could work up the courage to ask what she was asking him to. There wasn’t any pressure. It was only a date.

He could feel his heart getting lighter already.

“How many times have you done this?”

“Already losing count?”

“Not us, stupid.” Trapper gestured at the supply shelves around them, eyes glinting in the light of the single bulb rocking above them from the rumble of distant mortars. “This. What’s your scoresheet look like?”

“I prefer wining and dining, if you must know.”

“Never dragged a nurse into a supply closet?”

“Occasionally. Occasionally another doctor, if I play my cards right.”

“Cad.”

“Touche.”

“I got it down to a science, y’know. Five minutes flat. I don’t even muss her makeup.”

“I’m sure your mother must be very proud.”

Trapper’s laugh was so big Hawkeye could see his fillings. “Nah. But my old man prob’ly is.”

Hawkeye set out a can of tuna for Gandalf, dropped the mail on top of the list of Sidney-approved therapists he didn’t plan on calling, and rattled the dog tags hanging from the knob of the over-sink cabinet when he fetched himself a glass of water. He’d read the mail later. “Probably all junk mail anyway, huh?” he asked Gandalf. “Why are they allowed to send us that stuff? If I wanted a dozen pieces of post to throw away, I’d start writing letters to Aunt Catherine.”

There wasn’t much in the fridge. That wasn’t good; what if someone came over?

“The first day I met Tommy, I asked Dad to make sure he could always make French toast at the drop of a hat.” Maybe just a sandwich; there was enough around for that. Bread, lettuce, fresh tomato; tomato knife in hand, carving into the tender red flesh. He’d found the greengrocer the day before; what else was he supposed to spend all that leftover Army pay on? He’d only managed to drink so much of it in liquor, and he wasn’t planning on repeating that particular practice, given it would be a waste of the way they’d so kindly tortured him sober at the Bedlam. “I was terrified that if we didn’t have enough to make it when Tommy finally came over, Dad would steal eggs from the Jordans—our neighbors, as much as we could be said to have neighbors—and then he’d have to break one of their legs and set it to square away the debt.”

Gandalf meowed.

“I don’t think you understand the consequences of your actions,” Hawkeye said, awkwardly stepping over him to fetch the sliced chicken from the fridge. “It’s not your fault Dad’s making you live here, but it does mean I’m going to have to find some way to pay him back. Maybe I’ll break one of the Jordans’ legs and ask them to give him some eggs instead of charging them for the service. The breaking includes the setting, of course, or I wouldn’t be much of a doctor.”

Sandwich, constructed. He needed to buy condiments that weren’t maple syrup. “That was one nice thing about the Army: you always knew where your relish was.”

Hawkeye took the mail, his sandwich, and happened to bring along the cat to sprawl out on the couch, kicking his shoes into the corner behind Gandalf’s all-but-unused bed. The cat preferred sleeping squarely in the small of his back, which he couldn’t say was a terrible burden when it might have very well been fixing his scoliosis.

Junk, junk, forwarded junk that Dad had sent from well-wishers who were all extraordinarily pleased he was back from the war in what appeared to be one piece, how would he like to meet their new baby? Hawkeye wondered with what Dad was bribing the good citizens of Crabapple Cove to send him letters. He opened most of them just long enough to make sure there wasn’t any cash or other non-letter paraphernalia lurking inside the envelope before throwing them on the floor for Gandalf to play with.

The last letter was thick, forwarded, and had a return address in Mill Valley, California.

He nearly tore the letter opening it. BJ, BJ, BJ; BJ was writing him and didn’t even need to be pestered into doing it, because Dad would have given him Hawkeye’s new address instead of serving as the middleman. BJ had hauled so many rocks around there was no chance of their goodbye being anything but final, but there was a packet of something inside another envelope and a few pages of writing in BJ’s sprawling cursive hand resting in Hawkeye’s lap.

11 August, 1953

Dear Hawk,

Home! Can you believe it? I certainly can’t. I don’t want to bore you with the details—I made a mistake boring you with the details rather than saying what I wanted to say one time quite recently, and I’d rather not repeat the mistake when I’d have to drive up there and lug another few hundred rocks around for catharsis’ sake—but I can honestly say that things back at home (home!) have been going perfectly acceptably. Not fantastic, certainly; I think we all built up an idea of home that’s never going to compare to the real thing. I’ve never been quite so aware of that as I am now. There are so many things I’ve missed, Hawk. So many hours I’ll never be able to get back. Peg has seen pictures of what I look like now, of course, and she saw that interview with Clete Roberts, but I think it really sunk in when she took a moment to recognize me at the airport. I can’t say I blame her; the last time she saw me in that dress uniform, I still had my baby fat.

On the subject of Peg, she would like me to tell you that you have poor taste, and the mustache makes me look “particularly scrumptious, provided I’m capable of keeping it clean.” She says it makes me look like I came to California looking for gold. I can’t begin to guess why she enjoys that, but I’m not one to argue with my wife’s tastes.

On a similar subject: do you remember that Polaroid, the whole debacle with Klinger? Not that the debacle with Klinger is relevant, it’s just that Ma and Pa Hayden sent us one as a bit of a homecoming present. Peg wants to make a scrapbook of our first year back together, but it’s only been a few days and we’re close to running out of film! I thought, and she agreed, that we could spare a few to keep you company. I made sure they were covered in case you don’t want to look—Lord knows it was terribly uncouth of me to talk about the things I did when I visited you—but I’m hoping I can tempt you to appreciate a few photos of Erin with the promise of the single most embarrassing one ever taken of me.

I expect you’re going to tell me all about Crabapple Cove in your return letter. Is it lobster season? I also expect you’ve eaten your entire body weight and then some in shellfish by the time this letter gets to you. Say hello to your dad for me, and don’t show him that picture or he’ll never think anything good of me ever again.

I hope you’re ready for non-stop correspondence, by the way. I keep saying jokes over my shoulder and expecting you to laugh, so I think that means I need to write them down! Peg laughs, luckily, but telling jokes to no-one is a habit I need to kick before I go back to work. I start at Bay General Hospital the first of next month. I wish I could take the same approach you’re taking, but Peg’s done more than her share while I was away, which makes dilly-dallying a rather undesirable prospect. I feel so awfully for the way she’s had to support all three of us, but she says my anger would be better spent at the Army for paying me so little rather than at myself for being paid so little, and I’m trying to remember that.

I keep waking up and expecting you next to me. Is that happening to you? I can’t imagine it’s not.

If I don’t see a letter from Crabapple Cove in my mailbox within the next month, I’ll follow through on my threat to walk there, and that sounds terrible for my knees.

Call me if you can’t stand to write: DUnlap 8-1270

Yours,

BJ

The first picture was exactly as bad as BJ had promised it would be. Peg made me! was scrawled across the back, which Hawkeye wasn’t at all surprised by when it turned out to be all three Hunnicutts at some cheesy historical photos stand in a mall somewhere. It was a joy to have physical evidence of the prospector Halloween costume Peg would inevitably dress BJ up in, and Erin looked so happy in Peg’s lap for a two-year-old so covered in lace she could pass for a grandmother’s tea room that Hawkeye barely felt sick to his stomach.

There were plenty more photos. He’d look at them later. BJ had written him; he needed to write him back before he forgot, because if he didn’t, he’d forget. BJ didn’t want to stop being friends even though he had every right in the world not to want to be friends when they weren’t trapped in a tent together.

He had to write back before he forgot, but the idea of BJ wanting to keep hearing about his life was exciting enough that he didn’t want to forget. Pen, paper, stamps in a drawer in the kitchen, exactly where they’d always been in Crabapple Cove.

August 20 1953

Dear BJ,

As you’ll be able to tell from the return address, Crabapple Cove doesn’t have a particular demand for traumatized trauma surgeons when they already have my dad for aches, pains, and bruises. Boston has more use for us, but I’d say we’re rapidly approaching the limit with three in the same city, even if one is presumably occupied with Ma-ma and Father before he brings an iron fist to Boston Mercy’s thoracic surgery department.

I’m doing well, because you forgot to ask, you dick. Self-absorbed much? I’ll tell you all about me: one day back at work and I’ve already kissed Trapper John McIntyre squarely on the mouth and have an open invitation to attempt to earn another from a lovely nurse named Hortense, who you are required to call by Lottie if you ask about her, because I’ve only earned the right to calling her Hortense because I let her call me Dr. Benjamin. She’s great, Beej. I think she might even distract me from the fact that not wanting to work with Charles means I have to work with Trapper, who’s apparently punched at least one guy who called him John, and rumor has it he’s the one who keeps putting dents in the break room walls. You think I went crazy? He’s got this stuffed rabbit wrapped in his old dog tags he keeps in his locker, and he was wearing a pinstripe suit that goes the wrong way when I kissed him. I keep my dog tags hanging from the cabinets like a respectable nutjob.

No pictures; I don’t have a camera, but I’ll buy one if you’re willing to splurge on developing the film. Expect plenty of photos of Gandalf, who is currently standing on the counter beside me while I write this begging for chicken, which is a better alternative than terrorizing the pigeons, so I put up with it. Maybe when I finally get organized enough to throw my dog tags in Boston Harbor, I’ll take a picture for you of that little escapade. No more fitting place to throw something you resent the government for, as I’m sure my namesake would attest. The postmaster general, not the Indian.

Send me a picture when she dresses you up like that in the bedroom.

Hawkeye

Letter, addressed. Stamp, on envelope. It would get there faster if he went and mailed the thing right now, and he wouldn’t have to keep thinking about not forgetting about it. There was a drop box on the corner, less than two minutes away, so he took his as-yet-uneaten sandwich and stuffed it in his mouth as he went to deposit the letter.

It was curious, the way you could regret something the very moment you’d followed through on it, such as telling the best friend you’d ever had that you’d lied to him, moved to Boston, and kissed the man he was so upset at being compared to that he’d organized a prank war over it, particularly considering said kiss could earn him a spot on a blacklist from medicine if blonde-haired, blue-eyed, picket fence BJ Hunnicutt took offense to the kissing of men.

Hawkeye went back inside, lay face down on the couch, and decided he’d stay there until someone told him he had to do something different.

Chapter Text

Try as he might, Trapper couldn’t make himself go home like Hawkeye had told him to. What the hell was he supposed to do there? Sit and stew about how things could have gone better, probably, all while the ache for a drink continued to run through him like a linebacker. Instead of drinking, he’d focus on being irritable about how Hawk seemed to think he had the right to boss him around like he still had rank over him. Trapper shouldn’t have yelled—shouldn’t have called Hawk Ben like he barely knew him—but John had been raised with a poor temper and Trapper had never been able to shake it. He ought to be grateful he hadn’t gotten so angry he did something stupid and mean when Hawk closed the door on his nose. He ought to be grateful he’d gotten a kiss, because it was a hell of a lot harder to be angry when he had a reminder of what it felt like to be the second most important thing in Hawkeye Pierce’s world fresh on his lips. Surgery would always come first, but Trapper didn’t begrudge him that when surgery would always come first for him, too.

Trapper fetched the book Hawkeye had forgotten in the cafeteria before he went to his car, lit a cigar from the glove box, and aimlessly drove the streets of Boston while he waited for the tobacco to calm his shaking nerves. He didn’t know what to do about Hawkeye. The man had been dead not twenty-four hours before—dead and buried beneath some great maple tree in a cemetery in Maine, the way Trapper had always forced himself to remember when he saw the man dribbling from a hole in his head in his dreams.

Then again, Trapper had felt damn-near dead the first few months after he came home. He’d felt even deader when a care package and a note in smeared red ink reappeared on the front step of the South Boston row house that felt emptier than ever with the promise that he’d be able to lure Hawk there some day soon. He couldn’t go back, not until he’d talked to someone. Not until he’d made a plan that would return him to Hawkeye’s good side, even if Hawk wouldn’t let him say why he’d never written. Even if the fat and bunchy, spotted brown and white rabbit carefully belted into the station wagon’s bench seat beside him was judging him for not making a louder point of saying it.

He didn’t know where he was going until he looked up and saw he was parked outside Vernon’s red brick row house in South End. He didn’t bother going up to knock; the lights were off, so either nobody was home or Vern had brought a guy over and wouldn’t appreciate being interrupted. They respected each other’s privacy, as much as they were able; Vern sure as hell wouldn’t knock if he even suspected Trapper had a tight piece of ass in his former marriage bed.

There wasn’t anything to do but wait. Trapper put down the rear seats, lit another cigar, and lay down in the back with an ashtray next to him and John the Rabbit tucked between his thighs.

His eyes were watering. They had been off and on since he left the hospital, but the angry buzzing in his brain had largely drowned out the sensation except for when something trickled down his cheek. He cranked the radio so loud he couldn’t hear his own thoughts except for the craving in his gut, much less the drone of traffic outside the metal walls, the thrum of chopper blades in his bones, the snarl of a Jeep engine across camp and the burble of the gin still–

Christ. Yeah, maybe you couldn’t go back to Constantinople like they were crooning about on the radio, but what if Constantinople came crawling out of its maple-shaded grave in Maine just to kiss you on the lips and slam a door on your nose? Trapper was pretty sure the Turks—or at the very least the Army—owed him a demonstration of the Oriental resurrection techniques they were employing.

His glasses had fogged up again. He wiped them with his handkerchief and left them unfolded on the upholstery next to him, staring up at the fuzzy roof. His hands were trembling from how badly he wanted to numb the memories of the last few hours. All of it, from the kiss that had left him panting to Hawkeye’s gaunter-than-ever frame to the kid Hawk hadn’t been able to remember was bleeding into his belly in Boston rather than Korea. Hawkeye hated him for damn good reason, and a drink would dull the way he couldn’t stop reminding himself. It would make the stabbing, pepper-spice ache behind his nose hurt just a little bit less.

Not for the first time, Trapper John McIntyre, devoted father, thoracic surgeon, all-around miserable bastard sat somewhere and did everything he could to convince himself the dampness on his cheeks was allergy-related while he thought about how much easier things would have been if Hawkeye had come home with him. They would have pressed their thighs together on the plane over the freezing, roiling waters of the Sea of Japan, played I-spy until the stewardess told them to shut up, and fucked in the plane bathroom even though it would have been the riskiest thing they’d ever done. They would have played it just like the Boston and Maine train where Trapper had earned his name. He would have waited for Hawkeye to scramble away for a leak, given him a minute and a half, and silently slipped in behind him to re-christen himself. They would have said see-you-later rather than goodbye at the Boston train station, both of them knowing without ever saying it that Hawkeye was coming home as soon as he’d seen his dad and packed clothes and trinkets and tchotchkes to decorate the gaps Louise had left behind.

If all had gone exactly as planned, Trapper would right now be spending his day reading on the couch, two years deep into the best change in his life since his girls, waiting for the man he loved to come home from work to snuggle him.

It was too far-fetched. The fantasy didn’t hold the same comfort it had on the days he’d spent lying in bed doing nothing but waiting for the restless patter of his heart against his rib cage to settle enough for sleep. Hawkeye was home, he was alive, but he hated him. There was no turning away from that. There was no arguing with it, because it was right to hate a man who could have written a ten page letter a day and never did.

Why hadn’t he called someone, anyone at the 4077th? Why hadn’t he written to Radar, or Klinger, or Hot Lips? They would have told him Hawkeye was alive, after chastening him for his failure to say see-you-later. If nothing else, Radar should have known. Radar should have written him; the kid was prescient enough to have them waiting at the chopper pad just in time to have dust whipped into their eyes, so why hadn’t he written to ask Trapper to write?

Trapper turned off the radio and picked up the book Hawkeye had left behind so he could do anything other than keep blaming Radar for his own shortcomings. It was a trim little book, evidently science-fiction from the automaton on the cover, by an author Trapper recognized from when Hawkeye had stolen a handful of Radar’s Astounding Science Fiction magazines so they had the excuse of reading them together to huddle by the camp stove with every inch of their sides touching. Hawk had taken the Asimov story poorly enough that Trapper had spent the next few hours trailing him around camp while he ranted, doing everything he could to coax him back to the Swamp with the promise of tea and gin and, if he remembered correctly, an under-the-blankets handy. Hawk had been furious that the Army treated them as nothing more than the robots between the pages. Do no harm was Hippocratic enough, but obey orders and only protect yourself so long as you’re obeying orders had tied him in knots.

Trapper’s memories of Korea had grown fuzzier and fuzzier with every passing month. It had been cold when Hawkeye found that story, certainly, but had it been before or after they’d gone to get their incubator? Had Trapper actually offered him what he wanted to, or only wished he could? Had he yet become Real, or was he still shambling through the days with a cotton-filled gut and sawdust weighing his limbs?

A rap on the tent frame. Trapper slammed his forehead into the roof of the station wagon as he jolted to wakefulness with a gasp. He supposed he could be grateful he wasn’t wearing his glasses if he was bashing his forehead against things.

“Do you not remember how to ring a doorbell?” Vernon asked.

“Didn’t wanna bother you.” Trapper tucked John off to the side, though Vernon was the man least likely to judge him for carting a stuffed rabbit around half the time. A check of his watch showed he’d fallen asleep for about half an hour. It was as useful as anything else he could have done with his time. Time spent at his recently-found boxing gym would have been time spent ruminating on Hawkeye, except he would have gotten himself so worked up he hurt his hands. “How was your date?”

Vernon snorted and folded his arms as he leaned against the car. “I was asleep, same as you. What on Earth are you wearing?”

Trapper squinted down at the pinstripe vest he’d put on several months ago that morning. “Got it in Korea. Thought it was smart.”

“I suppose it’s appropriate.”

“Why?”

“You look like someone turned you sideways.” Vernon grabbed Trapper’s glasses from the folded-down seat, placed them on Trapper’s face for him, and waited for him to rub the sleep out of his eyes beneath them. “Look, Trap. I’ll clear up the Pierce business for you, get you a couple more shifts this week–“

No point beating around the bush. “He ain’t dead.”

Vernon squinted at him. “I won’t tell your ex you’re hitting the sauce again, but–”

“He ain’t dead, Vern, I saw him.” Trapper waved his hand vaguely in the direction of Korea, which was really any direction when you got right down to it. “Army must’a fucked it somehow, ‘cause he’s alive and mad at me and I can’t say he’s wrong to be. Couldn’t even get a goddamn word in edgewise, and that used to be one’a my favorite things about him.”

Vern stood there, leaning against the side of the car, judging him. Trapper picked John the Rabbit up and ran his thumbnail over the ridges on his dog tags, tak-tak-tak rumbling through his skin.

Vern raked his hand through his hair. “We all come home different.”

“Come back from the dead different,” Trapper scoffed.

“Like you did, Trapper?”

Trapper settled back down on the seats, cradling John to his chest. Christ, he was gonna cry if he kept this up. Why was he throwing himself a goddamn pity party? “He said he don’t wanna work with John McIntyre.”

“I take it you told him nobody calls you that.”

“Yeah, but did he listen?”

Hawkeye hated him. Hawkeye hated him. He’d spent the last two years aching for the man every single day, carrying a picture of him in his wallet like a war-widow, and Hawkeye was calling him a sexist and doing everything he could to avoid using the name he’d christened him with. If Hawk would just let him explain, he’d stop caring about the lack of letters, because Trapper had thought about following him to a maple-shaded grave in Maine so many times that Sidney Freedman would have called him a danger to himself and others if he got a peek inside his head.

Trapper closed his eyes so he didn’t have to watch Vern watch him cry. What was wrong with him? Here he was, an adult man creeping up on 40, and he was clutching a stuffed toy and begging someone to comfort him because he was having trouble with his sweetheart. He was acting like a teenage girl, though a teenage girl wouldn’t be working with a history of drowning herself in a bottle of whiskey or a still full of rubbing alcohol until she stopped thinking about much of anything.

He wasn’t like this before Korea. He used to have methods. You closed your bulbs and it all went away, right up until doing anything to push away the memories of Hawkeye felt like killing him all over again. Even with Hawk ten feet across the Swamp from him, he’d never been able to stop thinking about how much he wanted to bring him home, take care of him when he went mad, and slow-dance to Sinatra records in the living room with their cheeks pressed together and breath hot on each other’s necks, the insides of their thighs, against their lips.

This was humiliating. It was pathetic.

He took one deep breath, squeezed the rabbit so tight he was tempted to pop at the seams, and turned his focus to making a plan instead of picturing Hawk looming above him in a Tokyo hotel room, bangs dark against his eyes as he set a hand on his stomach and made him Real.

“I gotta do something big,” he said, wiping his eyes with the heel of his hand. “Somethin’ that proves I ain’t forgotten about him.”

A promise this would stay between them: “The vest wasn’t enough?” Vernon teased. He didn’t look the least bit guilty when Trapper scowled at him, but he didn’t have as good a scowl as he used to with his glasses softening his face and his eyes tear-reddened.

“A date,” Trapper insisted. “Promised I’d– take him to Fenway or the zoo or somethin’ when we came home.”

“So take him to Fenway. The Braves are playing this Sunday. First time back since they defected to Milwaukee.”

Baseball was something workable. It was something big, something noisy, something that would prove Trapper hadn’t forgotten the things he’d promised while not embarrassing either of them if it devolved into shouting all over again, because the whole point of going to Fenway was to shout at anything that crossed your path. If he was clever enough, he could avoid the whole issue of shouting in the first place. He’d go to Louise’s and get her to let him take the girls even though it wasn’t his every-other-weekend. Hawkeye would finally get to meet his daughters. Angry as he was, he wouldn’t shout around Trapper’s girls.

It was a better idea than the zoo, at any rate. Trapper had only been back once since those miserable first few weeks home, and he’d spent the next long span of days barely sleeping for nightmares about polar bears operating on him that were terrifying in the moment and ridiculous five minutes after he woke up.

Trapper dragged himself out of the car and started putting the seats back up. “You got good ideas sometimes, you know that?”

Vern tucked John the Rabbit against his hip, keeping him from getting pinched in the angry tangle of the seat hinges. “Wouldn’t be much of a surgeon if I didn’t.”

An hour and a half later, after getting tickets at Fenway so nobody could deny him what he was asking for, Trapper parked the station wagon outside Floyd Brennan’s house in Brighton. Louise was off work on Thursdays, school was over for the day, and with any and all luck, Floyd would still be grading papers up at Boston College. It wasn’t that Trapper didn’t like Floyd—the man made Louise happy, which was certainly more than he’d ever done, and he liked to see the mother of his children with the spring in her step he couldn’t give her—it was that Floyd didn’t particularly like him.

He couldn’t call that unfair; he wouldn’t like himself if all he knew was that he’d knocked her up, gone off to war, and fucked more women than he could keep track of even before he was a couple continents away.

It would be easy to convince Louise to let him have the girls for the weekend. He’d earned a few favors over the years and had the right to cash them in. He hadn’t had a drop to drink no matter how badly his mouth watered for it when he thought of Hawkeye’s ghost dribbling from a hole in his head while he puked his way through the DTs or as he thought of the furious kiss he could still taste on his lips. He swore around the girls, sure, but he’d also taught them not to say those words unless they were certain everyone in earshot would be okay with them. He couldn’t make it to all of Becky’s tee ball and now little league games no matter how hard he tried, but he traded shifts all the damn time to be there for as many as he could. No matter his failings as a husband and wartime lover, Trapper John McIntyre was a devoted father, and he wouldn’t let Louise take that away from him.

Louise opened the door in a pair of slacks and a loose blouse that didn’t do as much to hide her figure as the look on her face made it clear she was hoping, hair up in a loose bun that made her curls look like a halo. It was easy to remember why he’d bagged her, these days; she actually smiled on occasion, cheeks rosy-red and finally dropping the last of their baby-weight.

He put a hand on the door to stop her from slamming it on him. His nose had already taken enough of a beating. “Hey, Lou.”

It always took her a moment to get her mouth around his name. “Trapper. It’s not your weekend. It’s also Thursday.”

He needed to not get angry, no matter how fucked up it was she could keep him away like this. “Ah-huh. See, I thought about that, and I kinda figured since they’re my daughters, I got a right to drop by.”

Louise put on that expression where it was obvious she didn’t trust him, lips pulled tight and brows furrowed beneath her glasses. Trapper felt a little bad for the trouble the girls would inevitably have with their vision, but it was the condom company’s fault if it was anyone’s. “We’re taking them to celebrate our engagement tomorrow,” she said.

Trapper ignored the shock of jealousy in his chest. “’Bout time.”

“Excuse me?”

“C’mon, Lou, you’ve been datin’ the guy two and a half years. Anyone else would’a pulled the trigger the second you legally dumped me. Now you got a better reason I can’t see my daughters?”

He could probably take a pulse off the infuriated blood vessel pounding in her forehead, if she wouldn’t break his finger for trying. “You aren’t even–“

“Yeah, congratulations, love the guy. Look, I got a friend who wants to go to the Braves game this weekend, and I’m takin’ the girls, alright?”

Louise snorted. “What friend?”

There was no retort that wouldn’t make him sound pathetic, so he didn’t bother. The anger he was catching off her was too tight in his throat, anyway. “God damnit, Louise, you gonna let me show my daughters a good time or not?”

Becky, still in her school uniform, chose exactly the right moment to come careening down the stairs. “I hear baseball?”

“Rebecca,” Louise scolded.

Trapper leaned around Louise to waggle his fingers in a wave. Becky lit up, ducking under her mother’s outstretched arm that tried to stop her to slam into his legs. It was a struggle to pick her up, these days—ten years old was rapidly approaching the weight limit of his spinal column—but he’d missed an entire year of opportunities to give her a ride on his shoulders. He was damn set on making them up, no matter the limits Louise kept putting on him.

“You wanna go to a baseball game this Sunday?” he asked.

Becky put on her best considerate face, clinging to the shoulders of his jacket in poorly-concealed excitement. “I was gonna listen on the radio.”

“And you can still listen on the radio,” Louise interrupted. “Your father–“

“I’m gonna take you to meet a friend of mine,” Trapper interrupted in return. “Push my glasses up, honey, I don’t want ‘em fallin’ off. A real good friend of mine from when they sent me to Korea.”

That got Louise to shut up. He didn’t have any friends from the Army who weren’t fish food or who Louise thought were fish food. She dropped her hand away from the door and watched with that same tight-lipped expression as Becky pressed a fingerprint into the middle of Trapper’s right lens with a giggle.

Best to rip the band-aid quick rather than leaving her on tenterhooks. “We had this thing in the Army called FUBAR. I’ll tell you, ‘cause you’re a big girl, that that stands for ‘fucked up beyond all recognition.’”

Louise pressed her fingers to her forehead with a sigh, but didn’t say a damn thing.

“They coined that term ‘cause the Army FUBARs things all the goddamn time. Big stuff, little stuff, they don’t care. And one’a the things they FUBARed is that I sent off a nice care package to my friend Hawkeye, and instead’a givin’ it to him, they told me he was dead.”

“Told you?” Louise gasped. There was a look in her eyes he hadn’t ever seen directed at him, pity and hope and a hint of honest-to-God sympathy all rolled into one.

He let himself soak it in. When else would he get another chance?

“He’s alive. Got all his bits intact and everything.”

He wouldn’t say why exactly that was the best news he’d heard in his entire life with Becky still in his arms, but Louise would understand. She had to understand; he didn’t remember much of it, but he knew she’d picked him up off the floor and let him sob all over her dress when she found him mourning and days away from killing himself in a bottle.

“You gonna let me take my girls to a baseball game with Hawkeye?” Trapper pressed.

Louise was a good girl at heart. She risked a touch to his shoulder, barely more than a butterfly’s kiss. “Don’t you dare mess this up.”

It wasn’t hard to catch what she meant. He knew as well as she did that if things went poorly with Hawkeye…

Even promising her he’d stay out of a bottle might not keep him floating.

“Pick you and Kathy up Saturday, huh?” he said to Becky as he set her down. “Get your homework done so I don’t gotta ride your ass about it.”

Becky happily scrambled away up the stairs, shouting to get her sister’s attention.

Without a kid in his arms he was likely to drop, Louise threaded her arms beneath his suit jacket and gave him a perfunctory squeeze. “You know something?”

“What’s that?”

“I think I’m happy for you.”

Trapper patted her on the back of the head hard enough to dig her glasses into his chest. “Thanks, kid. Now I gotta go tell Hawk we’re goin’.”

With twenty minutes left in Hawkeye’s shift, Trapper stood in front of Hawk’s locker with the Asimov collection, a ballpoint pen, and a plan. He opened it to the bookmarked page and found all the room he needed in the margins.

Hawk—Braves/Sox game Sunday. I got tickets and you’re coming. Got your address from Admin and I’ll file a goddamn missing persons case if you aren’t there when I pick you up at one.

— Trap

P.S. — told you you’d get to meet my daughters some day.

He stuffed the book in the locker, neatly clicked it shut, and went home to daydream about holding Hawkeye’s hand beneath the bleacher seats.