Chapter Text
A week had gone by since Colonel Sherman T. Potter rode up to the 4077th on a horse and a prayer and so far, no one had bitten him. Yet.
Not for lack of trying.
Frank Burns had turned him in to someone,he didn’t know who, but he had his suspicions, that it was the Vatican. Klinger’s already attempted to persuade him to sign off on a Section 8 after a bold (and sparkly) Joan of Arc number. And Margaret Houlihan was polite, precise, and tension so tight she could vibrate through a wall at any moment.
But Potter was no stranger to chaos. (He was only new at this sort of chaos)
Yet, even through the fog of operating tables and camp shenanigans, Potter figured he had most of them pegged.
Take BJ Hunnicutt, for example, bright, gentlemanly, a little obsessive about hygiene. Always washing his hands, as though a single germ could sue. Radar O’Reilly was half soothsayer and half puppy dog, and Father Mulcahy was half boxing coach and half man of the cloth, a man of peace who would absolutely body-slam you in checkers, if the Lord allowed.
But Hawkeye Pierce?
That had been a code, a manual only Potter had been unable to decipher. Pierce had the bedside manner of a saint and the bedside wisecracks of a bawling stand-up comic. He flew through surgery as though his hands had been kissed by Hippocrates but outside the O.R. he drank from the tap and put off any deep questions with a pun.
And yet … there was something beneath that flippant surface. Something haunted.
Potter had seen it before. Not often. But enough to recognize when pain put on a clown nose.
It had been a hell of a day. A total of 14 hours straight of meatball medicine at its worst. The sort that makes surgeons who have handled hundreds of corpses feel like butchers. Potter emerged from the OR, wiping the imaginary blood off his hands. He saw across the compound that Hawkeye was coming out of the opposite tent, shuffling as if his feet weighed a thousand pounds each.
Something made Potter follow him.
He didn’t call out. Simply walked behind, stealthily as a church mouse in sneakers.
Hawkeye got to the tent for changing and wrenched his bloody scrubs from his body with that cool detachment of the practiced hand who’s done it one too many times. His skin was pale. Leaner than it should’ve been. Not just thin — carved down. And there, on his left forearm, beyond where the hem of the sleeve of his usual shirt would cover...
Potter stopped dead.
The figures were faint but unmistakable.
A-12984.
The type of thing that had been seared onto you. The kind of thing no one should ever wear. Potter had known them once, when he was young enough to still believe life made sense. Poland. A camp called Dachau. Or maybe Buchenwald. The names all ran together like bad dreams. But the figures stuck with him. Tattooed onto skin like cattle. Stripped of identity. Of dignity.
And here they were. On Hawkeye Pierce.
Potter opened his mouth. Closed it. Hawkeye pulled his shirt sleeve down over the numbers before he had a chance to say anything, just as one might if one were pressing upon an old wound that had never truly healed. Then he strode out of the tent without looking back, cigarette already in-between his lips.
Potter stood frozen.
Potter slumped in his chair, staring at his whiskey glass.
Radar had delivered the mail, a pile of requisitions, and a new complaint from Frank about how BJ had substituted a pair of his socks with frozen liver. But Potter barely noticed any of it.
A-12984.
It didn’t add up.
Benjamin Franklin Pierce hailed from Crabapple Cove, Maine. Or that’s what every personnel file and Army record said. Protestant. American. Smart-mouthed, emotionally unavailable, perennially teetering on the edge of insubordination — yes, honestly.
But none of that jibed with the tattoo. None of that explained how the hell Hawkeye somehow now had a goddamn number seared into his flesh like one of the Holocaust survivors Zemo had spouted off about in your sophomore year.
Potter rubbed his temples.
“Colonel?” Radar said, shifting from one foot to the other.
“Yeah, son?”
“You okay? You look as though somebody just informed you that you’ve been reassigned to Tokyo with Frank Burns as your bunkmate.”
“I'm okay,” Potter lied with military crispness. “Just tired.”
Radar nodded, but Potter noticed the look he shot over his shoulder as he departed. The kid missed nothing.
Potter reclined and gazed at the ceiling.
He had questions blistering the insides of his throat. But with a man like Pierce, he knew not to ask too quickly. That kind of pain was not the poking type. It was like this: It came out in jokes, in booze, in the occasional spontaneous chicken dance. And if you asked too directly, he’d make it a game of emotional dodgeball.
He needed to wait. Watch.
He puffed on a cigar and grumbled to himself:
“Well, Pierce. Then who the hell are you anyway?
Hawkeye was sitting on the stairs outside the Swamp, staring at the stars like they laughed in his fucking face.
BJ returned with a martini glass and plopped down next to him. “Just another day, just another mess of arterial spray.
“Why didn’t we go into dentistry again?” Hawkeye asked, voice hoarse.
“Because you passed out when looking at me floss.”
They chuckled, but Hawkeye’s laugh did not quite make it to his eyes.
BJ studied him for a second. “You okay?”
“Dandy. Peachy. One dark-night-turf-grab away from a punch card for a free psyche eval.”
“That good, huh?”
Hawkeye didn’t answer.
BJ was holding the martini, half-warm. “Drink?”
Hawkeye took it. “You know what I miss?”
“Human decency?”
“Bagels.”
BJ raised an eyebrow. “Bagels?”
“With lox and cream cheese. Real ones. Not them rubbery circles they pass off in the mess tent. My bubbe used to make the best — ” He cut himself off.
BJ blinked. “Your what?”
Hawkeye glared at the martini glass as though it had cheated him. “Nothing.”
BJ didn’t push. But as he re-entered, he cast one last look over his shoulder.
Hawkeye remained sitting, his eyes yet in the stars. And beneath his rolled-up sleeve were the numbers, barely visible.
A-12984.