Chapter Text
The winter air is cool, and the sun provides no warmth to Hawkeye’s face. He closes his eyes, lets himself feel the thorny January breeze ruffle his hair. His hands are cold where they sit on the frosted bench, knotted wood under his fingertips, but he can feel them, at least. His fingers almost ache with the chill. He wonders morbidly if they would become frostbitten if he sat here long enough. He hasn’t done too much feeling lately. Numbness prevails.
The funeral was last week. It had a good turnout. Daniel Pierce had probably helped half the people in Crabapple Cove into existence, it only made sense that they should see him out as well.
The service was informal and undeniably different to his mother’s. Hawkeye had worn a suit to hers, listened quietly to the rabbi and tried not to cry in front of his grandparents. He spent most of his father’s zoned out, stood at the back of the church as the priest droned on about things Hawkeye doesn’t think his father much believed in. He wasn’t particularly enigmatic – Hawkeye felt it didn’t do his father much justice.
Not for the first time over the last decade, Hawkeye finds himself missing Father Mulcahy. He wonders where the padre may be now, whether he is still in Korea or back in the States or somewhere else entirely. He could use a friendly ear.
Hawkeye had realised fairly quickly upon his return that so few of his friends remained in Crabapple Cove. They had all moved on, moved out into the city or got married and switched towns. Things weren’t the same when he returned, like his memory of home had been so tinged with nostalgia that he was looking upon it with rose-tinted glasses.
He had mourned his boyhood then, just as he mourns his father now.
His other friends – the ones he could talk to, could turn to at a time like this – are scattered across the country. These days, Hawkeye isn’t too sure if they would still be his friends.
The only person Hawkeye still has in way of a friend is Margaret. She’s in Boston now, has been for a few years, and he’s very proud of her. They write sporadically, letters dotted across the months and filled with mild and uninteresting anecdotes. Sometimes she encloses a postcard or a poster torn from some door with a handful of folk artists Hawkeye hasn’t heard of, and sometimes he tapes small shells from the beach onto the creased paper of his own writing.
He considers calling her. He knows he won’t.
Hawkeye needs something more than what Margaret would give him. Or maybe less. She’d offer apologies and solidarity and an intelligent idea, none of which Hawkeye really wants or needs. He needs to hold and be held and have someone tell him it’ll be alright, even though he knows it won’t. He needs someone to love him, to show him he isn’t alone anymore. He needs someone who will save him from drowning.
He misses BJ.
He takes a swig of scotch from his flask. It burns his throat the same way the icy air burns his skin.
BJ would know what to say, he thinks, but quickly realises that the idea may be incorrect. BJ spoke a lot about nothing in particular, nothing important. BJ often couldn’t find the words, often stalled, like an actor who had forgotten his lines and was too afraid to stray from the script or improvise.
He couldn’t find the words so much that he hasn’t replied to any of Hawkeye’s letters in nearly five years. Even now, it aches, so deep and consuming that sometimes he wonders who he’d be without it.
Rarely, Hawkeye resents him. He resents his marriage and his family and his apparent unwavering happiness, the way he slot back into his life in Mill Valley like a final puzzle piece and seemed to succeed in forgetting what happened over there. It read that way in his letters, anyway.
He gets over the feeling pretty quickly. He wants BJ to be happy. BJ deserves it, deserves it more than anyone he’s ever met. He hopes he’s happy, imagines him taking down his family’s Christmas tree in California with Peg and Erin, no frost on the windows and the sun still warm in the sky.
The sun in Maine is cold and bright.
Maybe he should be over it by now, Hawkeye thinks. Then again, he has never fallen out of love – whether it be Tommy, or Carlye, or Trapper, or Kyung Soon – it makes sense that he should still love BJ.
Somehow, though, it’s different. All consuming. It hums in his veins like alcohol and sometimes he’s dizzy with it. He’s never sobered up.
Hawkeye wonders if BJ caught wise of his feelings – if that was why he stopped writing. He isn’t sure if the idea is worse than any of the alternatives. That BJ simply didn’t care enough anymore, that he has moved on, that he outgrew his need for Hawkeye now they were home.
It doesn’t feel fair. Still, he feels maybe he should be used to it by now. Always being the one left behind, never the one to go first.
He clenches his fingers tighter around the cold wood, kicks at the frozen snow beneath his feet. It crunches.
The cemetery is empty, none but him and the dead. It feels familiar.
It’s a nice day, as days go. Cold, yes, but the snow on the ground is frosted and old. It hasn’t turned to slush, neither has a fresh layer formed. As a kid, he used to love it. Now, it often seems an inconvenience. The glare of the sun off its stinging whiteness hurts his eyes.
His hands are numb. The pain of the frost has subsided into cold blankness. He needs more than this. He needs something warm, someone intense, to sustain him and breathe enough life back into him so that he doesn’t put himself in the family plot as well.
Hawkeye sighs, slipping his flask into his pocket, and walks over to the grave, the ground still risen and disturbed. The dirt sticks out in the white of the snow. The flowers are crusted with frost.
He leans over, presses a gentle kiss to his parents’ headstone and leaves the cemetery.
He slips into his car, pulls his gloves on and starts the engine. He switches the radio off and pulls away. Hawkeye drives almost clumsily to the town over – the one with a train station – and buys a ticket for Boston. He doesn’t even bring a toothbrush.
*
Boston is only marginally warmer than Maine that morning. The roads are cleared and the paths are icy. It’s been a long time since he’s been there, not since his residency, and he inhales the fumes of petrol with a strange sense of wistfulness.
Hawkeye steps out of South Station and pulls his coat tightly around him. He knows where he intends to go, although whether it’s a good idea or not is another story entirely. The smarter thing would be to go to Margaret’s, let her hug him and funnel enough booze into him that he doesn’t feel so bad about crying.
He hasn’t cried yet.
Even seeing Charles may be a better idea, something he doesn’t consider lightly.
Still, he follows the poorly thought-out plan and hopes with his whole heart that the address he has – the one he still somehow remembers without any concerted effort – is still correct and walks for nearly two hours in the cold. He imagines the chilblains that will form on his skin with anticipation.
He reaches the edge of the city and finds what he’s looking for.
The house is tall, red brick with a brown wooden door. It’s nice, the house of a man with a decent paying job, and the glass is clean and bright in the windows. He sizes it up, looking all the way up to the roof and squints as the sun hits his eyes.
With more bravery than a coward like him should have, he walks up the steps and knocks firmly on the door.
Hawkeye steps back and waits. He isn’t waiting long. The door swings open, and finally, after all this time, he sees him.
“Hey, Trap,” he says, slightly abashedly, almost weakly.
Trapper’s hair is greying around the edges and his face is lined in ways it wasn’t when Hawkeye last saw him, but his eyes are still bright and warm and he’s still him, still the same man after all this time. He looks at Hawkeye with wide eyes and pales. He looks like he’s seen a ghost, and Hawkeye supposes he has.
“Hawk,” Trapper replies indistinctly, not moving from the doorway.
Hawkeye looks to his side. “Can I come in?” he asks after a moment.
Trapper doesn’t snap out of it, but he nods shakily and steps aside. Hawkeye enters. He shuts the door in a daze behind him.
Once it latches, Trapper surprises him by almost immediately pressing him up against it and kissing him with such strength and fervour that Hawkeye is sure he nearly breaks his nose. He grips at Trapper’s shirt with a white-knuckled grasp as Trapper does the same to his hair. It hurts, almost, and it sends a thrill of electricity down his spine. His chest bursts with warmth and it’s the first good feeling he’s had in weeks.
When Trapper breaks apart, he presses his forehead against Hawkeye’s, not releasing his hair. His eyes are clenched shut and Hawkeye feels horrifically out of the loop. He brings his own hands up to cradle Trapper’s face as Trapper breathes unsteadily.
“I don’t know what I was expecting,” Hawkeye says roughly, “but it wasn’t this.”
Trapper opens his eyes and for a moment, Hawkeye thinks he might cry. He wonders what he’s done wrong. Trap looks at Hawkeye like he had expected him to disappear and now that he hasn’t, he doesn’t know what to do. “I thought you were dead,” he says thickly.
He pulls back a little. That definitely wasn’t what he was expecting. “What?”
“Thirteen years, Hawk,” Trapper tells him, loosening his grip a little to card his hands through Hawkeye’s hair. It feels tender in all the ways Hawkeye doesn’t remember Trapper being.
It takes a moment to remember. The clerical error that led to his unpersonhood, as that snide army Captain had put it. “You knew about that?”
“Your dad called me – couldn’t get through to Korea, wanted to know if I knew any more than he did,” he says, and Hawkeye tries not to flinch at the mention of his dad. “It was so soon after I got back, I was still celebrating. Party-pooper,” he jokes weakly.
The words take a moment to register. “Well, I always did like to be the centre of attention,” he tries dimly. “Guess he forgot to tell you.”
“It tore me up, Hawk,” he replies, vulnerable, like he’s telling him a secret. “That I never said goodbye- that I just left you, and then you were gone.” He drops his hands from Hawkeye’s hair, drops them and lets them linger on his arms like he doesn’t want to let go.
Hawkeye isn’t sure he should feel as bad as he does. This feels like something that shouldn’t be his fault. He feels like he might collapse under Trapper’s unfaltering gaze. He looks down. “I’m sorry, Trap.”
“You’re-” Trapper starts before he stops.
Hawkeye can feel him looking at him intently, assessing him. Hawkeye has never been more aware of the fact that he’s changed than he is now. He wonders if Trapper will still want to see him, now he stands here like a glued-together plate of shattered china.
Trapper seems to reach a verdict. He pulls Hawkeye in tight to a close embrace, wraps his arms gently around him. Hawkeye sinks into it. “Hawkeye,” he says. He doesn’t apologise. Hawkeye is unsure what it means.
He buries his head in Trapper’s shoulder.
They pull apart all too quickly. “Can I, uh-” Trapper scratches the back of his neck, “Can I get you anything? Coffee?” he asks. “I’d offer you a drink, but…I’m on the wagon.”
“Really?” Hawkeye is surprised.
Trap smiles, soft and gentle with the same crooked tilt as ever and the warmth Hawkeye feels at it lets him know that a part of him still loves him. “Twelve years,” he says, and Hawkeye wonders briefly if it had something to do with his un-death.
His mind races as it tries to find something more to feel bad about, like his own tendency to still crawl into a bottle, but he finds he can’t muster it. He smiles back. “That’s great, Trap,” he says. “Good for you.”
Trapper squeezes his arms a final time before letting him go and leads him into the kitchen. He even pulls a chair out for him, bowing almost comically. "Ma'am," he says.
Hawk smiles. He hasn’t felt like smiling for a while.
Soon, two cups of coffee are sat in front of them, between them, on the kitchen table. Hawkeye looks around. It’s relatively modern, papered walls and painted cabinets. Neat too, neater than Trapper ever was in Korea. He spares a glance to Trapper’s left hand. His wedding ring is still on his finger. He isn’t sure if he’s surprised. “You alone?” he asks vaguely, letting Trapper take it any way he likes.
“Louise is visiting her sister. She’ll be back this evening,” he says. Hawkeye isn’t sure if he’d expected them to have split or not. “Beck’s at college. Kathy lives with her husband.”
Husband, he thinks. He feels old, and it isn’t an unfamiliar feeling. He can remember when Kathy and Becky were 5 and 7. Kathy must be 18. Although it isn’t unusual, Hawkeye thinks back to when he was 18. He’d have considered moving to work as a B-girl in Las Vegas before he’d have considered marriage. “Huh,” he says.
“You can’t get drafted if you’re married,” Trapper says loosely.
For now, he thinks but doesn’t say. He swallows and chooses not to linger on the thought. “What’s Becky studying?”
“Linguistics. MIT,” Trapper says and Hawkeye can hear the pride in his voice. He smiles. “It all goes over my head.”
“That’s great,” he replies and pauses, wondering whether to pry. It isn’t really his business, the state of Trapper’s marriage. “How’s Louise?”
“She’s good,” he says and sips his coffee. “She’s doing some accountancy course. More power to her, I say.”
Hawkeye isn’t sure whether to ask more. He wonders if Trapper’s infidelity is a thing of the past.
He doesn’t get a chance to ask, anyway. “What about you?” Trapper says. “How’s your dad?”
“Dead,” he says quickly, smiling a smile he doesn’t mean. Trapper’s face drops and Hawkeye immediately regrets his flippantness.
“I’m sorry, Hawk,” he replies softly, reaching across the table to put a hand over his. His skin is warm. “I know you were close.”
Hawkeye nods.
“When’d it happen?”
“Last week.”
“Damn,” Trapper says and leans back. “I’m sorry,” he says again.
He allows it.
“Listen, Hawk,” Trapper starts, and Hawkeye almost dreads it. “Not that I’m not glad to see you – believe me, I am,” he says. Trapper pauses and Hawkeye remembers that until around twenty minutes ago, Trapper thought he was dead. “But why are you here?”
“I’m not sure,” he lies. He almost hopes Trapper understands without him having to say it.
Trapper nods. He sits, quiet for another few moments. Hawkeye places his hands in his lap and waits for his response.
Trapper stands. He rounds the table, slowly.
He places his hand under Hawkeye’s chin, tilting his head up slowly, and Hawkeye knows he does understand. Trapper leans down and kisses him, slow and open-mouthed. He bites Hawkeye’s lip. He tries not to moan straight away. It’s been a while, and finally, a decent feeling courses through his body. The numbness begins to come away like scrubbed-out blood.
Hawk hesitates. He presses his forehead against Trapper’s to part them. “What about Louise?” he asks. He feels bad, especially seeing as they seem to be doing okay.
“You never used to care about that,” Trapper remarks, not unkindly.
It’s true. Though he’s been trying so hard to avoid it, Hawkeye thinks about BJ. How it had mattered so much that he stayed away from him. BJ is married. So is Trapper. He shrugs. “Things change.” He starts to pull back.
Trapper doesn’t let him. “Louise and I have an agreement,” he says.
Vague. Hawkeye isn’t sure what it means. “An agreement,” he repeats, the question loose in his tone.
“Sure,” he replies. “Mess around all you like, just don’t fall in love.”
“Oh,” he says, staring up at him with wide eyes.
The hand below his chin moves to his jaw, cupping it. “Maybe I’d broken it a little with you,” Trapper says, and kisses Hawkeye again. Hawkeye almost melts into it.
Never breaking away, he stands to be at a more convenient height, letting Trapper push him onto the table. The coffee mugs clatter behind him as the kiss moves from soft to more passionate. Trapper’s mouth is hot, so hot, and his tongue is no less skilled than the last time they did this, over a decade ago. He tastes of coffee, good coffee – not the dreck they had in Korea, the taste that Hawkeye remembers Trapper tasting like the most.
Trapper clenches a hand in his hair and Hawkeye hisses into his mouth, pulling him closer with an arm around his waist. Heat pools in his gut and Trapper grinds against him, between his thighs. He breathes shakily.
“Okay?” Trapper asks, barely pulling away.
Hawkeye nods. “I need-” he tries. He isn’t quite sure, he hopes Trapper can remember what he used to need when things were hard.
“I know,” he replies, pressing back against him, stronger this time.
Soon after, they make it upstairs, fumbling, after a realisation that anyone could look in through the kitchen window. Trapper takes him to the spare room, not his own, pushes him onto the bed before he roots around for some Vaseline and falls on top of him.
It’s long, and Trapper is very thorough and rough in all the right ways, and he’s good, so good, as he always was. He gives Hawkeye’s nerves something to really sing about, is perfect and everything Hawkeye needs him to be, except – it’s still not enough.
It should be enough, it had always been enough.
When they finish, when Trapper pulls out and kisses him softly, high on the cheekbone, all Hawkeye can think about once again is how this isn’t fair. He feels like he could cry. He feels guilty for asking this of Trapper, guilty for falling back on this in his grief, guilty for some vague reason that leads back to BJ, like he shouldn’t have done this.
Trapper rolls him onto his back and strokes a hand over his hair as he lies next to him. “You okay, Hawk?” he asks.
Hawkeye looks at him. Trapper watches him with such care that it aches. He nods, if for no other reason than to assure Trapper. He smiles the smile he always used to give Trapper when he wasn’t doing so good but he didn’t want Trapper to worry. The one that always used to work. “Great.”
He frowns slightly. Hawkeye can tell he doesn’t believe him. “I don’t believe you,” he confirms.
Trapper notices. Trapper never used to notice. Hawkeye again remembers that a lot can change in a decade and he feels a little like he’s been left behind. Trapper is here, he’s sober and he has a home and a family and grown-up daughters.
Hawkeye has an empty house, a drinking problem and a stack of discontinued letters from a man he loves and who won’t talk to him.
“I thought-” he starts. “I thought this would help.” It did, a little. At least he isn’t numb anymore. Now he can feel every bit of sorrow and pain - and anger, at himself, at his father, at the whole damn world yet again because it isn't fair - that ricochets through his body. He isn’t sure if it’s better.
Trapper sighs, though he doesn’t look offended or upset. He makes Hawkeye sit a little so he can get his arm behind him before he pulls him close. Hawkeye leans against his chest. “I’m sorry,” he says simply, not affording it any more comment.
Hawkeye nods. “Me too.”
He’s quiet for a long time. Hawkeye feels his breathing under his head, under his palm. Then, “Who?”
“What?”
“Who is it you're mooning after?” he asks. It's put less seriously than he means it, encompasses far more, and Hawkeye appreciates it, even if he wasn't expecting that sort of insight.
He looks up at him, startled. Trapper is watching him carefully. “You’re smarter than you look,” he says.
Trapper shrugs. “I’ve lived with three women for thirteen years. Call it female intuition.”
He huffs a laugh. “BJ Hunnicutt,” he says at last, lets himself taste the name in his mouth. He hasn’t said it in a while. His tongue, his lips, his vocal cords – have missed it.
“Who?”
Hawkeye grins, thinks briefly that BJ would resent that. “Your replacement in Korea.”
“That long, huh?” Trapper replies. “What kind of a name is BJ?”
He laughs, louder this time.
“You in love with him?”
“Yes,” he answers simply, and the single word seems insufficient.
Trapper strokes his hair lightly. “The real thing?”
Hawkeye wonders what he means, whether to Trapper the love they felt for each other wasn’t the real thing. It was real enough for Hawkeye. Still, he supposes the way he feels for BJ is very different to the way he feels for Trapper.
Trapper is – was? he wonders – his friend first and his lover second. The love feels like friendship, although Hawkeye has never been particularly good at telling the difference. BJ is- well, BJ. Someone Hawkeye can’t live without, yet still does. Someone, so far away, yet still somehow the centre of his life, like Neptune around the Sun.
“Yes,” Hawkeye answers simply.
“Let me guess,” he says. “He’s straight.”
“Grievously,” Hawkeye replies. “Married,” he adds. “And Californian.”
“Californian!” Trapper replies with mock disgust.
Hawkeye laughs. He realises how much he’s missed Trapper. It makes him feel worse again, this sinking feeling in his chest like he knows this won’t last, or that he’s asked Trapper for something he shouldn’t have.
Trapper continues to fiddle with his hair for a few minutes. “You’re all grey,” he remarks, changing the subject.
“I’m old,” he replies. Hawkeye doesn’t think it has changed all that much since the war, but then again, Trapper didn’t see how he’d turned out by the end either.
“Still younger than me,” he says.
“I’m working on overtaking you.”
“Suits you.”
He hums. “It goes great with the crow’s feet and the bad back.” The same bad back twinges a little, not helped by his little – or not so little – romp with Trapper. He sighs. “I’ve grown into it. I’ve had it for at least ten years.”
“Stress?”
“War will do that.”
Trapper’s hand stills but doesn’t leave his head. “Still, you made it out in one piece.”
“Yeah,” he says softly, knowing how untrue it is.
As Trapper holds him, presses him to his skin, Hawkeye still feels far away. This should be enough, for him. This sort of thing has always been enough, he tells himself again. It’s a lie. It’s been a lie since 1953, perhaps before.
Hawkeye devours. The people he has loved – he takes until he’s had his fill and then some, gives them himself in return but not the right parts of himself. He knows this because the people he has loved have told him so. He’s too much, too unrefined and dedicated and more than a little unstable. His relationships are short and passionate and he falls whole-heartedly in love with each of them. It’s the way it always was – so he expects it. He refuses to commit, so people won’t leave him.
They leave him anyway.
Against Trapper’s chest, he knows that whether Trapper had planned to write or not doesn’t matter – he had left him. BJ had done the same, and BJ had done it twice. Once in Korea, and once back home.
BJ had left him twice and he still, with great shame at what it means about what he’s just done with Trapper, he would rather the man under his touch was him. He would still do anything for him at a moment’s notice, fly across the country if he asked. The problem is that BJ isn’t going to ask.
“I’m sorry, Trap,” he says.
Trapper hums a question and Hawkeye feels it rumble against his ear.
“I shouldn’t have done this to you.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
Hawkeye begins to feel a little claustrophobic. He pulls himself from Trapper’s grasp, getting out of the bed.
Trapper pushes himself up onto his elbows. “Where are you going?”
“I should be off,” he says. He picks his clothes off the floor and pulls them on. “I have…things to do,” he lies. He has nothing to do, not anymore – no letters to write (except to Margaret, who probably already expects him to stop any day now), no one to look after, no one to go home to. He doesn’t even want to work anymore – surgery reminds him too much of Korea, and, startlingly, he realises general practice would remind him too much of his father. He rubs at his chest at the sharp pain he feels at the thought of him.
Once he’s passably dressed, he leaves the room. He’s vaguely aware of Trapper pulling on his own pants and following, still bare-chested. “Hawk!”
Hawkeye pulls his coat on from where he threw it downstairs. “Thank you, Trap, really.”
“Hawkeye!” Trapper calls, almost incredulous, grabbing his arm as he rushes into the hallway.
Hawkeye turns and looks at him. He calms down a little at the gentleness in his eyes.
“Why don’t you stay for dinner?” Trapper asks him softly. “I’m sure Louise wouldn’t mind.”
He almost can’t think of anything worse. Sitting there, eating her food having just fucked her husband. He cringes at even the idea of it and remembers why he often keeps to himself these days. He seems to have lost his ability to put his embarrassment on hold. “No, thank you,” he says, calmer. “I really should be going, Trapper.”
Trapper hesitates in letting him go.
“Thank you for this, Trap,” he says, yet again.
“It was good to see you,” Trapper says reluctantly. “Don’t be a stranger,” he adds.
Hawkeye nods. He doesn’t think he’ll follow through.
Trapper kisses him softly, hand lingering on his arm. “Look after yourself, Hawk.”
“See ya, Trap,” he says. He opens the door and leaves.
The air is cold. It feels sharp against his skin.
Everything hurts. He hates that he misses the numbness.
As Hawkeye walks down the street and back into the centre of the city, he doesn’t know where he’s going. He doesn’t know what to do next. Neither in Boston nor in general. He thinks about selling his father’s practice. He thinks about selling the house.
He walks into the bustle of the city and lets himself fade into the crowd.