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Hawkeye is dabbing away the last of the shaving cream that got pushed to his neck when something about how he shifts makes the bathroom light hit him at an odd angle, and like a moth to a flame, his gaze skitters right to...it. To be fair, it's almost impossible not to see it, what with it being right there on his face, taking up an unfair amount of real estate, but...it. There it is. Unavoidable.
Nose.
Every day, he seems to be noticing something else about how his body is changing that gives him pause, but there's still a wide array of options that can take his mind off it—maybe even prove that however he's seeing himself in the mirror is completely untrue. Admittedly, a lot of it has to do with the doting attentions of one extremely enthusiastic lover who, once he's told what the trouble is, will go out of his way to demolish Hawkeye's uncertainty with all the subtlety of a wrecking ball.
Part of that tremendous ease BJ has with Hawk's worries probably has something to do with the decade and a half of experience they have with each other, truth be told. Still feels unreal, when he really considers it. From the minute Rudyard Kipling slithered through the air between them, it felt as if Hawkeye had known BJ Hunnicutt for his whole life. But just like anybody else, they had to fight and claw their way through bickering and misunderstandings and double speak and just downright assholery before they could finally get here, to a charming house in California where, against all odds, they appear to be able to spend the rest of their lives side by side.
They get to be together. They no longer hesitate about sharing the most minute thoughts of affection. God, with the ever shifting landscape around them of free love, how it's permeated down to Castro Street, they're able to even have public dates in a way that Hawkeye had never truly thought would become real. Dates surrounded by people just like them, everybody looking out for each other, smiling as they wander down the sidewalk or into a restaurant by the sheer power of the fact that they can just...hold hands. Kiss. Wrap their arms around each other's waists and claim and know down to their very depths that everyone around them is doing the same.
In a way, it's funny. On nights like this, where Hawk's less concerned about how close he can stand to BJ in public without interlopers starting to whisper, it seems to open up his mind to notice, again, those strange aspects of living in a body that's changing right before his eyes. Love handles. Shiny stretch marks on his thighs. Silvery hair.
And the things that aren't changing, but just becoming more apparent every day. Like...nose.
"How's it coming?" BJ asks as he wanders in from the bedroom, fingers cleverly securing his tie.
Hawk turns his head this way and that, eyes not moving from his face in the mirror. He ponders. Frowns. "D'you think my parents should've named me Rudolph?"
"Like Valentino?"
"No, like..." Hawk blinks and finally turns his attention to Beej. "Really?"
BJ shrugs with a little smile. "Well, yeah, hello." He strolls in and tucks himself up close to Hawk's back, resting the side of head against his. "You seeing what I'm seeing?"
It's all but impossible to look away from BJ's handsome face through the glass, actually, the way his grays have brought out the elegance of his mustache, how deeply the wrinkles at the edges of his eyes sink in when he grins like this. He's so solid. Safe. Sexy as hell. "You know what it does to me when you wear that tie, right?"
As his eyes turn into smoldering diamonds, Beej's lips curve into a lethal smirk. "Sorry. Losing my memory in my old age. You'll have to remind me later."
"You'll be lucky if I let you get out of the car before I'm fucking reminding you," Hawk teases.
BJ keeps his gaze right on Hawkeye's as he leans forward and presses a hot kiss behind his ear, the kind that makes Hawk hum and go a little weak in the knees. "We have a reservation," BJ reminds him, as though he's not touching the small of Hawkeye's back to keep him steady and press him into the bathroom counter all at the same time.
"Fuck you," Hawk murmurs.
BJ laughs, winks, then steps away to let Hawkeye get a deep breath to settle himself. It would be a shame to miss out on some amazing cheesecake when he can just let BJ get through dinner unruffled and then blow him in the front seat, if Hawk's back'll let him.
Maybe it won't. But wouldn't it be fun to try?
Hawkeye hangs up the hand towel, but the moment he looks back at the mirror to check his hair, his stirring thoughts go dead silent. "Really, though." As he lifts his chin, a combination of the lightbulbs they use in the bathroom and his skin, warm from the California summer, makes the very tip of his nose seem even more bulbous and flushed than usual. "Look at this."
BJ hums in question. He settles his hand on his waist as he leans into the counter for a better angle. "At what?"
"This! Are you kidding?" Hawkeye gestures at his nose more grandly than he did that new bike he bought Beej for Christmas the year before last. "Look at it."
"What about it?"
"I swear it's getting redder. Bigger. I don't know." As Hawk screws up his face, his expression briefly reminds himself of a cat, disdainfully analyzing the food that was just set before it.
BJ chuckles. "I really have no idea what you're talking about. It looks exactly the same as it has since the first day I met you."
Somehow that's an even more horrifying thought, that Hawk's gone this long thinking he's some handsome, sexy ladykiller—mankiller? That one doesn't flow as well. Maybe neither of them do. He shakes his head to try and dispel the thoughts before they can go racing away from him. "Okay, sure. Forget it. It's fine." It's not. He's fixating, stuck, compulsively spinning his mind around it so that even when he looks down to grab his bottle of cologne, all he sees in his head is a bright red berry stuck at the end of a crooked hose.
Beej makes a quiet sound—one that Hawk instinctively understands to be his problem-solving hum—before he slides a hand into Hawkeye's back pocket, against all odds managing to get his thick fingers in no matter how form-fitting the trousers currently are. "I think I could pick just about any part of you out of a lineup."
Hawkeye snorts, the corners of his lips quirking despite himself. "Oh, yeah, kind of like weeding out the weird freaky misshapen apple from the bunch."
"Nope."
He cocks his head, considers another angle. "Because when Erin's not visiting, I'm allergic to anything that's not a bathrobe."
"Close," BJ murmurs, his tone shaking only slightly with a repressed laugh.
"Okay, okay, okay." Hawk waves through the air. "I'll bite. Why?"
"Because you ruined any other body for me."
Hawk pauses, still clutching the bottle of cologne, staring hard at the faucet.
"You're not gonna believe me. But try." BJ nuzzles Hawk's cheek, the words inescapable from so close. "When Erin and I swung by SF MoMA the last time she was here—when you were pulling that emergency shift, remember?—I kept having this feeling when I was walking past some of the paintings, the sculptures. I couldn't really figure it out. It's all gorgeous stuff. Erin kept pointing out some of the most incredible details I've ever seen. She's got an eye for it, I swear. But it took me until I got home and came into the bathroom and you were in the tub, and I just...I saw you, and I realized that every person depicted in those masterpieces, yeah, sure, they were objectively lovely, and also they stirred nothing in me. They were some of the most lifelike pieces I've had the pleasure to see, but they were so incredibly fake. They couldn't hold my attention because they weren't you."
All at once, Hawk can't bear to look at him, turns his head completely away. It's strange. It's so fucking weird how they've been together all this time, and yet there are moments where BJ will see him so vividly that Hawkeye half-wonders if he's been walking around in a blur up until then.
But Beej's palm finds his cheek then, and Hawk feels it all the way down to his toes. No, there's nothing fuzzy about life for him. He's been seeing in brilliant clarity since Kimpo.
Slowly, slowly, BJ guides Hawk back around, like a planet rotating toward the sun, and the moment they lock eyes, Hawkeye finds his face so gently cradled in both of BJ's massive hands. Suddenly there's no thoughts of noses, of stretch marks, of sore backs. There's just a silent invitation to look and be looked at in turn.
Hawk can't stop himself from resting his palms on BJ's softening waist as he drinks in the sight of him. It's incredible how impossible it is now to separate the potent reaction he has to the lines on his skin from the way his muscles melt in relief that he's here at all. As Hawk falls deep into his blue stare, his blood sings for him as though they're magnetized. There's so little distinction between the visceral physical attraction and the comfort that he can tell now has only come from time, time, and more time.
BJ thumbs over Hawkeye's skin. "You know what this face reminds me of?" he asks quietly.
Hawkeye considers. A single butterfly begins beating its wings right at the base of his stomach. As desperately as he's trying to flip through his mental rolodex to find a joke, a quip, the combination of BJ's touch and the longing in his gaze stops any playful comments stone dead. "No."
"It reminds me that you're here. You're real. You're not some dream." Those stunning eyes wander palpably all over Hawk's expression, from his forehead to his cheeks to his chin, leaving no part of him unloved. When BJ's fingers brush along the creases at the edge of Hawk's eyes, Beej bites his bottom lip for a moment. "That we made it. That we're living. That no matter who was taken from us, we're still marching forward together. That every day, there's a part of you that changes—just a few dozens of billions of cells—" The casual nature of that number makes Hawkeye chuckle, makes BJ's grin widen. "—but that even when you change, you're asking me to come right along with you. Because you don't need me to stay the same. And neither do you. Because what matters is we're making the choice every day to love the man we see right there, right in that moment, and finding we never want to make another decision but to stay. To learn each other's minds and passions and bodies over and over again."
The fervency of Beej's words pick up the longer he talks, and Hawkeye leans into him, bumping their foreheads together with a shuddering exhale. "You're such a bastard," Hawk finally manages to whisper back, smiling so broadly that his cheeks hurt. "How do I follow up something like that? What am I gonna say, ditto? C'mon. It's not enough that you took all the stars in the sky and put them in your eyes, but you've gotta take all the perfect words too?"
"Look who's talking," BJ repeats in a voice that's so lush, so sweet that Hawk could never doubt it.
BJ cups Hawk's cheek more deliberately, and without another thought, Hawkeye closes his eyes and purses his lips, waiting for a millionth kiss from the man he gave up so little for and yet gained so fucking much from. But there's no gentle brush over his mouth. Instead, faint but intimate warmth presses right to the tip of his nose, and Hawk, already at the edge of emotional overwhelm, feels his legs buckle as he gasps and leans his weight into BJ.
Beej catches him, because of course he does, his arms wrapping around Hawkeye's waist in the exact space that was made for them. He busses their noses together, back and forth, and Hawk drags up fistfuls of BJ's shirt over his spine, pulling it out from under his belt, and lets out a whimper.
"I love your nose," BJ whispers, the heat of his words tickling Hawk's face. "I love your grays. I love your wrinkles. I love your figure, all the soft parts, all the knobby bits. I've never felt like this about anybody in my life. And every day, there's something new about you that lights me on fire. So hush. The next time you see something you don't feel like belongs on your body, you just come find me, and I'll make sure it feels plenty welcome, huh?"
Hawk barks out an unexpected laugh. "I love you so much. You asshole. We've got a reservation that you made. We don't have time for me to blubber up with the waterworks."
It's the silence between them that's always been a warning. Hawkeye risks a glance and finds BJ already smirking at him, toothy and dangerous, and just as Hawk's heart starts to flutter, he's already hopping away—but not before BJ finds his ticklish belly and grazes over it.
"No!" Hawk cackles without thought, leaping from one foot to the next in a shot of adrenaline that makes him feel like he's barely thirty again. "Don't you—don't you dare!"
"I'm just making you laugh," Beej taunts as he comes after him. He makes an impressive lunge, but Hawk manages to spin out through the bathroom door and scamper across the carpet. "Aw, c'mon, babe—"
"Menace! Dick! Ass!" When BJ makes another grab, Hawk somehow manages to duck under his arms. "Pri—no!"
As Beej catches his wrist at the last possible moment, he drags Hawkeye in and pins him gently up against the hallway wall with his broad form, kissing his nose, his cheek, his jawline. "Love you," he breathes.
Thoughts of cheesecake rapidly slipping away, Hawk tips his head back with a shivery laugh. "Love you too—" And then cuts off with a squirm the second his evil lover presses fingers into his waist. "Hate! HATE!"