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An announcement comes through over the PA system - two colors, a three-digit number - unintelligible to patients, understood fluently by hospital staff. Hawkeye shivers, because the crackling speaker always manages to transport a little piece of his mind back to Korea, or maybe that piece of his mind has never managed to leave Korea in the first place. Rationally, Hawkeye knows he is in Boston, at the Mercy Hospital, smack-dab in the center of the city, where he works with a number of his friends, where he wears civilian clothes to build rapport with his patients. But it’s unnerving: the code describes an Emergency Room patient in psychiatric distress and resisting treatment, making Hawkeye wonder frantically if it could be any of his patients from rounds earlier that morning. Could he have overlooked someone in need? Sheltering in place is advised.
When the announcement is read, Hawkeye is on his way up to the PACU nurses’ station, with a load-bearing cafeteria tray clutched in both hands. They are serving apple pie today, so picturesque Hawkeye had to stop, stare, and make plans to share it. He has three slices, a la mode, and cups of black coffee to balance the equation. Charles should be done with his cases by this late in the afternoon, and he needs very little coercion to go visit his wife across the hall. The couple is infamously infatuated with one another - but the talented Chief of Thoracic Surgery and the beloved PACU Charge Nurse are best kept in good moods, which essentially means ‘in close proximity to each other.’ Hawkeye yearns to be a part of a love like that, especially theirs. He can’t tell if lunches together in the cafeteria are going to cut it, but he counts every touch of his hand atop the table, every time the eye contact lingers, every time they laugh at one of his jokes.
Charles must care about Hawkeye somewhat, and at least enough to have recommended him for his job in the ER, the same as he recommended Donna for her job in PACU… after Margaret recommended Charles for his position in Thoracic Surgery, and Trapper for his position in Pediatrics… There’s a lot of love to go around, and that’s the kind of environment where Hawkeye thrives. He can find beauty and goodness in just about anything, even in the ice cream beginning to melt over golden, glazed apples, and a lattice-work crust.
The hallways are eerily empty; everyone has rushed into hiding. Hawkeye quickens his pace up the stairwell and ducks around the corner into PACU, where the lights are dim, and the circulating nurses are nowhere to be seen. Charles is standing behind the high, horseshoe-shaped counter, with Donna sitting out of sight, right in front of him, working on her charts on the tabletop. The back of her chair is flush with Charles’ belly, and he rests his hands over the back of it, protectively holding Donna’s shoulders. The side panels of his lab coat frame her nicely, like a portrait, and it signals he is certainly done with surgery for the day. When Hawkeye comes in, they both smile at him, and invite him to pull up a chair. He sets the tray down on the table and passes out goodies to his ‘hosts,’ only for Charles to affectionately chide him.
“We are... companions,” Charles insists, carefully, unsure of what term Hawkeye would prefer to use for their yearling relationship.
“Companions on what could become an extended coffee break,” Donna observes, tucking her paperwork away in a folio.
Charles reclines, sitting against the drawers, and tips Donna’s fork toward her invitingly. Hawkeye has a rushed bite of his ice cream, stinging his teeth with the cold, biting down on the hard prongs of his fork, making him restless.
“I should be down there,” he mumbles, straining for breath.
“Oh, is this a patient of yours?” Charles says, intending lighthearted humor. “In that case, one could hardly blame them for snapping.”
Hawkeye tries to funnel all of his patients through his mind, seeing if anything unusual gets sifted out. None of them seemed particularly anxious, but sometimes the very nature of emergencies means they cannot be predicted. He might have said something, inadvertently, to send any of them into a spiral; he can sympathize, because it still happens to him, too, when he’s least expecting it, though he’s getting better at warding off the side-effects…
He drops his fork, and it clatters from the rim of the bowl, to the edge of the tray, finally skidding to a stop on the tile.
“I don’t think so,” he says, looking down at it. “But I don’t know that. I need to go and see, and– and then-”
“You need to stay precisely where you are,” Charles says firmly. “Safe from harm.”
Perhaps it would be easier if all of him was still in Korea, instead of one tiny piece crying out for chaos. Where is the mud? The still? His aching back after who-knows-how-many hours spent in the OR? How is he supposed to practice medicine and perform miracles with all of those factors gone ? But his friends are the same. His friends are with him.
Donna is looking him over carefully, calculating what advice to give him. His breathing is steadying out, already, and his eyes are alert and focused. He is not in danger of dissociating, or trying to fly his brain back to the 4077 in search of medical advice.
“I don’t think I missed anything,” Hawkeye vocalizes this with confidence, and has it multiplied by Donna and Charles immediately.
“No, I wouldn’t expect you to,” Donna says.
“You’re quite thorough,” Charles says.
“But I… still worry. I’d worry about anyone, like that. If that were me… ” Hawkeye trails off, hoping better for the anonymous patient.
Charles tuts his tongue, in recognition of this.
“We will keep you quite safe, Hawkeye,” he promises.
“Do you want to finish your dessert?” Donna asks, and she offers her fork, laden with sparkling pie-crust, toward Hawkeye. “It’s just as good as it looks. They're really spoiling us, today."
Hawkeye wonders how they’re trying to treat that poor patient, if they’re giving him the good stuff, a spoonful of something sweet instead of a sour pill to swallow. When he was in psychiatric care, himself, there was a nurse assigned to help feed him, watching him while he took his medicine. It’s a kind gesture, coming from Donna, but Hawkeye doesn’t want to inconvenience her.
Charles takes a similar approach to his wife, but abandons his own fork in solidarity. Their dear friend Hawkeye is no longer a surgeon relying on a tray full of instruments, but a man of hands-on medicine. Charles cracks his own crust apart, with the noise prompting Hawkeye to look at him as he eats the corner. Hawkeye follows suit, feeling the grainy sanding sugar beneath the pad of his finger, gently breaking the buttery-soft underside of the crust, dolloping the whole thing - apple slice and all - into his mouth to dissolve. He focuses on the late-blooming flavor of it, the glowing tactile sensation on his tongue, while two people who love him look after him.
The ice cream is only touched after it has melted completely, sopped up on dry crust, no longer shockingly cold. While Hawkeye alternates this with slow sips of his coffee, feeling the heat sinking down his throat and making itself at home in his belly, Donna gets up and locks the door.
“I sent the gals home already, since we were done with surgeries for the day,” she explains. “I haven’t heard an ‘all clear,’ yet. I’d rather be safe than sorry.”
It isn’t a small room by any means, but the bolt on the door clangs heavily in Hawkeye’s ears. He has an aversion to being confined anywhere, even though he knows this is for his own good. Donna picks up the subtle way his eyes shift, and gently clears his dishes for him when he’s finished. She makes a little pile there on the desk, beside Charles.
“Would you be more comfortable away from the door, Hawkeye?” she asks. “Why don’t you come with me…”
His eyes are fixed on the lock, as he imagines the poor, startled patient running by on the other side. Since he has no idea what the person might look like, he imagines a gaunt version of himself, and hopes they get the help they need… Hawkeye allows Donna to touch his shoulder, turn him around in his chair, and guide him toward the recovery bay. There are three gurneys with their headboards against the wall, ready to receive oxygen and medication infusions, with curtains between each bed to be pulled for privacy, and a rocking chair at the end of the row to watch over them all.
Charles follows at a careful distance, while Donna sits Hawkeye down on the first gurney, and draws the curtains closed all around him. Then she hauls the rocking chair in close, so that her knees touch the edge of the bed when she rocks forward. As usual, Charles situates himself behind her, perching his hands on her shoulders and his chin in the nest of her soft curls. Hawkeye worries his gaze is intrusive, as he watches Charles squeeze his wife’s shoulder and reset a stray lock of her hair. But they would not have moved him if they did not care about him.
“You’re welcome to go marching around on the furniture,” Charles says, with a vague gesture forward, tipping both his head and Donna’s down at the same time. “If you feel that would, ah, calm your nerves.”
“No, no, no. You’d have to make the bed again,” Hawkeye says, patting the quilted pad he is sitting on, in the middle of the mattress.
They’re about to administer care to him, he’s sure of it. He knows that look they’re sharing, because he makes the same face all the time.
“We always do, after a patient uses it,” Donna says sweetly.
Hawkeye rocks from side to side, resting weight alternately on each arm, while Donna and Charles sway forward and backward.
“You aren’t nervous around doctors, are you?” Charles teases, to break the tension.
Hawkeye shakes his head, “of course not. Why do you think I went to doctor school?”
Rather than continue to hover in his lab coat like a ghost, Charles puts his restless energy to bed, and goes to sit beside Hawkeye on the narrow gurney. He wraps an arm around Hawkeye’s back, bending up in time to tickle Hawkeye’s shoulder with featherlight touches from his fingertips. Donna decides to join them, sitting on Hawkeye’s other side, and freeing up the rocking chair for him to sprawl out his legs. His heels squeak on the cushion, and the seat glides backward with very little resistance, even though he kicks forward weakly. It soothes his mind and slows his thoughts, when his body is kept busy.
Donna strokes one hand through his graying hair, while the other kneads his shoulder, the same one Charles is stretching around to touch. Charles leans in, bridging his temple to Hawkeye’s cheek, splaying his fingers over Hawkeye’s chest to feel his breath and his heartbeat. Never mind the fact both of them are wearing stethoscopes; that would be too impersonal. His pulse is perfectly ordinary, but the tempo is meant to be experienced, not merely observed or recorded at a time like this.
“That’s it,” Donna encourages his breathing. “Nice and easy.”
“You’re in capable hands,” Charles demonstrates by gathering Hawkeye’s hands within his own.
Charles leans into him, and so does Donna from the other direction. He feels like he’s wrapped up in a blanket, and even dozes off without realizing, until–
The PA system buzzes over their heads, and the operator announces the ‘all clear.’
Hawkeye fidgets. His companions maintain their loving embrace around him, including him, and Charles even lifts one of Hawkeye’s hands to bestow a kiss on the back.
“I see no harm in staying put,” Charles decides.
"I'd never argue with my doctor," Hawkeye replies.
"Your compa--"
"Or my companions."