Chapter Text
Hawkeye got out of his car and stared up at the house. It was gigantic — eight bedrooms, really ridiculous; it was built when the Pierce family subscribed to good old Catholic values, the kind that meant at least a couple kids would make it into adulthood — and as of today, he was the only one who lived in it. He walked up to the house slowly, like it was encased in some kind of forcefield; he didn’t really want to go inside, but what other options did he have?
He decided, halfway up the walkway, that, hell, he should get the mail. It had nothing to do with his new aversion to his own home. It was just something he had been neglecting to do for a long time, and he realized he needed to tend to it. He walked back down to the mouth of the driveway and grabbed about a week’s worth of letters. He picked up the newspapers off the porch, too. Then he was out of things to do, so he stared at the door for a few seconds.
He walked from the door to the dining room table in a single burst of movement. Then he sorted through the letters in his hand. To Hawkeye, from BJ. To Hawkeye, from Sherman Potter. To Daniel, from Violet— he stopped and tore it open. May 15, 1958; that made more sense. He had seen Aunt Violet a few hours ago.
“How are you feeling, Ben? Holding up okay?” she asked.
“I’ll tell you when my feelings catch up to me.”
It was true enough; he hadn’t stopped to think about how he felt since he pressed a hand to his dad’s forehead and found it clammy and feverish.
He threw down the letter without reading anything else. He didn’t need to go snooping through Dad’s mail. Not that it mattered anymore, but still, the principle of it stood — he wouldn’t want his dad reading any of his letters.
A tortoiseshell cat brushed up under his hand, breaking his train of thought. He paused and gave her a look.
“Juno. You’re not supposed to be up there.” He scooped her up and put her back on the ground. Then he stared at the piles of mail he’d created and left them all to walk up the stairs.
The cat followed at his heels, meowing. He looked down. “What? I guess you’re hungry?”
She stared back up at him, and he felt bad for sounding so annoyed. She didn’t understand. She probably never would. He had brought her here from Boston when he got that damn telegram and left the country for three years, but he came back. She probably thought Dad would come back one day, too.
“Sorry. Come on.”
There was food in her bowl when he got there, though. He picked it up and shook it, but she stayed at his side. They stared at each other for a few seconds— although, was it truly staring if she kept blinking all slowly like that?— before he gave up. Alright, then, he thought. The cat’s developing a stalking problem. Well, it’ll fit right in; give my drinking problem a friend when I bring it back from its coma.
Hawkeye had done pretty well for himself after the war, all things considered. It only took a year or so of moping before he dragged himself out of it and started working again. Sure, there had been some missteps along the way — an attempt to work in the ER unit of a hospital which had ended up in disaster came to mind as an example of hubris that had nearly cost him his sanity — but altogether, he was alright. He worked at his dad’s clinic, he didn’t drink, and while he didn’t socialize very much, he didn’t hide from anyone, either. He was pretty well adjusted.
But there was an important constant in that equation: Daniel Pierce. An incredible man, and understanding one. A man who was always willing to give Hawkeye an excuse if he needed to get out of an outing; one who was always there to offer coffee and breakfast when he found his son sitting on the couch, jumping at every sound and looking like he had barely slept at all; one who smoothed over the rough patches Hawkeye made in conversations when his tongue stopped working with him and he started spitting venom instead of cracking jokes.
But he wasn’t here anymore, and he never would be again.
Hawkeye sighed like he was 10 all over again, and the weight of the world was on his shoulders. It felt like it sucked all the air out of him, like he couldn’t breathe, all of a sudden. He pulled at the knot in his tie until it was undone, hanging unevenly around his neck, and unbuttoned the top button on his shirt. Then, when that wasn’t enough, and he realized he couldn’t bring himself to go find the key to the liquor cabinet in the study, he stepped out onto the porch and lit a cigarette. It was ironic that it fixed the problem, really, but he’d take mercy where he could get it.
—
Three weeks later, Hawkeye still couldn’t bring himself to feel anything about it. He got up in the morning, ate a bowl of cereal that tasted like sawdust, and went to work. Instead of going home, he haunted the movie theater in town until eight or nine or whenever the last showing ended— On good nights, Fridays and Saturdays, that wasn’t until around midnight— and then, finally, he drove home.
When he got to the house, each night, he sat in his car for 20 minutes, staring up at the house. Then, he’d get out and lean against the side of the car while he smoked a cigarette. Sometimes, one of the next-door neighbors, Jan Ehrens or Ken Mason— maybe one of their spouses if he looked so pitiful that people from outside the town were worried about him— would come over and say hello. He entertained them just to keep himself from going in.
The cat never got over her obsession with following him from that first night, and once he was in the house, it could be relied on that there was a tortoiseshell body brushing up against him anytime he was still.
Tonight, as with every other night after he got to that point, he was sitting and reading a medical journal like it was the most important thing in the world. It was a routine that kept him carefully numb, too distracted to think about how quiet it was. And it was always quiet, no matter how loud the wind blew against the side of the house at night, or how much thunder the summer lightning storms brought.
He didn’t realize the phone was ringing at first, but when he did, he reluctantly closed the book and crossed the living room to pick up the phone. There was an armchair next to it, but he didn’t bother to sit down; he didn’t want to talk long, unless it was someone very specific. Juno jumped down, off of the couch, and up onto the arm of the chair. He had gotten used to her sitting on every surface he was standing near, and he didn’t even bat an eye.
“Hello? This is, uh, Dr. Ben Pierce.” ‘Ben’ always felt so wrong in his mouth, but these days ‘Hawkeye’ didn’t feel right, so he guessed it didn’t really matter. If it was one of the vacationers in town calling, they’d just get confused by a nickname, anyway.
“Hawkeye?” The voice was familiar, but not the one he’d been hoping for. Some irrational part of him got hopeful every time the phone rang, started thinking a voice just like his would come through on the other line. It wasn’t that he thought Dad was still alive somewhere; it’d just be a nice introduction to his own afterlife.
He must have taken too long to reply, because the voice continued, “It’s Margaret. Margaret Houlihan.”
“Uh– Yeah. Yeah, I know. Hello, Margaret. Been a few years. You need something?”
“No, no. I’m just calling because everyone else you know is too headstrong.”
This is starting to sound like a hallucination, he thought.
He hadn’t had one of those in a while. But it was more realistic than the idea that the real Margaret Houlihan had that note of worry in her voice. And it was a familiar enough tone that he thought he could make it up himself — it sounded like it was meant to frame the words, “Get it together, Pierce. You’re scaring me.”
“Headstrong? I thought that was your defining attribute.”
“Well, Potter’s been calling BJ, and BJ’s been inviting me over to his to grill me like I’d know anything, and what I’ve gathered is that you dropped off the face of the earth, Pierce.”
“Unfortunately, no, I haven’t. Still right here.” He got crazy ideas sometimes about going to California, where he knew she, BJ, and a few others lived, or something. Maybe just driving down an interstate and never looking back. But he would never do that. No matter how quiet it got in this old house, it was still Dad’s house. The fifth step up to the second floor still creaked if you put your weight on it, like it had when Hawkeye was little, and when his dad was little. The flower boxes on the front porch still had petunias in them, the ones Dad had planted that spring, although they were starting to look overwatered, because Hawkeye had no idea how to take care of them.
“Well, you haven’t replied to anyone’s letters in a month.”
“Oh. Yeah. I guess not. Sorry. Been kind of… preoccupied.”
“Is something going on?” She sounded suspicious. It almost sounded like she thought he had a girlfriend, for a second, which was laughable and she knew it. He didn’t care to make fun of her for it at the moment, though. The last thing he needed to know was that she still cared about whether or not he was dating.
“I don’t know. I guess it’s really that some one isn’t going on.” Before she could tell him to speak plainly, he continued, “Uh, my dad’s… gone.”
“Oh, God.” The guilt in her voice confirmed his theory, and it would have really made him laugh if the haze of nothingness wasn’t seeping in.
“Yeah. It’s—” He shrugged, even though she couldn’t see it. “You know.”
“Are you alright?”
“Well. You know. Working. Breathing. Eating, sometimes. I’d say that’s alright.”
“But not talking to anybody. I’ve learned it’s never good when a man like you shuts his mouth.”
“My neighbors, uh, talk to me, sometimes. I oblige. My Aunt Violet came over the other day. She brought her friend Paola, and they both looked at me like I was going to explode for about an hour before I suggested they might need to leave if they wanted to get back to their place in New Hampshire before it was dark.”
“But you’re not talking to BJ or Sherman.”
“You’re all kind of on the other side of the country, Margaret. Sorry I can’t pick up and head over to have brunch with you and the Hunnicutts.”
Margaret hadn’t gotten any harder to bait into an argument since the one three years ago that had convinced her to stop calling him. “I don’t see how this is my fault. You’re the one scaring everybody. I was just making sure you weren’t dead.”
“Well, I’m sorry to say, I’m not. So you can tell BJ that and, while you’re at it, tell him about this newfangled device you’re using to bitch at me with. He could make better use of it.”
“You’re impossible. Someone goes out of her way to make sure you’re alright, and you bite her head off.”
“Goodnight, Margaret.” He set the phone back into its cradle with force and shook his hand out.
Juno stared at him with her big, yellow eyes. He ran a hand over her head and huffed. “That woman drives me nuts. My dad dies, and she’s mad that I’m not writing people letters. Who gives a damn about letters anyway?”
The cat meowed. She’d gotten more and more fond of talking back, in the last month. He preferred it to silence, so he pet her for a while longer and listened to her purring. Then, he turned all the lights off and went upstairs.
He had trouble getting to sleep for a different reason than usual, that night. He couldn’t stop thinking about Margaret’s voice. Truly hurt, and truly concerned, when she called him impossible. It was such a reversal of the argument they had gotten into last time.
Then, he had jokingly suggested that six months of weekly phone calls had to be leading up to something. It hadn’t been what she wanted to hear, apparently, because she dressed him down like she never had before. There hadn’t been a call the next week, or the one after that. He’d sent a letter to BJ, confirming that she wasn’t dead, and then let it go.
It was around the time he realized how useless dwelling on everything was. He spent a few months afterwards really focusing on catching up with new advances in surgery and picked up an application for a general surgeon at Augusta General. Of course, that had gone swimmingly.
The fact that he’d ended up frozen, shaking, and then running out of the OR like that surgeon from when Potter and Winchester got the measles— or was it the mumps?— had just punctuated the whole Margaret issue for him. She was the one who was so insistent that he needed to get back into surgery. Really into it, not just doing routine appendectomies and tonsillectomies for the denizens of Crabapple Cove. And it had turned out just like he always told her it would.
He sighed. He reached down to the ground to dredge up his jeans, then dug through his pocket until he found his lighter. Then he walked over to the window, opened it a bit, and lit up a cigarette. His mother had always hated people smoking indoors. She was sensitive to headaches, and the last thing she needed was more agitants. The way she put it, he and his father gave her enough problems. That always used to make Dad smile.
He sat up in the window seat and stared out at the moon where it reflected on the sea. The air stung a little, salty as it was. But it didn’t sting like the wind in Korea had, when it kicked up dust as he and Margaret pressed their lips together for the last time. He tapped the ash off the end of the cigarette on the windowsill. If he was lucky, it’d catch and burn the whole place down.