Chapter Text
Hawkeye wasn’t a communist, honest, but there was something about visiting Charles, Margaret, and secretly also Trapper at the house on Beacon Hill that made him see red in more ways than one. The amount of wealth on display, even in just how the Winchesters decorated their foyer, was so absurd that it became embarrassing and infuriating in equal measure.
Still, he’d gotten used to it, like with any other horror, and liked both Charles and Margaret enough that he mostly didn’t do anything too petty like track mud all over the pristine floors. At least the food was good; when he’d worked seasonally at the resort, he’d steal some of what he’d serve when the customers weren’t looking, and it was universally much worse than what he’d buy for cheap in town. Charles may have been fussy and stuck up and born with a silver spoon up his ass, but he’d somehow developed genuinely good taste despite it.
It would also be good to see old friends, after a day that could be nicely described as hectic and honestly described as awful. He’d worked a full shift at the hospital, and then he’d finally packed to his satisfaction and figured out what train out to Chicago he wanted to be on that evening. He was depending on Charles being sympathetic enough to let him off work for a while, or else he’d have to call Sidney again with a change of plans.
Hawkeye was pretty sure Charles would be understanding, but there was always a chance he’d be weirder about it. Not that there was anything Hawkeye could do about that.
At least Charles wasn’t making him wait around in the foyer, looking at art worth more than Hawkeye’s yearly salary, like he did sometimes when he was feeling petty, or when Trapper was being particularly distracting. Instead, Hawkeye was ushered immediately to Charles’ absurdly fancy dining room, where he found Charles and Trapper locked into a heated argument, with Margaret spectating with an expression of amused fondness on her face.
“--your books, Charlie, I know you can afford to pay your driver more than that. Hell, it’s the ‘60s and you’ve driven Army Jeeps behind enemy lines before, you can absolutely drive yourself around.” Trapper was standing, his hands on the back of his chair, and Charles sat across from him, pointedly not at the head of the table.
“Yes, one of the many indignities visited upon my person in Korea, what an excellent argument for maneuvering my way through Boston traffic, instead of paying an expert to do so.” Charles was seated, with his arms crossed. He was, most likely, going to lose this fight and pay the man more; how Trapper had ended up Charles’ conscience, Hawkeye did not know, but at least it seemed to be working out for everyone.
“If he’s so skilled, that’s just another reason you should--Hawkeye!” Trapper’s expression turned gleeful when he noticed his new guest. “Welcome to dinner, Charlie’s providing the entertainment.”
“I’m certainly entertained. Welcome, Pierce, it’s good to see you.”
Margaret didn’t get up. She, unlike her two dinner companions, was actually eating her food. There was a fourth place set.
“I see I’m late,” Hawkeye said. “You can blame the subway for that, by the way, since somebody’s family campaigned to keep any lines from passing nearer to his house.”
“Digging under the hill would simply be impractical,” Charles said. “John, sit down, we have guests.”
He sounded so fond, and Trapper’s answering grin was equally besotted.
“Hawkeye’s not a guest,” Trapper said, but sat anyway. “He’s family.”
“The implications of that are worrying,” Hawkeye said. “We’ve done things I would not do with a member of my family.
Trapper winked in response.
“You’re going out to see B.J.,” Margaret said. She was ignoring Hawkeye and Trapper’s back and forth. She’d only gotten better at it over the years.
“Yeah,” Hawkeye said. “How come everyone knows that before I even say anything?”
Margaret looked at him, disbelieving. “It’s B.J.,” she said. “You’d do the same thing if he got cancer.”
“Are these the same thing?” Hawkeye asked, uncomfortable with the comparison. It made him think too much about the scares his father had given him over the years, scares that came more frequently as Daniel got older.
“Cancer would be less expensive, and wouldn’t be his fault,” Charles said, like a pronouncement from on high. “It is admirable of you to go be with him in his foolishness.”
“What the fuck, Charles,” Hawkeye said, without thinking. “How is this possibly his fault?”
Charles shrugged, and ignored a glaring Trapper. “I imagine it would not have been difficult for him to simply find other work,” he said. “If he had simply kept his head down, there would be none of the current difficulty, or publicity.” He waved his hand. “What can he possibly expect to come of it? Kameny was unsuccessful, why should he fare any better?”
“Not everyone has your connections,” Margaret said. “But he’s right, Hawkeye. You have to know that. Maybe he’d have a chance if people had different ideas about this sort of thing, but that’s not the world we live in.”
Margaret wrote editorials for a lesbian magazine, mostly about medicine, nursing, and how to keep yourself safe in government service. That just made hearing her say all this all the more surreal.
“I don’t know anything,” Hawkeye said. He took another bite without tasting it. “I found out from a fucking newspaper, instead of from my best friend. Honestly, I might be heading to San Francisco to throttle him, not to give him moral support.”
“I had no idea either,” Margaret said. “Are you sure he did?”
Hawkeye shrugged. “That’s what he implied? He seemed surprised to hear that I was bent, which threw me for a loop.”
“You’re too obvious, Pierce,” Charles said. “And you do not care how other men perceive you, at least not in this regard. I had no idea until John told me, and I was certain you and Hunnicutt had figured me out on my first night at the camp.”
Three queers in a tent, all unaware of each other, was one of those little ironies that Hawkeye wished he could appreciate better. This probably meant that all the other doctors in the unit were more heterosexual than Adam.
Charles knowing that Hawkeye was queer was still a little bit of a sore spot, since Trapper had mentioned that he and Hawkeye had slept together to Charles before the two of them had properly reconciled. Then again, Hawkeye had only learned the true nature of Charles and Margaret’s marriage at their wedding, so it wasn't like Charles was the kind of man to blab.
“He was probably worried about your rejection,” Margaret said, her voice a little softer than it had been. “That would have destroyed him.
Hawkeye stared at her. “I’d never,” he said. “He could tell me he was the Toledo Strangler and I’d visit him in prison until one of us died.”
“Was that another of Klinger's gags?” Trapper asked.
Hawkeye nodded, smiling faintly. Klinger had gotten into a habit of complaining to him and B.J. whenever a gambit failed, so he'd heard of most of them, even though Potter only shared the really funny ones with the class. “One of his better ones. Had the newspaper clippings to prove it and everything.”
It was oddly easy for him to forget what Trapper hadn't been there for, and vice-versa. Sometimes he'd imagine B.J. and Trapper working side by side, which he could remember was a fantasy most of the time.
He forced himself back on topic, even if he appreciated the out. “He was out the second he was fired,” Hawkeye said. “I don't think they've stopped trying to get people to inform on their friends.”
Margaret's expression tightened, bringing Hawkeye back to who she'd been when they first met. He'd been too caught up then in his own misery to realize how frightened she'd been, all the time. “Do you know they did that for sure?” she asked.
“No,” Hawkeye said. “But they would have, right? It's what they always do.”
“I'm aware,” Margaret said.
Trapper looked lost, which told Hawkeye that he'd never been told, or if he had not in a way that made it sound significant. “What did they do to you, Marg?” he asked, his voice flat like it only got when he was trying to cover something stronger.
“It wasn't about this,” Margaret said. “How could it have been, when I didn't even know yet? They were checking to see if I was a communist.” That felt like too polite a description of what Hawkeye remembered as a persistent harassment campaign, but he wasn't going to push it.
“Christ,” Trapper said. “Sometimes, I feel like I took all the fun out of the war when I left.”
Margaret laughed. “Our definitions of fun have not grown any more aligned over the years, Trapper.”
“No, you and Charlie have more in common,” Trapper said, winking.
There were some things about the three of them Hawkeye didn't understand. This was one of them. “I need time off work,” Hawkeye said. This wasn't just a social call. It was Trapper dragging Hawkeye out of his apartment, something he still seemed to consider something of a duty even a decade after Hawkeye had started being able to keep regular hours again. He'd called Trapper in a crisis, and now Trapper was keeping him occupied so he didn't go off and do something stupid.
Sometimes, Hawkeye thought the real reason they'd never gone back to how things were in Korea was that they'd never stop. He'd let himself imagine chaining Trapper to his radiator and never letting him leave one too many times, and Trapper has admitted once, the two of them looking out across what had once been Scollay square, but was now an unending sea of construction, that he sometimes hated Hawkeye's guts so much it made him feel sick with want.
Not that things weren't similarly complicated with B.J., but there was less of that leftover anger.
He would've asked Sidney about all of this, but Dr. Freedman did not take friends on as clients outside a war zone.
“I do not have infinite power at the hospital,” Charles said, snapping Hawkeye back to reality. “Eventually, you will run out of paid leave, and you will have to either return or lose your job.” He was older than Trapper, and usually that didn't show, but it did now, as he rubbed a hand over his face. “There's nothing more I can do.”
“I know,” Hawkeye said. “I just... need to see him. Just say someone's died.”
“Lying that obviously won't help you,” Margaret said. “Just say an old war friend has taken ill, very suddenly, and you need to see him. You wouldn't even be lying, in some people's minds.”
It was the kind of joke he might've made, though Margaret had a slyer, more understated delivery than he did. Now, even jokingly calling it a disease made Hawkeye feel off. It was one thing to think of himself as sick. Hawkeye was sick with a lot of things. It was another to think of B.J. as sick, even when he had an actual infection. “You have people to cover my work?” Hawkeye asked.
“We work for the best hospital in the world,” Charles said. “It would be an insult if I didn't.”
“Regretting not training as a surgeon, Marg?” Trapper asked, earning him an eyeroll. Margaret had gone into family medicine, and now worked longer hours than her husband, her husband's lover, or her husband's lover's best friend. It was, Hawkeye privately thought, an utter waste of her talents, but if she'd decided she'd seen enough of the insides of people for a lifetime he couldn't exactly argue with that.
He'd done the math at some point; unless he retired in his eighties, the surgeries he did in Korea would always outnumber his civilian work. There had simply been too many bodies.
“I would not waste Margaret as Pierce's replacement,” Charles said. “Nor am I in charge of her schedule.” He looked fondly at Trapper. “No, this will be creating more demands on your time.”
Trapper smiled back. “As long as I don't have to sneak my daughters into the hospital to see them, that's alright with me.”
Trapper's daughters were both in high school, and even more than Erin's growing up, they were a stark reminder of the passage of time. Soon, they'd both be adults, and wasn't that absurd.
Hawkeye finished up his plate, but didn't move to leave. Instead, he let the meal continue, no longer talking much himself, just listening to the conversation around him.
Of the four of them, only Charles drank with any regularity, but Hawkeye was sure the water in the pitcher on the table was somehow as expensive to procure as a middling bottle of wine. All that motivated him to do was gulp it down with more enthusiasm.
He liked spending time here, with his friends, but he couldn't quite slot into the dynamic the way he once had. Even though one leg of the triangle wasn't sleeping together, it was still hard not to be vividly aware that he was an outsider to this marriage. And worse, he could feel himself getting lost in his own head, with no way to stop it from happening. He didn't want to dwell on the fact that if he and B.J. really were so devoted to each other that other people could see it, why hadn't B.J. told him, but that simple fact dominated his thoughts.
“Hawkeye,” Margaret said, sharply, drawing him out of his thoughts. “Where are you?”
“San Francisco,” Trapper teased. “His spirit's already gone over.”
“Maybe that explains how I'm feeling,” Hawkeye said. “It's spiritual jetlag.” Another reason he preferred to take the train. His body could adjust to the time better than way.
“No wonder I couldn't stand Europe,” Margaret said. She stood up, also finished with her meal. “Come along, Pierce, let's leave Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to their meal.”
“Please stop comparing us to characters who die,” Charles said, in a weary tone that told Hawkeye this was a long-standing bit he was getting tired of.
Margaret ignored him. Hawkeye waved as he was led out through that awful foyer, where he retrieved his outerwear, and out to the street. Margaret looked like she belonged on Beacon Hill, in a way Hawkeye never would. Hawkeye knew better than to ask if this fact made her happy.
“Honoria and I have been leaning on him to change the decor,” Margaret said. “That's how it's looked since his parents re-did it, and I can't say it's grown on me in the time we've lived here.”
“I think I'm used to it,” Hawkeye said. Boston this time of year, no matter where you were, smelled of cigarette smoke and road salt. “It's better than some other places he's lived.”
“That bar is in hell,” Margaret scoffed. “Look, Pierce, I brought you out here to give you this.” She pulled a man's wallet out of her purse, and proceeded to hand him what looked to be almost a thousand dollars like it was beer money.
Hawkeye stood, dumbfounded, with the cash in his hand, before returning to his senses and shoving it in his own billfold. “What's this for?” he asked, all jokes about payment for service rendered turning to ash in his mouth.
“It's for B.J.,” she said. “He doesn't have an income, and this is nine hundred dollars his wife doesn't have to take out of her own pocket.”
She'd been just as eager as Charles to call what B.J. was doing ridiculous, but now Hawkeye had to wonder if that was them putting on a front for each other, neither fully willing to back down from an image they'd created together. It took two to make a sham marriage, and unlike B.J. and Peg, Hawkeye knew that there had only ever been friendship between the Winchesters. “Why not wire it to him?”
“This is the only way to stay completely anonymous,” Margaret said. “Since I trust you not to tell him it was me.”
“Why?” Hawkeye asked.
“I can't exactly scold him and give him money at the same time, can I?” She looked at her hands, as though she were about to bite at her short, scrubbed fingernails.
“I can't lie to him,” Hawkeye said. He'd have to make it all the way to San Francisco without getting robbed, which was easier said than done when not taking the direct path. “And I can't imagine he'd take charity from me.”
He entertained, for half a second, a fantasy of B.J. being his housewife, of the two of them living together, of Hawkeye providing B.J. with everything he could ever want or need. He dismissed it almost as quickly as he conjured it up. B.J.’s pride wouldn't allow it, and if he said any of this out loud, Margaret would say something appropriately cutting about Hawkeye's perspectives on women.
“Think of it as a scheme, then,” Margaret said.
“I'm out of schemes,” Hawkeye answered. “Scheming is undignified when you're forty-three.”
Margaret laughed. “Pierce, you could be eight-six and you still wouldn't have any dignity.” Her expression turned serious again. “Just tell him the donor would rather be anonymous.”
“And if he asks me to tell him directly?”
Margaret sighed. “It's not like you ever listened to me outside the OR, anyway, and it took me two years to convince you I was worth listening to there.”
Hawkeye bit back a retort. She wasn't wrong, as much as he didn't want to think about it. The OR nurses he worked with now had no idea how much they owed to a family medicine doctor working in the same system as them. “I'll get this to him,” he said. “I'm just glad I'm not the only one worried about how he'll make his living.”
“I still can't believe he went to work for the VA,” Margaret said. “Of all of us, I would've picked myself as the most likely to stick with the Army, but here I am.”
“And there he is.”
“And there he is.”
“Would you sue? If you were fired, I mean.”
Margaret's mouth formed into a grim, thin line. “I wouldn't get caught,” she said. “So, I wouldn't know.”
Hawkeye thought about his own close calls, in the now destroyed Scollay Square, in other, even seedier areas, in the back of his father's car on Church Street with Tommy, a hundred years ago. The whole point of undercover cops is that it didn't matter if you were careful, unless you were so careful you were celibate.
“I'm not sure either,” Hawkeye said. “It was good to see you, Marg. I need to go home now, before someone gets a bright idea and decides to take this money off me by force.”
“It's Beacon Hill,” Margaret said.
“Have you met your neighbors?” Hawkeye said, which got him a smile. “See you.”
“Travel safe,” Margaret said. “Call when you get there. He won't admit it, but you know Charlie worries.”
That was the other reason it was hard, sometimes, to feel at ease here. The three of them worried about him like he was always on the verge of spinning out, when he was a perfectly competent adult.
“We'll be fine,” Hawkeye said. “But I'll be calling collect.”
-
It would've been more efficient to bring his luggage to the Winchesters’, but he hadn't, so instead he'd given the Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority even more of his hard earned dollars by taking the back to his apartment and then boarding the Red line to South Station, where he let himself get lost in the crowd of people trying to get tickets.
The problem with South Station, and other transit hubs like it, was that it always reminded him of the promise he and B.J. had made a decade ago. They'd fulfilled it, dance included, the year before, and it had done nothing for the all-consuming ache he felt in B.J.’s presence.
If Trapper was right, and that was a big if--
He couldn't think like that. Pining over B.J. was supposed to be a joke, and now it wasn't.
South Station stank, but it grounded him. It was hard to feel lost in time when every sense told him he was very much in present-day Boston, with all the noise that implied.
He'd arrived too early, so he sat down to wait, his suitcase between his knees, and tried not to think about the end of his journey.
-
Spring in Crabapple Cove was like Dorothy waking up in Oz. Stark white winter snow melted into a riot of colors, and the woods behind Tommy's house turned gold from the sunlight filtered through the leaves.
Hawkeye lay with Tommy under the large, spreading oak, the oldest tree Hawkeye would ever see in his life. It was bigger than any person he'd ever met, and it spread its branches so far in every direction that it made its own clearing in the underbrush around it, making for a perfect hideaway.
It was their senior year, and Hawkeye was trying not to think about how far New York was from Crabapple Cove. He'd spent the whole year hoping that Tommy didn't remember that when they were ten years old, they'd promised they'd go to the same college and get married. If he did, that meant he'd known about their promise and decided to go to college out of state anyway, while Hawkeye was staying within driving distance of his dad.
“I wish we could get married,” Tommy said. A pit opened in Hawkeye’s stomach. Why did Tommy have to bring that up now?
“You promised we would,” Hawkeye said. He sounded angrier than he wanted to. He regretted bringing it up almost immediately. He turned to look at Tommy.
The sun cutting through the leaves lit up Tommy’s eyes. Hawkeye couldn’t tell what color they were. He couldn’t look away; he felt, if he looked long enough, like he could drown in them, and that he wouldn’t mind.
“I didn’t know better,” Tommy said miserably.
“We can pretend,” Hawkeye said. “For one more summer. People get married when they’re eighteen all the time.”
“I can do that,” Tommy said. He took Hawkeye’s hand in his.
Tommy’s hand was cold, too cold for spring. “You promised you’d write,” he said. His voice was older, now, and tired. Neither of them were boys anymore, but they were still under the oak.
“Life got away from me,” Hawkeye said, defensively. “You left first!”
“You knew my number in New York,” Tommy said. “You could’ve called whenever you wanted. I never moved until the day they drafted me.”
“I didn’t even know you were drafted until you arrived at the MASH.” Tommy’s arrival had broken the last of Hawkeye’s ability to separate himself from his surroundings. Uijeongbu and Crabapple Cove were in the same world, and people other than himself could travel between. He’d been so happy to see him; he’d been so scared by what his arrival meant.
“Right back at you, best friend.” Tommy’s grip on Hawkeye’s hand didn’t feel good anymore. Long nails dug into the skin of his wrist. “I had to find out from my sister, ‘cause you never wrote about this either.”
“Nails don’t grow after death,” Hawkeye said, trying and failing to extricate his wrist from the corpse’s grip. “That’s a myth.”
“You left me,” Tommy said, his voice hollow. Did Hawkeye even really remember what he sounded like?
“That’s not true!” Hawkeye protested. He tried, and failed, to pull his hand away again. “I don’t leave people! I would’ve stayed in Maine with you forever.”
Except, of course, he couldn’t have done that to Tommy. He couldn’t trap a mind like that in a tiny resort town where nothing happened, just like he couldn’t beg B.J. or Trapper to stay in a war that didn't matter and wasn't any good.
“You killed me,” Tommy said, half-dressed in the supply room where they’d made it for the last time. “And then you couldn’t even bother to find out what they did with my body.”
Hawkeye knew, in the abstract, what they did with the bodies of the soldiers they couldn’t save. They were buried somewhere, though not all of them made it all the way home. Tommy had. He knew this for a fact, because when he’d come back to the Cove Hattie Gillis had found him and brought him to her brother’s graveside.
“That’s not true,” Hawkeye said. “You died and I had to keep working. You weren’t even the first death on my table that day. You weren’t even the last.” That had been a bad day; it had to have been, Henry was an actually competent commander for most of it.
“I never should’ve left,” Tommy said, wrapping his rotting hands around Hawkeye’s head. He leaned in for a kiss.
Before their lips connected, Hawkeye startled awake to the shrill screech of the train’s whistle. At least it sounded nothing at all like Reveille.
“Buffalo in thirty!” the conductor shouted. Hawkeye bit down the urge to comment that you could use the name of the city to make the longest sentence in English that used the same word.
Hawkeye got up. He wasn’t hungry, but he’d taken this exact train to Chicago enough times that he knew that it was a good idea to walk around a bit, just to make sure his legs weren’t so stiff at the other end that he couldn’t move at all.
Walking to the dining car, he tried to blank his own thoughts by looking at his fellow passengers. Businessmen either too cheap or too broke for a better class ticket sat in the same row as families, and he was pretty sure that the gang of youthful twentysomethings on the far side of the coach were all college students, though whether they were heading to school or heading home he couldn’t say.
It didn’t take a psychiatrist to interpret his dream, Hawkeye thought to himself as he passed between carriages, the unprotected noise of the train not quite loud enough to drown out his mind. He felt abandoned, and he felt guilt about Tommy’s death, guilt above and beyond his overall guilt because for once the death on his table was someone he knew. What he didn’t understand was why he was having this dream now.
He missed Tommy terribly, of course, but in the waking world he had understood completely why his friend would want to move away. Tommy wanted to be a writer, more than anything else in the world, and you couldn't be a writer in a place like Crabapple Cove, not unless you were already famous and trying to hide from it. At the time, Hawkeye didn't have any greater ambitions than helping people in the exact same way his father helped people. It had only been when medical school had taken him to Chicago and New York that he'd started looking for something more.
It was hard to imagine trading his own life for Tommy's, when Hawkeye knew for a fact that he could save more people, but if anyone deserved that trade, it was Tommy. But, and this Hawkeye knew from the brief stint in the late ‘50s that he'd had a proper psychiatrist, before he'd simply gotten too busy, the dream wasn't just about Tommy. Tommy was just a part of whatever greater turmoil he couldn't escape.
“Are you looking for the restroom, sir?” a conductor asked.
Hawkeye startled. He was right near the entrance to the first class carriage, which was not where he'd meant to be. “No, sorry, stretching my legs. I'll go back to my seat.”
As he made his way back down the train, he tried not to think about the money burning a hole in his wallet. Instead, he thought about B.J. again, which wasn't much better.
What if they had figured each other out in Korea? It was nice to imagine screwing around, but B.J.’s reactions to Carrie Donovan and Aggie O'Shea, women Hawkeye envied so deeply he'd considered asking Mulcahy to hear his confession, told him that any affair would've gotten strange quickly.
Would it have been worth it? His friendship to Trapper was as strong as it had ever been, but that had taken careful repairs. Hawkeye had spent the rest of the war convinced Trapper had written him off as another symptom of battle fatigue, and Trapper spent that same time convinced Hawkeye had been avoiding his calls those last few days on purpose.
He and Tommy had actually kept up a very healthy correspondence until the day Hawkeye was drafted, at which point the only person he wrote to was his father. He'd craved reminders of the outside world as badly as he loathed them, and the idea that his friends, other men his age, were still out in reality while he was trapped was difficult to think about.
He settled back into his seat and watched, unseeing, as the train pulled into Buffalo Station, and crowds poured out like blood from a severed artery.
He knew B.J. had these sorts of dreams, too, or had them right after he came home. What corpses stared at him out of his past, if any? B.J. had been lucky. Leo Bardenero made it out of Korea alive, and all the way to Boston where he'd been, for a while at least, Hawkeye's problem instead. No one B.J. had loved before the war had died. Nobody had left him.
Clearly that luck had run out now, but it felt cruel to think of it that way.
The train started up again, and Hawkeye let himself be rocked back to sleep. It would be impossible to see anything out of the city, so there was no point in staying up.
This time, he did not dream.