Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

A postcard showing sunrise over Muscongus Bay, Maine. Three words scrawled on the back: I miss you.

A postcard of the Brooklyn Bridge at night. Chattier than the note it’s replying to, it ends with a sentiment that’s just as unmistakable: Come for a visit. I’m dying to see you.

*x*x*

He makes the trip in stages; it’s the only way he can get his head around the idea of leaving home.

His mother’s sister still lives in Portland, so he and Dad drive down to spend the holidays with her family. Hawkeye and about a dozen of his cousins all pile into the den on sleeping bags and couch cushions the way they’ve done since he was a kid. Most of them are younger than he is, kids he hardly knew even before he missed the last three-odd years of their lives. One of them, Freddy, tries to beg off on account of ‘still having nightmares.’ Twenty years old, the poor bastard, with souvenirs from the very same police action that chewed Hawkeye up and spit him out half-wrong, and so they stay up late into the night talking about it. Sarah, one of their older cousins, widowed in the second world war, joins them, and one by one so does everybody else. They listen like nobody else Hawkeye has tried to talk with since getting home; they listen without judgment and without fear, with nothing but familial love and loyalty and Hawkeye could weep – he will, later, when he’s alone with his dad – for the beauty of it, the bittersweet beauty of the way he’d lost his mom so long ago but gets to keep her family even after this.

Dad takes him to the train station the day after Yom Kippur, hugs him and doesn’t let go as Hawkeye clings to him for five straight minutes, finally kissing his forehead and waving him onto the platform when the final whistle blows. The train ride to Boston passes in an uncomfortable blur; it’s the first time he hasn’t been within calling distance of someone who knows him since he returned stateside and especially after the week he’s just had Hawkeye feels more alone than he can remember ever feeling in his life.

Boston, however, rejuvenates him in ways he never expected. Seeing Charles is a shot in the arm for his sanity; the part of him that had worried and warned and fretted that any contact with anyone from over there would only bring back bad memories ends up doubled over laughing as Hawkeye finally has to admit that the bad memories are squatting in his brain without even paying rent, and seeing as the people over there were the only good thing about it trying to hide from them makes about as much sense as pulling a blanket over his head to ward off the monsters under his bed. The fact that Charles seems genuinely glad to see him and actually goes out of his way to introduce Hawkeye to his sister does some interesting things for Hawkeye’s ego, as well.

And then Trapper takes him to a motel and reminds him with all the subtlety of a land mine that his ego, not to mention the raging ball of existential angst and turmoil that Hawkeye calls his self, is actually contained within a body, and that the body miraculously still knows how to have a good time. 

The train into New York City feels like a magic carpet ride. His eyes are open and his heart is light. He’s surrounded by so many people and finds that he can’t get enough of just looking at them, wondering so fiercely about the stories that reside behind every wrinkled brow and Mona Lisa smile, hidden behind each newspaper and novel and dreamy gaze out the window that he just about starts to cry from his curiosity. And when he steps off the platform at Grand Central Station, there he is, not even ten paces away and looking right at him, like Hawkeye has just stepped out of someone else’s story and into Sidney’s and there was no other possible place for him to be. 

“You’re a sight for sore eyes,” Sidney murmurs in his ear, hugging him right back before he holds him out at arm’s length to look him over before saying with a grin, “I never realized how good-looking you were under all that mud, blood and khaki.”

Hawkeye throws back his head and laughs as he hasn’t laughed in months. The sight of Sidney, grinning up at him, sets him off again and he has to catch himself on Sidney’s shoulder, shaking with delight and with nerves.

“You’re looking rather dapper yourself, Doctor Freedman,” he says when he has his breath back, and it’s the truth, though Sidney is already shaking his head.

“Not ‘Doctor’ today, Hawkeye. I told you, it’s my day off.”

“Ah ha, so you dressed down just for me?” Hawkeye slips a finger beneath one suspender strap to snap it against Sidney’s chest as he winks at him, then catches himself, feeling suddenly wrong-footed. “And where is your lovely wife?” he asks, too-loud, just in case anyone around them cares that he’s still got his hand curled over Sidney’s shoulder, that Sidney is still smiling up into his face, eyes twinkling.

“She’s waiting outside,” Sidney nods towards the exit. “You feel up to meeting her right away?”

“Are you kidding?” Hawkeye squeezes him and steps back, reaching down to heft his duffle bag. “You didn’t really think I was here to see you, did you?”

Sidney chuckles, and with a grand gesture leads the way to the doors.

He really does look good, Hawkeye thinks, trailing half a step behind him. His hair is cut shorter, his mustache trimmed neater, and he seems less gray overall than Hawkeye remembers. As for seeing him out of uniform… Sidney is wearing a crisp white shirt tucked into a pair of well-tailored gray wool pants, a combination that really serves to show off a trim little waist and backside and prove what Hawkeye had always suspected, that he wasn’t just a pair of ears connected to a brain and really did have a body under all that stiff khaki all along. When Sidney glances back at him Hawkeye notices for the first time that he isn’t wearing a tie, that the top two buttons of his shirt are undone, which sends his thoughts scattering off in interesting directions.

He and Sidney had clocked each other as fellow travelers the moment they met, way back in Henry’s office the day the psychiatrist had arrived to evaluate Klinger, and Hawkeye had spent the following year worming his way into Sidney’s heart, making him his friend whether Sidney had meant to let it happen or not. And then Trapper left and Hawkeye began flirting with Sidney in earnest, pulling out all the stops in a campaign to tease his way into Sidney’s bed. His efforts were kindly but steadily rebuffed, which was probably all for the better as he spent the final year of his Korean fever dream relying more and more on surface tension and Sidney to keep from falling apart any sooner than he did.

“How was the trip?” Sidney interrupts the start of a really promising spiral and Hawkeye gratefully quickens his step to fall in at his side. He’s barely through rhapsodizing about his aunt’s challah when they push through the doors into the sunshine of a New York autumnal paradise and Hawkeye is temporarily blinded by the most beautiful woman he’s seen in living memory as she steps forward to link her arm through Sidney’s. 

“You must be Hawkeye,” she says, offering her hand. “I’ve heard so much about you since Sidney got back, it’s lovely to finally meet you.” 

“Aha. Miriam, yes? I’ve heard…well I’ve heard that your name is Miriam,” Hawkeye flounders and recovers, transforming the handshake into a gallant kiss. Even knowing who and what she is can’t convince him to stop staring and only Sidney’s knowing chuckle finally breaks the spell. “My god Sidney how did you hoodwink this angel into holy matrimony? With you?” he says, releasing her hand and flashing his very best smirk in between the two of them. 

Miriam laughs and swats at his shoulder like they’re old friends and they all three fall into step together on the sidewalk, Sidney pointing the way. 

It’s quite not true that Hawkeye knows nothing about Sidney’s de jure wife. In fact he’s gleaned three important facts about her from the sparse hints that Sidney had dropped over the years: that they married when she was nineteen and he was thirty-five; that she’s a Broadway musical actress; and that a few years before Sidney was shipped to Korea they conceived a child together, a boy, who’s being raised by Miriam and her – well, Sidney had once referred to her as Miriam’s wife, so Hawkeye supposes he ought to as well or risk looking like a country bumpkin. 

Looking at Miriam now, he divines a few facts of his own: she may be shorter than Sidney by a couple of inches but she’s got the kind of presence that Hawkeye can just bet makes her seem like the center of whatever room she walks into. Her auburn hair seems to answer to a different set of rules than the gravity that orders the rest of the world around them; every time Hawkeye catches a glimpse from the corner of his eye it’s swirling beguilingly around her face but when he looks straight on it’s always floating serenely in the afternoon breeze, catching the light and refracting it back in a hundred different shades from autumn maple to summer honey. Hawkeye can believe that she’s a rising star in musical theatre, her voice is rich and sweet and smooth like Winchester’s finest cognac and she carries herself with the kind of poise Hawkeye normally associates with old world movie stars and yet here she is in front of him, warm and living and sparkling with vivacity and wit. 

“Huh?” he says, with the utmost intelligence, when she leans around Sidney to meet his eyes, lifting her eyebrows when he answers her questioning look with a blank-faced stare. 

“Pierce,” Sidney says mildly, “if you drool on my friend this visit is going to be over before it’s really begun.” 

“I’m — god, no, I’m not—”

Sidney and Miriam crack nearly identical wicked grins, laughing at his stuttering protests, and as he watches Miriam pats Sidney’s arm and lets go of him, moving to walk in between the two men. 

“I asked if you’d ever been to New York City before,” she says, pointing to their left. “Or if we should be playing tour guide. Anyway, that’s Rockefeller Center.”

“I’m sorry,” Hawkeye says to her, contrite, after a flickering glance at the landmark. “I may be a bit distracted, it’s just that when your, ah, ‘husband’ told me about you, he completely failed to mention how very, very far out of his league you are. And don’t get me wrong, I like Sidney myself a little bit, but you are…not what I expected. How did you crazy kids meet, anyway?”

Miriam smiles up at him, pushing a lock of hair behind her ear, a plain gold band glinting on her right ring finger. “It’s quite a story, if I say so myself. I grew up in Carondale, New Jersey, you ever hear of it?”

“No one’s ever heard of it,” Sidney stage-whispers over her head. 

“Exactly,” Miriam nods. “Three hundred people and I’m related to half of them. I just… I had to get out, I’m sure you can imagine.”

Hawkeye hums in understanding. 

“So after high school I followed my uncle here to the city. My family is all very musical, he’d come hoping to perform for a living but ended up working as a talent scout. Anyway. My parents were going out of their minds about me, as you can imagine, I thought they’d let me be if I was living with my uncle but nooo, they wouldn’t rest until I was properly—”

“Kinyan’d?” Hawkeye guesses, and she nods.  

“Mm-hmm.”

“And you just stumbled across Sidney?”

Sidney chuckles. “I’d been seeing her uncle on and off for quite some time. He introduced us, we got on like a house on fire, and the rest is history.”

“Sidney, you devil,” Hawkeye grins hard to cover the manic fluttering in his chest. For all the implicit confirmation he’d given Hawkeye over the years, for all he’d let Hawkeye ramble on to him about his own male lovers past and present, this is the first time he’d ever said anything so unambiguous about himself. “And do you still have this little boychick on the side?”

Sidney smiles back at him, placid as anything. “Nah, he’s happily settled down with a goyim of his own for the past few years.”

“And I suppose your folks didn’t care that he was old enough to be your uncle himself,” Hawkeye turns his attention back to Miriam, “so long as he was male, Jewish, and gainfully employed.”

“Are you kidding, Sidney charmed the pants off them when he came courting. He is by far their favorite son-in-law. Probably because they’ve only met twice.” She grins, then sobers a little. “I love my family, I do. If I didn’t, I might have done what my uncle did and cut ties, but…I just couldn’t.”

“Yeah,” Hawkeye agrees quietly. “I get it.”

Miriam takes his arm and smiles up at him. “Sidney tells me you have a relationship with your father that anyone would envy, especially when it comes to matters of who you spend your time with.”

“For two people who are only married on paper you sure seem to tell each other a lot!”

“That comes of actually being friends, on and off paper.”

“That and living in the same house,” Sidney adds, nodding to the left where the traffic lights have just changed.

“Aha,” Hawkeye says, wiggling his eyebrows reflexively and coming back to earth with a bump. That’s the whole reason for this outing in the park, after all. Because coming to stay with Sidney meant, of course, staying with his ‘wife,’ and her wife – and their son. 

“Irene will be picking up Teddy from school right about now,” Sidney says, glancing up from his watch with a look like he knows he was just reading Hawkeye’s mind. “They’re going to meet us in the park.”

“She’s bringing a picnic,” Miriam adds. “Are you hungry, Hawkeye? How was your trip down?”

And so he tells them about Boston, about Portland, conveys greetings for Sidney from Trapper — catching Sidney’s barely-there smirk before it isn’t there at all — and from Charles, and chokes himself up a little talking about spending the holidays with his family. Somehow, in stepping aside to let a group of tourists pass, Hawkeye ended up walking next to Sidney again and when he lifts a hand to wipe at his eyes he feels a fleeting touch to the back of his neck, a gentle squeeze that’s there and gone before he knows what’s happening, leaving a tingling warmth in its wake and setting a low-key buzz of expectation jangling in his belly. That’s when Hawkeye has to admit that the shameful secondary motive behind his stop to see Trapper, namely to take the edge off in anticipation of this particular reunion, was not altogether a success.

Central Park is even more beautiful than Hawkeye remembers it. Maybe it’s the autumn colors, or the company, or a newfound appreciation for the idea of a peaceful sanctuary within the bustling chaos of an uncaring world. He tunes out a little as Miriam and Sidney argue genially over the best way to get to their meeting point on the other side of the pond, listening instead to the birds and the squirrels carrying on the business of their lives overhead.

“Hawkeye,” Miriam says, her tone and her hand on his arm making him think it’s probably not the first time she’s called to him. He blinks and looks down into her eyes, warm and concerned, and when she speaks it leaves him with no doubt that she’s been let in on the secret of where he spent the last few weeks of the war. “If you’d rather Sidney take you back home to rest first, we can always keep Teddy occupied until the evening. He’s five,” she adds, lips curving into a lopsided smile, “he won’t be offended by a change of plans.”

“No, no,” Hawkeye says quickly, and dredges up a grin. “I’ve been looking forward to meeting him for as long as I’ve known about him. If it’s, uh, if it gets to be too much, I mean, you won’t be – you’ll understand if I –”

“Anytime you need,” Sidney’s quiet voice cuts through the strident rising of his own, “just get up and go for a stroll. Tap me on the shoulder if you want company.”

Hawkeye can’t look away from Sidney for a long moment, eyes locked on his like he can siphon off some of that ever-present calm that seems to emanate from the very core of him. When he looks around again, Miriam is half a dozen paces away, speaking to a well-dressed couple who look just delighted to be in her presence.

“Fans of hers?” Hawkeye asks, and Sidney nods with a small smile.

“It’s happening more and more, her getting recognized on the street. She really is sensational, Hawk. She’s got a show opening in a couple of weeks, I’ll take you if you can stay that long.”

Hawkeye swallows, and ducks the implicit question in what Sidney’s saying. “She’s aces, Sid, honestly. No chance she’s got a sister who’s looking for a boyfriend, hey?”

“Not a brother?” Sidney asks mildly, lifting an eyebrow.

“Eh, I’ve got my eye on someone else,” Hawkeye says, his attempt at nonchalance ruined by the way his eyes slide away from Sidney’s.

“Hey,” Sidney says quietly, drawing him back with a hand on his arm. “Save that for later. For now, tell me honestly, how are you?”

“I’m—” Hawkeye makes himself stop before he cracks a joke, holding his breath and trying to sort through the clamor in his head for something that’s true enough to satisfy Sidney and tame enough that it won’t set him off minutes before meeting Sidney’s – Miriam’s son. “I’m certainly better than the last time you saw me.”

Sidney’s lips twitch in a crooked smile. “I can tell.”

“And so are you.”

“I am?”

“Damn right you are. I didn’t want to tell you then, but you really started to let yourself go at the end of things over there, Sidney. You really looked like hell.”

Sidney snorts and looks away, shaking his head. It’s not the reaction Hawkeye had expected and he spends about ten seconds worrying that he’s actually offended him before Sidney gives a sharp sigh through his nose and turns back to meet his eyes. “You actually did tell me that, a couple of times.”

“I did?”

“Mm-hm. I’m not surprised you don’t remember. You were angry, I was the face of the system that you felt was betraying you, it was only natural that you’d be angry with me. I… Hawk, I’ve spent a lot of time regretting the arrogance that made me think I was the only one who could help you, over there. I honestly didn’t know if you’d ever want to see me again after that. When you got in touch last month – well, Miriam could tell you. Getting that postcard made me smile like I hadn’t since I got back. I am so glad that you’re here,” he adds with quiet fervor, startling the breath right out of Hawkeye’s lungs.

“Sidney…” Hawkeye whispers when he’s finally able to inhale again. “You – you rat, you had to go and – what am I supposed to say to that right now, people are –” He makes himself shut up and tips his head back to laugh soundlessly up towards the clear blue sky, rocking back on his heels and tucking his hands into his pockets to keep from physically reaching for Sidney. “I can’t believe you, Sid.”

Sidney is watching him closely, lips twitching over the start of a word or a smile, mirroring Hawkeye with his hands in his pockets as they look at each other, things realigning and falling into place in the silence between them until that silence is broken by the shrill of a child’s high-pitched giggle and Sidney breaks eye contact to look over towards the sound.

A stone’s throw from where they’re standing, a young woman who must be Irene is laying out a picnic blanket under the nearest tree. Her dirty-blond hair is bobbed at her chin and she’s wearing slacks and a short-sleeved sweater, carrying herself with an air of deep-seated confidence that Hawkeye had got used to seeing among the nurses at the 4077. And just beyond her, a little boy is shrieking with laughter as his mother swings him around by the hand. He’s talking a mile a minute, doesn’t even stop when his feet leave the earth, all the while gazing up into her face with a look that’s pure adoration.

“That’s his default setting,” Sidney says quietly, watching with evident fondness but without making a move to join the scene. “If he’s not asleep, he’s a study in perpetual motion.”

Hawkeye, for his part, is trying not to watch Sidney himself too openly. Even from this distance he can see that Teddy is a dead ringer for Sidney with the tight dark curls and the big bright eyes, and yet Hawkeye knows that Sidney does not consider himself to be, in any way that extends beyond biology, the father of this child.

It stumps Hawkeye – not intellectually, of course not, but in his gut. Down below the hard-packed places of himself where the longing for a family long ago took root, shocked into too-rapid growth by the loss of his mother but nourished into bloom by the reverence he carries for his own father. Even now, as barren as his experiences in Korea have left him, the longing remains, and he can’t help searching Sidney’s face for some hint that Sidney feels more for this child, or about this situation, than he’s letting on.

“Excuse me a moment,” Sidney murmurs, touching Hawkeye lightly on the elbow before striding over towards where the high society couple are still standing and watching Miriam, now looking vaguely scandalized by the way their revered starlet is cavorting with a muddy five-year-old and beginning to direct glances between her and Irene until Sidney smoothly steps in, brushing the little boy’s curls back to plant a kiss on his forehead before taking his other hand. Hawkeye feels a moment of sweeping disorientation as the kind of ice-cold rage that used to be his constant companion floods him from head to toe. He hasn’t felt anything like it since he got back home.

“It’s all right,” Irene says, stepping to put herself between Hawkeye and the sight of Sidney and Miriam playing happy families. “Really. Doctor Pierce, right? I’m Irene Doyle, glad to know you.”

She has a firm handshake and when Hawkeye looks at her, really looks, his first thought is that she seems familiar. He searches her face, trying to place her, until he realizes that it’s not her, it’s who she reminds him of; stand her next to Nurse Bigelow and anyone would think they were sisters. The thought warms him and he smiles at her. “Likewise. But it’s Hawkeye, please.”

“Well, Hawkeye,” she says, the nickname sounding a little awkward from her as it does from some people before they get used to it – or used to him – but she’s smiling. “As soon as they manage to tear themselves away, I’ll lay out the sandwiches. Do you keep kosher? They don’t, but I didn’t want to presume – oh here, help me with this damned blanket, the wind keeps taking it. You’re from Maine? I’ve never been that far north, all right I’ve only left New York a couple of times in my life. Never thought I’d be caught dead living anywhere outside of Queens for that matter but, well, life, you know.” Irene glances over his shoulder and Hawkeye catches the way a big smile lights up her face before he turns to see the group finally moving back their way, Teddy shrieking “Watch me, watch me!” and turning a somersault that leaves him more grass-stained than before.

“I didn’t know city parents let their kids run amuck like that,” Hawkeye comments, watching. “My mother used to call me her mud-child and tell me I was lucky to be growing up in the middle of nowhere.”

Irene snorts. “Up until we decided to have him, I’d have said ‘No child of mine…’ That’s all Miri. Always going on about how ‘a kid should be a kid’. I don’t know about all that, but he seems happy and Freedman says that’s what’s important at this age, psychologically speaking.”

Hawkeye gives a theatrical gasp and presses his hand to his heart. “I’m wounded, Sidney always told me he couldn’t analyze me because he’d had no training in child psychology, that fink!”

Irene laughs out loud and only shakes her head when Miriam asks what’s so funny, waving her questions away and beckoning Teddy close, putting her hands on his shoulders and turning him to face Hawkeye.

Hawkeye, for his part, immediately goes down to one knee in front of him, the motion both instinctive and fearful; on his feet he couldn’t stand how he’d towered above the boy, how small he’d looked, how easy to—

“This is our new friend, Mr. Hawkeye,” Irene is saying, before ducking to whisper into Teddy’s ear. A moment later, a little hand is extended so quickly Hawkeye jerks his head back to avoid getting hit in the nose. He bursts out laughing, can’t help it, and the little boy laughs, and they shake hands, and then they all sit down for a picnic.

*x*x*

Hawkeye’s flask is empty by the time Irene is wrapping up the remains of their meal. (After the second time he caught Sidney watching him without comment, Hawkeye waited until the women were distracted by their son and then offered him the flask, almost falling over backwards when Sidney actually took it, eyes unwavering on Hawkeye as he took a slow sip.) Hawk tries to help Irene pack everything back into her basket but she’s a bit of a perfectionist, as it turns out, and everything Hawkeye knows about picnics he learned in Korea where the pitstop between the OR and the supply tent was usually the least of his worries. So he just sticks his hands in his pockets and carries on with the story he was telling, the latest anecdote from BJ about his adventures in re-learning how to be a father, replete with details about how extraordinarily above-average little Erin is.

“And where are you lot off to now?” Sidney asks when they’re all on their feet.

It’s the first Hawkeye’s heard about the group splitting up but it seems that Miriam has rehearsals all evening and Irene is going to take Teddy around to visit Miriam’s uncle before bedtime. Hawkeye feels suddenly warm all over and hopes that his face isn’t red but between the booze and the exertion of being on his best behavior in front of Sidney’s friends, not to mention the emotional toll of the last couple of days, he really can’t do anything about it but turn and look at Sidney and wonder if he’s the reason they’ll be going back to an empty house.

Sidney smiles, but his eyes are keen. “I think it’s a cab home, for us. You look exhausted.”

“Thanks for noticing,” Hawkeye says, fluttering his eyelashes. “I had these lines around my eyes put in just for the occasion.”

He gets a handshake from Irene, a hug from Miriam, and a sleepy wave from Teddy before he and Sidney are off. He lets his shoulders slump as soon as they’re out of sight and leans against a signpost while Sidney hails a cab. He hasn’t felt this tired since he was in Korea, hates himself for making the comparison, hates the way that the very things which used to feed and replenish his spirit now require so much energy from him just to get by. He’s deeply grateful for the long, quiet cab ride through the city, and for the way Sidney makes not-talking feel so comfortable sometimes just as easily as he can make spilling your guts feel like the most natural thing in the world. Just sitting there beside Sidney makes the world seem to stop spinning around him quite so fast.

Hawkeye is too slow in pulling out his wallet to win at the game of who gets to pay the driver, and griping at Sidney about it while they get out of the cab wakes him up better than a cup of coffee, watching with growing delight as Sidney meets his verbal thrusts and parries as calmly as he ever had before but there’s something just beneath, Hawkeye’s sure of it, a lightness that was missing in Korea, as though Sidney was always holding on to himself just a little tighter than anyone realized and now, finally, Hawkeye is getting a peek behind a curtain he didn’t even know was there.

“This is us,” Sidney says, pointing, and Hawkeye finally shakes himself out of his laser focus and looks around. A row of brownstones march sedately down the street in front of them and Hawkeye is instantly enchanted, marveling out loud about this kind of architecture being the perfect marriage of form and substance.

“By rights these should look like the heaviest, gloomiest sorts of Gothic knock-offs but no, someone had the smarts to design them as a sort of, as the most livable kind of art, don’t you think so? Look at those details, the carved lintels, and the staircases lifting the front doors up above the street level? Genius! You must feel like you’re ascending into heaven every time you come home.”

Sidney is laughing at him, and Hawkeye can’t make himself stop talking even as he descends into nonsense just to carry on watching Sidney reacting to the sound of his voice. There are children and families out everywhere, mothers pushing prams and kids perched on stoops and scrambling up bannisters, many of them waving to Sidney and greeting him by name. Hawkeye had assumed that one of the benefits of big city living was anonymity – a faggot being far less remarkable in a forest after all – but that’s clearly not a force at play in Sidney’s life here in Brooklyn.

“Mrs. Barnes,” Sidney says, the only time he stops to return more than a wave or a nod to one of his neighbors, shaking hands with a woman whose face seems weathered by more than age. They chat for a moment and Sidney introduces Hawkeye as, “My friend, Doctor Pierce,” before they move on and he lowers his voice to tell Hawkeye that she’d lost her eldest son in 1945. “His sister Rebecca is married to one of my brothers. They took it very hard, when James didn’t come home from the war, and we all try to keep an eye out for them.”

Whether that ‘all’ means Sidney and his family or his entire enclave of a neighborhood Hawkeye isn’t sure and doesn’t have time to ask before Sidney is taking his keys out of his pocket and leading the way up a flight of stone steps that seems, in Hawkeye’s entirely unbiased opinion of course, to be the nicest one on the block.

“Come in,” Sidney says, swinging the door wide and stepping inside. “Welcome.”

Hawkeye brushes his fingers over the weathered mezuzah by the door and follows him in.

The entry hall is neat, tidy and almost entirely lacking in personality, which Sidney explains a moment later when he points to the door on their right. “That’s my office, I see patients in the front room. The house really starts through here,” he says, and opens the door directly ahead which leads to a staircase. The landing is cluttered with shoes, jackets, hats, and the odd toy or two just waiting to trip someone up. Hawkeye’s heart gives a twinge at how familiar it looks; this could be the front hall of his home in Crabapple Cove twenty-odd years ago.

“The girls and Teddy have the second floor,” Sidney’s saying as he leads the way up. “Main kitchen’s on this level, too.” They poke their heads into the living room and Sidney points out the kitchen and the doors that lead to the two bedrooms before they continue up the stairs. His grandparents bought the brownstone in 1875, Sidney tells him, and Sidney himself had grown up on the third floor.

“It’s just me now,” Sidney says, opening the door, “but for a dozen years in the ‘10s and ‘20s there were at least five people living in here at any given time. Seven, for the two years after my youngest sister was born and before my eldest brother moved out.”

“Must have been cozy,” Hawkeye says, looking around. Late-afternoon light is pouring into the living space through the big bay windows at the front, lighting up dust motes in their captivating dance and falling on thick, faded rugs that look as though they haven’t been moved in a generation. There’s a very small kitchen tucked into one corner of the living space, obviously not original to the house, but it’s the only thing that looks out of place. Bookshelves that are too dignified to be called overflowing and armchairs that are just the right side of overstuffed and leaded lamps placed just so on mahogany end tables… Hawkeye finishes turning in a slow circle and comes to rest grinning at Sidney. “There is no other place that you could have grown up, Sid. This is you, this is where you come from. I can see you in every scuff mark on the floorboards and every —”

He can feel every one of Sidney’s fingertips where they rest so light and gentle against his jaw in the moment before Sidney draws him down to kiss him slow and sure.

Hawkeye whimpers, desperately sure that his knees are going to give out, and gropes back behind himself for the wall when Sidney presses his lips once more to the corner of his mouth before he steps back and away.

“Sorry,” Sidney says, his voice as calm as ever, his eyes dancing. “You were saying?”

“I—” Hawkeye can’t move. “I was – I don’t know what I was – I think you broke me, Sidney, I’m speechless!”

“Not so’s anyone would notice,” Sidney comments, and finally cracks a smile as Hawkeye glares at him. “Was that okay?”

“Okay?” Hawkeye is suddenly reanimated by the sound of his own voice, rising high and strident in his ears. “Okay? Sidney we passed ‘okay’ about ten blocks ago, that was, that was, that was fantastic. Ecstatic. Sensational. Superb. That was – is one of these books a thesaurus, I need a better word for ‘magnificent’.” He strides over to a bookshelf, pulls down a few books at random and then walks right back over to Sidney where he takes his face in his hands and kisses him with everything he's got.

“Mind the lamp,” Sidney murmurs when Hawkeye bumps against the sofa table, stumbling backwards and pulling Sidney with him.

“How about you mind the lamp, I’m a little preoccupied here,” Hawkeye mumbles back, licking into Sidney’s mouth and groaning when Sidney opens to him, getting the breath knocked out of him when Sidney finally takes him by the lapels and pushes him back against an open stretch of wall like he’d known exactly what Hawkeye wanted, what he was trying to do, had known and given it to him without a word and but for the wall at his back Hawkeye would feel like he’s in freefall, blood rushing wildly in his ears while his heart and his stomach stage a somersaulting contest and the trembling in his knees has sent out exploratory missions to his hands.

“Breathe,” Sidney says calmly, lips brushing along Hawkeye’s jaw. “Just breathe, Hawk.”

Hawkeye pulls in a shuddering breath and drops his head back against the wall with a dull thud, his breath sounding monstrously loud in the darkness behind his closed eyelids.

“Let’s take it easy,” Sidney’s saying, his thumb sweeping in slow circles over Hawkeye’s pulse point. “I’d be happy just getting my fill of looking at you in some other color than olive drab.”

Hawkeye laughs weakly, and with his eyes still closed he gropes out blindly and gets his arms around Sidney, hauling him in close. Sidney hugs him back just as hard, humming in his chest when Hawkeye pushes his fingers through Sidney’s curls to cradle the back of his head in his palm.

“I can’t believe I’m here,” he says after a moment.

“I’m so happy that you are,” Sidney tells him.

“I mean, I mean home-here. Not-there-here.”

“Mm. Me too.”

“Do you ever get scared that you’re just dreaming?”

Sidney hums again, and shifts in Hawkeye’s arms, but Hawkeye only holds him tighter and Sidney settles back in against him, his right hand traveling softly over Hawkeye’s back and shoulders before coming to rest curled around the back of his neck. “Sometimes when I am dreaming, I think that I’m awake. But I’ve never yet mistaken reality for a dream.”

“Not even right now?” Hawkeye manages a passably indignant tone even muffled against Sidney’s neck. “You’re telling me that this moment right here isn’t the stuff that dreams are made on?”

Sidney laughs into Hawkeye’s shoulder and detaches himself just enough to turn and capture Hawkeye’s lips in a slow, tender kiss. Hawkeye chases after him when he pulls back and blinks his eyes open when Sidney holds himself maddeningly out of reach. When he looks at him Sidney’s eyes are sparkling, his lips twitching around the bud of a smile. “I know this is the real thing,” he says finally. “A dream could never feel as good as this.”

“Oh,” Hawkeye whispers, feels his heart trip over itself. He licks his lips and tries to sound like he’s not dead serious when he says, “If I was ever planning to tell you that I’m not that kind of girl, that plan’s gone right out the window. Let’s go to bed, Sidney, please, let’s… Let’s.”

Sidney’s smile only grows even as he gives a gentle shake of his head and it’s as though he’s channeling every moment of fending off Hawkeye's advances back in Korea with that one simple motion. “You might be that kind of girl, Hawk, but – and believe me that I’m saying this without any kind of judgment – but that might be moving things a little too fast.”

“What,” Hawkeye forces a laugh, “three hundred years of foreplay not enough for you?”

Sidney’s smile is genuine and dazzling and Hawkeye didn’t realize he was trying to look away from it until Sidney cups his face in his hands and holds him still. “Would you like to hear something amazing, Hawkeye?”

“More amazing than you saying my name when I know you’re thinking about kissing me again?”

Sidney’s eyes crinkle up as he leans in, so slow he sends Hawkeye into a spiral of delicious agony, and places a gentle kiss on his lips. “Besides that,” Sidney says, arching an eyebrow as he pulls away. “Here it goes: what we went through back there? It doesn’t have to set the tone for what we decide to do in the here and now. And here and now we’ve got time, Hawk. See,” his voice is so warm, so tender, that Hawkeye has to close his eyes, can’t help the way his breath shudders out of him as Sidney leans in to kiss away the tears trembling in his lashes. “See, I told you it was amazing. We’ve got so much time, and I want to take my time with you, Hawk. I want that so much.”

Hawkeye lets out a sigh that turns into a low groan, helpless, hips juddering against Sidney’s as he tries not to let it all out in a hysterical laugh. “Taking your time might be a little problem here, Sid,” he says, trying for long-suffering. He’s not sure he sticks the landing. “Not all of me got the message that we weren’t taking this reunion to the bedroom right away.”

“Mm-hm, I can see that.” Hawkeye would swear he can taste Sidney’s voice like honey on his tongue and groans again as Sidney, instead of backing off, shifts on his feet until he’s pressed tighter against him, one of his thighs inching in tantalizingly close to where Hawkeye really needs it. “And what were your plans for that?”

“Well, I thought I’d skip asking and go straight to begging.”

“Is that right?” Sidney kisses Hawkeye again, dropping his hands to Hawkeye’s waist where his thumbs draw teasing circles through his shirt that make Hawkeye shiver and swear as his hips buck up against Sidney’s despite his strict lack of permission.

“I’m serious Sidney, you don’t stop that and we’re going to have a serious problem.”

“We are?”

“Well one of us is!” Hawkeye glares at him, exasperated. “You said you didn’t want fast, what do you call this, un-slow?”

Sidney laughs out loud and tangles his fingers in Hawkeye’s hair, pulling him down just this side of rough and groaning quietly into his mouth when Hawkeye falls on him like a starving man.

“Mixed signals here, Sid,” Hawkeye mumbles, and Sidney breaks from his mouth to nod a little desperately, dropping his forehead to Hawkeye’s shoulder.

“I know. I know, I’m sorry, God, Hawkeye, I didn’t – I swear to you I thought I had a better handle on myself than this.” He laughs almost wildly against Hawkeye’s shoulder, then lips meet skin again and Hawkeye shudders as his next words buzz against his throat. “But like you said, three hundred years, it’s been a long wait.” He lifts his head, eyes glimmering dark, lips slick and red, head to toe the prettiest picture of self-control teetering on a knife edge that Hawkeye has ever seen and God, it takes his breath away. He realizes he’s just standing there staring open-mouthed at Sidney when Sid laughs again, quieter, and gives him a little shake by his hold on Hawkeye’s waist. “How drunk would you say you are?”

Hawkeye snorts, traps a laugh in his chest as he orates, “I have not yet begun to drink.” Tucking his chin he grimaces slightly and adds, “Probably not what you wanted to hear, huh.”

Sidney shrugs one shoulder. “It’s a conversation we can have another time.”

“Okay well on a scale of ‘one’ to ‘a light day over there’ I don’t think I’ve even cracked a ‘two’ and no offence Sidney but I really need you to make up your mind here and either march me into a cold shower or else give the green light for the kind of conversation where there’s fewer words and more—”

Sidney finally, finally slides his hand from Hawkeye’s waist to the front of his pants, which has the sublime effect of short-circuiting Hawkeye’s brain and shutting him up immediately.

*x*x*

Hawkeye wakes all at once, disoriented, locking down the instinct to flail before he remembers that he’s not in an army cot and doesn’t have to worry about rolling himself onto the floor.

His mind is spinning in that very specific too-lucid way it does when he goes to sleep sober, or near enough, and as he flips through his memories like spinning out a film reel he feels his hands and feet start to tingle as the cloud of butterflies in his stomach all start to flap their wings out of sync. He’s alone in the bed in Sidney’s spare room where he’d stumbled, with Sidney’s help, after cleaning himself up and brushing his teeth in the bathroom. Sidney hadn’t let Hawkeye get his hands on him, saying something about starting something he couldn’t finish which Hawkeye had tried to protest – tried and failed, his brain and his body already shutting down for the day after being delivered to a truly spectacular orgasm right there against the wall in Sidney’s living room. So he’d let himself be led, first to the bathroom and then to the bedroom, let Sidney pull the curtains against the late-afternoon sunlight and tuck him in with a cup of tea on the nightstand like he was an invalid or an expectant mother.

He's desperately thirsty now so he drinks the cold tea in a couple of gulps and shivers as he gets out of bed. His flask is empty, he remembers belatedly, and roots through his duffle bag in the dark until he finds the bottle of scotch that he’d bought in Boston under the pretense that he ought to bring a host gift for Sidney. Opening it, he takes a long pull and then another until the sweet warmth begins to melt its way through his bones, and he sighs with relief as he once again abdicates all responsibility for everything that’s stuck inside his head.

He changes into his pajamas once his brain has quieted down, which is when he hears a noise from the outer room. He has no idea of what time it is, he could have been sleeping for five minutes or five years, so Hawkeye wanders out of the bedroom to find Sidney going around the room turning off all the lamps. Through the window Hawkeye can see that the city has gone as dark and quiet as the city ever gets, and when he draws his gaze back inside he sees that Sidney has paused beside the single remaining lamp, standing quiet and watching him. So he watches Sid right back, though his eyes are drooping hard again, takes in the silhouette of him in robe and slippers, the play of light and shadow over his features like he’s expecting to pose for Caravaggio later. He looks like he comes from another world, Hawk thinks vaguely, a world of contradictions, where a man can appear wise and ageless but fragile, too. Sidney is lovely, Hawkeye has always thought so, but like this he looks both otherworldly and somehow more human than Hawkeye has ever seen him. It’s probably something to do with being at home, he realizes all at once, and lifts a hand towards him, holds it palm-up.

Sidney leaves the lamp on and walks slowly over to Hawkeye, reaching back. He stands still for a long moment, eyes searching while Hawkeye just drifts, lets himself be seen. And then Sidney nods once, weaves his fingers tighter through Hawkeye’s and gives him a smile. “Come to bed, Hawk.”

Chapter Text

“Where’s, hey wait, stay…” Hawkeye mumbles, grasping, as the bed dips and a rush of cool air reaches him under the covers.

An amused huff precedes the brush of lips to his temple and Hawkeye finally gets his eyes open. Sidney, right. He wraps his fingers around Sidney’s wrist and gives a little tug. “Where you goin’?”

“Bathroom.”

“Oh.” Hawkeye smooshes his face against the pillow, reluctantly letting go of him. “S’pose you don’t need any help with that.”

“Not for about forty years.” Sidney cards his fingers through Hawkeye’s hair and tweaks his ear. “I’ll be right back.”

Hawkeye is bent over the sink in the kitchen drinking water straight from the tap when Sidney comes out. Straightening up, dragging the back of his wrist over his mouth, Hawkeye meets his crooked eyebrows with a shrug and says lightly, “You’re a trend-setter,” as he sashays into the bathroom. He brushes his teeth, debates running a shower but he hadn’t thought to check the time and doesn’t know how long he’s got with Sidney before the man has to run off and do something boring like start seeing patients for the day, so he just takes care of a few things as best he can – presumptuous, maybe, but it never hurts to be prepared – and hurries back into the bedroom.

“Primping, were you?” Sidney asks, and holds up a corner of the quilt to welcome him back into the bed. Hawkeye appreciates the gesture more than he could express if he wanted to, which he doesn’t, and tries to bury his uncomfortable gratitude under a simper and a smirk and a ‘just trying to make myself pretty for you’ as he molds himself to Sidney’s side, a relieved sigh coming out almost like a whimper when Sidney wraps him up in his arms like he’s never known a moment of doubt in his life.

A kiss, a touch, a sigh – a laugh and the floodgates open. Sidney’s hands are everywhere, exploring Hawkeye’s body as thoroughly as Hawkeye is mapping his. Finding landmarks with teeth and tongue they make each other gasp and moan; the first time Hawkeye coaxes a giggle out of Sidney it’s a goddamn religious experience, choirs of angels and everything as they conduct themselves like the finest symphony, as they crest and crescendo together until Hawkeye, dizzy and desperate, presses himself up on hands and knees to tremble and sway over Sidney’s body, watching the way Sidney’s jaw pushes forward as he looks up at Hawkeye, a glint in his eye that speaks to something primal and hungry just barely kept at bay. His dark hair is wild against the stark white of the sheets, chest heaving and nipples wine-dark from the ministrations of Hawkeye’s mouth, covered in a sheen of sweat so fine that Hawkeye wants to taste the ocean on his skin, wants to dive in, drown, submerge himself entirely. So he does.

“Oh,” Sidney breaths, as Hawkeye takes him into his mouth, “Oh, Hawkeye. Oh, darling.” From the very first ‘oh’ Hawkeye’s eyes are rolling back in his head and it feels like a prize, like the ultimate reward, like the greatest gift the universe has to offer; this undreamt-of chance to hear Sidney Freedman gasp and cry and break his name in two.

*x*x*

The bed is empty and cold when Hawkeye wakes again. His pajamas have been picked up and draped over a chair in the corner but he reaches for Sidney’s bathrobe instead, wrapping it around himself as he leaves the bedroom.

The clock on the wall tells him it’s a little after ten o’clock. There’s a plate on the table with a pastry sitting on it and a note pinned beneath it and Hawkeye eats one as he reads the other.

Hawk– patients ‘til noon then I have an hour for lunch, I’ll come and get you when I’m done and we can go out and get something to eat. Help yourself to anything you can find in the kitchen, use the phone if you like. (Give BJ my regards.) If you need anything else, Irene will be home all morning, just knock. –S

Hawkeye snorts crumbs onto the note and thinks about not calling BJ just to prove Sidney wrong, but he’s talking to the operator in Mill Valley before he’s finished licking powdered sugar off his fingers.

“Hey, Beej,” he says, when BJ answers, and has to pull the phone away to protect his ear from the sound of BJ’s bright, loud laugh.

“I knew it was you! I knew it, no one else would call so early. So did you go through with it? Am I talking to you in New York?”

Hawkeye huffs, as annoyed with BJ as he had been with Sidney a moment ago. “No, I’m still in Boston, I decided to stay here and move in with Mr. and Mrs. McIntyre.” He relents quickly in the silence on the other end of line and says, conciliatory, “Yes, I went through with it. Sidney met my train yesterday, I’m in Brooklyn.”

“Okay,” BJ says, perfectly genial. “Good. I thought I’d hear from you sooner but it sounds like – so you stopped in Boston?”

“Only way I could make myself go through with the trip, take it in legs. Charles says hello, by the way. Or should I say, he asked me to ‘Please convey my most tepid of greetings to that mustachioed lunatic you call your best friend.’ Hey, that was pretty good, I think I’m ready to play the Boston Symphony Hall with that accent, don’t you think?”

“For a minute I thought it was old Windbag the Third himself on the line.”

Hawkeye preens for a moment, then makes his traditional opening move. “How’s Erin?”

“Oh, Hawk, I wish you could see her,” BJ says, and his voice in Hawkeye’s ear is so warm that he feels the side of his face burning with it. “I’ll send you a photograph – don’t forget to give me your address in Brooklyn if you’re going to be there awhile – one of the little girls in her play group has a big sister, eight years old you know so practically a grownup, and the other day she took a pair of her mom’s scissors to play beauty shop with the little girls. Erin now has one pigtail and one patch of spikey hair on the side of her head. I know I should be mad but it’s so funny, Hawk, somehow it makes her even cuter.”

“Three years old and she’s already using her hair to rebel against regulations, just like her daddy, you must be so proud.”

“As a mustachioed peacock,” BJ agrees, and launches into his next story.

Hawkeye grins, laughs, interjects here and there, listening hard and storing up everything BJ has to say like it’s going to be on a test later. Maybe it is, though it’s a self-administered one – Hawkeye is constantly discovering things he didn’t realize he knew about BJ until now, at home, when he misses them. And that pleased-bashful-flattered little hum that BJ gives whenever Hawkeye shows that he remembers something BJ had told him days or weeks ago about himself or his life or especially about Erin, well, Hawkeye hadn’t understood until recently what a kick it gave him, or how unconsciously he’d used to chase it.

“Anyway,” BJ says, winding down, “the best part is that I can understand her these days just about as well as her mother does. I realized yesterday that it’s been over a month since I had to ask her if she knew what Erin was trying to say, and that time she didn’t know either.”

“That’s great, Beej,” Hawkeye says quietly, when it sounds like BJ has drifted off into his own thoughts. He’s not sure but he thinks it’s the first time in months that BJ has mentioned Peg on his own without Hawkeye asking about her first. Casting his eyes around the room, Hawkeye makes for the closest armchair, stretching out the phone cord in order to settle down into its upholstered embrace. It smells like Sidney.

“So how are things out there?” BJ asks into the silence Hawkeye didn’t realize was stretching. “Sidney started shrinking that head of yours back down to size, yet?”

“Wha – uh, no,” Hawkeye laughs awkwardly. “No, we uh, haven’t quite got there yet, we’re still just catching up. He’s working this morning, I’m lounging around like a slug in a rug, so far it’s not much different from being at home with Sidney playing the role of my dad.”

“Ah-huh,” BJ says dryly, and they keep the bit going between them for a minute or two until BJ lets Hawkeye have the last word, waiting a beat before he says, quiet and gentle, “How are you, Hawk? Really?”

The thing of it is, every time BJ asks him that question Hawkeye feels himself torn between just answering it, or saying something along the lines of ‘I know you don’t really want to know.’ As if a part of him wants to catch BJ out in acting a role, just keeping up the appearance of being a good friend. So far he’s only said it once, he thinks, and that time he was so bombed that BJ probably wrote it off, probably forgot about it by the next time he picked up the phone to call. Because that’s the other thing of it, after all; ever since they’ve been back every letter from BJ, every note and card and stilted phone conversation has been saying the same thing: I’m sorry, and, I won’t leave you again.

With all of that in mind, Hawkeye says, “I’m all right. For the moment I’m even feeling good. With all the comings and goings and meeting new people and talking and walking and everything I actually went to bed last night almost sober. I didn’t enjoy it,” he adds, just to make BJ laugh in spite of himself. “Sidney says hi.”

“Tell him hi back. Are you staying with him?”

“Ayuh. He inherited the old family brownstone. How many people can say they spent the night in their shrink’s childhood bedroom?” Hawkeye laughs, feeling slightly hysterical, shoving it down. “It’s a palace, anyway, four floors and a back garden, used to belong to his grandparents. Did you know he’s the middle child of five? Don’t know how he ended up with the place all to himself, probably something to do with sibling rivalry.”

“Maybe he took a leaf out of an Abigail Porterfield mystery and worked his way through the will.”

“So that’s what happened to the final page of ‘The Rooster Crowed at Midnight’!”

BJ laughs out loud. He sounds happier than Hawkeye’s heard him in a long time and the thought fills him with an indistinct ache.

“So when he’s not taking in stray surgeons, he lives in this palace all by himself?” BJ’s asking, and it takes Hawkeye a minute to snap back to the conversation.

“Ah, well no, not – oh! Hey, here’s some news: I met his son.”

“His – I’m sorry, his son?”

“Yeah, his son,” Hawkeye frowns and sits up straighter, confused by BJ’s confusion. “His son Teddy, you know him Beej, you’ve seen photos.”

“Oh, yeah of course but, I’m sorry, I thought—”

Oh, boy, Hawkeye thinks, but, “Careful, Beej,” is all he says. He hasn’t heard any mouth-breathers on the party line yet but that doesn’t mean they aren’t there, a tight-knit neighborhood like this.

“Right,” BJ says tersely. Message received, apparently. Lucky him – Hawkeye’s not entirely sure how he’s supposed to read what BJ was not-telling him. “Right. So, his son, how old? How was that?”

Hawkeye exhales discreetly. “Okay. He’s five. So. Not an infant, that’s…that, that helped, I guess. But, uh, it was. You know. I was happy to say goodnight to the kid and think about something else for awhile.”

BJ hums. Starts a few tentative sounds that don’t quite turn into words and then clears his throat. “You think it’s a good idea to – you know what, don’t mind me, what do I know about psychology.”

“No, go on. You know me, anyway.”

BJ huffs quietly. “Just. Staying with him. Especially when there’s a child. Is that. Just sounds like a lot. A lot to handle. You said living and working at home was too much, but this seems like a lot more.”

“I said that?”

“In your last letter, when you wrote about going to New York.”

“Oy.”

“You don’t remember?”

“Not clearly.”

“Want me to remind you? I’ve got it here.” There’s a faint rustling through the line, and it does something funny to Hawkeye’s insides to think that BJ was carrying his letter in his breast pocket. A moment later he hears BJ take in a deep breath and let it out slow before he reads, “’I got a letter from Sidney today, he sent me the names of a couple shrinks in Portland and one in Augusta. Just looking at their phone numbers makes me tired like everything else these last few weeks, everything is too much, I keep waiting for this feeling to pass but it just won’t. I gave my patients back to my dad, I could barely look him in the eye to tell him so I got blind drunk just to prove I meant it. He offered to call any and all of those analysts for me like he used to call me in sick when I was just too sad to go to school. I thought I was coming home, you know? Not going back in time. I don’t want him to call me in sick, I don’t want to drive an hour each way just to hear some stranger tell me what I already know, that I’m a basket case. I want to see Sidney. I’ve wanted that for a long time now but this is the first time I actually admitted it. Okay. I’m writing it on a spare piece of paper write now –‘ Oh, that’s funny Hawk, I just noticed you spelled that last word ‘w-r-i-t-e’. Anyway, ‘writing it on a spare piece of paper right now, Go to New York after holiday, so I don’t forget in the morning. Did I tell you Dad and I are going to go stay with my aunt for awhile, it’s the Jewish New Year—’”

BJ stops reading, there’s a pause in which Hawkeye realizes that he’d closed his eyes and blinks them open again, scrubbing away the irritating prickle of imminent tears, and then BJ hums thoughtfully. “You know what I just… I’m not sure I can put it in words, but it just occurred to me how…how unconventional everything was over there. Sidney used to make house calls in fox holes. So maybe you going to stay in his home isn’t so strange after that.”

“You know what he said to me last night?” Hawkeye asks, leaning his cheek in his hand and looking over towards the spot on the wall where Sidney had kissed him before taking him apart. “He said ‘we’ve got time.’ When we were over there, some days it seemed like time was all we had, we were so bored with nothing to do and it was agony, nothing but time time time on our hands until the meat wagons rolled in and then suddenly time was the one thing we didn’t have. I guess it was like that for him, too. Meatball psychiatry. Fix ‘em, close ‘em, and holler ‘next.’ But that’s not how things work in the real world, is it? Treatment could take years, and that’s okay. That’s okay. That’s more than okay, that’s amazing, really. To think about all that time. And sure, I mean in a way that scares the hell out of me, to think it could be years before I’m okay, but who among us is really okay to begin with, you know? I mean we come into this world utterly helpless, life itself being totally against our will, not our own idea, from the very moment of conception we exist without our own consent and then birth itself, well, that’s not exactly fun for anyone involved. Do you think our mothers ever really forgive us, for what we put them through? I still haven’t forgiven my mother so I wouldn’t blame her if she hasn’t forgiven me. Miriam looks like she’s forgiven Teddy and she had to go through more than most to – she’s the tops, Beej, I mean wow, if she weren’t – doesn’t look a day over twenty, fairest skin you’ve ever seen but she’s got these freckles and you know how I feel about freckles, hair that’s just begging to be touched and that voice—”

“Hawkeye!”

“What?” Hawkeye almost loses hold of the phone when he turns too quickly and pulls the cord too taut. Blinking rapidly, staring down that familiar flash-flood of fear when he realizes he can’t remember the past few minutes beyond a vague impression of his own voice ringing in his ears, he comes back into his body completely disoriented by the discovery that he’s on his feet. “I was rambling again, wasn’t I.”

“You were raving, more like,” BJ says lightly.

Hawkeye drops down to sit on the floor with his back against the wall. “Care to meet me halfway and settle for ranting?”

“All right, since you caught me in a good mood, but don’t let it happen again.”

“Good thing I’m seeing a shrink.” Hawkeye chuckles at his own double entendre, wishing he could share the joke with BJ.

“Right,” BJ agrees, perfectly pleasant, but with nothing to follow it up. After a long, tense stretch of silence, he clears his throat. “We probably shouldn’t tie up Sidney’s line all day.”

“Right, yeah. I’d hate to get kicked out over a phone bill.”

“Mm-hm.”

“Well.”

“Well. Write me, would you, Hawk? Tell me everything you’d say if we were face to face.”

Hawkeye forces out a laugh. “Are you kidding, you want me to get writer’s cramp? I’ll be useless! More useless than I already am, anyway, and that’s saying something.”

“I’ve been reading about an experimental study to correct compression in the carpal tunnel,” BJ tells him. “You could be a surgical test subject.”

“I wonder if a promotion to guinea pig comes with a big pay raise.”

“I think you should hold out for a corner cage with a view.”

“Nah, I’ve had that view, it’s not all it’s cracked up to be. Of course—”

“—neither is cracking up,” BJ finishes with him, which Hawkeye takes as his cue to retire that particular joke.

They say goodbye, BJ swearing out loud when he realizes what time it is and that he’ll have to run out the door to make it to this hospital on time, and it takes an unfamiliar voice ringing tinny and harried out of the receiver to make Hawkeye summon all of his energy to get up off the floor and hang up the phone. He’s reading on the couch when Sidney comes in an hour later, and lays the book down on his chest to look up at him when Sidney leans on his elbows over the back of the couch, surveying him with a smile that’s only missing a little eyebrow action to be called a smirk.

“Well, this is a nice sight to come home to,” Sidney says, reaching to run his finger along the hem of his robe where it’s hiked halfway up Hawkeye’s thigh. “You look like a chorus girl resting between shows.”

“Just for that…” Hawkeye reaches for Sidney’s tie and uses it to reel him in, meeting him halfway and finishing his thought with actions instead of words

*x*x*

“Would you ever want to fuck me, Sid?” Hawkeye asks later, dopey and happy and paying even less mind to the filter between his brain and his mouth than usual.

“Would I ever?” Sidney looks up from buttoning his shirt. “Try three times a week since I met you.”

Hawkeye blinks, pushes himself up on his elbows to squint at Sidney, feeling suddenly a lot more awake than before he opened his mouth. When Sidney only meets his stare with a calm smile, Hawkeye shakes his head slowly. “You really mean it, don’t you. We’re really doing this.”

“I really mean it,” Sidney sits back down on the couch and Hawkeye pulls his legs in to make room, reaching for Sidney’s robe again and draping it over himself. Sidney finishes fastening his cuffs before he looks up at Hawkeye again, really looks, scrutinizing him as he hasn’t done yet on this continent. “But saying that we’re doing ‘this’ leaves a lot of room for misinterpretation. What do you think we’re doing?”

Hawkeye groans and drops back down flat on his back, groping out blindly for one of the couch cushions and covering his face with it. “Is this how you talk even when you’re not on the clock?”

“Sometimes.” Sidney gently uncurls Hawkeye’s fingers to prise the cushion away from him, waiting until he opens his eyes to say, “Speaking of being on the clock, I’ve only got twenty minutes until my next patient. Let’s run out quick and get something to eat, the deli on the corner makes a great pastrami on rye.”

“I’m not hungry.” Hawkeye catches at Sidney’s hand, arresting his fingers in their maddeningly gentle caress over his skin. “You go on.”

He sees the line draw down between Sidney’s brows and closes his eyes before he has to bear witness to the whole floor show. The quality of Sidney’s silence has changed, and Hawkeye forces himself to breathe steadily through the feeling of iron bands tightening down over his chest.

“All right,” Sidney says, squeezing Hawkeye’s hand before he stands up, Hawkeye’s body swaying into the empty space he leaves behind him. “I’ll bring something up for you.”

He waits until Sidney’s footsteps are retreating down the stairs before he wriggles himself back into the bathrobe without ever fully sitting up, stretching out to snag the afghan that had fallen on the floor and burrowing down under it, shivering slightly. He’s dozing by the time Sidney returns, and grumbles a reply when Sid shakes him gently by the shoulder. Hawkeye eats half the sandwich without getting up from the couch, and is planning his attack – shower, clean clothes, a walk in the fresh air – when he falls asleep.

Chapter Text

Hawkeye doesn’t wake when Sidney lets himself back into the flat in the early evening. Doesn’t seem to have moved at all in the hours since Sidney left him on the couch, besides to pick at his sandwich.

Sidney goes into his bedroom to change, shedding jacket and tie in favor of his sky blue cashmere sweater. It was the first thing he bought for himself when he made it back home the year before, and he doesn’t have to think too hard about why he’s reaching for it now despite the warmth of the evening.

Hawkeye is stirring fitfully on the couch when Sidney comes back out and he makes straight for the west-facing windows, pulls the curtains wide. A beam of honeyed light falls over Hawkeye’s face and he whines and pulls the afghan over his head. “Mean,” he groans when Sidney pulls that away, too. “You’re a very mean person.”

“I’m a very hungry person,” Sidney says as he folds the blanket and places it out of Hawkeye’s reach over the back of the armchair. “Come on, get dressed, I want to take you to my favorite Italian restaurant for dinner.”

“I’ve got my dinner right there,” Hawkeye grouses, pointing to his half-eaten sandwich and turning his face towards the cushions. “Go find someone fun to take out on the town.”

Sidney lets out a silent breath to a count of four and then crosses to sit on the end of the sofa, nudging Hawkeye’s feet aside and running his palm along Hawkeye’s thigh to settle over the bony jut of his hip.

The timing of this reunion hasn’t escaped him. After months of getting his news about Hawkeye secondhand from the folks who were in contact with him, for that postcard to drop into Sidney’s mailbox only a couple of weeks after the one-year anniversary of the ceasefire – for Hawkeye to actually show up here looking like he’s struggling far more than anyone who’s spoken to him had realized – is too significant to brush off as a coincidence. Margaret had said, ‘Same old Pierce, maybe a little softer,’ when they crossed paths in Boston. Sherman and Francis both continued to say the same thing in their letters; that Hawkeye reported settling in to his role of country doctor and always wrote like clockwork the first week of every month. And BJ, well.

Sidney had intended, is still trying, to welcome Hawkeye with open arms and no judgment, whatever state he was in when he arrived. The mild bouts of mania hadn’t surprised him, ditto the disordered sleep and voracious sexual appetite. The self-medication is worrying, given the way that he isn’t trying to hide it but none of the people Sidney spoke to had mentioned it. And then there’s the fact that he is noticeably underweight. And not in the way Sidney had grown used to seeing him over there, as a naturally slender man contending with a constant barrage of bad food; now he has the ascetic look of a person who has recently dropped several pounds he really didn’t have to spare over a short amount of time.

Sidney is lost in second-guessing himself and all of his actions since Hawkeye arrived when Hawk heaves a sudden, noisy sigh and flops around on the couch until his head is propped up on the arm, squinting at Sidney through the hazy light like he’s only just woken up. “Hey… You know something, Sid?” he asks, and his voice is rough but he’s smiling. “In this light, sitting there like that…you look just like Hedy Lamarr.”

It’s not at all what Sidney was expecting and he can’t help the loud, ungracious snort that he lets out, shaking his head and looking up again to see Hawkeye grinning, his eyes lit up as he reaches for him. Sidney lets Hawkeye get his hands on him, lets himself be pulled into a slow and sensual kiss that Hawkeye clearly intends to build up to something more, before he wraps his fingers around Hawkeye’s wrists and uses his hold on him to leverage a little bit of space between them.

“Hawk,” he says, and clears his throat when his voice comes out a little hoarse. “Come on. You’re my guest, I’d like to take you out. We’ve got all night for the rest of it.”

“Oh, yeah?” Hawkeye’s voice hums low and sweet in his chest and his eyes crinkle up with a dopey little smile and God help him, Sidney could have him again right now.

“You’d better believe it,” he says instead, getting to his feet and reaching down to haul Hawkeye to his feet. “But first – clothes, dinner, a little exercise. Let’s go.”

Washed, dressed – shaved, even – Hawkeye falls in at his side, that loose-limbed stride of his so familiar from the corner of his eye that Sidney has to turn and let himself look his fill before they step out onto the street. Sidney remembers this about Hawkeye, how easily he vacillates between extremes and with so little fanfare it can make you doubt your own memory, your own experience of him. The gaunt, tremulous man who’d appropriated his bathrobe and colonized his sofa for an entire day is almost unrecognizable in the easy confidence of the man walking beside him now, voice and laughter ringing out loud with his hands in constant motion as he waxes poetic about the best Italian food he’d ever had in his life at a little hole in the wall in Chicago, and Sidney cannot deny that there’s a desperately greedy part of himself that wants to take the path of least resistance, to float along with his good humor and bask in his smiles, to ask no questions and take him to bed and have him and have him again.

He leads the way to Sal’s where he orders everything on the menu that catches Hawkeye’s eye until one would think they were expecting the entire 4077 to join them for dinner. Hawkeye’s grin is infectious and just when the waiter looks like he’s expecting one of them to yell ‘gotcha’ Hawkeye closes the menu decisively and adds, “All that and a bottle of red wine for the table, and a bottle of white for me,” and sends him on his way. Leaning in on his elbows, Hawkeye says in a carrying whisper, “You should have brought me somewhere you didn’t plan to come back, this is pretty embarrassing for you, being seen with the likes of me.”

“Oh, don’t worry,” Sidney says, relaxing in his chair. “They know what I do for a living.”

Hawkeye gapes at him, then drops his head forward, shoulders shaking as he cackles as quietly as he can. Beneath the white linen tablecloth that drops almost to the floor, Sidney finds Hawkeye’s foot with his own and gives him a kick.

The meal passes and they talk through it without saying much of anything. After the food arrives Sidney notices Hawkeye employing the same tactic, possibly without even realizing it, as he had at the picnic yesterday; picking up his fork or a piece of bread and using it like a conductor’s baton without actually bringing it to his mouth. Although, tonight, once a couple of bites actually make it in past his lips, his taste buds seem to come back to life with a will and then Hawk is falling all over himself in praise of the meal, calling the waiter back to their table so that he can send his compliments back to the kitchen.

Sidney has spent a lot of time wondering what Hawkeye would be like in the real world. With every passing minute, understanding grows: Hawkeye is Hawkeye. He thinks he understands what Margaret Houlihan meant when she described him as ‘softer,’ that it seems to apply to both the quality of himself that he brings to every interaction but also to the overall volume at which he lives his life. He’d seemed louder, over there. While most people found themselves steadily worn down and their voices stifled beneath the endless grind of the war machine, Hawkeye had seemed to stay up nights just keeping his edges sharp and every day raised his voice a little more. That might not be so necessary now that he’s back home, but the tactics he’d employed over there hadn’t been the simple product of where he’d happened to find himself, Sidney can see that now. Hawkeye is Hawkeye. And he is the most extraordinary man that Sidney has ever known.

“Something on my face?” Hawkeye asks, swiping at his mouth with a napkin, and Sidney can only shake his head, helpless with the love of him.

“Who have you heard from, lately?” Sidney asks him as they’re finally winding down, dipping another piece of bread in the little bit of herbed olive oil that Hawkeye had left for him.

“Oh, almost everyone,” Hawkeye says vaguely, pouring the last of the white wine into his glass. “What about you, have you kept in touch with anyone?”  

“Here and there. I’ve exchanged a few letters with Francis and Sherman, I wrote to Max Klinger last month when I heard he’d made it back to the States. I work rounds at some of the local hospitals and I’ve run into a few nurses who I knew by sight over there. Do you remember a young woman named Shari, I can’t recall her surname, dark hair, she’s a radiologist now—”

“Shari!” Hawkeye interrupts, beaming. “Of course! Great kid, I always liked her. A lot more than she liked me, if you can believe it, but not every good nurse is blessed with a working pair of eyes.”

Sidney laughs, shaking his head. “I can absolutely believe it. I’m surprised I didn’t think to mention her yesterday – she and Irene have been good friends for years.”

“Oh. Ohh. Well, in that case, all is forgiven. She’s in radiology? Good for her. Go on, who else? I know you saw Margaret in Boston awhile ago.”

“I did. She looked well. Happy.”

“Yeah?” Hawkeye leans his chin in his hands, smiling softly, looking very young in the glow of the candle that’s burning down between them. “Good. That’s good. I mean, she says she’s good, but you know how it is…”

“She was the first person to give me any reliable news of you.” Sidney swirls his wine in his glass, watching it catch the light. “Said the same thing, that you seemed good in your letters, and she hoped all was as it seemed.”

Hawkeye is already speaking before Sidney finishes: “Had she already quit the army when you saw her?”

“Just. That’s what brought her to the medical convention, networking.”

Hawkeye makes a face. “I don’t know who can stand to go to those things.”

“Well,” Sidney arches an eyebrow. “I do.”

Hawkeye scoffs. “Sure, but you’re used to dealing with the outsides of people. I prefer them sedated and naked on my table.”

Sidney shakes his head. “It’s not all bad. I never thought I’d see Sam Pak again but there he was in San Francisco in April.”

“Sam? Oh man, Sam! What a guy, it was heartbreaking when he got transferred out, the poker games were never the same.”

“That’s what I told him.”

“Good old Sam. You know…” Hawkeye darts a glance around the room, more play-acting discretion than actually being discreet, and leans in to say, “I always wondered about him.”

“Well,” Sidney doesn’t bother fighting a smile, “wonder no more.”

“What – you? No! You and – yeah?”

“On occasion.”

“Over there too?” Sidney lifts a shoulder and Hawkeye laughs up at the ceiling before grinning back at Sidney. “How did you – no kidding?”

“No kidding. He – it was the only… We moved in such different circles, it felt…safe. As safe as anything could have been.”

“Because unlike other dark-haired but slightly taller surgeons of your acquaintance there was no risk of him ending up on your couch.”

“Mm-hm.”

Sidney watches as emotion ripples over Hawkeye’s face like he’s picking and choosing between any number of responses, finally settling on a cheeky grin and leaning in to ask, “So you had a nice reunion, huh? I hope the convention was at a swanky hotel.”

“It wasn’t, but we did anyway. So you see, it’s all in what you make of it; you might surprise yourself and find that you get some value in finding new ways to stay connected with the medical community.”

“Well if I knew that that was on the agenda…” Hawkeye smirks, then huffs quietly, fiddling with his fork. “Beej and I used to talk about how we couldn’t imagine being caught dead at a one of those. Now...”

“Now…? Now that he’s betrayed the brotherhood, you’d consider it too? Or will you be holding out all the more stridently against.”

“Now he’s – what?”

Sidney brushes his thumb over his mustache and props his chin on his closed fist, looking across at Hawkeye. “I saw BJ at that same event in San Francisco. I thought he would have told you.”

Hawkeye blinks, but is otherwise quite still. “You’ve seen BJ?”

“Uh-huh.”

“How – how was he?”

“He seemed okay. Wearing a full beard at the time but he told me it was out of laziness and he planned to shave it come summer. He misses you.”

Hawkeye wrinkles his nose, suddenly impatient. “Yeah, that much I know.” He’s bouncing his knee under the table, and jostles it so sharply Sidney’s wine sloshes in his glass. “What did you talk about?”

“This and that,” Sidney says lightly. “Why do you suppose he didn’t tell you that we’d seen each other?”

Hawkeye bites the inside of his cheek and looks away, eyes roving distantly over the crowd of other diners. “I talked to him today. Sorry about your phone bill.”

“Oh yeah? How’d he seem?”

“I don’t know yet. I’ll have to wait to for the book to come out.”

“Excuse me?”

“Oh, BJ doesn’t tell me anything on the phone. He’s always fine, he’s always busy with Erin, he’s always… He gets closer to the truth in his letters. He usually drinks as he writes and by the end he’s almost honest. At least that’s what I have to assume, I can’t always make out more than one word in five.”

“He told me that he didn’t drink anymore.”  

“Yeah,” Hawkeye rolls his eyes, “that’s what he tells everyone. I don’t know how he thinks he’s hiding it from his wife, or if they’re both just playing an elaborate game of make-believe.”

While in some ways BJ remained a complete mystery to him, Sidney had been quite sure that he was lying about being on the wagon. But that wasn’t what BJ had wanted to talk about, so Sidney hadn’t challenged him on it. “Are you worried about him?”

Hawkeye shrugs, tilting his glass on its base. “I think I miss him too much to worry about him.”

“Have you thought about going out to see him?”

Hawkeye looks up sharply, meets Sidney’s eyes and transforms a frown into a sly little smile. “Not as seriously as I thought about coming here to see you.”

Sidney shakes his head, smiling. “It’s not a contest.”

“You’re just saying that because you won.”

“It’s not a contest,” Sidney repeats himself quietly. “It’s not even the same game.”

Hawkeye’s expression falters, naked longing shining so clearly in his eyes that Sidney reaches for him, patting his hand before he grips his shoulder, giving him a friendly shake.

“Would you have gone to California if you thought you’d get the same reception that you got here?” Sidney asks, leaning back in his chair.

“It’s a moot point,” Hawkeye says with finality, “because I wouldn’t. No, Sidney, I know what you – I know what you’re trying to say without saying.” He makes an abortive gesture at the space they’re in, their shared awareness of the many ears around them. “What’s not moot is that I’m here because this is where I want to be. Not because it’s closer than California, or easier, or, or, ‘friendlier’.” His eyes are fixed unblinking on Sidney’s, shining with a steely resolve that takes Sidney by surprise. “Are you done?”

Startled, it takes Sidney a moment to catch his meaning, and then he looks down at the host of picked-over plates between them. “I think so. Are you?”

Hawkeye reaches across the table for the bottle of red wine and tips the remainder into his glass where it swirls and turns pink as it mixes with the white. He downs it in one gulp. “Now I am. Let’s go.”

Standing outside the restaurant, Hawkeye groans and rubs his belly with both hands, and just like that he’s soft and smiling again. “That food was amazing,” he tells Sidney. “But I might need to sleep some of it off before I can get started on the list of things I want to do with you tonight.”

Heat pools low in Sidney’s belly and he cocks his head to the side, looking up at Hawkeye. “Walk home or cab?”

“Actually…” Hawkeye nudges him with his elbow and they step out of the pool of light spilling out from the restaurant’s front window, walking by silent accord to a spot partway down the block where a shadowed storefront gives a modicum of privacy. “Not that I would expect an upstanding psychiatrist of your caliber to know all the spots where degenerates of a certain persuasion can mingle freely…”

“…but that’s exactly what you expect. You want to go out?”

“More like I don’t want to go in yet. It’s a nice night, I’m feeling good, I’d kind of like to go somewhere that we can just, where we can be…”

“Where we can just be, full-stop?”

“Yeah. Maybe somewhere we can talk.”

Sidney hums, then reaches out swiftly and gives Hawkeye’s wrist a little squeeze. “Come on, I know a place.”

“Oh yeah?” His plan in place, Hawkeye relaxes back into slouching insouciance. “Bar? Club? Shady street corner?”

Sidney tries to land an exasperated look through the wave of affection he feels breaking over him. “Just come with me.”

Chapter Text

“Uh,” Hawkeye says when they arrive, “I feel like I’m about to step into an Edith Wharton novel. What is this place?”

“Officially, it’s a private residence.”

“And unofficially?”

“Unofficially, it’s still private but it’s more like a club. Believe it or not there used to be dozens of houses like this, all up and down Fifth Avenue. Most of them are gone now, but some…”

Hawkeye lets out a low whistle, tipping his head back to take in the sight of the mansion rising out of the pavement in front of them looking like nothing so much as a miniature chateau from a fairytale sprung to life here in Manhattan. While Hawkeye looks at the house Sidney looks at Hawkeye, lanky and unselfconscious with his hands in his pockets and his throat shining white beneath the streetlights, poised and lovely as though he, too, had been transported from the land of imagination. After a moment, Hawkeye drops his gaze back down to earth and Sidney finally steps up to ring the bell.

Sidney gives his name and vouches for Hawkeye and they’re ushered inside by a man who looks about as nondescript as a bank teller, but once through the foyer they’re greeted lavishly by a man who is several inches taller than Hawk and wearing a gown that would have made Klinger swoon with envy. He stoops to kiss the air beside Sidney’s cheek while berating him for stopping by unannounced when he never bothers to show up when he’s invited. Then he turns a keen gaze on Hawkeye, looks him brazenly up and down and pronounces Sidney forgiven on the spot. Hawkeye, for his part, laughs out loud and offers his hand, looking thoroughly charmed when he receives a gallant kiss instead of a handshake. They pass on through to the ballroom where, up on the bandstand, a lone singer is crooning along to an ethereal tune pouring out of a phonograph. There are a few couples dancing, and several more mingling at the bar and the small tables dotted around the room, but overall it’s a smallish crowd, the atmosphere subdued, and Sidney’s not sure what expression is on his face that makes Hawk nudge him lightly, asking, “Hey, what’s up?”

“Nothing, nothing. Just – never mind, I’ll tell you in a minute.”

He recognizes a few people as they cross the room and stops to introduce Hawkeye but they don’t linger. At the bar Sidney asks for a club soda with lime and then leans on his elbows, enjoying the performance as Hawkeye instructs the bartender on the best, the only way to create the perfect, the absolutely driest martini known to man. He drinks it at the bar, pronounces it outstanding, and orders another for the road, following Sidney around the edge of the dance floor to a semi-private table where they sit, toast, and sigh in unison.

Halfway through his drink Hawkeye makes Sidney get up and switch chairs with him so that he can look out across the room. He seems a bit dazzled by the place even half-empty as it is, which Sidney finds endearing even as it makes him feel old. Time was, the dance floor would have been packed even at this early hour on a Tuesday night.

“I was seventeen the first time someone brought me here,” he hears himself say the next time Hawkeye looks up and meets his eyes. He nods at Hawk’s look of wide-eyed surprise, and lets himself sink into the memory, sifting through images and feelings he hasn’t revisited in years as he shares them with Hawkeye. It was 1925 when he first walked through these doors, prohibition in full swing and this place sparkling like an oasis in a dry desert. It was a watering hole for all sorts, too – Sidney’s own brother had been in love with a Black girl and they came here to be together in a place that was safely out of sight of their separate communities, while Sidney himself came to mingle with the other boys.

“When were you born, ’20? Ah, you missed out on a great decade,” he tells Hawkeye, smiling broadly. “As ridiculous as they were, the laws that made criminals out of anyone who wanted a drink broke down a lot of barriers between people. Folks who might never have exchanged the time of day suddenly found themselves drinking and dancing and making time together. That’s how I decided to go into psychiatry, as a matter of fact. I made friends with a professor who ended up pioneering a study on sexuality, which he only got interested in after spending time here and seeing for himself that most of us so-called inverts are just regular people trying to live our lives.”

“And you introduced him to the joys of homophilia?” Hawkeye asks with a leer, trapping one of Sidney’s feet between both of his.

“Not in the way you’re clearly having fun imagining right now,” Sidney says, tapping his toe against Hawkeye’s ankle. “But in another way, yes. There was a lot of joy in those days. A lot of simple pleasure to be found just from being in community with each other.”

Hawkeye hums thoughtfully, and Sidney looks up from fiddling with his lime wedge to find Hawkeye gazing at him with his chin in his hands. “What?”

“Oh, nothing,” Hawkeye murmurs, smile growing. “Just trying to picture you at seventeen.”

Sidney laughs, and impulsively leans across the small table to kiss him.

“Wow,” Hawkeye whispers after they separate, looking dazed. “Sid…”

Sidney lifts one shoulder, feels his eyes drooping as he looks at him. “You’re very kissable, Hawk, I’m sure I’m not the first to discover this about you.”

Hawkeye swallows hard, and Sidney watches with great interest as color rises to his cheeks. It makes him want to kiss him even more, but he stays still when he catches the way Hawkeye pulls in a breath, squaring his shoulders subtly before he starts to speak. “You asked me a question this morning, about what I wanted this to be. I’ve been thinking about it.”

That actually isn’t the way Sidney had phrased his question. He wonders if Hawkeye misheard him or if he subconsciously altered the question to what he wished Sidney had asked. Either way, when Hawkeye glances up he only nods encouragement for him to continue. 

“The most honest answer I have for you is ‘I don’t know.’ In order for this to be any more than what it’s been the past two days would entail a major life change for me that is in no way something I’m prepared for but on the other hand the thought of packing my bags and leaving for home, leaving you here, well that’s no thought at all, at least for the moment. Give me another week of 24-hour access to you maybe I’ll be able to think about leaving you alone for awhile without wanting to throw up, but no promises. That’s a joke,” Hawkeye adds after a beat, eyes twinkling.

“You’re a true comedian,” Sidney murmurs, pressing his foot against Hawkeye’s, watching his lips twitch as he gives a fey little shrug before dropping the act and refocusing on Sidney with his face wide open and honest.

“The truth is even if you wanted to do this, which I don’t know if you do, I don’t know how to do it. The only person I ever—” Hawkeye pauses abruptly and Sidney is pretty sure that he’s recalibrating, adjusting to the fact that here in this space he doesn’t have to give his pronouns the runaround before he continues, “the only guy who’s ever been more than a two- or a three-night stand for me was Trapper and that wasn’t exactly, well, that wasn’t anything that was ever going to outlast the war. But with you… I get the feeling that this, that this means something. To you, I mean. I know it does to me, and I guess I’ve been assuming that you know that too although come to think of it why would you when I haven’t actually said it. I’m really… I really like you, Sidney. And I want you in ways the English language isn’t equipped to express. And I know I’m no great catch, and I know that you know that better than most. Since I’m being honest I might as well say it, I don’t know why anyone would take a chance on me right now but the fact that you did, and the way you held out on me until peacetime too, it makes me think you wanted it to be more than a good fuck to pass the time but what do I know, you know? I don’t exactly have the best track record of being on the same page with someone I, that I, that’s, when it’s someone that I…”

“That you what, Hawkeye?”

“I don’t know if I should say. I uh, I’ve been reliably informed that I come on too strong.”

“With someone that you love?”

“Hey, just remember that you said it, not me.”

“Do you want to say it?”

“That’s kind of a personal question, isn’t it?” Hawkeye lifts his eyebrows, grinning, trying to bluff his way through.

“It’s a very personal topic, that’s the whole point.” He waits a beat to see if Hawkeye will jump in to fill the silence, but not so long as to make him squirm. “Well, since you were so honest with me, I’d be a cad to leave you in suspense, huh?” His tone makes Hawkeye smile, shoulders relaxing down from their instinctive hunch, and Sidney reaches to lay his hand alongside Hawkeye’s, thumb stroking lightly over his knuckles. “I don’t know what this might end up being, Hawk. And for the moment, I’m fine with that. I’ve never felt it was necessary to have every step mapped out before the journey’s even begun; the important thing, for me, is that we have something, that we both know it, that we both want it. Because I do, Hawk. I want you. And I think you’re a hell of a catch. And I’ve been waiting a long time to take a chance on you.”

He feels Hawkeye’s fingers twitch and a moment later, Hawk is turning his hand over, palm-up beneath Sidney’s, and Sidney smiles at him as he slots their fingers together right there in plain sight on top of the lacy tablecloth.

“Any path we walk together isn’t going to lead to a white picket fence and while I gather that you don’t value normality just for the sake of it, like most people you still find it scary to walk without any map at all. So I’ll tell you what I do know, what I can promise,” Sidney says, not breaking his eyes away from Hawk’s. “Whether this ends up being the only time we ever go to bed together or if it’s only the first of many hundreds of times, I want to have you in my life and I want to be in yours. To borrow a phrase that I technically have to disapprove of during working hours, I’m crazy about you, Hawk. I’d like this to be something. I’d like to keep you around, I’d like to see you happy. I’d like to, in any way that you let me, have a hand in making you happy.”

The look on Hawkeye’s face is one that Sidney’s never seen before. A little like a sunrise over still water, a little like the calm after a long night of shelling.

Hawkeye gets up a minute later, when it looks like his choices have come down to a little light fleeing in order to regroup or starting to cry right there at the table. Sidney watches him make for the bar, brushing his thumb over his lips and marveling at how much pleasure can be imparted by a simple kiss when it is freely and fearlessly given. He watches Hawkeye lean against the bar, watches him nod and smile absently at the bartender, picking at the bowl of pretzels in front of him, turning when a young man Sidney vaguely recognizes approaches and gets his attention with a light touch to his arm.

From the deferential nod he directs towards Sidney as he speaks with Hawkeye, he can guess what the man is saying – I know you’re here with someone, but how about a dance? – confirmed when Hawkeye’s chin comes up in surprise, before he darts a look out towards the dance floor and then back at Sidney, tilting his head in a silent but unmistakable question. Amused and grateful on Hawkeye’s behalf – he shouldn’t be the only one here tonight who recognizes Hawkeye’s allure – Sidney throws him a cheerful two-fingered salute and watches Hawk’s mobile face dance from surprise through to amusement and pleasure until he picks up his drink, tosses it back, and follows his new friend out onto the floor.

It's not until they’re cheek to cheek that Sidney realizes that the man is a couple of inches taller than Hawkeye and broader in the shoulder, and from the way he’s holding him it’s clear that he’s trying to lead and also that they’re laughing together about Hawkeye’s inexperience in following. It’s nothing so straightforward as jealousy, unfortunately, that curls insidiously through Sidney’s gut. But there is a certain nuanced insecurity that he carries around with him nearly everywhere he goes, cultivated over a lifetime of being slight, queer, and Jewish all at the same time. He’s very aware of it, and aware of the responses it triggers in him that he prefers not to act on. But he’s still got his blind spots and somehow he finds that he’d failed to consider the thought that Hawkeye, as someone who obviously, painfully yearns to be cared for, to be coddled, might prefer that care to come from one who is physically larger and stronger than he is, someone who could more easily indulge him as he plays the role of the receptive partner.

Sidney doesn’t permit himself to dwell on the thought, simply acknowledges that he had it and allows it to pass on its way. He’s less successful in giving the same treatment to the thoughts that float in on its wake; that this is what Hawkeye would look like in BJ Hunnicutt’s arms, that Hawkeye himself might be entertaining the same thought. It’s eating at Sidney, his indecision over telling Hawkeye about his conversation with BJ last spring. But just because BJ hadn’t officially engaged his services as a doctor doesn’t mean that Sidney can divulge what had been shared with him in confidence. An irritatingly rational voice has begun to migrate from the back of his mind up towards the front, suggesting that BJ didn’t tell Hawkeye that he’d seen Sidney because he was expecting that Sidney would do it for him. That Sidney would break the news to Hawkeye that BJ missed him so terribly that he’d actually considered, however briefly, that he might be like that about Hawkeye just to explain away the intensity of his own attachment. But while Sidney remains adamant in his conviction that it’s not his place to report on a personal conversation, he feels oddly guilty about keeping this information from Hawkeye.

It's not a competition, he’d said at dinner.

That’s because you won, Hawkeye had replied. Hawkeye, for as long as he’s known BJ, has been insisting that if BJ ever made a move he would let him but until that day came (which he was sure it never would), the simple friendship that they shared was enough for him.

That there was nothing simple about the friendship between himself and BJ was an idea Hawkeye tended to shrug off. Which is what Sidney tries to do as he watches the scattered couples on the dance floor drift to a halt with the end of the song. He finds Hawkeye already looking back at him and tossing him a wink when he catches Sidney’s eye before turning back to his partner, grinning broadly and shaking his head, leaving the poor boy with a star-stuck look in his eyes as Hawkeye turns and makes his way back to Sidney with an easy roll to his gait.

“Would you believe I used to spend twelve, sixteen, thirty hours on my feet at a time? While performing surgery, no less!” Hawkeye groans as he drops down into his chair and stretches his legs out in front of himself, continuing his maudlin monologue. “And now look at me. One dance and I’m in the market for a gurney hoping someone will take pity on a poor corpse and wheel me out of here.” He presses his hands to belly and grimaces. “Doesn’t help that I think I was eating for two back there, how could I be this far along already? Ah, the bountiful mysteries of life. What? What’s that look about?” Reanimated, Hawkeye is sitting up in his chair and leaning on his elbows, sparkling eyes roaming all over Sidney’s face from up close. “Are you laughing at me? Did I look like a complete idiot out there? Oh I get it, you want to take me back out there, show that young buck how it’s done?”

“I thought your feet were heading down the trail for the last roundup.”

“For you, they’d turn right back around. Pour some coffee in a footbath, let ‘em soak a few minutes, they’ll be good as new. Although…” Hawkeye scoots his chair around the table until his knee is jostling Sidney’s, “maybe we ought to save our energy for the dance that can only be danced behind closed doors, hmm?”

Hawkeye is a line of supple warmth along his side and Sidney wants very much to melt in against him, catches himself swaying in closer – and catches the look on Hawkeye’s face that says he caught it, too.

“What do you say,” Hawkeye murmurs, warm breath ghosting over Sidney’s ear and making him shiver. “Take me home?”

Sidney drops a hand to Hawkeye’s thigh, fingers caressing along the inseam of his trousers as he allows himself a moment of foolish indulgence, leaning in against Hawkeye and listening to the way his breath catches and stutters in his chest. “I think I’d take you anywhere,” Sidney tells him, his lips a hair’s breadth from Hawkeye’s, and then he pulls back, looks him in the eye, watches the flush rise in his cheeks while the incredible blue of his irises are almost submerged beneath the black of his pupils. Watches the muscles in his jaw jump and release as Hawkeye lets out a slow trickling breath.

“You really are something else, Sid,” he says at last, voice rough. “And you get me going like…like I didn’t know I could get anymore.”

“Well.” Sidney slides his hand a little higher, thumb swiping lightly over Hawkeye’s groin, “I’m forty-five years old and you make me feel like a dumb kid, so I’d say the feeling is very, very mutual.”

Hawkeye groans quietly and slumps down in his chair, breathing in short bursts through his nose. “I don’t suppose this is the kind of place that rents rooms by the hour?”

“Let’s go.” Sidney takes his hands off of him and leans in to capture his mouth. “Let’s go home.”

*x*x*

They barely make it through the front door before they’re reaching for each other. With his hands on Sidney’s hips Hawkeye’s got himself backed up against the door, slouching down until Sidney is looming over him, insinuating his thigh between Hawkeye’s easy as anything and kissing him with his hands tangled up in his hair. Hawkeye groans deep in his chest, breaks off panting when Sidney presses in close, rubs up against him. His own rhythm falters when Hawkeye gets his hands up under his sweater, knees going weak at the pleased little rumble of a laugh that rolls out of Hawkeye.

“Ticklish, Sid?” Hawkeye murmurs in his ear and Sidney turns to nuzzle against his neck, waiting for the sigh before he gives him a sharp nip.

“Oh, God,” the words burst out of Hawkeye in an impetuous whine, hips stuttering up against Sidney’s as he tips his head back, exposing his throat. “God, yes, please.”

“Mm, I should have known.” Sidney’s lips buzz against Hawkeye’s skin, curving into a smile when he feels Hawk pushing up into his touch.

“Analyzing me in bed, Doctor?” he gets out, managing to sound cheeky, his chest heaving.

“Bed, no, that’s off-limits.” He worries at the same spot on Hawk’s neck, heat and pride flashing through him at the resulting throaty sigh. “Up against the wall in the foyer, though, that’s fair game.”

Hawkeye manages to trap his whine between his teeth, fingers bruising on Sidney’s waist. “I want—”

There’s a muffled thump from the floor above them, followed by a voice raised in alarm and quick footsteps, a moment of silence and then a burst of laughter. Sidney draws his eyes back down to Hawkeye who looks startled and then bemused and then – wonder of wonders – bashful.

“Maybe we should take this to the bedroom after all,” he whispers, hands flexing and withdrawing from Sidney’s waist, rubbing the fine cashmere of Sidney’s sweater between his fingers and tugging it lightly back into place as he retreats.

“You may be right about that.” Sidney cups his face between his hands and kisses him soundly before tugging at him by the front of his shirt and turning to lead the way up the stairs, holding a finger to his lips as they creep quietly past Irene and Miriam’s door.

Being with Hawkeye is like being with no one else. Once they’re safely shut away from the world Hawkeye falls on him with such abandon that Sidney finds himself totally swept away in it, not thinking plans or logistics or anything more than getting his fill of Hawkeye in every moment that is given to them like this. Hawkeye is keen, focused, but not desperate. His eyes are dark with desire and his fingers nimble in pursuit of what he wants and all the while he is brimming with affection, laughter flowing easily with joy and gratitude humming right there on the surface of him. They undress each other slowly leaving a trail of clothes on the way to the bedroom and Hawkeye is fully naked and breathtakingly beautiful when he lays himself out on Sidney’s bed and reaches for him.

“Oh, darling,” Sidney breathes as he looks at him, leaning in to kiss him on the mouth and then working down his neck to his shoulder, exploring him with his hands and his mouth.

Neither of them makes a move or a mention to turn out the light so Sidney looks his fill, sees Hawkeye’s ribs stand out starkly when he sucks in a breath and holds it, watches his thighs tremble as Sidney trails the backs of his fingers across sensitive skin. He sees the way Hawkeye reacts to his voice, his praise, his affection, and he can’t get enough of it; calling him sweetheart and darling and telling him how perfect he is, how lovely, and how very, very much he likes the sight of him here in his bed.

“Sidney, you’re killing me,” Hawkeye moans, hands fisted in the sheets at his sides as he trembles and writhes beneath him, and Sidney carefully closes his teeth over the tight bud of his nipple, feeling his heartbeat stutter and race beneath his mouth and humming in deep satisfaction at the helpless rumble that works its way up from Hawkeye’s chest to explode in a groan as Hawkeye arcs up beneath him, needy and shameless and delightfully indecent. “Great,” Hawkeye gets out on a ragged breath. “Terrific. I’m dying and he’s laughing at me.”

Sidney really does laugh, then, capturing his wrists to press him back into the bed and laying himself out along Hawkeye’s body, bringing them into perfect, absolute alignment.

Chapter Text

If Hawkeye had to guess he’d say it’s close to dawn. He’s drifting, lying flat on his back with his face turned towards Sidney, eyes closed. Sidney’s touch is gentle, light but purposeful, like even now after two orgasms, a couple hours of sleep and then another round just for fun, he isn’t finished with Hawkeye yet.

It’s nice. It’s unexpected, but it’s nice. Unfortunately it’s also keeping his brain on edge, just this side of awake, his overworked pleasure centers trying desperately to keep up.

Sidney murmurs something and Hawkeye’s sure he’s misheard him, works his heavy eyelids open to squint up at him. “What?”

Sidney’s lips twitch around a bewitching smile. “I said, you have a beautiful penis, Hawkeye.”

Hawkeye barks a laugh, blinks, frowns when Sidney just keeps gazing down at him. “You’re serious?”

“What would be the point of lying about something like that?”

The skin of his face feels too-tight and he’s sure he’s blushing to beat the band as he gapes up at Sidney, whose brows draw together just slightly, a little line forming between his eyes.

“No one’s ever told you that before?”

Hawkeye licks his lips, finally breaking his eyes down and away. “I uh, no, I guess I haven’t spent much time with, with guys who, uh, who look.”

From the corner of his eye Hawkeye sees Sidney lower himself down from where he’s been propped up on his elbow, reaching for the blanket to cover them both as he drapes an arm over Hawkeye’s stomach and settles in beside him. “I hope you don’t mind if I look,” he says after a minute. “I love to look at you, Hawk. I always have.” Another long minute passes before Sidney asks quietly, “What’s wrong?”

Hawkeye sniffs hard, facing away from Sidney and rubbing his cheek against the pillow, trying to breathe quietly through his mouth.

“What is it, sweetheart?” Sidney asks, even softer, and Hawkeye rolls towards him onto his side, hiding his face against Sidney’s chest.

He can’t fight against the wave after wave of melancholy that breaks over him so he doesn’t try, just holds on to Sidney to weather through it, breathing slow and steady in rhythm with the sweep of Sidney’s palm over his back. After an indeterminate amount of time, he speaks aloud the words he’s been running from, pressing them into Sidney’s skin like a confession. “I’m so lonely. I’ve been so, so lonely.”

Sidney breathes his name out like a sigh and wraps him up in a fierce embrace, pressing his lips to the crown of his head as Hawkeye slides his arms around Sidney’s waist and clings right back.

“I’m really not doing so hot,” Hawkeye mumbles, still hiding, knowing Sidney will hear him anyway. “I wonder, I think…maybe I should have come here as a patient not, not, not fooling you that I’m in any kind of shape for this. Maybe I needed your couch instead of your bed.”

Over his head he hears Sidney laugh, feels it in the way his whole body rumbles around Hawkeye’s, not letting go. “I’m sorry to burst your bubble but that wouldn’t have worked out for either of us. I couldn’t analyze you any more than you could operate on me, no matter how badly you might need a therapist or I might need a surgeon. I love you, Hawkeye. I put that aside over there because I had to but I can’t anymore, I couldn’t, even if I wanted to. I’ll help you, I’ll help you as best I can but as your friend, as your lover, not your doctor.”

Sidney holds him as he cries. His hands on Hawkeye’s back and his neck are soothing and grounding like little that Hawkeye has ever known and the storm of grief and fear passes quicker than he’d thought possible over these weeks and months when he hadn’t let himself cry out of dread that he wouldn’t be able to stop.

“I’m not going anywhere,” Sidney says when Hawkeye clutches at him, and Hawkeye reluctantly lets go of him long enough for Sidney to turn over and reach for the drawer in his bedside table. He hands Hawkeye a handkerchief and waits until he’s wiped his eyes and blown his nose to settle back in and take Hawkeye’s hand, holding it loosely against his chest. “You want to tell me what’s been going on? I gather you haven’t spent the whole of this last year feeling this way, is that true?”

Exhaustion is creeping up on him, black spots dancing at the corners of his vision so he closes his eyes and shakes his head.

“Maybe since the end of July?”

“Yeah,” Hawkeye breathes, relief at not having to say it himself making him feel almost buoyant for a moment.

“Interesting timing, coincidental as it may be, that you were able to make a move towards healing yourself around the time of the high holidays.”

Hawkeye opens his eyes, feels himself smile without it taking any special effort. “I thought about that too, actually.”

Sidney’s gaze on his face feels gentle as a caress and Hawkeye leans in to meet him halfway in a slow, sweet kiss.

“Go on,” Sidney says a minute later. “Start at the beginning, wherever that may be.”

Hawkeye breathes deep, and thinks back, but he knows the answer. “I started getting letters in July, more I mean, until I was getting one a day or more, mostly from people I hadn’t heard from yet. Jo Ann, Able, Igor…”

“What was the tone of those letters?”

“A lot of the same, really, ‘Dear Hawkeye, I meant to write sooner but now that it’s been a year…’ A lot of disbelief that a year could have passed already. A lot of carefully worded concern.”

“For you?”

“Who else?” he asks, with an attempt at a theatrical shrug.

“And that made you feel…?”

“Like a ghost. Like an imposter. Like a lunatic.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know.”

“Okay. What happened next?”

“Nothing. Really! It was just that overnight the world went dark. Not like everything was champagne and roses before that, but I was alive. Now…” Hawkeye puffs up his cheeks, lets his breath out slow. “I’ve got no appetite to speak of but when I don’t eat I’m – well, you’re a doctor, you know what happens when a person doesn’t eat. I sleepwalk through the day and I can’t sleep at night. I wake up hungover and hating myself and vowing I’m done with the booze and by ten in the morning I’m counting down the hours until I can have my next drink. I play some pretty elaborate games with myself about that. Day by day the idea of going in to spend another shift tending to housewives’ complaints made me think seriously about throwing myself in the bay, but my dad was stubborn about taking back my patients so one night I stayed out until dawn and he found me passed out on the front lawn, that got his attention. He does what he can, I love him for it, I don’t mean to – I love him, but he’s not… Is it possible for a person to die from loneliness when the person who loves them most in the world is right down the hall?”

“Is there anyone in particular you’ve been missing? Or anything?”

“You.” Hawkeye lifts his eyes to Sidney’s, then drops them again. “Beej. Klinger,” he adds with a wry smile. “I didn’t expect – that guy was a gem, honestly, he lightened the load in ways I didn’t really appreciate at the time. The whole surgical staff… The morning I first skipped out on the clinic it was because I was putting on my jacket when I heard myself say, ‘I’d give anything to be going into surgery right now.’ The thought made me sick and since then I haven’t been able to stop thinking and listing and categorizing all the things I miss.”

Standing back-to-back with Beej or Trap while they operate, he tells Sidney. Consulting with the people he respects most in the world and the rush of pulling off an impossible save – Margaret, Margaret is indivisible from thoughts of that kind of triumph, not with how dedicated she always was, how invested she would get in those seemingly hopeless cases and how she tried so hard to hide that fact even from herself.

“And then there are days I’d give absolutely anything just to have someone tell me what to do, even if I didn’t do it, just to have some direction to point myself in or push back against.”

“And that’s when you miss Colonel Potter.”

“And Father Mulcahy. And I miss the nurses, just seeing groups of women all over, the way they’d stick by each other and the way they looked just going about their work, the competence – the confidence! I know it was as horrible for them as for anyone and us men didn’t make it any easier but they could be so…” Hawkeye shakes his head, giving up. “I guess I just got used to being surrounded by these roving bands of capable wonderful beautiful driven independent women. You don’t see that much in Crabapple Cove, everyone is either married or widowed and coming after me.”

Sidney snorts a laugh and Hawkeye feels himself grin back if only for a moment, another stone lifting off his chest, leaving him lighter.

“So you miss your community. You miss your people, your…connections, your usefulness. Knowing what your role is and performing it with everything you’ve got.”

“Yeah…” One stone lifted, another takes its place. “I can’t tell you how many times I heard someone – Henry, Potter, Mulcahy, even Margaret, how many times I heard them say, ‘Oh Hawkeye Pierce, he’s the…’ Depending on who was talking I was the heart and soul of the operation, I was the backbone, I was the moral compass… I was the comic relief. And it horrified me at first being…being bodily identified with a place I hated so much. But…that’s the way it was. After awhile you grow into being where you are and doing what you’re doing and so sure, I guess, I was all of that. And now what am I?”

Sidney hums, sounding very thoughtful, his thumb swiping slowly over the backs of Hawkeye’s knuckles before he says, speaking carefully, “Regardless of what you felt about it, the complicated emotions about why you were there, the fact is that you were there, and while you were there you were indispensable. Most of us tend to respond well to the feeling of being needed, of having our unique skills appreciated. And yours were: constantly, vocally, loudly. For three years you were absolutely necessary to every single person around you.”

“Even Frank Burns?” Hawkeye can’t help but ask, and thrills to they way his stupid joke makes Sidney’s face light up with his smile.

“Who would Frank have been without you to rail against? God,” Sidney murmurs a moment later, brushing Hawkeye’s hair back from his forehead. “I’ve missed the sound of your laugh.”

“I’ve missed laughing,” Hawkeye admits, and turns his face to press his lips to the center of Sidney’s palm.

“Do you remember a conversation we had once, about how all highs and lows seemed more extreme, relative to back home? I don’t think you appreciated me pointing out that if your anger and sadness had reached new depths over there, your pleasure seemed to reach corresponding new heights.”

“You’re right, I didn’t appreciate that at all. I hated the fact that my very range of emotion was being dictated by the goddamn army.”

“And yet there are elements of army life that are almost universally attractive – why do you think there are always so many soldiers lining up to sign up? You said that you missed having someone tell you what to do, just to have some order to orient yourself against. The order and discipline and even in some cases the lack of agency – think about how many decisions you did not have to take responsibility for on any given day. Things like…what to wear when you got up. I’ve actually been working with a new patient these last few weeks, a former army nurse, and a few days ago she told me that she’s been picking up extra shifts at work just to have fewer days off. Fewer days where she has to decide what to put on in the morning. She told me, ‘Any day I don’t have to pick out an outfit is a day that’s far more likely to go well for me.’ Same with deciding where to eat, who to socialize with, where to go. It got me thinking about you and BJ, believe it or not. BJ – well, his rebellions against army life were very self-centered, in a way. The hat, the mustache, the shirts and suspenders, the basketball shoes. Conversely, aside from a garish shirt or two what did you do every morning – you got up and put on your green shirt and your boots. How to dress was one decision you didn’t have to make, and maybe for you that decision was about something you didn’t care about, your physical appearance, but sometimes those inconsequential decisions can be more draining and paralyzing than decisions that mean something to us. So maybe putting on a green shirt allowed you to save your energy for… For painting a mercurochrome target on the ammo dump and ordering takeout from Chicago, brazening your way into Panmunjom to tell the generals to just end the damn war already.”

Sidney seems a little out of breath by the time he winds down, and Hawkeye feels like he’s just had a cup of coffee delivered to him intravenously.  “I was pretty good at that, wasn’t I.”

“You really were.”

“Huh.”

“You are extraordinarily good at a lot of things, Hawk. So tell me, what’s keeping you from returning to surgery?”

“Besides the fact that Crabapple Cove couldn’t support a surgeon’s practice?”

“Besides that.”

“I don’t know.”

Sidney hums. “I think you might have some ideas.”

“Sidney, I honestly haven’t thought about it. Working at my dad’s practice was fine until it wasn’t, and since then I haven’t been able to think ahead more than two hours or one drink in the future.”

“Okay,” Sidney relents, and Hawkeye finds his answer in the ensuing silence.

“I became a surgeon to help people. The army corrupted that. I spent three years performing surgery and hating myself for what I was a part of.”

“Do I need to tell you that none of that was your fault?”

“No, I just need to work on believing it.”

“Okay. So how can you get back to what is at the very core of you, the reason that you became a surgeon – the reason you’re such a damn good surgeon – which seems to me like a combination of the kind of god complex that makes you think that you alone can fix people…and an absolutely genuine desire to leave the world a better place.”

Slowly, drawing the words out one by one, Hawkeye begins to arrange them in the pattern of a dream he’s barely let himself look at since his world began to collapse around him like a house of cards. He’d been reading, awhile back, about the efforts of medical workers in a few cities around the country to found and fund so-called ‘free clinics’, the idea being to provide everything from routine general care to life-saving surgery for those who can’t afford to go anywhere else.

“Sort of a Robin Hood approach to medicine.”

“I see,” Sidney says, eyes twinkling, “and who exactly would you be robbing to bandage the poor?”

“Oh, I was thinking I’d start with Charles.”

Sidney laughs. “It’s intriguing, Hawkeye. Not to mention admirable. And it’s…well, it’s exciting, isn’t it? To think of taking your skills, your capabilities, down the road less traveled.”

Hawkeye hums, tapping his fingers against the sheets, the palms of his hands and the soles of his feet starting to feel itchy. Sidney is watching him closely, and ventures after a moment, “Of course, work like that, serving the poor and the left-behind, one would expect to witness a lot of suffering.”

“What?” Hawkeye asks, startled into stillness by the non-sequitur. Sidney is still looking keenly into his face, and Hawkeye is startled again by the realization that Sidney is responding to something he thinks he sees in Hawkeye’s expression. It makes him smile slightly to think that he’s so used to Sidney reading his mind that the realization that he’d simply misunderstood feels entirely alien. “Right. Yeah, I know that. But…hey, just because I’ve put in more than my share of time with suffering abroad, that doesn’t give me the right to tune it out back home.”

“That’s a fair point.” Sidney touches his cheek, traces the shell of his ear. “So where’d you go just now, when you started to pull away?”

Hawkeye grimaces. “As soon as I start to think about it, I spin out in a million directions. How to start, how to make connections, could I actually support myself, could I handle the work or am I fooling myself – see, this is why I don’t, I didn’t want to think about it let alone talk about it, I’ll jinx it, I’ll—”

“Hawkeye.” Sidney’s hand is heavy and warm on his shoulder and Hawkeye’s chin comes up sharply, looking around to discover himself sitting up in the bed with the sheet bunched in his fists. “Hey, it’s okay. Just listen to me for a minute.” Sidney waits until Hawkeye meets his eyes, and then gives him a smile, the kind of easy, genuine smile that used to calm Hawkeye’s heartrate with just a glance, over there. Still works over here, little wonder, and Hawkeye takes in and releases a steady breath and gives him a nod. “Those details you’re talking about? They do not matter. Someday they will, of course, but right now, they absolutely do not matter. Right now, what matters is the big picture. If you can keep your eye on the big picture, maybe you can keep your heart open to the hope that comes with it, to the idea and the belief that there is something for you in this world. That you will find something that fulfills you. That’s what matters right now. Details can wait.”

“And that’s…” Hawkeye starts, tentative and unsure, “that’s okay? Wanting something without...knowing how I'll get it."

“It's more than okay; it's so normal it’s boring.”

“Oh, well, good, you know me, that’s all I want out of life, to bore my shrink.” He blinks, starts to stammer a retraction, and just about gets the breath knocked out of him when Sidney pulls him back down into the pillows, laughing bright and loud and pressing kisses all over his face.

Sidney shifts after a few minutes of silence, grimacing a little and apologizing as he shifts Hawkeye away from where he’s been lying with his head pillowed against Sidney’s chest. Yawning, Hawkeye watches as Sid presses himself up to sit against the headboard, rolling his shoulders and cracking his neck from side to side. His eyes have gone distant, lips slightly parted, and Hawkeye recognizes the look, the prelude to Sidney pulling it all together, whatever they’ve been talking about, and offering him a new perspective. And he doesn’t disappoint. A long moment later Sidney pulls his gaze back in to settle on Hawkeye, keen but calm.

“Would you like to hear my opinion, even though you’re probably not going to like it very much? I think you’re a lot less messed up than you think you are, Hawk.”

Hawkeye laughs, surprised, and reaches up to tug on an errant curl over Sidney’s ear. “How dare you slander me, sir!”

“Don’t worry, I won’t spread it around,” Sidney says, voice dry and eyes beaming. “From what you’ve said and from what I’ve seen, I think the booze is keeping you in a cycle of not being able to fully process and deal with what you’re feeling. Over there, a little distance from your feelings was a blessing, I imagine that at times it was the only thing that let you get through the day. Here, now, it’s like a blindfold that keeps you from being able to get through the day. Your needs have changed, it makes sense that your coping mechanisms will need to change, too.”

“Hey,” Hawkeye says, lifting his chin to squint suspiciously up at Sidney. “I thought you said you couldn’t analyze me?”

“Well, not for money.”

“Oh ho,” he pushes himself up on his elbow, not even trying to fight the smirk that’s taking over his face. “But you would be amenable to other forms of payment?”

“I’m open to hearing about any ideas you might have about how to settle your debts, sure.”

It boggles his mind, how Sidney can be so calm, so sure, so…mild, and yet leave no doubt in his mind that he is every bit as on fire for Hawkeye as Hawkeye is for him. Sidney is still sitting propped against the headboard and Hawkeye moves to settle on his stomach between Sidney’s legs, not breaking eye contact. “I was thinking I might start here,” he drops a kiss to the little swell of Sidney’s belly, “just for an appetizer,” he adds, turning his face so that his cheek grazes along the outline of Sidney’s cock under the sheet. “And then for the main course, I was thinking…me, on my back…you, inside of me.” In spite of what Sidney said yesterday it still makes his breath catch, asking for this, and he doesn’t dare blink, barely trusting what his own eyes are seeing as a deep flush begins to spread across Sidney’s chest and throat.

“I think,” Sidney’s voice hitches and he licks his lips, blowing out a short breath before he gathers himself to say, “I think that sounds absolutely marvelous.”

“I was hoping you’d say that,” Hawkeye murmurs, closing his eyes at the way his own voice comes out far too raw for comfort, nuzzling his face against the sheet over Sidney’s groin and thrilling to way he feels him swell beneath his touch.

Sidney makes a wordless sound above him and then he’s cupping Hawkeye’s chin to lift his face and pushing the sheet out of the way, hand sliding around to the back of Hawkeye’s neck and Hawk knows an invitation when he sees one. His entire body shudders in anticipation and he licks a long stripe up Sidney’s cock before sinking down on him, swallowing him to the root and moaning around him as Sidney cries out, back arching, thrusting helplessly up into Hawkeye’s mouth.

A handful of minutes later an urgent hand on his shoulder brings Hawkeye out of his single-minded pursuit and he pulls off to see Sidney gaping down at him, eyes glittering dark and his flushed face sheened with sweat. “That’s some appetizer,” he gets out, voice a wreck, petting aimlessly at Hawkeye’s face and neck.

Hawkeye bites his lip, then ducks quickly down to press a kiss to the head of his cock, tongue flicking along the slit just to hear that sound one more time. “Ready for the main course?”

“Dying for it,” Sidney says, sounding like he means it.

Hawkeye grins, pushes himself up on his hands, all thoughts of finesse flown out the window at the way Sidney hauls him in and ravishes his mouth.

“I need a minute,” he manages at last, pulling away only to press back in, dragging his lips over Sidney’s jaw and behind his ear, nipping at the join of neck and shoulder and inhaling there, savoring the scent of him while Sid’s hands flex rhythmically in their hold at his waist. “Okay, I’m going now. Here I go.”

“I’m watching you walk out the door,” Sidney murmurs, letting out a breath like a giggle when Hawkeye rubs his nose over his ear and kisses his throat.

“Okay, okay, I’m – god, you taste good.” He presses one last kiss to Sidney’s lips and all but launches himself out of the bed to keep from getting drawn back in. “I’ll just be a few minutes.”

“I’ll be here,” Sidney drawls, and Hawkeye has to turn and look back to see if Sidney’s expression matches the unflappable tone of his voice. And oh, heavens no, he is well and truly flapped. Hawkeye grins at him, eyes raking over his body from gleaming eyes to heaving chest to trembling hand wrapped around his flushed and leaking cock.

“Oh, Sid. You make it really hard to walk away.” But he does – backwards – managing not to trip over anything as he keeps his eyes on Sidney until he’s in the doorway, then he lifts a hand and crooks two fingers suggestively, asking, “Should I go ahead and uh…”

Sidney’s narrow-eyed glare almost stops Hawkeye in his tracks before he sees the way his lips are twitching just before a big, naughty smile blooms over his face. “Don’t you dare. I reserve all rights to that particular pleasure myself, I think I’ve earned it. Hey, I already know you’re good at that,” he adds, eyes dropping to where Hawkeye’s mouth is hanging open. “Go on and get back here as quick as you can.”

Pleasure was too small a word for it, Hawkeye thinks a few minutes later, one of his last coherent thoughts for the time being. He’s done this enough times to know the drill but good god Sidney is upending everything he thought he knew about the joys of this kind of sex. With two fingers working deep inside his body Sidney is looming over him with one of Hawkeye’s legs bent and pressed in nearly to his chest. The angle, those nimble fingers and the tight bundle of nerves that Sidney needed no map to find all combine to light Hawkeye up and set his teeth chattering madly, exposure and desire like two sides of a coin that Sidney is tossing and catching with a magician’s command of the fall. And then Sidney’s asking him if he’s ready, and then the first thrust and roll is bringing them closer, closer, impossibly closer, and Hawkeye is filled to bursting with the kind of sublime pleasure that rides the knife edge of pain for the way it is more and more and more than he ever thought possible and still he is afraid that he’ll never get enough of it, never get his fill until oh, at last, his treacherous brain is overwhelmed, overrun and overruled and there is no such thing as fear, no past no future and no worry, only two hearts, two bodies, and this one moment that transcends the rest.

*x*x*

Through heavy eyelids he watches Sidney getting dressed, getting ready for the day. Watches the dark shadowed mark Hawkeye left on his throat vanish behind collar and tie, watches the way he sits to pull on his socks and gets lost there, sitting motionless, eyes stuck on Hawkeye.

“Want me to call you in sick?” Hawkeye mumbles, and then he’s watching Sidney startle, eyes flicking up to meet his, caught, a smile tugging at his lips. “Tell your patients your doctor ordered you confined to his bed.”

Sidney stands and crosses to him, runs his hand through Hawkeye’s hair before he bends to rest his forehead against his temple, the gesture as sweet and as intimate as a kiss. “I have to go,” he whispers, but doesn’t move for a long, lingering moment.

“You’re a better shrink than I am, Gunga Din,” Hawkeye murmurs, squeezing his hand as Sidney straightens up.

“I’ll see you at lunchtime.”

Hawkeye closes his eyes, listening to Sidney leave the room and then the flat. He’s alone. He knows it, he feels it, and yet…and yet. He’s okay.

He stretches beneath the covers, feeling the sweet pull and ache in muscles large and small, and turns over to curl up around a pillow, feeling lax and heavy and content. Sleep finds him before fear does, and he rests without dreaming.

Chapter Text

*x*x*

“Well, well,” Irene drawls, looking up at him. “I was wondering if Freedman was going to let you out for fresh air one of these days.”

Never entirely sure what to do with his face when someone genuinely surprises him, Hawkeye laughs and drops down to sit beside her at the top of the steps leading down into the back yard. Below, Teddy is weaving through the overgrown garden, brandishing a stick and narrating a tale of adventure to himself. When Hawkeye turns back to Irene, she’s still watching him with an expression of sly amusement on her striking face.

“You look a little better than when you got here,” she says.

“Oh, yeah?” Hawk lifts his eyebrows. “How’d I look when I got here?”

“Skinny, pale, lovesick.” She flashes a grin, then calls down into the yard, “Teddy if I have to tell you again not to eat grass we’re going inside!”

“You know,” Hawkeye says, watching the little boy reluctantly drop his snack back to the ground, “as a physician, I can tell you that a certain amount of roughage is good for a person’s diet.”

“I’m not taking diet advice for my child from someone who looks like he’s barely kept himself fed since he got home from the war.” He is slow to look up, to look over at her, but when he does her expression is keen, a match for her tone, and she’s not at all shy about the way that she’s openly searching his face before she asks, “Are you staying?”

“Am I what?”

“Are you staying. Are you going to stay with Freedman. Or did you come to get cured and run?”

“I’m sorry, is this – are you, you sound like you’re warning me off from breaking his heart.”

“Well?”

Hawkeye gapes at her for a minute, then draws himself up, pulling Sidney’s robe tighter around himself. “I’ll have you know,” he says, in his best faux-haughty tone, “that the only thing I came here for was to see a friend.”

“Why are you grinning?” Her nose wrinkles up as she watches him, keen look melting into an expression of bemusement.

“Am I?” Hawk asks, knowing that he is, struggling for the words. “Well, I suppose it’s just that…here I am, in Sidney’s bathrobe, receiving threats from his, his…”

“His wife-in-law, is the term Miriam prefers. But if I know Freedman at all, he would say the fact that you went right to hearing my question as a threat is very interesting.”

Hawkeye bursts out laughing, face tipped up to the sky. He is absolutely delighted and has almost no idea why – until he does. Of course he does. And while it’s a struggle to put into words, he tries, because he’s delighted, and figures that if anyone would understand, it’s the woman sitting beside him. Because, as he tells her, working it out as he goes, the plain truth is that he’s never been threatened by the friend or relation of a lover before. And now the fact that he’s seeing someone who has friends who care about him that much – and who also know about him – well, it’s amazing, isn’t it? It's amazing to Hawkeye.

“I’ve never even had that with a woman,” he says, looking away from Irene’s smiling eyes when the emotion there gets to be too much for him. “My affairs of the heart have tended to favor the former over the latter, and my only relationship of note was in med school, a million years ago, and she had no one. No one to warn me off her, I mean. No one to object to us living together in sin. The year was nineteen-forty-six and we lived together for over a year and not once did I get threatened. Now here I am on, what is this, day three of my whirlwind affair with Doctor Freedman and here I sit, thoroughly warned against breaking his beautiful heart. I’m over the moon!”

Whatever ice remained between them is not just broken but thawed and melted and a beautiful spring day is bursting into bloom. To belabor the metaphor, the sudden thaw seems to burst the dam, and Irene turns out to be almost as garrulous as Hawkeye himself. So while Teddy adventures in the yard they sit on the steps, gabbing like a couple of schoolgirls, thoroughly charmed with one another.

“Sidney hasn’t told me much about how you met,” Hawkeye says when they’ve laughed themselves out and a moment of silence begins to stretch, “but from what he has said it sounds like there’s a story there. I’d assumed you met through Miriam, but it was the other way around, wasn’t it?”

“It was, yeah,” Irene says, tucking her hair back behind her ear and leaning her elbow on her knee, her chin in her hand. “He saved my life, if that’s not too dramatic a declaration for so early in the day.”

Hawkeye looks at his watch-less wrist and declares, “A hair past a freckle is the perfect time for juicy confessions. Go on?”

She gives him a smile and says quite matter-of-factly, “I’d run away from my husband and was making my living on the street. I got in over my head one night, couldn’t go to a hospital, not without getting in trouble, so I called a school friend of mine who was in training to become a nurse – Freedman tells me that you know her, Shari, that she was in Korea with you? Yeah. I called her up and she took care of me. Introduced me to Freedman not long after and he hired me on as his receptionist. He couldn’t really afford one yet, he was only just starting his practice, but I suppose he’d copped to the fact that I wasn’t one to accept charity. Part of my wages came in the form of room and board, he gave me the attic room.” She points up and over her shoulder to the tiny gabled room at the top of the house. “His grandmother was still alive then, and she cooked my dinners for me. So there I was. Lawfully employed for the first time in my life, a roof over my head, a hot meal every night, and while I didn’t realize it at first, a therapist in my corner working overtime to help me find my way.”

“Wow,” is all Hawkeye can think to say when the silence starts to stretch. Irene is looking down into the yard, watching Teddy, and Hawkeye is gazing back into the past, trying to imagine the scene. “I have the feeling that anyone who’s lucky enough to cross paths with Sidney always comes away the better for it.”

“That’s for sure.” She glances at him, gives a crooked smile. “I know Miriam and I certainly are. I’m so grateful she came along when she did and not sooner, it was a long road for me to fix myself, even with his help. I’d left my husband and carried on with Shari and a couple of other girls for years and you’d have had to hold a gun to my head before I’d admit to being a sapphist.”

Irene rolls her eyes and shakes her head, though the expression is almost fond; as though she’s recalling the foibles of a beloved younger sister. That line of thought sends Hawkeye instantly back in time, to the nights and days after Sidney helped him uncover what was lurking behind his psychosomatic sneezing fit. The sneezing had stopped almost immediately after he recovered the memory of that day on the pond with Billy, but that only seemed to make room for the nightmares. Night after night he’d fall asleep only to land in the murky depths of childhood memories that all seemed to turn sideways before his eyes. Sidney had stayed at the 4077 for over a week, and among the various tools he’d suggested for Hawkeye’s use was the notion of speaking to himself as though he was still the young child he kept reverting to in his dreams. Hawkeye vividly remembers waking one night with his heart racing, unsure if the scenes behind his eyes were memory or nightmare, and laying both hands on his chest over his pounding heart and whispering aloud in the dark, ‘You’re okay little brother, you’re okay, I’ve got you.’ He’d cried himself to sleep after that but the tears had sprung from a very different source than the grief and fear that had woken him.

Inside the house the telephone rings and Irene cocks her head, listening as two long peals are followed by two short and then braces her hands on her knees. “That’s ours,” she says as she stands, and looks as though she’s about to call for Teddy, but he’s still deep in his own imaginary world and so she puts a hand on Hawkeye’s shoulder and asks, “Keep an eye on him, will you? When he’s playing like this he might not even notice I’ve left but if he asks you where Tante has gone just bring him inside.”

She’s up the stairs before Hawkeye can gather himself, so he just stays where he is and keeps his eyes fixed on the little boy who’s been left in his care. He’s still adventuring through the weeds in the back of the garden, a knight errant on a daring quest if Hawkeye is any judge of these things, and a sudden grin bursts across his face as Teddy leaps forward with a brave battle cry, waving his sword-stick with unexpected ferocity as he cries challenges at the dragon he’s fighting.

Hawkeye’s own childhood games had been more nautical in nature, which he supposes makes sense. When he looks back on those memories now, he and his friends who’d all troop around together, he mostly sees them as the band of pirates they pretended to be. He has a hard time conjuring real memories from back then but the games they played are unbelievably vivid; Toby always has a beard and a peg leg in the land of his memory. The little coracle they’d found scuttled in the bay near Dickie’s house had swelled in size until it was a three-mast pirate ship as they hauled it up high on the beach, propping it up with boulders and naming it the Flying Downeaster, the terror of the high seas. Whenever more than a couple of pirates had tried to climb in at once it would sway and rock and sometimes fall right over, which of course had been the height of excitement, tumbling them out into the sand which was invariably a choppy black sea, all of them windmilling their arms and spluttering, treading water while fighting off sharks and krakens and evil merfolk. Hawkeye laughs out loud, coming back to the present with the memory of his pirate name ringing in his ears. Benji the Outrageous. His mother had given it to him when he was eight. She hadn’t told him what ‘outrageous’ meant, but he’d loved it on the spot for how ferocious it sounded. Benji the Outrageous. It still fits.

But who would that outrageous Benji have been without Dickie Dreadful and Toby Blackheart and Calypso Annie at his side? Watching Teddy now he has to stomp down on an impulse to feel sorry for the kid, playing all by himself, remembering something Sidney had read out from a letter once when they were over there. Miriam had written to Sidney about how imaginative the boy had become, and also how content he seemed with his own company, preferring to play games by himself most days than with the other children in the neighborhood. Hawkeye simply cannot imagine what that’s like. He’s never thought about it in these terms before but from where he sits now it seems pretty clear that who he was – is – is almost entirely dependent on who the people around him are. Not that he’s nobody, not that he doesn’t have a sense of his own self, but the truth is he’s never been alone in his life, never wanted to be, always made room around himself to people his little world with those he loves the best.

It is probably the height of solipsism but there really have been times when he felt he was the architect of everything around him, that he was the author at the center of the story. The metaphor makes him think of Tommy, of the year in junior high when he and Tommy became inseparable; too old for the make-believe games that had seen him through childhood and the loss of his mom, Tommy’s passion for books and stories had swept Hawkeye along and they’d ignited each other’s imaginations, kept the fires of those make-believe worlds burning by turning them into words, scribbling in the margins of their schoolbooks and passing stories back and forth to one another.

He lets himself think about Tommy, really think about him, for the first time in a long time. His big, sweet smile, the way he’d stand up for Hawkeye when the football jocks called him a sissy, the way Hawkeye had thought his heart would burst with pride the first time one of Tommy’s stories got published in the paper. He’s still got that bloodstained manuscript bundled up safe in a box beneath his bed back home. Might be it’s coming time to take it out again, see about finishing it.

Before he’s gone too far down the road of that idea, Teddy comes trotting across the yard, up the steps, and plops his little body down right beside Hawkeye, as though he hasn’t a fear in the world.

“Irene, I mean your – your tante…” Hawk stumbles over the word, he’s pretty sure it’s Yiddish for auntie but it feels strange in his mouth, “she got a telephone call and went inside.”

“Okay,” Teddy says, and then, “Do you like ice cream?”

Hawkeye does, in fact, like ice cream, and this turns out to be a pretty big point in a person’s favor when it comes to bonding with a five-year-old. After discussing the relative merits of strawberry and chocolate, and lamenting that there is no such thing as grass-flavored ice cream but maybe mint is close enough, Hawkeye asks him what kinds of adventures he’s had this morning, how many dragons he’d fought, and discovers that when Teddy grins his eyes crinkle up just like Sidney’s do, dimples appearing in his pudgy little cheeks as he narrates a tale that is less than half-intelligible to Hawkeye but when he stops trying to puzzle out the individual words and just relaxes back into the idea that his presence and attention is enough for the little boy, his babbling voice paints a picture that couldn’t be any clearer if a motion picture were playing out in front of his eyes. Theodore Doyle Freedman, Hawkeye discovers, has been around the world and back in the last thirty minutes, without ever leaving the safety of his own back yard.

Later, Hawkeye thinks, he’s going to tell Sidney that it took almost an hour for him to remember that he should have been nervous around Teddy. But hand in hand with that thought comes the recognition that the boy at his side is a fully formed little person under his own power; only five years old and speaking a language he wishes he had subtitles for, sure, but even when he reaches for it Hawkeye finds none of the anxiety that has plagued him in the presence of babies and infants since Korea.

And speaking of hand in hand, Teddy takes his a minute later to lead him back inside and up the stairs where they find Irene in the kitchen, holding the phone against her shoulder and gossiping with a friend while she spreads peanut butter and jelly onto slices of bread. And that’s where Sidney finds them twenty minutes later, sitting on the kitchen floor, telling each other stories and eating their way through a stack of sandwiches.

Hawkeye tears a sandwich in two and offers half to Sidney. Sidney puts his hand on Hawkeye’s shoulder as he leans down to kiss the top of his head, teasing him that he’s a good friend for Teddy since they act about the same age, being teased in turn by Irene who asks if he’s too much of an old man to join them on the floor, and they spend the rest of Sidney’s lunch hour talking and laughing as though this were any other day, Hawkeye just another budding limb on their family tree.

*x*x*

The world beyond their window is dark, dark and quiet. Brooklyn at night has the feel of a softly-held breath, of a small town nestled safe and serene between rolling hills, enfolding and holding. Peaceful beyond anything he’d expected to find in New York City.

“I celebrate myself,” Sidney murmurs, lips against skin.

“Oh yeah?” Hawk asks a moment later, when it seems like Sidney has lost his train of thought somewhere around Hawkeye’s navel. “Any special reason?”

Sidney lifts his head, gives Hawk a smile that glimmers in the low light before going back to what he was doing, brushing words into Hawkeye’s flesh. “I celebrate myself, and sing myself, and what I assume you shall assume for every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.”

“Poetry, right?” Hawk asks as his stomach goes concave and he has to focus on something, anything, to keep from rutting up against Sidney, who’s taking his own sweet time to get where he’s going.

Sidney chuckles and Hawkeye feels it in the vibration of his mouth against the jut of his hip. “Poetry, yes. Walt Whitman. The start of one of his most magnificent works.”

“Oh yeah,” Hawk gets out. “I think I know that one.”

“I thought you might. He was…incredibly insightful…as well as…very prolific.” Hawkeye can hardly hear Sidney over the pounding of his own heart, his chest rising higher with each brush of Sidney’s lips along the length of him and he’s shuddering by the time Sidney finally takes him into his mouth and all thoughts of poetry, insightful or otherwise, scatter like a flock of startled birds.

Being with Sidney is like nothing Hawkeye has ever experienced, like nothing he’d even allowed himself to imagine he could have. Three days and the three nights that go along with them and it feels like Sidney knows his body as intimately as anyone ever has.

And he takes his time. It’s just as he promised Hawkeye, three days ago when the world started turning again. They have time. They have time. And Sidney makes the most of every moment of it.

He returns to the spots that he’s learned drive Hawkeye wild, sucking a bruise low on his throat while teasing a finger lightly over his nipple, and the contrast of sensation, of sharp and smooth, sends blinding little shocks zinging through Hawkeye’s body, and when Hawkeye tries to arch up off the bed Sidney slides his hands down along Hawkeye’s arms, twining their fingers and lifting Hawkeye’s hands above his head, pinning him to the bed and god, god, Hawkeye had no idea how much he needed this, how much relief was to be found in the act of surrender, in surrendering to someone so much stronger than he is, in the release that comes of bone-deep trust, the primal knowledge that he is safe and he is loved and he will not be left alone.

“What if we stayed here forever,” Hawkeye murmurs, his voice arriving to his own ears like a pleasant surprise, dreamlike and dazed.

“I think I could live with that.” Sidney is buried deep inside of him and Hawkeye feels his voice as though it is coming from his own chest, his own throat humming with Sidney’s low moan, his own hips picking up tempo as Sidney rolls over him like a wave, pulling him back under to drown in an ocean of sensation, pulling his life’s breath straight from Sidney’s lungs and then giving it right back, inexorable, every move he makes requited in every way, in every way he feels as though he’s found something he’s been chasing all his life except no, no, this time it found him. When he stopped running, it found him.

I can rest here, he thinks, his first thought as slowly he surfaces from the sticky-sweet peace of pure surrender, Sidney’s body a pleasant weight over and around him, grounding him, setting him free.

Chapter Text

*x*x*

Later, sprawled across the bed under a light blanket, Hawkeye watches Sidney through heavy eyes that want to close just a little less than they want this day to be over. Sidney is sitting up against the headboard, eyes on the darkened window, and Hawkeye wonders if he’s communing with his city the way Hawkeye himself used to do, wherever he was, whenever he woke in the night. He wonders when he stopped doing that; when listening to the world outside stopped feeling safe. And he wonders if simply basking in Sidney’s presence for a while will reawaken his own love for the world.

“That poem,” he asks, before he knows he’s about to speak at all, “‘Every atom that belongs to me belongs to you’, is that the one with the line, ‘I exist as I am, that is enough’?”

“Mm. Yes.” Sidney shifts to look down at him, reaching to brush Hawkeye’s hair out of his eyes before folding his hands in his lap. “The poem is quite long, fifty-odd verses, I don’t know them all, but I know that one.”

“It’s from ‘Song of Myself,’ right?” Hawkeye asks, and at Sidney’s nod adds in a murmur, “I love that title.”

“I do too. You know he lived about a mile or so that way,” Sidney waves a hand in a vaguely northward direction. “Near the Navy Yard.”

“No kidding?”

“No kidding. When I was growing up, I knew many people who had known him.”

“In more ways than one?” Hawkeye can’t help interjecting with a sly twang, and sees Sidney’s chest jump with his quiet laugh.

“Yes, indeed.” Sidney smiles at him, then lets his eyes drift back to the window. A moment later he lets out a breath on a quiet sigh, and Hawkeye could be wrong but it sounds a little melancholy, sending him back to the other night in the ballroom when he’d listened as Sidney navigated his relationship with his past.

“Feeling old?” he chances a guess, shifting slightly to look up into Sidney’s face.

“A bit. Not in any of the ways that really matter,” Sidney says, his small smile growing into the flash of a cheeky grin as he reaches for Hawkeye, his clever fingers dipping beneath the blanket, exploring, teasing.

“You want to hear something I don’t think I’ve ever said before?” Hawkeye nudges him, rubbing his cheek against Sidney’s arm until Sid meets his eyes. “I think I’m too tired to go again.”

Sidney dips his head to kiss him lightly on the lips, then begins to slide down under the covers with him, rearranging the two of them until they’re face to face, sharing a pillow, speaking as he settles. “You want to hear something I’ve only said to one or two other people in my life?” He reaches to trace the line of Hawkeye’s jaw, thumb trailing lightly down his throat, soft caresses traveling over Hawkeye’s spent and sated body until his hand is settled on Hawkeye’s waist beneath the covers. “I would be happy just to look at you and touch you even if it never led to anything more.”

Hawk moves in to kiss him, murmuring, “Hm, you are old,” as their lips brush and adding, “I deserved that,” when Sidney nips sharply at his lower lip. Reaching to run his fingers through Sidney’s mussed curls, Hawkeye muses, “I was feeling young, earlier.”

“Oh, yes?”

“Mm-hm. When I was talking to Irene, and then when she left me alone to watch Teddy. She said…it doesn’t matter what she said, she made me think about that time we spent working together after – because of what happened that day on the pond with my cousin.”

Sidney hums, looking thoughtful. “You had recurring dreams of being a child, being helpless.”

“Yeah. It was like my whole world or at least my sense of having any place in it got shaken up when I found out Billy was not the savior I thought he was. I didn’t tell you this at the time because I didn’t know what to make of it and then the dreams stopped, but I’ll tell you now; I woke up from a nightmare one night back then and I remembered what you said, about talking to myself like I was still a child, being gentle. You remember?”

“I remember.”

“I remembered what you said and then I did that and it calmed me down. I guess it broke me out of the spiral of fear or panic or whatever just hearing a voice, any voice saying ‘it’s okay’ and telling me I was safe. The little-boy-me stopped being afraid and that left supposedly-adult-me free to think about that fact that everyone who had ever been there for me, to tell the actual little-boy-Hawkeye that everything would be okay, almost all of them were gone. I never had a big brother, and now I didn’t even have Billy. My mom’s been gone so much longer than I ever had her. Tommy, my friend Tommy who died in Korea, we were the same age but he always looked out for me, and he’s gone too. Trapper was a rock for me for a while – no, not a rock, a safe haven. A shelter. I didn’t know until he was gone how much he’d been looking after me. But see that’s just it, I have these people, these ideas about who I am that are all mixed up with who these people are, and then they leave me. Even if it’s not their own idea, they still leave.”

“Your father hasn’t left.”

“No, no he hasn’t. But he’s also…” Hawkeye brings his gaze back to the present, focusing sharply on Sidney, suddenly urgent in his need to make him understand. “I love my dad, you know that, you know I’d do anything for him. But I can never forget how he… After Mom, he checked out for a couple years. I don’t blame him, I could never blame him, but the fact remains that when I needed him more than I’ve ever needed him in my life, he wasn’t all there for me. And so I latched on to Billy and Tommy and my favorite teacher who left the next summer when she got married, and anyone else who would put up with me. And now we’re okay, you know we are, me and my dad, we’re friends, he’s like my best friend in some ways, I love him more than anything, but especially now when he’s, you know, he’s aging, he’s getting old, he’s had a couple of health scares already and I can see our future, I see how the tables will turn and I’ll be his caretaker, I’ll be…”

Hawkeye runs out of steam abruptly, and just gazes helplessly into Sidney’s face, sees the understanding and empathy in those deep, bright eyes.

“You’ll be the parent. You’re still in mourning for your mother, the archetypal caretaker, as well as for the ways in which your father did not adequately meet your needs in her absence, and now you’re facing the very real possibility that you will be in the same position. Could you be afraid that you, also, will be inadequate? Or that you will be adequate, and that it may breed resentment?”

Hawkeye thinks that over for as long as he can stand to and then asks on a breath of a laugh, “Could it be both?”

“Always,” Sidney responds with a smile. “It can always be both, or neither, or more.”

“It’s awfully complicated, being human, isn’t it? I mean I always thought peoples’ insides were complicated but I’m starting to think the heart’s got nothing on the mind.”

“It’s the ‘puzzle of puzzles,’ isn’t it.”

“More poetry?” Hawkeye guesses, lifting his eyebrows, and only realizes how tense he’d grown once Sidney’s answering smile begins to soften the taut bands of his muscles, allowing his body to relax back down into the bed.

“’The puzzle of puzzles; that we call being.’ It’s…” Sidney trails off, lips parted, eyes going distant for a moment before he shakes his head. “If you really want to talk about feeling old, I’ll tell you about how my memory is not what it used to be.” He pushes himself up to sitting and then leans over, kissing him softly. “Don’t go anywhere.”

It takes Sidney a minute to go anywhere himself, the way Hawkeye responds to the kiss, sinking his fingers into Sidney’s hair and holding him there, drawing out the press and slide of their mouths in an intricate and wonderful dance.

He finally makes it to his feet and pads naked from the room, returning in a minute with a worn and well-thumbed little volume, switching on the bedside lamp. Feeling some of his sleepiness ebb away before his curiosity, Hawkeye sits up to settle shoulder to shoulder with him as Sidney pages through Leaves of Grass, catching sight of the many marks and annotations populating the margins in Sidney’s own handwriting, until Sidney breathes a quiet ‘a-ha’ when he finds the passage he’s looking for. But then he marks the place with a finger and Hawkeye looks up to meet his penetrating gaze.

“It occurs to me that there are two notable entries missing from that list you’ve been keeping of people who look out for you. I wonder if you were aware of leaving them off, or if we were diverted from the topic before you came to them.”

Hawkeye presses his lips together but can’t pretend to misunderstand. “You mean BJ and you, don’t you?”

“Mm-hm.”

Hawk feels his nose wrinkle up as he scratches at the back of his head. “I feel like we’ve had this conversation about BJ already, what were you just saying about your memory starting to go?” Hawkeye heaves a sigh when Sidney doesn’t rise to the bait, and spreads his arms in a wide shrug, lifting his shoulders to his ears. “What do you want me to say? He left too.”

“But he came back.”

“That wasn’t his own idea.”

“I don’t only mean that he was sent back to the 4077, I’m talking about what you told me earlier, that you feel as though he has been trying to make that up to you with every point of contact he’s made since then.”

“Yeah, okay, I suppose.” Hawkeye grins suddenly, and revels in the way Sidney’s eyebrows lift, his face alight with curiosity; he always feels like he’s scored a point when he surprises Sidney. Doing his best to strike an oracular pose without leaving his nest of blankets, Hawkeye declaims in his very worst posh accent, the one that makes him think of Trapper: “Yes, BJ Hunnicutt will always be fond of me. I represent all the sins he never had the courage to commit.”

Sidney laughs with his head tipped back, then drops his chin to his chest and looks at Hawkeye with impossible affection beaming from his eyes. “And who said that?”

“Oscar Wilde, who else?”

“Of course.”

“I think the irony would be lost on BJ.”

“I’m not so sure about that. I believe he’s more perceptive than he lets on.”

“Yeah,” Hawkeye sighs, deflating somewhat. “I can’t argue with you there.” He looks at Sidney, two factions warring in his brain; to tell him about his conversation with BJ, or not. To tell him that BJ had seemed surprised to hear that Sidney’s son was real and not an invention to deflect suspicion in that man’s army – and everything implied therein about what BJ has discerned about Sidney’s private life – or let it lie. His eyes drop to the book in Sidney’s hands, and his mouth makes up his mind for him. “Hey! I thought this was supposed to be the story hour and here you are distracting me with BJ Hunnicutt. Go on,” he nudges him with an elbow, jostling the book. “Read me some poetry, and then I’ll write some for you on the subject of how you’re the very best caretaker I ever had.”

Sidney gives him a keen look, but Hawkeye can see that he’s giving in even before the smile that’s twitching at his lips makes a full appearance. “All right,” he says, playing at making a great concession. “But I’m not going to forget that you said that.”

“I hope you don’t! We don’t need two of us in this marriage with holey memories. Now, enough of that, what does Mr. Whitman have to say for himself and for this puzzle of life that seems to be missing half of its pieces half of the time?”

Sidney looks at him for a beat and then gives a slight shake of his head, bemused. “You told me once that you were the terror of your college professors, I’m feeling more sympathy for them by the minute. You have a way of making everyone around you forget that they came into the room with something of their own to say.”

“Gee, that makes me sound awfully self-centered,” Hawkeye simpers, fighting down the pang of actual alarm ringing in his chest.

“Not self-centered, no,” Sidney says, answering with more solemnity than Hawkeye expected. “But there is an undeniable gravity about you, Hawkeye. You pull people into your orbit.”

“Better orbits than obits,” Hawkeye quips, and Sidney gives a little sigh that does, indeed, make Hawkeye think of his old college professors, and he hurries to ask, “What made you think of him just now anyway, we were talking about puzzles?”

“No, we were talking about the complicated nature of being. You were exploring your relationship with your father, we were talking about how roles change over time, and much like Shakespeare’s assertion that ‘all the world’s a stage’ and that ‘one man in his time plays many parts,’ Whitman also has something to say about that, also likening it to a performance, in this case to a chorus or an opera.”

The obvious remark that this seems like something meant to appeal more to a Winchester than to a Pierce leaps to his tongue, but he keeps it behind his teeth, and nods at Sidney to go on. Sidney opens the book, finding his place again, musing as he does. “We tend to think of Whitman first as a poet of the natural world, but in fact his appreciation of nature was closely matched by his passion for music and it always seemed to me as if his verses were, at their heart, an invitation or even a plea to listen, to pay attention.”

Sidney’s smile slips sideways, and he looks a little rueful as he says, in a tone that sounds almost like a confession, “When I was young, I interpreted that invitation as something more akin to marching orders. In my early twenties I was so enamored of poetry, of his poetry in particular, that if I’d had any talent for it whatsoever I would have abandoned the study of psychiatry and embraced the life of an itinerant poet. I’ve never spoken to anyone about this, it would have been considered absurd by my professors and colleagues, but I approached my studies and my practice letting Whitman guide my philosophy as much as Freud.”

“That must be why I like you more than any other psychiatrist I’ve ever met.”

“Must be,” Sidney returns, eyes twinkling, “I certainly can’t think of any other reason,” and laughs when Hawkeye hooks a finger under the blanket covering his lap, twitching it aside to give Sidney an exaggerated leer up and down. He covers himself again and captures Hawkeye’s hand, holding it still as he leans in, kissing him slowly, pulling back just when it starts to get really interesting. “Now be good and listen.”

Hawkeye’s, “Yes, Professor,” earns him an eyebrow and, unless the low light is deceiving him, a hint of color in Sidney’s cheeks.

“Now I will do nothing but listen,” Sidney begins to read, putting what Hawkeye considers to be unnecessary emphasis on the last three words. “To accrue what I hear into this song, to let sounds contribute toward it. I hear bravuras of birds, bustle of growing wheat, gossip of flames…”

Sidney’s voice rolls over him, the very music that inspired the poet himself, a reciprocal ebb and flow that transcends time itself. Hawkeye hears the clacking of sticks, the sounds of the city, the brazen voices of the young and the ring of alarm-bells, steam-whistles, train-cars, and it all—

“—glides quickly in through my ears, it shakes mad-sweet pangs through my belly and breast. I hear the chorus, it is a grand opera, ah this indeed is music – this suits me. A tenor large and fresh as the creation fills me, the orbic flex of his mouth is pouring and filling me full—”

“Wow,” Hawk interrupts quietly, reaching to tilt the book so that he can read over the lines Sidney just spoke, sure he’d misheard. “He really just went for it, huh?”

“And this is far from the most overt example of homoeroticism in his oeuvre. May I continue?”

“Oh, by all means.” Hawk flashes him a smile and sinks down a little until he can rest his head on Sidney’s shoulder.

“The orchestra whirls me wider than Uranus flies, it wrenches such ardors from me I did not know I possessed them, it sails me, I dab with my bare feet, they are licked by the indolent waves, I am cut by bitter and angry hail, I lose my breath, steeped amid honeyed morphine, my windpipe throttled in fakes of death, at length let up again to feel the puzzle of puzzles, and that we call being.”

“The puzzle of being,” Hawkeye echoes in a murmur, after Sidney falls silent. “Love, pleasure, pain, death, birth… That’s the puzzle of puzzles all right.”

Sidney breathes steadily at his side for a long minute and then closes the book, though he keeps one finger between the pages, holding their place. “There is an Austrian philosopher and psychologist who has been writing about the idea that it is meaning – not biological instinct or the compulsion to seek power or pleasure but meaning, and moreover each individual’s search for meaning, that is at the center of human existence.”

“Huh,” Hawkeye says quietly, parsing this. “Individual meaning. I suppose that’s a nice change from saying there’s some universal meaning that we’re all supposed to bow down to, like religion I mean, where we’re expected to just close our eyes and pretend that there’s a grand and righteous plan even when we’re up against something that seems to go against everything we believe about the world.”

“Something like the atrocities of war, you mean?” Sidney asks, and when Hawkeye hums in assent, Sidney nods very slowly a couple of times. When he speaks next his voice is so measured and calm that it takes Hawkeye a moment to grasp the full implications of what he’s saying: “This man, the Austrian writing about man’s search for meaning, he survived Auschwitz.”

Hawkeye’s heart catches on before his brain does, and he feels it pick up the pace as a shudder rolls through his body. “Oh, god,” he gets out as his throat is trying to close, and when Sidney wraps an arm around him Hawkeye tucks his face against his shoulder and holds tight to him. “How…”

“How what, Hawk?” Sidney prompts when the silence begins to stretch.

“Any of it. All of it. How did we let it happen? How did anyone survive that and…and carry on?”

“Well…” Sidney takes in a long breath and lets it out slowly, dragging his open palm from Hawkeye’s shoulder down to his elbow in a slow caress that feels as though it’s meant to comfort himself as much as Hawkeye. “Many did not.”

There is a hard lump in Hawkeye’s throat that he cannot swallow down, familiar from three years of choking on his own fury and fear, eking by on a diet of black humor and outrage.

“The depth and breadth of the human experience is truly incredible,” Sidney goes on after a moment. “Our fragility and our resilience, our capacity for kindness…and cruelty,” he adds, an edge of steel beneath his calm tone. “Psychology can help us understand, and in some ways even predict how a person will act, but nothing is prescriptive. That’s why I find Doctor Frankl’s ideas about the search for meaning so compelling. If we hold to the tenet that there is meaning in life, that means we must acknowledge that there is meaning in suffering, because suffering is a part of life. That’s not to say causing another person to suffer should ever be justified, or that suffering itself is some kind of moral necessity, but if one must suffer – since we all will suffer…”

Sidney sighs through his nose and takes a moment’s pause, as though gathering the words he needs from the atmosphere around him before he goes on. “Every time we are faced with a struggle, every time we confront adversity, every moment that we live through offers us the gift of choice. Everything can be taken away from us, except the freedom to choose how we respond to the moment in which we find ourselves, and to the obstacles life throws in our path. That’s where meaning is made. That’s where we find the meaning that makes life worth living. Individual meaning for individual lives.”

Sidney keeps stroking Hawkeye’s arm after he falls quiet, but from the quality of his silence Hawkeye can tell the gears are turning between his ears. With anyone else, the compulsion to fill the silence would be stronger than any understanding that the other person might find the silence tolerable, or even necessary. But this is Sidney, and Hawkeye reaches down deep into his own reserves and manages to keep quiet and still until Sidney speaks again, sounding as though he’s turned a corner in his own mind.

“Perhaps that’s why I find poetry so invaluable, for how it has opened my mind to the reality of others’ experiences in ways that facts and figures never could. It is a great gift to experience a world that is different from our own, to find meaning from a life that is very different from our own. And then of course…” Sidney trails off on a thoughtful hum, picking up the thread after another moment’s thought, his voice gone very quiet, distant. “No subject is out of bounds for the poet, same for the therapist. We get the most out of both when we bring our entire self to the experience, understanding that everything is worthy of our attention. That just the act of noticing a thing makes that thing noteworthy.”

“And I suppose that the things we notice say a lot about the person we are. Isn’t that what ink blots are all about?” Hawkeye waits a beat, until Sidney turns to look at him. “Oh wait, I forgot – the answer is always ‘sex’ isn’t it.”

Whether he says it to invite his lover back down to a plane where Hawkeye has a chance of keeping up with him, or to give them both a respite from peering back into the dark places pieced together by this puzzle called being, Hawkeye isn’t rightly sure. Whatever the reason, though, Sidney is pulling himself back from wherever he’d gone and saying, “Yes, of course, but how did you know?” with the shadow of a wink, but then he is simply smiling softly as he re-focuses on Hawkeye. “But before we return to that particular topic, I’d like to wrap this one up by mentioning another parallel that just occurred to me. I was thinking about how so many of us expend so much energy just trying to justify our own existence, and that a good poet, like a good therapist, can help us towards the understanding that we are enough, just as we are; the way we experience the world doesn’t need justification, only a good faith effort at understanding.”

“Hey!” Hawkeye sits up a little and reaches over Sidney to pick up the book from where it’s resting beside his hip, handling it with great care as he turns the pages. He finds verse twenty already dog-eared, the words he’s seeking already underlined. “You’re a lucky guy, Sid,” he says with a grin, gesturing first to his own body and then to the book in his hands, “you’ve got a top-flight surgeon here in your sheets and a world-class poet-therapist right here between these sheets.” Sidney laughs aloud and Hawk sways with his gentle nudge, warmth from the sudden point of contact radiating all the way down to his fingers and toes.

Feeling inordinately pleased with himself, Hawkeye begins to read: “I exist as I am, that is enough. If no other in the world be aware, I sit content. And if each and all be aware, I sit content.” He glances to his side, where Sidney has gone quiet and still once more. “One world is aware and by far the largest to me, and that is myself, and whether I come to my own today or in ten thousand or ten million years, I can cheerfully take it now, or with equal cheerfulness I can wait.”

“I think that to be able to sit content with the knowledge of who we are in this world sounds like the worthiest goal any of us could aspire to,” Sidney says, his head tipped back against the wall, eyes closed.

Hawkeye catches himself just gazing at Sidney, eyes getting stuck on the way the low light plays in a lovely sheen over his skin, leaving shadows in the hollows of his throat and clavicles while illuminating the deep peace to be read in the lines of his face. Hawkeye feels a wave of incredulity crash through him, wondering again how it came to be that he was lucky enough to find him, to be found by him, to have found his way here. That disbelief begins to scatter, however, before the insurgence of a brand-new feeling, one he thinks might be called certainty. He’s here because this is where he’s supposed to be right now. It’s the same feeling he had when he stepped off the train at Grand Central Station three days ago; that his story had aligned with Sidney’s, and there’s nowhere else for him to be.

The words on the page before him blur and then coalesce into a memory and Hawkeye is speaking it aloud before he even thinks it through. “When I first read that passage I remember thinking he sounded awfully big-headed, to be proclaiming that he is a world unto himself, but then I also felt so…so vindicated, I suppose, though only secretly of course, to know that someone else felt that way, felt that way and was bold enough to put it in writing, too, because I’d spent so much of my life feeling as though I was at the center of the world while feeling it was wrong to feel that way.”

“We are all the center of our own worlds,” Sidney says, tilting his head to the side without lifting it from the wall, meeting his eyes. “I think the mistake comes when we believe that we are also the center of the universe. Everything in the world is connected to everything else; every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.” Sidney lifts his hands, linking his fingers together. “The ways in which we are all interconnected transcends our individuality, transcends even time itself, we’re proving that right now, communing with each other as much as with a man who is long dead.”

“Yes,” Hawkeye says, nodding slowly and then with sudden vigor. “Yes, yeah! I remember that – I don’t remember all that much from when I first read Whitman aside from this verse that obviously made an impression on me but I do remember – look, here it is: ‘I laugh at what you call dissolution, and I know the amplitude of time.’ I remember how often he seemed to be talking directly to me – to the reader I mean, but not in a – he wasn’t talking down. He wasn’t speaking from on high. He seemed so…so, god I don’t know, so aware, that’s what it was, exactly, so aware that his life was no more than a dot on the timeline and that he wasn’t the apex of everything, or even of anything, he knew that he would eventually die and the world would keep turning without him and others would follow after him but still he seemed so certain that his death wouldn’t be the end of him, either, that he planned to keep the conversation going for all time. And I felt… It’s hard to describe it without sounding a little crazy but hey, you’re the one who writes letters to Sigmund Freud, you won’t turn me in. I remember like it happened yesterday, the feeling that we were sitting nose to nose and Walt Whitman was talking directly to me.”

“He has spoken directly to me many times,” Sidney tells him, eyes luminous. “In a poem about crossing the river on the Brooklyn ferry he says that all the hundreds of people he sees ‘are more curious to me than you suppose, and you that shall cross from shore to shore years hence are more to me, and more in my meditations, than you might suppose.’ It’s a direct dialogue, Hawk, there’s no question about it, and I just love the way he uses the word ‘curious’ – we are curious to him but we are also curious about him, or why would we be sitting here a hundred years later and talking about him as a way of talking to each other. A hundred years ago this man wrote these words while looking at the river and thinking about you and me, Hawkeye. ‘A hundred years hence, or ever so many hundreds of years hence… It avails not, time nor place, distance avails not.’”

Sidney seems almost out of breath when he finishes, the look in his eyes both swept away but also very, very present. He was right, Hawkeye thinks, we might be talking about Whitman but we are talking to each other. It takes a moment for him to recognizing the uncomfortable feeling in his chest as something like jealousy. Who is ever going to eulogize Crabapple Cove?

“It must be pretty incredible to hear this guy you like so much talking about your hometown, huh?” Hawkeye asks, watching as Sidney shifts on the bed, pulling one knee up beneath the blanket and folding his hands around it while he considers the question, and Hawk feels his petty jealousy stop dead in its tracks and start slinking away after one look at the expression on Sidney’s face. Its absence leaves room for recognition to take root, wonder blossoming warm and welcome as Hawkeye realizes that Sidney has told him more about himself tonight than he had in the entire three years they spent over there. Maybe it’s Whitman, maybe he’s reached some kind of saturation point where he just can’t hold anything back anymore, but something has unlocked the careful doors between Sidney’s heart and his mouth and Hawkeye feels rich beyond the telling of it to be here, taking it in.

“There have been times when I was away from home,” Sidney says, drawing Hawkeye back to the present and then sending him off again as he goes on, “first in Europe in the forties and more recently in Korea, when some of the words he wrote about Brooklyn felt more real to me than my own lived memories of the place.”

“Was that disconcerting?” Hawkeye asks.

“Actually it was very comforting.” Sidney gives a crooked little smile, gazing off into the distance, then turns to speak directly to Hawkeye. “It was a reminder that this place I call home existed before I was here and will exist long after I am gone. It may change and evolve just like a person might, but it won’t just up and disappear. Certain lines that he wrote became mantras, of a sort, word-pictures of my home that were more tangible than my own memories. And just as he did I took sustenance from thinking about ‘the others that are to follow me, the ties between me and them, the certainty of others, the life, love, sight, hearing of others.’”

“Huh,” Hawkeye says quietly, leaning his head back against the wall, trying to sort out his actual thoughts from the nebulous wash of his emotions. “You know something, I was just thinking that in all that time over there, you never really talked about yourself, I never really heard you talk about your home, while I could never seem to shut up about mine. And what you just said, about the certainty that Brooklyn wouldn’t up and disappear on you, I didn’t feel that about Crabapple Cove, it was actually the opposite of how I felt when I’d think about it. I thought of that place like it was a person who might up and move without a forwarding address, I used to have dreams that I’d get home and no one I knew still lived there, and then when I looked around again it turned out I wasn’t even in Crabapple Cove, and I couldn’t find anyone anywhere who’d even heard of it.”

“That doesn’t surprise me,” Sidney says after a beat when Hawkeye runs out of breath. “I’d place the fear of being abandoned very high on the list of things you struggle with, would you agree?”

“If only Whitman had written a few odes to my hometown, maybe I wouldn’t have been so afraid of getting a Dear John letter from Maine.”

He can see that Sidney sees through his diversion, and that he can see that Hawkeye sees it, but with his unerring skill for reading the moment Sidney must decide to let him get away with it. “Who was your home-grown poet, Longfellow, I suppose?”

“Yes, he’s one of ours, can’t avoid him. I’m partial to Edna St. Vincent Millay, myself, though I know she isn’t terribly fashionable anymore.”

“Oh, yes? I didn’t realize she was from Maine.”

“Ah, like a moth to an electric streetlamp, she was another genius we lost to the allure of the big city.” Hawkeye lifts his shoulders, fluttering his eyelashes dramatically, then drops the act as a memory courses through him. “She gave a reading in Boston when I was in school, she was…” he blows out a breath, eyes wide. “Let’s just say I’ve never felt so electrified while I still had all my clothes on. She was sensational.”

“She was. I heard her several times here in the city.”

“You did?” Hawkeye turns to him, incredulity rapidly giving way to delight, and he shakes his head with a smile. “You know, you could almost make a person want to be a city boy.”

“I think you know I’d have no problem with that, Hawk,” Sidney says, his voice as soft and warm as a summer breeze, and meets Hawkeye’s gaze with his own eyes drooping slightly, incredible fondness radiating from his entire being.

“She’s got this one,” Hawkeye murmurs, dragging his eyes up from where they’d gotten stuck on Sidney’s mouth. “This sonnet called ‘Love is Not All.’ It’s line after line about how love won’t save you, won’t feed you or heal you or put a roof over your head, and the last couple of lines are something like, ‘In a difficult hour, I might be driven to sell your love for peace, or trade the memory of this night for food. It well may be. I do not think I would.’ She read it and I just…” He gives an involuntary shiver, rubbing his hands lightly over his own arms. “’I do not think I would.’ It got me. It still gets me.”

“I can see that…” Sidney murmurs, and Hawkeye shivers again, this time at the brush of Sidney’s fingers as he cups his cheek very gently, holding Hawk’s eyes as he says without fanfare, “I do not think I would either, Hawkeye.”

Hawkeye shivers again, and when Sidney moves to draw him into his arms Hawk moves with him like it’s a dance they’ve been perfecting all their lives. Coming up for air a minute later, blinking his eyes open to see that they’ve found their way back down into their nest of blankets, Hawkeye catches the moment that Sidney opens his eyes and looks right back at him. The kick of his own heart is echoed in Sidney’s, Hawkeye can feel his pulse thrumming where his hand rests gently along the side of Sidney’s throat.

A week ago Hawkeye hadn’t known his ups from his downs, let alone where he might find Sidney on the chaotic map of his own tumultuous life story. That Sidney might let Hawkeye take him to bed had been a thought that kept him up nights. That Sidney might let Hawkeye love him had been a thought so absurd that he’d never even bothered to dismiss it.

Sidney lets Hawkeye look at him for a long moment while time itself seems to pulse and shift around them, leaving Hawkeye with the feeling that he genuinely doesn’t know how long he’s been here – here in this bed, here in this man’s heart, here alive on this earth and aching to love and be loved without condition or fear – and then Sidney is reaching for him, stroking the side of his face with his open palm in a tender caress that steals the breath he might have used to form the right kind of words for this moment right out of his lungs.

“Are you trying to tell me that you’re ready to return to the one topic that both poets and psychologists agree is at the center of everything, Doctor?” Hawkeye asks, because he’s never needed to catch his breath in order to be glib.

Sidney just kisses him, and Hawkeye sinks gratefully into the dark behind his eyelids.

His body makes a valiant effort to rise above the limitations of biology, and he feels a little betrayed by the fact that going to bed sober doesn’t seem to have turned him into a superman, but neither does Sidney seem to care, doesn’t seem to be in any rush to be anywhere but here. Here where Hawkeye is on his back beneath him and Sidney’s kissing him as though it were the first time all over again, lips supple but firm against Hawkeye’s, lingering at the corner of his mouth, flicking his tongue along Hawkeye’s lower lip with a satisfied little hum, like Hawkeye himself is the dessert course at a banquet that had been, until now, just a little disappointing.

Hawkeye is usually better with metaphors than that but right now he’s got better things on his mind, like the way Sidney is touching him, warm and gentle and as soft as Hawkeye is in his hand, no sense of urgency, holding him just as sweet and tender as the kisses he’s brushing against his lips, finally opening Hawkeye’s mouth with his own, tongue sliding against Hawkeye’s and setting sparks racing beneath his skin all the way down to the soles of his feet, stars bursting behind his eyes, ringing in his ears, the works.

He hears his name in Sidney’s voice, barely a whisper, and Hawkeye sighs out long against his skin, wrapping one arm around him, reaching to touch his face, surrendering to one long, unhurried moment after another, like waves on the shore, each overlapping in crest and retreat, hypnotic enough to make him believe in perpetual motion. You sea, I resign myself to you also. The line comes to him as though from the ether. Cushion me soft, rock me in billowy drowse, dash me with amorous wet, I can repay you.

This perpetual moment seems to be distilled down from everything Hawkeye has ever wanted, the ocean in the drop of water, unsubstantial and momentous at once, and Hawkeye falls into a waking dream there in Sidney’s arms. The susurration of their breath turns to the swell of the sea, an orchestral uprising, music in his ears and moonlight in his eyes as he is rocked by the ebb and flow of unnumbered waves. Now I will do nothing but listen, he thinks, that is enough. It is enough, as he settles with Sidney into the ocean of their bed, to feel himself held by the motion of the waves, and for once in his life not to fight against the current.

I can rest here, he thinks, and hears Sidney’s response with his ears and his heart; “Rest now, Hawkeye.”