Title: Silence Followed, and We Wept
Rating: K+
Wordcount: 5500
Warnings/Spoilers: Basic MASH spoilers and speculation. Note: MASH's timeline is unsolvable as usual. In this, I take the later-season approach that Potter & BJ arrive sometime in late 1950.
Summary: Hawkeye's second Christmas in Korea. Or, how he spent the night in the Colonel's tent, asked a question, and got more of an answer than he bargained for.
A/N: Merry Christmas! MASH sets up a really interesting quandary for itself in season 4, which is the question of Sherman Potter, MD, a man who has fought in three wars, is a career Army man (a colonel, no less, in charge of other men), and thinks war is terrible. Potter is a question MASH never successfully resolves, because they tend to dance around him, to either flanderize his character, or accentuate the parts that fit in with the plotline of the week. Why does he fight? Why does he stay?
The titles of this story and its chapters are taken from Alfred, Lord Tennyson's In Memoriam. The title of this series is taken from S7E24, "A Night at Rosie's," a show that's meant to be funny but leaves me melancholy.
(This remains unbeta-ed and barely edited. I welcome any and all feedback.)
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Hawkeye's about one minute from diving into his coffee cup, or better still, sending his fingers for a swim in the thick, undrinkable but hot coffee, when BJ plunks down next to him. The Mess Tent's pretty full for a late Thursday evening, but most of the people in here are trying to catch up on meals from the last O.R. shift.
"I thought you were sleeping." Hawkeye said, not looking up, tracing a circle around the mug.
"I thought you were eating. But your fingers are trying to commit suicide, not your stomach." BJ demurred, resting his chin on his hand.
"My stomach has given up hope." Hawkeye griped back
"The matter of the thing," BJ agreed. "And I was sleeping, until our stove was requisitioned for purposes, or purposes unknown."
"Again! My chilblains are going to get chilblains. I'll freeze straight to my cot—"
"—a Hawk-sicle—" BJ interjected, helpfully.
"a Hawksicle, thank you, and you'll have to ship me back home through Siberia with the post-mark: contents frozen, do not heat." Hawkeye's eyes took on a devious glint, and he elbowed BJ. "My Dad'll need a bigger freezer."
"Do not open, son inside."
"Lay me in a snowbank and think of Maine!" Hawkeye crowed, thinking about the possibilities. Then he sobered, looking at his coffee cup, steaming in the cold air of the mess tent. "Do you know, BJ—" he said, and then broke off.
"What, Hawk?"
Hawkeye can feel BJ's blue eyes, bloodshot but earnest, looking at him from the side, but he rests his eyes low, doesn't look to the right, just thinking. There's a moment between admitting what he really thinks about things and the joke he could make to cover his thoughts which is always a temptation. Hawkeye the trickster, Hawkeye the jokester, Hawkeye the man who has been pushed too far, lost too much, found humor only a defense mechanism instead of fun.
Did the war do it, or just accelerate the process?
"INCOMING WOUNDED—ALL PERSONNEL REPORT TO TRIAGE—TWO DAYS TO CHRISTMAS AND THIS IS NOT A SNOWBALL FIGHT, FOLKS."
"The war calls." BJ said, standing up.
"Yeah." Hawkeye breathed, putting his coffee cup down, and hightailing it out of the Mess.
.
.
Night comes on fast in Maine, in the wintertime.
Once, when Hawkeye was ten or eleven, he had taken it into his head to go for an adventure in the woods before dinner. And he had had his adventure climbing over the frozen brook, investigating deer tracks, listening to the sounds of wolves howling in the distance, and then being hungry, decided to go home for dinner. The darkness of sundown found him lost, no longer on adventure in the woods.
No one who grows up in Maine is a stranger to the cold, or to the snow that seeps through your boot seams, to the chill wind that steals your breath from your very lungs. Or the pitch black of the woods, at night under a waning moon, with clouds covering the stars, when the only thing darker is the cold of the night coming on.
He was just a kid but the thing is, and he remembers it vividly, the way the crunch of the snow felt beneath his boots when his feet were numb, the sharp push of the branches on his wet and frozen jacket and hat, and the terrible, growing numbness inside of himself, as he looked in every direction and saw no light, no house near, no one coming to save him, nothing but the growing certainty that he would die alone in the woods of cold.
In the next moment, he had crested the hill and seen the distant lights from the front room pealing out to the snow. He had sobbed a little with relief, and let his terror show on his face when his father had scooped him up off the front porch, wet frozen clothes and all and stripped him in front of the roaring fire, and carried him to his bed, piled high with blankets and warm from his fireplace. He had been warmed all the way through to next winter, and the next. But he had kept that tiny sliver of self-knowledge tucked somewhere behind his heart, that dark grasping hand that had laid cold fingers on his soul and said, death.
.
.
"You took our stove." Hawkeye groused, pulling his surgical top on over his head with a slight shiver. Even with his leanness, you could only really fit one sweater underneath these things. He'd had to leave his other two and jacket on the hook.
"Yes." The Colonel acknowledged, agreeably, scrubbing over at the sink. "And you'll get it back, tonight."
"We have not yet begun to fight, and fight we will, for our stove, our lives, and my name of Franklin," Hawkeye countered, bending over to untie his boots. BJ tapped him on the shoulder.
"Hawkeye, he's agreeing with you." BJ turned to Potter, giving a mild shrug. "The cold's gone to his head."
"I heard that, Californian."
"Settle down, boys." Potter wafted his hands, leaning against the O.R. doorframe, half-resting, half-standing. "Right now, there's no room at the inn. Our last wave of casualties was as many patients as we had beds, and that was only eighteen twelve hours ago. We've evac-ed, we've called around, but the Swamp just became Post-OP 4 for our latest patients. Right now we're trying to evac more of our patients out of here, but it's not looking good."
"Where's the 8063rd?" Hawkeye wanted to know, stepping into his scrub pants.
"They're in worst shape than we are. Radar's on the line, but Bethlehem's looking full up."
"You look tired, Colonel." BJ offered from the scrub sink, looking over his shoulder at the shorter, older man.
"We're all tired, and that's a fact." Potter sighed, took a deep breath. The wrinkles under his eyes looked deeper than normal, his gaze staring on right through the both of them, but his hands were scrubbed, sterile, held aloft in the air, and absolutely steady. "But the biggest problem is this cold. Our own men are coming in with frostbite. I'm having Burns double up the enlisted men per tent, the nurses as well, and you two jokers are bunking with me tonight. If we get enough bodies in each tent, they might be a little warmer."
"If we see our beds tonight." Hawkeye retorted sardonically, tying his strings off.
"What about Burns?" BJ asked.
"He can sleep in the stable." The Colonel paused, leaned against the door. "On second thought, the Lord was born in a stable, and I don't like the implications of that for Burns." Potter shook his head, chuckled, then the smile fixed on his face like the humor had gone out of it for him. "Let's get to work, boys."
"Five dollars says he'll be sleeping in sin with Margaret." Hawkeye whispered to BJ, raising his eyebrows demonstratively. Hawkeye had very expressive eyebrows, once even Fr. Mulcahy had pegged his eyebrows as obscenely telegraphing.
"No bet. Burning the money would at least keep me warm." BJ said back, raising his mask and tying the strings.
Hawkeye shivered, dramatically, and then stalked into the O.R.
.
.
"Just don't cut my boots off." Hawkeye growled, not opening his eyes, pushing someone—BJ, by the length and shape of the long forearm bones—to the other side of the O.R. bench. "I sold my soul for these boots. And to the Army."
"Why would I want to cut your boots off?" BJ wanted to know, not genuinely, but with the kind of studied insouciance that said he was willing to play along. Good old BJ, just like an actor on a stage.
"To tell why my feet are numb." Hawkeye said back, mumbling. Even his lips felt tired. And his feet were numb, but with the cold, the tiredness, or doing eighteen hours in surgery, he couldn't tell. Maybe it was better that way, not to know.
"I thought it was your head that was numb."
"No, that's Frank's." It was the ending shot to all their little joke-plays, the jab at Frank. Particularly since, as like most times in surgery, he had been too tired to finish out their last O.R. push.
The O.R. door swung open, and Colonel Potter's even, measured footfalls walked into the scrub room. Hawkeye liked to listen to the colonel's tread—it had a kind of order and easy rhythm that was calming about it. Army boots had a very distinctive sound about them, they sounded heavy, even against regular dirt. You could tell a lot about a person from the sound of their stride—Frank Burns made a sort of wish-washy noise, because he tended to drag his heels, not scuffing, nothing so definitive, just a soft scrape-scrape, just like the man. Margaret sounded like a brass drum when she was angry, stomping down her whole foot all at once. BJ rocked on his feet, rolling from the outside to the inside.
"Officially, that was our eighty-sixth patient," the Colonel's voice sounded like the gravel end of an organ. "Unofficially, that's damn good work, boys."
"Finest kind." Hawkeye murmured, seeing the stream of bodies passing before his eyes again, with the kind of weariness that came from seeing the same stream, over and over and over again.
"Thanks, colonel." BJ said, the words coming out slowly and quietly, almost as if he were half asleep.
Hawkeye opened his eyes to a familiar scene, BJ sitting next to him, neck flung back and head resting against the wall of the O.R., already drifting into sleep, Potter pulling off his surgical cap, looking down at the both of them with something that might be just a hint of approval curving the right edge of his mouth. I've caught him out, Hawkeye thought, so now he'll pretend to be twice as gruff to make up for it. Time for some command, with a side of bravado.
"Hunnicutt, I don't want to see you for eight hours. Go get a feedbag and some shut-eye. Pierce, you're on in Post-OP." The colonel held up a hand, foreseeing Hawkeye's need to complain. "I know, I know but there's at least one of Burns' patients from last night—took a load of shrapnel in his belly—that I want you to go over."
Under a lesser man, Hawkeye might have balked, but he knew, after forty-eight hour surgical marathons and weeks of constant wounded, that the colonel worked just as hard as he did, if not more. He wouldn't want to be in command of this lot at all, much less for two months.
"With a fine tooth comb, colonel." Hawkeye promised, trying to eke out the energy to get up. He elbowed BJ, on purpose, not hard, just enough to get him up and moving. BJ shouldered him out of the way, still with his eyes shut. Hawkeye gave him a push back.
"This bench is too soft." BJ complained, standing up right and stretching his shoulders.
"What are you, Goldilocks—"
"They always are." The Colonel agreed, buttoning up his fatigues. Hawkeye shut his mouth, considering.
It was not even too much work to find a joke in the colonel's sincerity, but like Radar, there was something there that was too good to spoil. "BJ, food and sleep, in that order. You'll relieve Hawkeye at midnight."
"Sir, yes, sir." They chorused together, BJ moving towards the door, Hawkeye still in his slump on the bench but operating together as if they'd planned it. Synchronicity in distress, Hawkeye mused, this is your love in war. He doesn't care to examine that thought too closely. Love in war, war in love, the distinctions seem to blur.
"If only you meant it." The colonel only sounded disgusted, Hawkeye knew, but is inwardly pleased. Hawkeye doesn't want to examine that too closely either—he thought he'd only known his Dad that well, once.
It haunts him, like the birches bent under ice in the winter's sun, startling into flame, that these people shine in the darkness of this war.
If something good, he thought, then stopped, seeing the outline of the Swamp in his mind, filled with wounded soldiers, the caravans of displaced Koreans, women and children, moving South away from the shelling, the inexorable press of time on his father's face, somewhere over the sea—if anything good, he thought, fiercely.
And with that, he goes to work.
.
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The Pierces of Maine came from a long line of men, and women, who had settled the harsh and unforgiving landscape of New England seacoast long before the country had even had a name. His forebears had endured centuries worth of winter, waves, and work. It took a certain kind of immovable will, formidable vision, and obsession, to the point of insanity.
Hawkeye was no exception.
His feet might be numb, his hands might be red and swollen, chapped with cold, and there might be a stabbing headache behind his eyes, but there was his sworn duty—all measures to the sick—and he would do it, or die trying.
He'd thought that an impossible promise once.
Dear Dad, he composed mentally, if I am dead, or alive, whichever comes first,
when they ship me from this place –if they ship me from this place—
bury me next to Granddad Nathaniel, in the family plot.
And let me sleep.
.
.
He's dog-tired and the eight hours ought to slog by, but they don't.
He circled the Post-OP wards like a hound on a scent. Post-OP 1, the real postoperative ward, but what was real to a homeless MASH unit that packed its bags and moved once a month?, was the warmest and best lit, and also where the worst of the causalities were recovering. He headed there first. Some of the patients were left over from yesterday, or was it the day before, he wondered. No point trying to figure out what day it was, tomorrow would come soon enough.
The wood of the door was frozen even under his gloved hand, and he touched it only long enough to push the door open and shut it smartly behind him. The warm air of the ward was enough to make his eyes water, and he crossed to the stove in the corner with a sigh of relief. There was no appreciation like numbness.
Private Williams, A. was the patient that Burns had operated on, and the colonel was right. His condition wasn't great. His pulse was slow, his blood pressure could use improvement, his temperature was high and there was drainage from his wound. Hawkeye pulled his glove off to pull the blanket back, letting his breath out in a hiss when he saw the sweat beading on the private's chest and felt the heat aching in his frozen fingers.
"Kellye," he called, taking the chart hanging at the end of the bed and noting the current orders for penicillin. "Keep an eye on Williams here, if his condition hasn't changed in two hours, I want to know, stat. I'll come back to Post-OP once I'm done checking on the other wounded." He lowered his voice, speaking more reflectively to himself than to the nurse beside him. "Either we've missed shrapnel in this kid's gut, or he's got one heck of an infection."
He pulled the glove back on, tucked his hat more securely down around his ears, and went out back into the coldness of Korea.
The colonel, Hawkeye reflected as he ducked into the Officer's club, was nearly always right. He finds he misses Henry more and less than he thought he would. He's fond of Henry, of course, but there's a relief in having Potter standing at their backs. It's not even that he knows how to cut red-tape while elbow deep in some kid's chest, or that he's as sharp as his scalpel and knows all the tricks, but that he's seen it all before.
There's something there to lean on, stronger than the war that surrounds them every day.
Henry didn't have that, he was as uncertain as the rest of them, and that's the double-edge to Hawkeye's grief. At least Henry was as unwilling as the rest of them.
This is the colonel's third war. And that, he still can't understand. He's still trying to figure Potter out.
He's short, wiry and balding, but he's got the composure of a monk, the authority of a judge, and the humor of a vaudeville comedian. The folksy expressions and rustic vocabulary came straight off a farmer's potato truck, but he sews wounds like a master tailor stitching.
Tough as old nails but tender—
"And he's a colonel," Hawkeye mock-debated to himself, checking the warmth and blood response on the toes above the bandage. "Those things don't go together."
The Officer's Club is packed with patients tightly enough that he must turn sideways to get by some of them in the corner.
They are as tight as sardines in here, packed wound by wound, almost like a slaughterhouse—except here, at least, there are beds and not hooks. Some of the boys under their pile of olive drab blankets look pale enough to be drained of blood—some of them have come wounded off the line, marched or waited in the cold for hours, long enough to get borderline hypothermia and frostbite.
In Korea, it's too cold to snow. They'd hit freezing ten degrees ago and the mercury is still plummeting. And the pushes towards the Christmas truce were fierce, as if to make up for ground about to be lost. He'd spent more time in surgery this week than out of it, and he feels that frozen hand on his back, uncomfortable close, resting just below his scapular.
The patient whose chest he's examining is cold, too, it's not just his numb hands. There's a peculiar sensation to numb fingers touching things, you feel the pressure and the gross block-iness of something else pushing on your flesh, but you don't feel the sharpness or the edges to things.
He pulled the pile of olive-green blankets up, and steps back. The patient, the kid he reminds himself, is already covered in four blankets, and he's cold. It's warmer in the Officer's Club than being outside, in the shelter out of the freezing wind and off the frozen ground, and its warmer with all these bodies in the room, but it's still too cold for a man coming off shock, major surgery, anesthesia, and painkillers.
"Bigelow." He said, side-shuffling a bed, automatically scanning: left chest wound, tight bandage, easy breathing by sight, sound, flesh cranially and caudally pink to the abdominals and pectorals. Not one he did, must be either BJ or the Colonel. "Look, have we got any more blankets?"
"Sorry, Hawkeye," Bigelow's mouth is tight: she's probably cold too under her parka, she's a slight woman, prone to poor circulation in her hands and feet. "They're wearing them all already."
"Well, go over to the supply tent and get some more." His voice is rising in the empty space of the Officer's club, and Hawkeye knows that the anger at Bigelow isn't justified—it's the Army, it's always the Army—but he almost can't help it. "I'll stay here—these kids aren't warm enough. We aren't going to lose a patient because we haven't got enough blankets."
Bigelow's eyes are intent on him, and he backs down a little. He knows he sounds tired, and angry, and maybe even a little defeated.
"Look, just go see what you can do. See if anyone has any to spare, and if you can't find any, take the ones from my bunk."
"I'll see what I can do, Hawkeye."
No one will, of course, and they'll grunt and they groan, but somehow, Bigelow will come back with an armful of blankets. No one will admit what they've done either, until they show up with mild frostbite in their toes. If it were possible to love this place and hate it at the same time, Hawkeye would have it down to an art.
He pitched his voice to carry to Bigelow's back as she walks briskly to the door.
"Tell them thanks, Bigelow."
Her look, as she turned around briefly, is curious. It's unfamiliar to him, or rather, he recognizes the look of a woman softening, but doesn't fully understand why in this situation. She's out the door in the next minute, in a draft of below-zero wind.
"This place," he said meditatively to the patient asleep next to him, pulling open the pajama top, watching the chest rise and fall in the unconscious movement of breathing, "this place," he repeats, heavy with the weight of it.
.
.
He opens Williams up again at a quarter to nine.
It takes more than two hours to fish out four pieces of shrapnel, two hiding under the liver, one lodged under the back side of the heart, and a stray piece in the chest wall. There are bleeders to tie off, and Williams almost crashes twice on the table. His blood pressure's low, his pulse is faint, but all that ought to improve, if Hawkeye's caught it all in time.
If.
Of course, all that would be a moot question if Frank were more than a warm body standing at an operating table. As it is, sometimes Frank is actually less trouble than he's worth.
The problem is, Frank likes rules, and straight little lines, and narrow corridors of approach. It makes him decent at dealing with the basic, easy surgeries where nothing unexpected happens, and nothing beyond basic surgery needs to be done. But shake him out of that rut and he falls to pieces easier than an intern. Worse, though, is that he doesn't care, he gives up in the second between a man living and a man dying.
And that, Hawkeye can't abide.
He's spent two hours fishing metal out of a boy's body so that he'll live, because Frank can't look beyond the blunt end of his own nose.
"Take the blankets off my cot," Hawkeye sing-songed to himself, stepping into the shower stall. "Bigelow should have taken the blankets off Frank's bed, forget that, she should've have taken Frank's bed." He perked up, and raising his head, thought beyond the boundaries of the shower tent in his mind. If Bigelow took Frank's cot, and he took the cot next-door, well, then they could be cold together. He pulled the shower cord, shut his eyes peremptorily, and drew a deep breath.
"Warm together," Hawkeye corrected himself, shook his black hair like a dog, rushed into the shower spray, and let out a low yowl. Even if you are covered in blood and sweat, it's hard to rush into a cold shower when the temperature outside is cold enough to freeze your hair straight to your cot. But he's a doctor, and he needs to be clean, so he soaps in fifteen and a half seconds, and bears the spray again.
"Warm, warm, warm." He hummed under his breath, banging his hand on the beam below the shower handle when he lets go too late. Good thing he doesn't have a heart condition, or else his draft board never would've taken him. Hawkeye dressed quickly enough in his clean fatigues, sweater, sweater, sweater, bathrobe, parka and hat that he's not actually dry before he gets dressed. He takes more care toweling his feet and stuffing them in new old socks before pulling on his boots. Feet go first is the old Pierce adage.
If his father were here, he'd scold him for going wet out in the cold, but there isn't really another option here. Their towels are the size of postage stamps, the shower tents as cold as an ice house, and even a warmish shower is too much to hope for at an hour to midnight.
Of course, his father would also frown on seeing patients half-dressed, unshaven, and without tying a tie. He can picture his father's face, blue eyes piercing, looking over his book from his armchair near the fire, raising one silver eyebrow, and saying, in his low baritone,
"And where are you going, dressed like that?"
It was like clockwork, watching his father come back from a two-a.m. birthing call, or a three-a.m. pneumonia patient, dressed in a full three-piece suit, a double-Windsor in his tie, getting out of the car as if he'd just come from church, the sole concession to the hour and weather being a heavy wool overcoat or a pair of boots.
His father would be horrified at the conditions here, appalled at the indifference to life.
Hawkeye reminds himself that, often, oftener on nights like these.
.
.
In the last half an hour of his shift, he checked up on Williams again, made brief stops through all four of the Post-Ops, and met BJ coming down the compound to relieve him with three soldiers trailing behind him.
"Who're the strays?" He's too dull to think of anything snappy.
"Came in off the line." BJ responded, something flashing in his dark blue eyes. He makes an abortive movement toward Hawkeye, then raised his shoulders, as if bracing against the cold, unbuttoned the middle of his parka, and pulled out a wax paper packet.
Hawkeye mimed clapping, his fingers too cold to actually clap together.
"Thank you, maestro." He intoned gravely, stuffing the packet under his arm. "Something the wife picked up at home?"
"Only if the wife is Klinger." BJ demurred, then took a step closer to Hawkeye. "Look, these guys need beds for the night, and I've given them ours."
"Ours?" Hawkeye echoed, feeling the beginnings of a familiar, dark anger.
"Ours—well, mine, yours and Frank's. And if by beds you mean cots. And if by night you mean whatever comes after this." BJ's face is very earnest, and seems very young, set in this certainty that whatever the cost, he's doing what's right.
"My bed." Hawkeye's not angry, he realized that in a flash of inspiration. He's furious. What right does BJ have to give away his cot, leave him to fend for himself, leave his friend out in the cold, without so much as a by your leave? They'd run out of cots before they'd run out of blankets, and that had been halfway through his shift, but that doesn't give BJ the right to just commandeer his bed.
"Just look at them, Hawkeye." BJ's plea is quiet, intense and so very earnest that Hawkeye stalls, stalls enough to look. There's an older man, a sergeant, who has taken a position in front of the other two boys. He's of middle height, middle age, middle looks, he might be any man in this man's army. The only thing he can see over his shoulders is two thin faces surrounded by olive-drab, with big eyes and white cheeks, white with frostbite, and not yet old enough to shave.
"Okay, okay." He buckled, patting at BJ's forearm roughly. There's too much furtive hope in all the eyes looking at him, BJ's worst of all. "How are they?"
"Go to bed, Hawk. I'll take care of them." BJ's tone is firm, and his voice is, if not light, at least dead-set on mother-henning Hawkeye into bed. "The sergeant's worst off, but mostly they need food, bed, warmth."
"So do we all." Came the dark reply.
"Go." BJ responded firmly, pushing at his waist.
"Going." Hawkeye said, faux meekly, wishing he could stop by the Swamp for a belt before bed. It's a futile wish, but he wants it all the same.
There's an ache inside him, and it's not just the ache of standing on his feet for two days, or not sleeping or not eating or not being warm. It's not even the ache of being always afraid, which takes an awful lot of energy and leaves him as tightly wound as a spring at the end of a day.
No, it's the deep, deep down chill like when he was a boy, lost in the woods. There's the heavy, cumbersome push of his boots through the crust of the snow, the numbness seeping in his arms and legs and creeping up towards his heart, the ache of the cold air against his eyes and deep in his ear drums, and the hollowness coming from inside him, asking a solitary question:
Why?
.
.
"Pierce, why are you standing in the doorway?"
"Had a hard day at the office, colonel."
"Is that a question or a statement, Pierce?"
"Either, both, I don't know."
"Hawkeye, what are you doing?"
A silent gesticulation with the sandwich he was eating.
"I just don't want to get crumbs in your tent, colonel."
"Thanks, Pierce. Now get inside before you freeze to death."
"I'm from Maine, we're a hardy bunch."
"At five below zero? Even the lobsters would be frozen."
Potter's objection to his retort was followed up by decisive action. In the next minute, he felt the colonel's firm hand between his shoulder blades, the even pressure pushing him forward. He opens his mouth to say something but loses the words between his brain and mouth. All he wants to do is sleep. He's not sure if he should be concerned about how intently he wants to sleep. He's been up an awfully long time—double double digits.
And to be honest, he didn't even know why he was doing it, hanging around the colonel's tent, eating his sandwich. It was just one peanut butter jelly sandwich after all, but Potter was a man of order and eating one crumby sandwich in his tent seemed almost like eating in a church. So, Hawkeye had swapped one hand in and out of his pockets and kept switching hands, so he could finish his sandwich before he went in to sleep.
He whacked his hand on the tent-frame, and swore under his breath. The back of his hand is numb, and it hurts twice as much as it should, the pain waking up the nerve endings in his hand.
"Easy, Pierce, I need those hands." Potter chided him, pulling the door shut behind him. The older man brushed past him, the edge of his shoulder pushing Hawkeye further into the tent. He ought to be doing something, but all of his energy is going to his mouth at the moment.
"Not as much as I do. Besides, I don't even feel it anymore."
"Why do I not find that reassuring?" Potter rumbled, taking off his hat and unbuttoning his parka. Hawkeye slumped down in the colonel's chair, kicked his legs out and is halfway into some deep breathing and slow blinking when Potter pulls on his pajamas and bathrobe and gets into bed.
"Pierce, get over here and join the herd."
He's missed something.
"Whatzat?" He muttered, sleepily, rolling his neck to one side. Someone ought to tell the Army about proper engineering for chairs, he thinks distantly, they haven't gotten the hang of it. The cold metal of the chair bites into the upper part of his shoulder blade, and is making his tail-bone send sharp pangs up his spine.
"I don't trust my horse's stall to strange men, Pierce, and you need a place to sleep, so get over here." Potter sounded impatient, but he's also not making much sense, so Hawkeye just ignored him.
"I'm fine here." He waved a dismissive hand and prepared to go back to sleep. The colonel harrumphed, sounding awfully close, and then Potter's pulling him out of the chair, tugging off his jacket, peeling his gloves off roughly, pushing him with sharp little taps towards the edge of his bed. He tries to help, tries to object, but the colonel's pushing too fast for him to get a thought in edgewise.
Brain, he ordered, stop sputtering with cold and fatigue, fire away, fire anything, add fuel to the fire, hold your fire, play with fire, fight fire with fire, fire something—
Hawkeye looked down and realized, abruptly, that Potter is unlacing his boots for him. He swayed, just a little, as if to bend down and help, but Potter's already taken them off, and he's been undressed as if he were a little boy again.
His body goes through the motions mechanically, undoing his fatigue buttons, pulling off his pants, putting his fatigues as neatly as he could on the foot of the bed. Army training is good for that much, at least.
There are three army blankets and one Calvary blanket on Potter's bed, and the welcome warmth of another body beside his. He feels that this ought to be a harder decision than it is, but his logic has shut down to: yes-sleep, no-sleep, and the answer to that is really an easy one.
There are worse places to sleep in Korea. And so, he slept.