Hawkeye is ten years old when he learns that silence is more than just the absence of sound.
His bedroom door is closed, but he can still hear the sharp, breathy sounds of his father crying in the bedroom across the hall. The window is cracked to let in the cool summer evening, and just outside there are crickets chirping and night birds singing and somewhere in the distance, a dog is howling. The house creaks and settles, a breeze rustles through the trees - the same static that runs in the background of every day.
He's seated in the middle of his narrow bed, wrapped in a soft, hand knit blanket. His mother had made it for him before he was born, had counted her stitches as she'd counted down the remaining days of her pregnancy. Hawkeye is growing in tall and gangly, but he still remembers when he was small enough to crawl into her lap and fall asleep listening to the steady clacking of her needles.
Hawkeye is ten years old, and he doesn't yet know how death will crawl into the hollow places in his chest and make a home there, twining itself around every heartbeat. He only knows that the house is too quiet, and it will never, ever sound quite right again.
In the dim lamp light, olive drab looks a lot like hunter green. Or maybe it's the other way around, like Carlye had taken all the color with her and left him with nothing but khaki.
Frank is mumbling in his sleep in the shadows on the other side of the tent. There are crickets chirping alongside the steady rise and fall of BJ's breaths, and if he really listens, Hawkeye can hear the distant sound of mortar shells. The 4077th is never quiet, not really - comings and goings of wounded and patrols and locals, the whir of chopper blades, Radar's pets barking or braying or squeaking. When he'd first arrived in Korea, terror had pounded constantly under Hawkeye's skin, turning up the volume and making sleep impossible. He hadn't known war would be quite so loud.
He didn't know war could be so still.
"BJ?" Hawkeye says, just loud enough to reach across the tent. He doesn't expect an answer - from the circle of light falling over his bed, Hawkeye can just make out BJ's figure curled up on his cot in the dark. His back is to Hawkeye, one arm thrown over his face to cover his eyes from the light that creeps into his corner of the tent. His sleeping breaths are different from his waking breaths, deep and even like the ebb and flow of the tide.
Hawkeye reaches up to switch off the light, and darkness falls over him. He closes his eyes, listening for something that isn't there, was never there, but is missing all the same.
Trapper presses a drink into Hawkeye's hand. It's new gin, no olive, and as soon as Hawkeye downs it, Trapper is already refilling his glass. "Drink up," Trapper says, tossing back his own drink. "We're havin' a wake."
Hawkeye doesn't need a reason to drink in this god-forsaken place, but he sure as hell has one today, so he lets Trapper get him drunk. It doesn't numb a damn thing and every time he closes his eyes for longer than a blink, he can see the light fade from Tommy's eyes all over again, but it sure beats the alternative.
The hardest lesson Hawkeye ever had to learn in medical school was that sometimes there's nothing he can do - anatomy and biology are nothing compared to that. Tommy's not the first person Hawkeye couldn't fix. He won't be the last. And every single time, Hawkeye will have to relearn how to live with the cold certainty that he isn't enough.
It's the nature of war, that young men die and doctors can't stop it. It's the nature of Hawkeye's life that they don't say goodbye. He fits in as many hellos as he can to make up the balance.
For years afterward, whenever Hawkeye catches the chipped vase on the mantle out of the corner of his eye, pinpricks of guilt twist sharp in his chest. It had been his mother's favorite, and he'd dropped it once when he was young, convinced he was strong enough to carry it from the kitchen back to the living room. It was a sturdy piece and had survived the fall mostly intact, save for a few spiderweb cracks and the chip in the rim.
He'd apologized through tears, convinced he'd ruined it, but she had just swept him up, more concerned with whether he'd injured himself than the state of the vase. She'd plucked it from the floor, tucked the flowers back into it and pronounced no harm done. Still, there was a look on her face sometimes when she replaced the flowers or refilled the water, something fond but inscrutable.
A few years later, he sees the same expression on his father's face across the table as Hawkeye tells jokes at a mile a minute, exaggerated expressions trying to fill up a three person space all by himself.
He's living in Boston, halfway through his residency when he finally understands it, catching a glimpse of his face in the bathroom sink as he stares down at the hairpins Carlye had forgotten when she left. It's surgery scars and too much gin and a string of nameless faces, a hollow ache that will never fill. It's dead silence in the middle of a war, mortar shells and artillery exploding all around you, still too quiet to drown out the itching loss in your own head.
Broken edges don't always seal up with time, no matter how much you love something.
Years later, Hawkeye tells himself he knew. That he could tell before he even opened the door that something was wrong, that the apartment was too quiet. That he saw the spider web cracks before they split into deep fissures.
The truth is, he doesn't even notice at first. He opens the door, chucks his keys in the vague direction of the bowl in the entryway, and makes a beeline for the kitchen, hoping Carlye left him some of whatever she had for dinner. His mind is still on the hospital, the nephrectomy he'd assisted on, and he doesn't see all the empty places where Carlye used to be.
The fridge is mostly empty, half a bottle of sour milk, dregs of strawberry jam, a carrot that's turning an unsettling shade of brown. He pokes through the cupboards until he finds a tin of beans hiding behind the mostly-empty sugar container. He pulls out a pot next, trying to decide if five extra minutes of blissful sleep is worth cold beans out of a can.
He decides heating them up is too much bother. Exhaustion pulls on him, comfortable and familiar like a heavy coat - it's the kind of exhaustion that follows a long, satisfying day or particularly athletic sex, the kind that promises a deep and dreamless sleep. He eats the beans over the sink and then leaves the can to rinse out in the morning.
He doesn't see Carlye's favorite mug, missing from its usual position on the kitchen window sill.
In the bathroom, he doesn't see Carlye's toothbrush, missing from the cup on the sink.
The bedroom is dark, but the shadowed figure of a sleeping Carlye is missing from her side of the bed. There are no limbs creeping across the center divide, no blonde hair thrown haphazardly across his pillow. "Carlye?" Hawkeye calls, switching on the light. "Carlye, are you home?"
He racks his brain, trying to remember her schedule - was she working a 12 hour shift or 24? She must still be at the hospital then. Hawkeye shucks his clothes, tossing them toward the laundry hamper and doesn't see Caryle's blouse, missing from the corner of the room, where it had been discarded yesterday morning during an all-too-rare overlap of their schedules.
A glint of light off of metal catches Hawkeye's gaze, and he narrows his eyes at the bedside table on Caryle's side of the bed. He doesn't see her stack of books and magazines, her little bottle of hand lotion, her half-empty glass of water, all missing from the nightstand.
There's just a single key.
Eventually, Hawkeye learns that you can't make anyone stay, but you don't have to wait around until they leave either.
He doesn't remember the names of anyone after Carlye. He barely bothers to ask for them in the first place, occasionally managing to fit the question in between quick lines and inviting grins. He takes home a girl whose blonde curls aren't Carlye's. He goes home with a man whose rasping voice isn't Carlye's. None of their names are Carlye.
There's no one after Carlye.
Hawkeye only calls BJ by the wrong name once. It's four days in, long enough that he's graduated from sharp betrayal to numb acceptance, like a scalpel wound that doesn't hurt until you can see the blood. Frank and Margaret are making eyes at each other across the compound, pretending to be subtle, and Hawkeye turns to his side, "Hey, Trap -" out of his mouth before his gaze lands on his companion.
BJ's face is carefully devoid of judgment. He doesn't pretend not to notice, but he doesn't comment on it either, just waits for Hawkeye to either correct himself or bluster on past it. For a moment, Hawkeye's not sure which one will come out of his mouth.
It only lasts a heartbeat, but the lull hangs heavy in the air between them. "I mean BJ," Hawkeye says finally, and BJ gives him just the tiniest hint of a smile, lips quirking up briefly as if to say no worries.
Korea hasn't had time to crawl under BJ's skin, but maybe Hawkeye has, and BJ takes him as he is, bumps and bruises and all.
He doesn't cry after Henry.
The minute he's through in OR, Hawkeye snaps off his gloves and heads straight for the Swamp. He downs half the still straight from the carafe, not bothering with a glass, trying to insulate himself against the shock wearing off. It's a futile pursuit, but that doesn't stop him - when the gin is gone, he and Trapper drink down the O Club, and when they get kicked out of there, they go to Rosie's, and Hawkeye gets the drunkest he's ever been in his life, including the three-day bender he'd taken after graduating from med school.
Trapper's not far behind him, but he can hold his liquor well enough to get them both back to the Swamp afterwards. They have to stop twice on the way so Hawkeye can be sick, and by the time they finally stagger into the tent, dawn is creeping over the horizon in a wash of pink and gold.
"Trap, Trap, Trap," Hawkeye croaks, his fingers tangled in Trapper's shirt, in his belt loop, any place he can reach as they both fall sideways onto Hawkeye's cot. His throat burns and the cot won't sit still. "Trapper-"
"You're alright buddy, I gotcha," Trapper murmurs, gently disentangling himself from Hawkeye's grasp. "Just sleep it off." He hauls himself upright and stumbles back a step, throwing out a hand to brace himself against the still table.
Hawkeye can't tell if the spinning is worse with his eyes open or closed, so he leaves them closed. At least he won't have to watch the tent go round and round. "Promise me, Trapper," he demands.
Heavy footsteps tromp across the tent, followed by a thump and a groan of canvas. "Promise you what, Hawk?"
There's an ache in Hawkeye's chest that has nothing to do with the time he'd spent on his knees, heaving into the bushes. "Henry-" he starts, and his voice breaks in the middle, smearing the sounds together. "Henry and Tommy and Mom - just don't, Trapper." It's not a promise they can make in this place, Hawkeye knows, with snipers and bombs and blood soaking into the mud, but he needs to hear it anyway. Confirmation that there's something left in Hawkeye worth holding onto, something bright and good like a candle flame that hasn't been snuffed out by this place.
He won't remember asking in the morning. It's for the best. The only response he gets is the faint sound of Trapper snoring.
There's all of three patients in post-op, two locals and a nurse minus an appendix, and with nothing medical to fill his time with, Hawkeye has fallen back on his two favorite hobbies, drinking and pretending everything is fine. His performance isn't winning any Tony Awards, but it fills in enough of the empty spaces that Carlye left behind.
BJ indulges him for a bit, a knowing twist in his lip that Hawkeye valiantly pretends not to see, but even BJ's patience has its limits. Hawkeye is on day three of the Hawkeye Pierce Show Starring Hawkeye Pierce, filmed in front of a live studio audience of one. He's only sort of listening to the words spilling out of his mouth, a chattering counterpoint to the still bubbling beside him and the crunch of gravel outside of the tent. He pauses long enough to swallow another mouthful of lighter fluid, and BJ slips a new record into the dead air.
"Haven't got much of a kitchen to work with here, so I'll just ask. You want to talk about it?" BJ's face is carefully expressionless.
Hawkeye refills his glass. "You haven't been in the army long enough to lose your hearing yet, Beej. When my mouth does this flappy thing it means words are coming out, and that's called talking."
BJ lifts an eyebrow. Hawkeye could play dumb a little longer, change the subject, carry on along his previous tangent. BJ would let it go. The empty spaces don't get smaller, but eventually Hawkeye will learn to live with them, will try, however futility, to fill them with other things.
"No," says Hawkeye. There are caverns in his chest where organs tattooed with Carlye's name have been scooped out of him with dull knives, no anesthetic. "Yes."
"Well, which is it?"
Hawkeye wishes he knew. He can talk around it, talk over it, walk and talk, talk back, tick tock, talk too much, but to talk about it, a straight line from A to B with nowhere to hide in between… He prods the wound experimentally, like tonguing a canker sore to see if it's healed enough for orange juice.
I was going to tell you. I wouldn't have just slipped away.
"No," Hawkeye says. The silence is still too loud, and if he stops, he'll drown in it. "Not yet."
"Okay," BJ says, nodding. Somehow Hawkeye knows BJ hears even the words he doesn't say.
It takes more than noise to fill the silence people leave behind.