Title: this year I slept and woke with pain
Rating: K+
Wordcount: 5472
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. Disturbing dreams, mild WWI imagery, violence, medical stuff. Tags to 'The Bus.'
Summary: Hawkeye Pierce'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: "Here's to the New Year. May she be a damn sight better than the old one, and may we all be home before she's over."
MASH does a good job of making it seem like Potter spent the whole of WWI doing something other than fighting, by being in hospital (gassed and blinded after Chateau-Thierry,) lost and a POW in the Argonne (Meuse-Argonne offensive), or "hiding behind bread racks" (Battle of the Marne). For a show that tried to portray the ugly realities of war, they stepped away from actually confronting them face to face. But the 3rd Calvary (the unit he mentions being in, in several episodes) was in the thick of the fighting for the AEF, and was honored for their gallantry and bravery. This is my attempt to reconcile that with who we know Potter to be.
And, of course, of all the characters, Potter's background is so inconsistent that the only way to come up with a coherent story is to pretend some episodes never happened. Other parts are made up whole-cloth, some are borrowed from other fics (particularly DestielsDestiny, thanks! and 'Missing Hawk' by Mariole (there are others who I can't remember, gratia in absentia).
(This remains unbeta-ed and barely edited. I welcome any and all feedback.)
.
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The steel bright bone-saw in his hand slices though the femur like a hot knife through butter.
It falls apart softly, with a straight, smooth cut. When he finishes sawing through the leg-bone, he picks up the leg with great reverence to transfer it to the silver serving dish at his elbow.
There ought to be blood. But the leg just sits there, like a lump of flesh, waiting behind the glass of a butcher's case to be sold. Blood dissuades customers, so the meat must be clean and properly dressed.
"Treat it kindly, it was a soldier, once, and brave."
It's his voice, but not his words. He could never sound so grave and dignified, full of pomp and circumstance.
Potter nodded, his Colonel's eagle flashing under the surgical light from where it is pinned to his surgical cap. Beneath it, his steel blue eyes pierce and pass through Hawkeye, on their way to the distant fields of France. He held the platter chest-high and bore it away. There's a sound like trumpets, playing a fanfare.
Enter the screaming.
Then, Hawkeye begins the surgery again, picking up the saw, holding the other thrashing leg down. There's nothing wrong with the foot or the leg, but it will have to come off.
Above the knee or below? Above. That way it will look even.
"We need your leg, soldier."
He doesn't say it but hears himself say it all the same.
The flesh under his hand is hot, burning hot, and it feels like he's being branded, burned with the outline of the other man's flesh on his hands. The leg jerks, kicking, thumping against the metal surgical table with a bang, bang, bang.
He can't hold him down and saw at the same time.
"It's just your leg—you'll have a spare." He pleaded.
This makes perfect sense.
Bang Bang Bang
The screaming rises in pitch, and comes to a ragged, sheer shriek that punches straight through his head. It's distracts him, how shrill it is, and disrupts his concentration. The muscles in the leg beneath his hand twitch as he sets the saw, and with one firm stroke, the saw bites—
BANG BANG BANG
Scream crescendos.
"Damnit, can't you shut that man up?" Hawkeye yells at BJ, never taking his eyes off his work. A slip of the saw and he might lose a finger. There's no answer—has BJ left him here in the O.R. alone?
He turned his head to see, and then he makes a mistake: he looks down.
The white face, screaming, mouth open in terror and agony, the lips bitten ragged and bloody with pain, the straining cords of tendons at the sides of the neck, the staring, empty eyes, the sheen of tears streaking down over the laughter lines and crow's feet—the face he knows almost as well as he knows his own.
"Dad—" his lips form the word, but his lungs are suddenly heavingly vacant. The bone saw clatters to the operating table.
His father's hand, the dexterous and kind fingers of a well-loved general physician, rises inexorably off the operating table, the bone saw held firmly in his hand. Dad's eyes meet his and hold them. They're blue like the sea, dark with determination and love and tenderness and strength. He offers the saw, as if to say, take it.
Hawkeye helps him to sit up, and their heads bend together to look where his leg was.
"It's just a spare, son." Dad repeated to him, with calm composure. "If you need it—" and his eyes are inexpressibly kind, "take it, Ben."
When Hawkeye just looks at him, his Dad wraps their hands together over the bone saw's handle, leans over the table, and presses down.
For some reason, this makes perfect sense.
Then, the blood starts, and Hawkeye screams.
.
.
BANGbang BANGbang BANGbang
His heart ran a mile a minute in the instant it takes him to realize it's a dream.
In the next, an elbow hits him, bruisingly hard, between his shoulder blade and spine, and his eyes snap open. Hawkeye rolled on his back, trying to forget the tang of a scream in the back of his throat, swallowing it back down.
—the slick white of the bone next to the steel saw, the blue of his father's eyes, the press of his Dad's fingers on his, guiding the saw, cutting into his own leg—
He can still hear the banging of that leg on the table, and realizes it is the crescendo of his heart
Now that he's awake and on edge, the relative awkwardness of his situation breaks over him. If it weren't individually personal, to the matter of freezing to death, he'd be embarrassed. As it is, he stiffens a little, restlessly, but concedes that laying next to a man who bleeds heat like a furnace might be a lesser evil than losing his toes, or worse, his fingers.
Or a leg. The meaty sound as he sawed through his leg.
He threw his hand over his eyes, trying to press out the images that still linger there. Flitter away, mind, think about women, songs to sing in the shower, his next prank on Frank, what the mess tent will try to kill them with next, BJ's last letter from Peg, sleeping next to the Colonel—
Which is surprisingly warm and comfortable, not that he's admitting that in the daylight—
The real mattress and clean sheets don't hurt, either. Being a colonel has some perks, after all.
Potter rolls over, his shoulder pressing firmly into Hawkeye's bicep, his arm splayed next to his hip.
"No, no, no," Hawkeye mumbled, trying to decide whether being court-martialed for shoving a superior officer counts when you are sleeping in the same bed, or whether he would even push the colonel, who exudes dignified reserve like a second skin.
He's sleeping next to Potter, not BJ, and he's not curious to see how the colonel reacts to a pillow to the face. Potter barks before he looks sometimes, particularly when he's on edge and grumpy from lack of sleep.
And he remembers with something not unlike fury how easily Potter had taken away his father's leg—no, he corrected himself, it was just a soldier's leg, any soldier's leg. In the real world, here in Korea, they don't get silver platters or fanfares, he thought bitterly, just a short ride and a shovel-worked hole down by the bend in the river.
Potter pushed further into next to him, curled up in the blankets, elbow in Hawkeye's ribs. The sheets are crisp, the blankets are warm, the bed is real, and it would all be very comfortable thank you very much if the slightly, actually very uncomfortable situation of Potter's being pressed into his side and making little whuffing noises weren't true.
"Uh, colonel?" Hawkeye whispered, feeling the rigid shoulder grind into his ribs with little jerking motions. It's odd because Army cots teach you pretty quickly to lie still when you sleep, they're only two and half feet across, which doesn't leave much room for moving.
"Ja." It's a guttural, soft word that sounded like a gunshot in the silence of the tent. The colonel's breath heaved out like a horse's, and he shuddered, again, with his whole body. Hawkeye realized with a start that he'd never thought the colonel, dignified to a fault, steady as a rock, would have nightmares. One other thing that's catching in war time.
"Colonel." Hawkeye said firmly, reaching across and shaking the shoulder that's sticking into his ribs as best he can. "You're asleep." He shook again, harder this time, and felt the sudden jerk of the collarbone under his palm.
"P'rce?"
"Yo." Next to you, Hawkeye thought, feel my ribs, colonel, sir?
"Why aren't you sleeping?" Potter said, rolling back onto his other side.
"Bad dreams, colonel?" Hawkeye asked the colonel's back breezily, ignoring the question with the practiced skill of deliberate obtuseness.
"Nightmares? Just indigestion." Potter replied guardedly, shuffling away. That light, easy tone of voice that the colonel has put on is a bluff, that much Hawkeye knew. And he knew the truth of his own senses, the restive movements of a man who isn't sleeping well.
"Do you normally speak German when you have indigestion? You ought to see a doctor, or be in Ripley's." Hawkeye challenged, speaking fast, angry that the colonel thinks he ought to have some privacy, or demand his obvious lie to protect his dignity go unnoticed. War doesn't allow those luxuries, and he ought to know.
Potter doesn't answer, but his breath comes out in a quick huff, almost as if he were trying not to laugh. If he were less of a tough old bird, it might have sounded like a man trying not to break down and cry, Hawkeye thought with a sudden realization. But the colonel's all bravado in sweat-soaked pajamas.
"Come on, colonel—" Hawkeye started, but whether his nerve would desert him hallway through his sentence, he never found out.
"Mind your own business, Pierce." Potter's sharp retort interrupted him. Potter was probably glaring at him, drawing his eyebrows together and drawing his authority up before him like the sharp edge of a sword. Or protection, Hawkeye thought, like a cloak. There aren't many friends in a place like this for a colonel, in a unit where the buck stops with him.
"My business?" He said heatedly, his voice rising half an octave and several decibels, feeling his heart do a two-step, and he's about to launch into a furious and towering tirade, fueled by a year's worth of horrific injustices and petty indignities when he stopped, abruptly. It all seemed to boil down to one thing. "My business is legs."
Legs, disconnected from their sovereign and vital parts by the cruelest and rudest way possible, discarded into sacks, being born down to the river to be buried in heaps and piles. Legs forgotten, legs dismembered, legs detached, legs useless, legs rotting, legs legs legs—do they have markers, he wonders, queerly, places to remember where their legs were?
Severed by B.F. Pierce, Captain, MD, on 23 December 1950; Buried by James Shultz, PFC on 24 December 1950; never forgotten.
"Hawkeye?" Potter's hand is grasping at his elbow, and his tone has softened into a resonant kindness, the end of the word lifting in a question. He's willing to bend to help someone else, but not himself, because he'd rather hide his own wounds and lick them in private because of his dignity, and Hawkeye hates it, hates him, himself, this place, this war in a great, sudden burst of loathing—because he understands it and he doesn't understand it, and that wears on him—
the legs and the saws and the screaming
He pulls his arm away roughly, and shifted over on his side, shutting his eyes to go back to sleep.
They're lying stiffly next to each other, and Hawkeye's too angry, too disgusted by his dream, to go back to sleep, but he also doesn't want to talk about it, not with the colonel. They lay there for a moment, maybe ten, not talking, not sleeping, just two bodies rigidly next to each other in one full-sized bed.
Suddenly, the light goes on over their heads, and Potter's getting out of bed and moving towards his desk. Hawkeye blinked against the light, determined to ignore this little tent-corner drama. If the colonel wants privacy, he's got it.
"No good comes of going to bed angry, Pierce." Potter said gruffly, pouring a low measure into two glasses. He turned, his face in a shadow, the furrow between his eyebrows and the braced set of his jaw the signs of how much this openness costs him. His eyes are a subdued blue, and intensely attentive to Hawkeye's face, and he frowned, as if he saw something there that made him concerned.
He handed the glass to Hawkeye, and Hawkeye took it, acknowledging the overture for what it is, and swallowed a sip. It's bourbon, and smooth as sin. He made as if to sit, and Hawkeye pulled up his legs for him. The navy blue calvary blanket rippled under Potter's weight, pulled tight over Hawkeye's knees.
"Mind's a fickle thing, Hawkeye," Potter said, his voice soft, and seemingly sad. "Memory plays tricks on you. Sometimes you remember things as they were, and sometimes, sometimes you don't." There's a heavy, almost hard emphasis to the way he says it. There's more than that here. More to it than that, Hawkeye decided.
The colonel's hands are pillowed in his lap, circling his glass, and his voice is steady, but there's a flicker of something foreboding in his face, a twinge of muscle in his cheek, the tightness around his eyes. He's hunched over his miniature horse-head pajama clad knees, looking off into the distance, determinedly not looking at Hawkeye.
"I saw men go mad with it. I never did." Potter went silent for a moment, as if remembering, and then started to shake his head and stopped, looking down at his glass. His voice is hushed and raw. "Maybe I should have. Better men did—with the things we saw."
He took a long swallow, knocking back his glass. He licked his lips, twice, almost pensively, and said again, evenly and more slowly, with a terrible patience,
"Maybe I should have."
There's a well-worn truth in the repetition of that admission, a burden of guilt for years and years and years. It's such a frank thing to say that Hawkeye's stunned out of himself for a moment. The colonel's laid himself open to the bone, and all of it with kindness, because he thinks Hawkeye needs help.
Hawkeye held his breath, thought, and let it go.
"It was surgery." He admitted quietly, feeling how steady his hands are, how steady his voice is. It's all a lie, a lie that Potter knows.
"It went wrong. Was wrong." He corrected. That doesn't catch the enormous horror of it, but it's enough—his Dad, and their hands on the saw, and the legs—and Potter's head turned, quickly, and there's an answering gleam of the dread in the colonel's cerulean eyes. He knows, Hawkeye realized, and breathed again.
Potter raised his glass as if to sip but puts it to his lips for a long slow minute, almost as if he's forgotten it's there, or it's just a prop to distract him. It's empty anyway, but maybe it's about the ritual of it, the comforting burn that chases away the numbness of the night.
He gets angry that this is normal, then the anger burns away, defeated.
"This whole damn place is a nightmare, why shouldn't I dream about it?" Hawkeye said, keeping his voice from breaking by sheer force of will, trying to fill up the empty space with his usual indignation, but mostly sounding despondent and more than a little exhausted.
Potter doesn't try to tell him nightmares are normal—the result of stress, fatigue, unbearable hours, no privacy, no time to unwind or relax, living on a knife-edge for twelve months—he's more honest than that, and he knows that Hawkeye knows that already. They are both doctors, just one with a bit more mileage than the other.
Hawkeye sipped again. The colonel doesn't say anything, doesn't look at him, as if he too knows that there's more to it than this. The colonel invites confidence, in his quiet deliberateness, the stillness of his strength. If Hawkeye's like the sea, Potter's as solid and unshakeable as the earth.
Maybe it's the colonel sitting on the foot of the bed, maybe it's his own need for release, but the words come out like an unburst flood, a jumble of left-over fear and terror and the faint edge of what might be hysteria.
"It was my Dad's leg—and I was sawing it off like, like a piece of meat, just like that, and it was okay. And I was okay with it. And I called him soldier."
Then the colonel does something unforgivable.
"Ben—"
"No, no, no, colonel, you don't get to call me that with your commanding officer bullshit— tell me that the nightmares are normal—that what we do here is okay—that the army is right—it was my father, for God's sake." His voice broke at last with the thick undercurrents of emotion he's trying to suppress, and he looked down because he's so furious, he's almost panting. His undershirt sticks to him, the sweat is slick on his neck, and he ought to have more control than this, but his temper is on a knife-edge.
If he'd said anything else, but Potter had called him 'Ben,' as if he were his father, as if he had right to demand his affection, to accept his authority, his comfort. Because, of course, he doesn't know, hasn't had the time to find out, that Hawkeye doesn't go by Ben, he hasn't for years, except for his father, who remembers when Hawkeye was still a child and his mother was still alive and they were still a happy family together.
Ben's a civilian, a boy in Crabapple Cove, with a beautiful, sweet mother and a protective, loving father, and an Irish setter named Whydah that follows at his heel from sunrise to sunset. Hawkeye's this man who wound up in Korea, hurt badly by a woman he'd loved, who he would have married, a man left behind by his own best friend without a good-bye, who's been drinking his own liver into submission. Hawkeye's as far from Ben as he can get. Hawkeye doesn't even know himself anymore, sometimes. And the colonel called him 'Ben.'
Disgust with himself has transformed into fury at Potter in less than an instant. It all winds up together, like summer-dry tree stumps dumped in a bonfire, his anger at the army, his anger at the war, his anger at guns, bullets, healthy young men being mutilated, killed, his anger at being stuck here in this place.
And if Potter had gotten angry at him in return, that Hawkeye could take, marshal it into his own anger, turn it back on the war, the Army, Korea, but the colonel's too perceptive for that, too wise to offer a platitude. Potter doesn't say anything at all, just waits, in silence, attending. And that makes him angrier, lets the rein on his tongue loose that he's kept bridled so far around the colonel, and it comes out sharp and tight and mean:
"Why are you here, anyway —didn't you have enough already—who the hell signs up for three wars?"
Hawkeye expected a barked retaliation, a command to shut up, even a frosty silence. Potter's got a temper and a short fuse.
But a hand appeared on his right knee, Potter's hand, finely muscled, with lean fingers and slim knuckles, dusted with old white scars, the legacy of doing desperate surgery in makeshift places, the hands of an experienced, tough surgeon. It's warm and firm, the palm resting on his patella, the fingers splayed over the insertion of the quadriceps. The hand stays there, just resting on his knee, and he can feel the strength of that hand, and the restraint.
Hawkeye took a ragged breath and looked up. The colonel's looking at him with a look of such steadfast gentleness, that Hawkeye felt his gorge rising, with disquiet and a desire to throw-up. It's disappointment, he thought, no, it's more than that, it's shame, he realized, he's ashamed. If Potter had only gotten angry, but now, Hawkeye realized how terrible a question it was to ask, what an awful thing to demand. The colonel's a good man, and he's just asked an unforgiveable thing, a question he can't take back.
He had let his anger override his principles, and now he's attacked another man with words, not just attacked either, but with the intent to wound, to hurt. The colonel had made a mistake, yes, but only out of ignorance. Hawkeye had been out for blood, and repaying Potter's kindness with injury. It's revenge of the worst kind, on a decent man who's just a stand-in punching bag for a bigger system.
He opened his mouth to say something, an apology, a retraction, an offer to go sleep with the colonel's horse, but the colonel beats him to it.
"There was a boy." Potter said, and then fell silent. "A German kid, probably eighteen or nineteen. Not much older than I was. If he's still alive, he'd probably have grandchildren now." He chuckled, a low dark sound in the back of his throat, and he shook his head.
They were so young, Hawkeye thought, feeling ancient at his twenty-seven. Probably both blue-eyed, Potter with dark hair, the German kid with blond. Hawkeye, caught in the beginning of the story despite himself, leaned forward, so he can hear better. Potter's voice is very low, and he's speaking huskily, half to himself, half to Hawkeye.
He's only known the colonel for a few months, but he's already realized that the colonel has two kinds of war stories. There are the ones that are full of fanciful detail, full of emotion, bravado even, the kind that get trotted out for nice young ladies or older aunts. It's not that they aren't true, of course, most of the time, but that they could belong to anyone, any soldier, a newspaper, a cartoon.
And then there's the second sort, matter of fact, straightforward, the kind that's bare and real, where the horror and terror and suffering all build up in the spaces between his words. The kind where Potter looks right through you, as if he's just re-lived his own death, or someone else's.
"It was WWI. Meuse-Argonne Offensive. We were both lost in the Argonne forest. I didn't even know he was a German, we were so covered in mud. There was always mud, everywhere, thick, clinging mud. You'd currycomb a horse clean, or pick his hooves, and then turn around and have to do it all again."
His voice caught, and then Potter cleared his throat, rolling his glass from hand to hand.
"We were lost." He repeated, almost hoarsely, and Hawkeye feels the scene building, he can picture it, the colonel almost doesn't need to narrate, his imagination has always been vivid and effortless, and he's seen enough young soldiers here in Korea to imagine two young boys, lost, in oversized army uniforms, trudging through the walls of mud, shivering. The German boy's a hair taller, but Potter is stouter, with the musculature of a farm-boy.
They'd be hunched in on themselves, with those heavy wool uniforms plastered in thick, brown gelatinous sludge, pulled left and right in their strides by their own exhaustion. And rifles, hanging from their arms, or clenched to their shoulders, tin hats slouched to the side of their heads, bayonets belted tightly at their waists. Just like his own toy soldiers, but taller, younger.
"The Argonne forest was as near a thing to hell as I've ever seen. Huge forest, with big, thick trees, some of them shot off or blown up ten or twelve feet from the ground, the whole thing a maze of branches and barbed wire, torn up with mines and shell craters, peppered with machine gun nests. There were German fortifications everywhere."
"I had gotten lost from my outfit, and that day it was cold—drizzly—there was this thick fog coming down in the gloom, and my legs were numb to the hip, and I was so tired that if I stopped moving, I would've fallen asleep where I stood. There weren't many trenches in the Argonne, but I spied a thick tree with big roots kind of like a cradle, and I just lay in it. Except there was someone already there."
The German, Hawkeye thought, instinctively.
"Maybe I knew he was German; maybe I didn't. But we just curled up together—like puppies, I suppose. It was like sleeping with my brothers."
Potter turned to look at Hawkeye, gave a little quirk of a smile. It stood out in the tiredness of his face. Hawkeye didn't smile back, but something in him warmed to that smile.
"I should have done something, he was a German, and that's who we were fighting. Except I was cold and tired, and I didn't want to have to kill anyone anymore. Not the boy who was sleeping up curled next to me, like my brother William had done in our bed at home."
Hawkeye doesn't want to think about that, the open admission that one man might have to kill another, but he wonders how many of the boys he's treated have done the same.
Don't think about it, he insisted, that's not the end of the story. That can't be the end of the story. Not the colonel with his kind hands and ready smiles and the way he speaks to every single one of the kids who come through this MASH, gruff and prickly but with a heart of gold underneath.
"When dawn came, we just walked away from each other there. That's what I know. Sometimes I remember it the other way—that he never walked away."
That I'd killed him, the colonel doesn't say, but Hawkeye heard it all the same. Hawkeye doesn't know what to say, doesn't even know how to breathe. If he puts a word wrong here, the colonel will back off and shut down, and Hawkeye will have lost one more friend without a goodbye. He feels odd, and cold, and his fingers have gone numb because he's clenching his glass too tightly.
He's been lying in bed with a killer; he was only a boy, it was a war but that doesn't make it right; it was a long time ago, but it was still murder. I'm sorry, Hawkeye thought, but that's hopelessly inadequate, saying I understand is blatantly dishonest, wishing it were different is both impotent and unjust.
He used to be better at this, feeling the edges of other people's feelings, the lay of a social minefield, but now he swings, fast and hard, between emotional extremes. He used to have words to say things, clever things, easy things, but now he finds he says what he means.
"Does it get better?" He asked, finally, finding the words sticking in his throat.
Does the blood ever wash off?
This pain, his words say but his mouth doesn't, is like your pain. How did you bear it? Potter's eyes are a pale gleam in his face, and unreadable, but he's looking at Hawkeye, tracing down the lines in his face and the beginnings of the silver in his hair. It's almost as though he is looking down the long, long run of years, to a better future that Hawkeye can't see yet.
"It gets easier." Potter pronounced, carefully, letting each word fall with the precision of a priest. "Not better, but easier."
Some things you don't forget, his gaze added, coming back to rest on Hawkeye's face, you just live with them. Legs, Hawkeye thought, arms, the dead bodies going out in a trickle, the rushing stream of the wounded, the blood caked around his boots.
"I'm not sure that's comforting." Hawkeye admitted, feeling hollow with a strange mixture of fear and gratitude.
"Who said it was comforting?" The colonel said, sharply, his words terse and clipped, a whole lifetime of suffering condensed into one thought. "You get through it, Hawkeye." He said, shortly, at last.
Hawkeye's not sure that that is comforting either, but sometimes it isn't about comfort, but about what's true and what isn't.
It gets easier.
When Potter had said it, it sounded like a promise, or more, like a benediction. Like a man who had gotten through hell, and made it good, with kindness, diligence, loyalty. But when he thought it, it sounded like a noose around his neck, like it getting easier means giving up something of himself.
The silence between them ought to be awkward, as it stretches out and thins Potter's words to the darkness of the Korean night, but Hawkeye finds it more honest, more familiar. He knows something of Potter now, more than that he prefers straight blades and always triple-checks his prescriptions of morphine. He ought to think something about the colonel—be angry or upset or something– about being in bed with a soldier, a man with blood on his hands, but he lets it go. It was a long time ago, he allowed.
Potter stood up, leaned over, and plucked Hawkeye's glass from his hands, pushing down on Hawkeye's shoulder with the slightest pressure. Hawkeye's body followed it down. It must be the bourbon which is making him feel so worn-out.
"Go back to sleep, Hawkeye." He murmured, and then his hand is gone, and Hawkeye let the deep pull of uncertainty settle back behind his ribs. He feels a great mixture of different things, gratitude, disgust, anger, comfort, frustration, fear, and c'est la guerre, isn't it, that inspired great deeds and great sins.
"Night, colonel." He managed to say, shutting his eyes against the darkness. The dreams might come, but it gets easier. Before he slides back into sleep, he thought to himself, it might be true, but it isn't any comfort.
If it gets any easier, he'll go mad.
.
.
When Hawkeye wakes up, the blankets slide down to his shoulder as he sat up in a mussed collection of olive-drab, shaggy black and a long-drawn-out groan that ends in a jaw-popping yawn. He stretched with all the vertebrae in his back, feeling the pull all the way down to the end of his toes. The bed feels positively palatial with no one else in it.
"Were you a cat in another life? You'll give yourself osteoarthritis." Potter said, looking back at him in his shaving mirror and raising an eyebrow.
"Good morning to you, too, colonel." Hawkeye replied, if not cheerily, at least flippantly, rubbing at his eye with the heel of his palm. He's slept more deeply than he has in days, and he has the tautness of a dehydration headache to prove it.
He watched the colonel shaving a moment, the short sure strokes of the straight razor flashing over Potter's cheek and jaw. Potter pulled the skin tight near his eye, shaved the final plane of his cheek, wiped the razor clean and studied his face in the mirror.
"Williams pulled through, we've got three evac buses coming in an hour, and we've got hot breakfast to look forward to." Potter sounded positively sunny.
"And good night." Hawkeye quipped, rolling his whole head in sarcastic disbelief in addition to his eyes. He debated lying back down on the bed but thought Potter might throw him out into the camp in his civvies, and he'd pushed the colonel enough for one day. And it was only—
"What time is it?" He mock-grumbled, leaning over to pull his pants on.
"Ten o'clock. And," the colonel thundered, not to be interrupted, as an irregular bringer of jollity, working up a lather with his brush again, "there's mail."
"O," Hawkeye hummed, springing for his clothes, good news added onto a good mood, "tidings of comfort and joy—" he sang, dressing as quickly as he could,
"You could shave—"
"No time, colonel, O mail" Hawkeye replied, cheerfully, dismissing the suggestion. "Tidings of comfort and joy," He repeated, raising his volume and broadening his voice. There was the teensiest bit of vibrato at the end. What could Hawkeye say, he was full of joy!
"Good morning to you, too, Hawkeye." Potter repeated, chuckling at his sudden zeal.
Hawkeye waved a gloved hand behind him as he went out into the cold—first, he wanted to check Williams himself, then breakfast, then mail—or maybe mail first, then breakfast. Mail would give him courage to face the Mess firing line.
Abruptly, Hawkeye stopped inside the Post-OP door. It's almost as if nothing had happened between the colonel and himself, but when he thought about it, when he had time to think about it, something had happened.
It's only the aftermath of last night, he argued to himself, but knew that to be a lie.
"God rest ye merry, gentlemen," Hawkeye sang over to the patient in the bed nearest him, unhooking the chart from the end of thebed, blazoning on a smile over the unease in his heart. There's a truce on, and there ought to be peace on earth at Christmastime. He'd make this good. "Let nothing you dismay—"
Something had happened: he hadn't met Potter's eyes.