The clock was a cruel mistress. Its hands toyed and fingered Margaret's emotions, heart, hopes, and dreams without any care to stop. Every time she checked the doors for her fiancé's streaking black hair, his sapphire eyes, or his raggedly adorable appearance, he wasn't there, and her heart cracked at the seams. Each time it was like living as a child, waking on Christmas morning to find an empty tree.

Helplessly, she collapsed at the cold, bitter seat that nipped at her skin. Moving her hands to rest on her midsection, she thought of her child. Their child.

A daydream, she mused, would heal her. She could slip away from reality and all its cruel hits to a world that she designed, created, and controlled.

Shutting her eyes, Margaret allowed fantasy to bend the arm of reality into submission.

"Hawkeye!" Margaret shouted, her words echoing throughout the house and bouncing off the walls towards where, hopefully, he resided. Her husband could be late anytime he pleased if he arrived on-par with her desire today. "Are you coming?"

He didn't respond, and just as she sucked in a breath to holler again, he stole it away. "Happy anniversary, Major." The once forced, cruel, unhappy title was now an endearing, loving name.

Her knight stood in the kitchen doorframe. There wasn't a thing about him that she would change. In fact, she could only ever wish that he would stay this way forever. If he changed, if time marched forward, his feelings could change. However, if he stayed like this, if time froze, he would always love her. Yes, that was her greatest wish, to kick time into unconsciousness so it would do her bidding and leave her husband just as he was.

A tightly-knit bouquet of roses appeared in her line of vision. "I missed you at work," he murmured as she stepped towards him, admiring the blooms. "How's the baby doing?"

"Fine. She missed you." Tilting her head up to meet his eyes, she admitted, as if she were embarrassed, "So did I."

That boyish grin of his found its way onto his face. "Cute."

His arms snaked around her waist, tight and protective, as she stumbled to place the flowers on the kitchen table. His gaze never left her, never moved, and never broke contact. The intimacy, even after enjoying marriage for a year, still gave her a lump of passionate emotion in her throat. How, she had no idea. Perhaps it was him. Yes, he and only he could bring out stop and start her heart at a moment's notice. "Hawk," she murmured, his lips taunting hers.

He smiled at the way he drove her mad. "Yeah?"

Giving up on his game, Margaret rolled her eyes. "Oh, shut up." She threw her arms around his neck and crashed her lips into his without a pause. Any brief flash of breath she had held onto was gone.

His hands pressed against her back in a tight hold. His lips left hers for her neck, and she nearly collapsed at his touch, the one she craved day and night. "Hawk, I love you." Her hands brushed over his shirt towards the buttons, and he kissed her again. He tasted of gin. She thought, for a moment, that she could get quite drunk kissing him as much as she was.

He pressed her up against the wall, and the kiss grew hard and passionate as she grabbed at his shirt. In a snap, the buttons gave up, and she pressed a warm kiss to his jaw.

He pulled away for a moment. "Upstairs?" She smiled at how much of his breath she had stolen.

Her own lungs gasping, she nodded. "Upstairs."

"Ma'am?" An MP walked to her, his glasses slipping down the bridge of his nose as he eyed a clip board, one that Margaret assumed held her fate. "You're Major Houlihan, right?" He didn't wait for her to respond. "You've gotta get on the plane in fifteen minutes."

"What?" The shock sounded hollow in her own ears. She should not have been surprised, with how the rest of her life had been knocking her in the head the past few months. "I thought the next plane didn't leave–"

"I know, I know," he waved her off with a carless voice, muffled by the cigar that hung limply from his lips. "Change in schedule, ma'am. Ya got fifteen minutes."

He wasn't going to make it. As she bid a hasty, crude farewell to the MP, her jostled mind rustled through memory lane in search for her last words to her fiancé. What had she last said to him? What had her last words been? She remembered yelling. A lot. Yelling at him, and hollering awful things to his face.

Wind crashed through the door and nipped at her fingers. She hardly dialed the call. "M*A*S*H 4077th please, yes, again." Every second had to be a minute, and that was just time that Hawkeye wasn't there.

With a click and a sputter, Klinger's frazzled, if not panicked, voice rang through the phone. "Major? What are you calling for, isn't Captain Pierce there by now?"

"No, of course he's not!" Her Houlihan tone could have physically slapped anyone within her line of vision. "When did he leave?"

Margaret didn't want to acknowledge the pause in Klinger's hesitant voice. "Uh, he left a few hours ago, I would have thought he'd be there by now. Maybe he's–"

The line died in her hands.

"Klinger?" Her voice went unheard, and she slammed the phone back into the receiver. It figured. It figured that, when she and Hawkeye had lived through the whole war a compound-crossing apart, now, with the world crumbling beneath their feet, she should fall for him now. It only made the type of twisted sense that she received in her life anymore.

"Come on!" The MP hollered harshly from outside. He opened the door wide for her, and she knew, if she stepped out, she might never see Hawkeye. If she stepped out that door, she would get on the plane, and Hawkeye would have missed her. If something happened to him, that was it. It would be over, and, again, the last thing she would have done with him was fight. Could she not say goodbye to men without it ending in disaster?

She clutched her bag and stared out the door. She turned, and another exit, where Hawkeye should have run through, into her arms, stood proudly before her.

He had to come. He wouldn't leave her hanging. The war couldn't take everything from her. He was going to walk through that door, with that annoyingly perfect smile on his face, shout something to her, and she would collapse into his arms, like she always did.

"I don't got all day!"

A minute. Please, one more minute.

The wooden panel remind firmly shut.

She could no longer take the blows, the hits, the beatings to her spirit, and she turned, walked out the door, and headed for the plane.