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You went away a human, but you will come back a newspaper clipping, cast in sallow shadows of black and white. Yellowing shades of grey carve circles under your eyes and etch the slivers of gum between your teeth. Back home, you were one in a million; here you are a dime a dozen. Lives disposable like bullets. You are of marginal value because of your spindly pale hands that can juggle intestines rapid-fire, and so they picked you out, the flower in the bunch with the thickest stem. Carve me an appendix, they say, knit me a soldier.
And you are deposited in an officer's club in Kimpo, starched and clean and too fresh for this godforsaken hellhole.
That was the day you met Hawkeye Pierce and his indolent smile and irreverent eyes. That was the day you took a crash course in holding your liquor to avoid the inevitable insanity a place like Korea tends to bring about. That burning sparkle in his eyes in the officer’s club when he was mourning the near miss of his friend (Topper, was it?) and his terrified kind of pragmatism and stoicism during the shelling make you feel like he's the only person in this war worth knowing.
---
Hawkeye looks after you, makes sure Burns doesn’t steal your socks, fresh from the States, smelling of laundry detergent and America (the idealized, foreign place it is to these men is still your reality, you are undergoing a molten paradigm shift). He smiles at you beneath his surgeon’s mask in OR, and you know he's smiling because those shocking blue eyes are crinkled at the corners and you hold onto that smile like it’s an anchor amid a sea of crimson tides, spurting veins and hemorrhages.
Hawkeye’s hand drifts its way to your shoulder one night, dragging you from the depth of a trauma-surgeon’s slumber and that's the night that you realize he is just as human as you are. His eyes are vividly, desperately azure and welling with tears.
“Nightmare?” You ask, casting sleep aside, sitting up on the creaking wooden frame of your cot.
“I just. Needed. Um. Someone awake with me, for just a minute.” Hawkeye sits down next to your cot, on the compacted dirt floor, and you prop yourself up on one elbow and offer him your hand. He looks up at you with these war-torn eyes and you see everything he’s been hiding from you, hiding from everyone under his thick plaster veneer of sarcasm and righteous anger. His trembling fingers move toward your outstretched ones and you close the distance, enveloping his cold hand in yours, pulling it to your chest. You let his icy fingers settle, burn cold through your thin shirt and feel your heartbeat, steady, earthen, constant. He exhales shakily and closes his eyes, letting a tear slip down his cheek, only to be lost among the green folds of his fatigues.
You wait a soft, bitten-back moment.
“Are you all right?”
“I am now.” Hawkeye says, and the bright, hard, bitter way he says it gives you an acute, indescribable feeling where his fingertips are still pressed firmly to your chest.
---
No one man is completely infallible, and you begin to notice the deep tension accruing in the taut blue veins on the back of Hawkeye’s hands, the ridged line of his vertebrae. You don’t ask him how long he’s been here because you know he’ll just toss you a sucker-punch of a harsh laugh and say something oh-so-bitingly clever like ‘too long’ or ‘since dinosaurs roamed the earth.’ You’d deserve it because the question walks an odd, unspoken line, tilting just so toward undermining, and he is chief surgeon, after all, but in keeping with that same morbid curiosity that sent you to medical school, you want to study him just a little bit. Dissect him.
If Hawkeye Pierce were an organ that you could cut open and pore over to study, he would be no gallbladder, that’s for sure, and that he has no respect for his liver is also something you can say with certainty.
His feet loll off the end of his bunk as he balances his third (sixth?) martini on his flat stomach and watches you as you wash your argyle socks, the pair you’re never going to wear as long as you stay in this hellhole, no matter what happens, because they are a woolen tether to Mill Valley nights. You need all the connections you can manage to obtain because it's becoming harder to remember Erin’s gurgling, sweet little bell of a laugh just by looking at a sun-faded photograph.
It's as though he sees your jaw tighten at the ache caused by the thought of your beautiful little (growing bigger every day you’re not there) daughter, and Hawkeye knows that’s what you’re thinking about. How, you couldn’t say, but you can tell by the way his eyebrows drift together as he watches you futilely wring the socks out again and again that he knows. He wordlessly sits up and pours you a martini. You accept with a nod and toast him halfheartedly, knocking half of it back in one revolting, perfect sip.
He is exhausted and half-clothed in bloody surgical garb and half-drunk and a little bit of everything, really, and he asks you in a low, clotted voice if you want to talk about it, and the thought blossoms underneath your tongue that he is more than a little bit perfect.
---
And one day you wake up to the odd, packed-brown-sugar realization that you don’t simply love Hawkeye Pierce. You’re in love with him.
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It's not until a full two weeks later that you summon every last ounce of your combat-training courage and kiss Hawkeye for the first time. He yields against you, melts towards you, and he tastes like cheap beer and gin, like salt and copper.
---
Hawkeye is and always has been your best friend, but now he is something both more far more comforting and far more daunting, something different.
Your eyes meet from over surgical masks as he cuts and you siphon and stitch, and the tension in your shoulders eases when you remember that different is his specialty.
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You went away a human and, with Hawkeye’s hand in yours, you will return as one.