Chapter Text
It was only when he found himself sprawled out on the floor of the Swamp mere inches away from a fresh cadaver, licking blood off his hands like so much boysenberry syrup, that he realized he might have a serious problem.
Stop the tape, swap the reels, roll it back—how did he get here?
It started, as all the most salient moments of his life seemed to lately, with a shipment of wounded.
In medias res :
“I don’t know,” Hawkeye said, glancing up to catch BJ’s eye. They were both wrist-deep in the same abdominal cavity.
“Not the oddest thing I’ve seen,” BJ said, his brows lowered, obviously lying. “But it’s up there.”
Hawkeye gently traced up a ureter—intact—to a firm, fibrously elasticate pouch: kidney, also intact. He shot a concerned look towards the anesthetist. “And he’s…?”
The anesthetist shook her head. “No pulse.”
“Obviously,” Hawkeye said, watching the kid’s heart not beat.
“But he’s breathing,” the anesthetist said.
“Uh-huh,” Hawkeye said, also watching the kid’s lungs inflate.
It was a bad injury. The kind most people didn’t see the other side of. The kid had been hit nearly head-on with a frag, and his abdominal cavity was full of twitching ground meat and blood and metal shards. His blood pressure was a flat zero. It had been for hours, ever since he’d allegedly died in battalion aid, then sat up with a peephole torn through his center and asked if anybody had any food, because frankly he was starving.
He looked up when BJ made a quiet, nauseated noise.
“Okay?” he asked.
BJ nodded. He looked pale, sweat shining on his forehead. “Think we’re about ready to close.”
“Uh-huh,” Hawkeye said, focusing on checking over the bowel, making sure they’d caught every perforation. The temperature inside the body was noticeably cool, even through his gloves, and he frowned. Some sort of metabolic problem, maybe? Hypothermia? Something slowing down the kid’s internal workings so efficiently it looked, to an outside observer, like death?
“Closing,” BJ said, atypically flat. The kid had shaken everyone. There were certain things one expected from the human body, even in extremis. All the blood and viscera and biological gloop concomitant with life was, at least, conceptually consistent gloop. It was a gloop that was in many ways predictable. There were variations, every person a slight deviation from the mean, but they were identifiable to a mean. There were universal truths. Slice a man open, he’ll bleed. Push him, he’ll fall. Stop his heart, he’ll die.
What did it make a man who broke the rules? More than human? Less?
He accepted a suture needle from Margaret, her eyes huge and blue above her mask. He readjusted his grip, gloves slick with blood, and looped the suture through the dermis, leaving a few millimeters’ space from the wound margin. He shifted, moving to make the near loop, when—
Absolute apocalypse. The sound of the explosion was life-shattering, and horribly, immediately close. The lights snapped off, plunging them into darkness as the ground rocked, literally, physically, rolled under their feet, sending bottles of epinephrine sliding off of shelves, bundles of bandages raining down from on high. Hawkeye flinched minutely, a sharp sting registering in his palm as he moved to shield the body below him from falling dust.
When the noise settled and the lights came back on, his stomach dropped.
Carefully he pulled his hands away from the body, letting BJ finish closing.
“Alright?” BJ asked, mattress-stitching like a champ.
“Well,” he said, considering the needle hooked into his hand. “I’ve never claimed to be clairvoyant, but all of a sudden I’m seeing a lot of phlebotomy labs in my future.”
Margaret gasped, and then started crowding him towards the scrub room. “Running water. Quickly.”
“Nurse Houlihan,” he said, planting his weight, “one moment, if you don’t mind.”
He pulled the needle out, turning it along its hooked curve. The needle dragged backwards through the white rubber of his glove, pulling heterochthonous blood down with it through the punctured material. Maybe he should have washed the glove off first, before breaking the seal between the needle and the rubber. This was bad practice. Still, he turned the needle until he felt the tip recede beneath the skin of his palm, re-entering the exit wound. Another pull and it tugged out of his skin, and then glove, with a sick, frictioned feeling.
He dropped the needle into a waiting basin and let Margaret push him bodily out of the OR. She pulled his gloves off and shed her own, before she turned on the sink.
“Keep it bleeding,” she told him, pulling on a fresh pair of gloves.
“Yessir,” he said, and went for the soap. The needle-stick didn’t look so bad, really. Just a pair of puncture wounds where the needle bit into the fleshiest part of his palm. It wasn’t bleeding, though, which was making him nervous. He aggravated the wound, squeezing at it under the running water, breathing through the minor combination sting of the soap and the pressure. Nothing.
He held his hand up to Margaret. “I don’t seem to be springing a leak.”
Margaret took his hand in her gloved ones. She shifted it back and forth, examining it under the light, before she stuck it back under the water and scrubbed.
“Ow,” he said pointedly, and then, when she tugged at his arm to get a better angle, “Really, ow .”
“You’re fine,” she said sternly, though her eyes were worried. “You’re sure it hooked you?”
“This Pierce was pierced,” he confirmed, drawing his hand back to look at it. The flesh of his palm appeared essentially unblemished, if not a little pink from thorough scrubbing.
“It looks like you weren’t.” Margaret pulled off her mask.
Hawkeye flexed his hand. No pain. No puncture marks. Maybe it’d only stuck him through the stratum corneum. Hooked through harmlessly, the way he used to frighten the girls in his elementary class by sticking a needle through the thinnest layer of skin on a fingertip, crowing look what I can do, fascinated as he always had been and always would be by the functioning of the organic fragile thing that both carried and was him. “Might’ve just got me through the epidermis,” he told Margaret, dropping his hand in relief.
Margaret nodded consideringly. “I still want to get a blood panel out of you.”
“That makes two of us,” he said, and stretched, his shoulder popping.
He glanced through the window into the OR. BJ was manually checking the not-dead kid’s not-pulse, looking openly ill.
Margaret stepped between him and the door, forcing him to step back. “You know the rules. Scrub out and get some sleep.”
“Ugh,” Hawkeye said, hating the idea of ditching BJ in the OR with Frank, hating it viscerally. “Look, if it didn’t even stick me—”
“No,” Margaret said firmly. “Go. Sleep. In the morning—”
“It is the morning,” Hawkeye said, checking the clock.
“Fine,” she said, rolling her eyes. “In twelve hours, we’ll put another needle in you. Try not to die of a savior complex in the meantime.”
“Hep won’t show on a lab a day after a stick,” Hawkeye said, feeling suddenly tired. “Could be four weeks. Could be half a year.”
“Would catch a hemorrhagic fever infection, most likely. And we’ll take a sample from the source patient, too. If he comes back clean you’re clear to operate. Pierce,” Margaret said, touching his shoulder, “you’re going to be okay.”
“Okay,” he said mildly, and watched her head back into the OR, back to BJ and Frank and Potter, to the anesthetists and nurses, phlebotomists and enlisted men, and the kid with a frozen heart and a stranglehold on life.
///
“Private John, 11213744,” Hawkeye read, glancing down the chart. Cardiac arrest - nonfatal , somebody had penned in a barely-legible scrawl. Condition ongoing. Under that was the panel of tests Margaret had run a few days ago. Sure enough, the kid was clean as a whistle, and Hawkeye was cleared to go on doctoring.
“Kai,” the kid said, sitting up in bed.
“Hi, Kai,” Hawkeye said. “I’m Doctor Pierce. How’re you feeling?”
“Bored,” Kai said. “When’re you folks gonna let me outta here?”
“Well,” Hawkeye said, letting the chart fall back against the metal of the bed. “That depends on your definition of ‘out.’”
“Back to the front?” the kid asked, wary. He had a distinct rural twang. “They can’t send me back. I just about was the Johnny that got his gun out there.”
That surprised a laugh out of Hawkeye, and he looked the kid over again. He was young, that was a given, but he was also rangy, obviously relatively new to his height given the way he kept his elbows close. Probably the kid had spent the last few months accidentally clocking his trenchmates in the ribs and getting whacked for his trouble. He also looked a touch sallow, his skin pale, his under-eyes bruised, his red-brown hair curling limply over his forehead.
“No, you’re not going back in,” Hawkeye said. “That’s the good news. You’re going to get an honorable discharge. Somebody’ll be around to pin some metal on you soon. The other good news is you’re recovering incredibly well.”
“Yeah?” Kai said, not looking like he bought it too much. “You lying to me?”
Hawkeye bit the inside of his cheek, feeling fonder of the kid by the minute. He looked around, and pulled up a chair. “No. That’s the truth. The sort of injury you had, most people don’t pull through from that. And if they do, it’s touch-and-go. But you? You’re just trucking along like it never happened at all.”
“Yeah?” Kai asked again, more friendly. “It’s just that you folks keep coming in here every few hours takin’ my pulse and my blood and everything. Don’t say why or nothing.”
“So, the blood,” Hawkeye said, leaning forward companionably. “There was an incident in the OR. I and my colleague Dr. Hunnicutt were stitching you up, a shell blew nearby, and I, fraidy-cat that I am, jumped. In the process I stuck myself with the needle I had been using on you.” He turned his hand, palm up, towards Kai. “When that happens, we have to test your blood to make sure I’m not going to get sick.”
“And I’m alright?”
“All your blood tests came back normal,” Hawkeye said. “Which means I can keep operating, and not worry that I might expose any patients to something that could make them sick.”
Kai nodded. “And the rest of it?”
Hawkeye sighed, and looked at the floor, rotating his right ankle as he tried to decide how to respond. “First,” he said slowly, “the last piece of good news. You’re alive.”
Kai gave him a look, sharp and nearly annoyed.
“Remember that,” Hawkeye told him seriously, and then held the chestpiece of his stethoscope between his hands to warm it. “May I?”
“Guess so,” Kai said, scooting forward in his cot. He pushed his shirt up to his chin.
Hawkeye glanced clinically over his torso, noting the nearly-perfectly healed shrapnel entry wounds, and the long, faded incision mark twisting across his belly. It looked like he’d been operated on a decade ago. Certainly not four days past.
He shook his head and donned the stethoscope, placing the diaphragm over the kid’s chest. Medium-pitch bronchovesicular breath sounds, healthy lungs, even inspiratory and expiratory durations. And nothing else.
“Okay,” Hawkeye said. “Could you breathe in, really deeply, and then breathe out as much as you can, and hold it there?” He closed his eyes, listened, and still came up with nothing, even absent breath sounds. “You can breathe again,” he said, pulling the stethoscope off.
“So?” Kai asked.
Hawkeye looked around. Margaret was speaking quietly to a kid in the corner holding a paperback. The cot beside them was empty.
“One second,” Hawkeye said, getting up to rifle through a drawer in the nurses’ station. He sterilized the stethoscope and wiped the earpieces dry, and then returned to Kai’s bedside. “Have a listen.”
Kai obligingly donned the stethoscope, chrome framing his face.
Hawkeye positioned the diaphragm over the kid’s chest, watching his expression.
After a few moments, Kai held his breath. Another moment went by, and he looked at Hawkeye. “Contraption’s busted.”
Hawkeye shook his head, and then pressed the diaphragm to his own chest, the metal cold against his skin. It hadn’t picked up much heat from Kai.
Kai frowned, and then pulled the stethoscope off. “I don’t get it.”
“Neither do we,” Hawkeye said. “For whatever reason, when you got hit on the field, your heart stopped. But you didn’t.”
“And that’s the bad news,” Kai surmised.
“Yeah,” Hawkeye said. “That’s the bad news. They’re going to have you stop over at Tokyo for a more thorough looking-over than we can give you here. They’ll see if there’s something we missed, and they’ll make sure you’re okay to go home.”
“Home,” Kai repeated. “Really? I’m really getting out of here? For sure?”
“For sure,” Hawkeye said. “Look, you’re taking this really well. Are you sure you don’t have any questions for me? Anything you want to know?”
Kai shrugged. “There anything I can ask you would know the answer to?”
Hawkeye looked down at his own palm, and the unmarked skin there.
“Didn’t think so. Anyway,” Kai said, grinning, “I know how it happened.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. See, I was up on that hill, an’ there were a hell of a lot of noise and shells comin’ down around me, an’ I says, I says out loud and all: ‘God, if you get me outta here, you let me live through this, I’m gonna go on home and never miss a day of church in my life.’”
“Divine intervention?”
“Well,” Kai said, looking shifty. “Probably it was that. But right after I also clicked my heels three times an’ said there’s no place like home. So it’s God or Hollywood magic.”
“Either or. And where’s home?” Hawkeye asked, settling in to listen.
“Colby, Kansas,” Kai said. “Oh, Doc, you wouldn’t believe the view out there.”
“In Kansas?”
“Flat as all get-out,” Kai said. “Flatter’n hell. You hold a level up at the horizon and it near sits perfect on the line. You can see forever, ‘til everything gets lost in the blue and the distance. Out on top a barn, warm September evening with fresh bread and butter and the smell of hay in the air, your best girl up there tellin’ a story, and you listenin’, well, that’s what I miss most of all. Silly, missing just a small thing like that.”
“Big things are made up of lots of small things,” Hawkeye said. “And home’s a plenty big thing. You know what I miss?”
“What?”
“Waking up early for school in late October. The crisp air, the dew on your windshield, maybe even an early frost coating every last blade of grass in diamond-glitter. Precocious jack-o-lanterns already starting to turn to mush on a neighbor’s porch. After school there’d be chocolate crinkle cookies fresh out of the oven, so heavy with powdered sugar if you weren’t careful you could aspirate it.”
“You miss school?” Kai asked. “Aren’t you too old for it?”
“Plenty too old,” Hawkeye said, even though he didn’t feel it. “Not like you. You can go back home and get more school, if you want.”
“And do what?”
Hawkeye shrugged. “Whatever you want. What do you want to do?”
Kai sat back, and then lowered himself onto one elbow. “You know I always assumed I’d go right back and farm. Not much else needs doing in Colby.”
“You don’t have to stay in Colby, if you don’t want to,” Hawkeye said. “You could go somewhere else. You’ve already been in Korea. Anywhere closer than that’ll be no challenge at all.”
“You know,” Kai said, tilting his head, “the WPA came on through Colby a few years back. We got a hospital. St. Thomas. Big old thing, right over where the high school used to be. Got a chapel, too, and an emergency place like this one. Lots of people working there. I never thought about it too much but I guess guys like you have to come from somewhere, huh?”
“We do,” Hawkeye said. “We come from all sorts of places. Mill Valley, Crabapple Cove, Boston. Even Colby, Kansas.”
“Uh-huh,” Kai said, laying down. “Maybe I go back and see if I can get me a white coat, too. Owe some folks in ‘em more than I can say.”
“I’ll write you a letter of recommendation for a place in Boston, if you need one,” Hawkeye told him quietly, standing and pushing his chair away. He walked away feeling blurry and dislocated, more than half on the roof of a Kansas barn, shingles warm against his back, smelling bread and dirt and the sharply clean air, looking out to a horizon that didn’t end so much as fade away.
///
“Uh-huh,” Hawkeye said, settling his weight on an elbow. “Well, no. I wasn’t aware of that. Might be new, I think we would’ve noticed.”
BJ looked up, away from the papers he was filing. Hawkeye raised his eyebrows, and tilted his head.
On the phone the fellow from Tokyo General was audibly rifling through a chart. “Hypothermic. Badly. But…”
“Let me guess,” Hawkeye said. “He seems completely fine?”
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” the man said. “He’s sitting at eighty-nine degrees Fahrenheit. He shouldn’t even be conscious.”
“And that’s in addition to the permanent state of cardiac arrest.”
“Right.”
Hawkeye sighed, and then winced, his side cramping. He’d been hunched over the desk too long. “Look, you’ve had him for almost a month. If you haven’t figured him out by now, can’t you just let him go home?”
“But his condition is getting worse.”
“Worse than a stopped heart,” Hawkeye said.
Audible hesitation. “Well, no. But he won’t eat. And the hypothermia is new. And he’s been complaining of insomnia.”
“Insomnia!” Hawkeye said, hitting the desk with the flat of his palm. BJ moved in, curious, and put his ear next to the phone. “Insomnia and no appetite. He’s stuck in a hospital a world away from home, after he took a load of shrapnel to the gut. He’s probably shell-shocked. Call a psychiatrist, why don’t you? Even better, make sure he’s not going to keel over on the first plane home, and get him set up with the VA in Colby, Kansas for a follow up. I’m telling you, if you haven’t figured it out yet, you can’t hold him until you do. He’s discharged.”
“But the hypothermia—”
“Is concerning, yes. I don’t like it any more than you do. But you’ve had him for a month. A month. His condition is otherwise stable, correct?”
“Correct,” the man said.
“And his honorable discharge came through?”
“Yes.”
“Then why are you still holding him? If this were any other injury, he’d be back in the states receiving treatment two weeks ago. Why is this different? Because it’s new? It’s not contagious, it’s stable, we’ve thrown every test we can at him. Let the doctors at home do the same.”
There was another long pause, and Hawkeye let out an aggrieved sigh, pressing down on the ache in his side. It only intensified in response, and he grit his teeth. He needed to sleep. Badly.
“I’ll see what I can do,” the man said at last. “The kid wants to talk to you.”
“Sure,” Hawkeye said.
“Give it a minute, and we’ll put him on.”
“Okay,” Hawkeye said, and glanced towards BJ. “He wants to talk to me.”
“Got yourself a pal,” BJ said, coming around to sit on the edge of the desk. A stack of papers crinkled under the spread of his thigh.
Hawkeye pushed at his leg, knuckles indenting into the slight give of the vastus lateralis. “Get off my paperwork.”
BJ didn’t move, except to tap his knee with a dirty sneaker. “Tell him hello from me. And speedy travels.”
“If they ever let him out,” Hawkeye said, breathing out as a new, subtler pain took up residence behind his eyes. The line clicked, and somebody on the other side said, “Hello?”
“Hey, Kai,” Hawkeye said. “How are you?”
“Dr. Pierce?” Kai asked.
“Hawkeye,” Hawkeye corrected. “How are you doing?”
“Um,” the kid said. “Okay I guess. I told one of the nurses I was feeling really cold though and they took my temperature and apparently it wasn’t so good. And I’m still here, so not so good on that front, either.”
“I know,” Hawkeye said, closing his eyes. “I’m sorry. I’ll give them the what-for. They shouldn’t be keeping you away from home. They shouldn’t have taken you in the first place, but they shouldn’t be keeping you, either.”
“I know you’re trying,” Kai said, a verbal shrug.
Hawkeye rubbed at the bridge of his nose. He could feel BJ’s eyes on him. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay.”
“How are you really?” he asked. “They told me you’re not eating.”
“Or sleeping,” Kai said. “I don’t know. I try but everything makes me feel sort of sick. And I’m having these dreams. The kind that makes it so you don’t even want to go to bed.”
Hawkeye settled a palm into his orbital socket, pressing lightly, watching green and purple flares flash in the dark. “I know. I get those sometimes, too. I’ll try to get them to let you out. And if they do, you can find somebody to talk to.”
“A head doctor,” Kai said, unimpressed. “I guess if I keep on going on this way, I’ll end up with one. Anyway, I got to go.”
“Doctor Hunnicutt says hello,” Hawkeye said. “Our collective best to you. Shabby though it may be.”
“Thanks, Doc-Hawk,” the kid said. “Maybe I can see you stateside after all this, huh?”
“Sure,” Hawkeye said. “You have my address here. Send me a postcard from Colby.”
“I’ll send a picture of the watertower,” Kai said. “Bye now.”
“Bye,” Hawkeye said, and set the receiver down. He kept his eyes closed, and pushed a hand into his trapezius, trying to work out the tension there.
“Good kid,” BJ said, tapping his knee again. When Hawkeye opened his eyes, BJ was looking at him softly.
“What?” he asked, feeling very tired.
“Nothing. Long day. Let’s get some breakfast.”
Hawkeye felt his expression twist in response.
BJ’s brows drew together. “All good?”
As near as he could figure, it was seeming increasingly as though nothing was. But that wasn’t BJ’s fault. He inclined his head and pressed a hand to his middle, over the pain settling there. “I just can’t seem to find an appetite for stale toast and last year’s milk.”
BJ nodded, and then gave him another quick glance, his gaze sharpening into what Hawkeye had internally started calling his Dr. Hunnicutt stare. There was diagnostic intent in those eyes.
“What?” Hawkeye asked again. Thinking of trying to stomach breakfast was making him nauseous.
“You look off,” BJ informed him, like somebody who wasn’t sporting bruised undereyes and a distinctly unshaven face. “Are you feeling alright?”
Hawkeye tilted his head equivocatingly. “I’m starving, but not enough to risk my life on the eggs. I’ve got a cramp in my side, my head hurts a little, and, in case you haven’t noticed, there’s a war on.”
“Point taken,” BJ said, casting a despairing look in the direction of the mess. “I’m not looking forward to being sentenced to breakfast, either. Make sure you have something later, though. You’re looking a little wan lately.”
“Wan?” Hawkeye said. “Wan? What am I, a pasty little street urchin you’re taking home for the holidays? Wan, BJ, really? You should see yourself.”
BJ shrugged tiredly. “It’s been a bad few weeks for all of us. I haven’t seen the inside of my cot in two days. I’m just exercising all due professional and personal concern.”
“Consider your concern exercised,” Hawkeye said, at the forkroads of peevish and touched. “Go drink some coffee, it’ll help you sleep.”
“Whatever you say, Doctor,” BJ said, squinting at him in the low light of the office.
///
“Telegram for you, sir,” Radar said, coming into the OR. “You want I should read it?”
“Depends,” Hawkeye said. “Who’s it from?”
“Is it dirty?” BJ asked. “Read it loud if it is.”
“Smut peddler,” Frank scoffed. “Dirt, that’s all you two care about.”
“That’s not true,” Hawkeye said, wounded. “I care about filth, too.”
Margret made a disgusted sound, and Hawkeye had the presence of mind to feel a little bit bad.
“It’s from Tokyo,” Radar said, his glasses catching the fluorescence of the OR lights.
“Read on,” Hawkeye said.
“Dear Doctor Pierce stop,” Radar read.
“Stop what?” Hawkeye asked the room at large. “Clamp. Thanks.”
“Writing to inform you Private John 11213744 has been sent stateside as of this morning stop. Incident lessened ward treatment capacity stop. His bed was needed stop. Regards stop.”
“God forbid his regards continue,” Hawkeye said, pulling out a clump of bloody surgical gauze. It was a fairly straightforward gut injury, something he’d seen plenty of, but he was starting to sweat. He’d been having some stamina problems recently. He wondered if he was finally hitting his ignition point, if this was as hot as it could get before he’d burn out. “Wait. Incident?” he asked belatedly.
“Something happen to him?” BJ asked, catching his eye.
“It doesn’t say,” Radar said. “That’s all I got. Just ‘incident.’”
“I happen to know what incident they’re talking around,” Potter said. “First, how many have we got to go?”
“That’s all the big ones,” Radar said. “There’s just one guy has a broken wrist left.”
“I thought it was right,” BJ said. “Suture.”
“He’s left with the right wrist,” Radar said.
“Right,” Hawkeye said. He was becoming aware of an increasing pain in his stomach. It’d been coming and going for weeks, along with a series of unpredictable migraines. But as far as anybody could tell he was, physically, in great condition. All he was was overworked, and overstressed. Like that made it any better.
“I’ll take the wrist,” Frank said, pulling off his gloves. Klinger left and then came back, leading in the kid who was walking under his own power. They didn’t see too many of those.
Hawkeye looked back down at his patient, and then up at the nurse. Nurse Kolach. Just like the cake. He was horribly hungry. He hadn’t been eating well, recently, finding it harder than ever to force down army rations; that and the stomach pain had been dragging him through the wringer. He was dropping weight faster than he had even his first few weeks in camp. He needed to put the brakes on that somehow. More likely he just needed a break.
“Incident?” he asked Potter, counting sponges.
“Incident,” Potter confirmed. “Somebody broke in and robbed their blood bank.”
“What?” Hawkeye asked, craning his neck briefly to look at Potter. “Robbed?”
“Lots of missing units,” Potter said. “Whoever did it smashed the refrigeration unit, and the whole rest of the lot went off. Tanked their patient capacity, and now there’s a blood shortage. Better hope things stay tame while supply catches up, or we’ll be in dire straits.”
Hawkeye shook his head, and flattened his lips when the motion set a headache pulsing behind his eyes. For once he couldn’t think of anything clever to say. “That’s horrible,” he said, so quietly he figured maybe only Nurse Kolach heard him.
“I’m finished,” BJ said, stepping back from his table. “Klinger, you want to take this guy to post-op?”
Klinger came back with one of the enlisted men, his petticoat rustling. “Sure thing. Off we go.”
“Silk. Who would do something like that?” Hawkeye asked, and then blinked, his vision going fuzzy. He wasn’t feeling well at all. His voice sounded distant and tinny. A sharp pain shot through his stomach and he gasped.
Nurse Kolach gave him a worried look, but handed over a needle trailing silk.
“Terrible thing,” BJ said. “Robbing a hospital.”
“Uh-huh.” Hawkeye managed a few stitches, trying very hard to focus on anything but his increasing pain. It was quickly passing the threshold of what he would call normal, or managable. But he had a job to do.
“BJ,” he said tightly, making his way through another stitch. His hands were perfectly steady, the stitch spacing flawlessly even.
“Yeah?” BJ asked, and then looked over at him. “God. You look…”
“So handsome you’re speechless?” Hawkeye asked, blinking sweat out of his eyes.
“You’re pale as the backside of a DD214,” BJ said. “Need me to step in?”
“I’m just about done,” Hawkeye said. “Last stitch.”
“Pierce?” Potter asked.
“I’m okay,” Hawkeye said, tying off the silk. “Done now.”
He handed the needle back to nurse Kolach, and watched as Klinger came in and carted the guy away. He leaned down and balanced his weight on his elbows, rocking forward and backward. The pain slowly alleviated, edging off into manageable again.
“What was that?” BJ asked, closer than he expected.
“Oh, you know,” Hawkeye said, upbeat.
“I don’t,” BJ said. “But if you say I do I’ll believe you.”
“Just a little Monday misery,” Hawkeye said, and straightened up. Frank was putting the finishing touches on setting the guy’s wrist, and Potter had just closed his last patient.
“Need any help, Frank?” Hawkeye asked.
“Not from you,” Frank said. “Whatever happened to the doctor who worked through three shifts of nurses last year? You couldn’t even get through ten measly hours today.”
“Thanks,” Hawkeye said, trying not to show that the hit had landed. “Exactly the sort of empathy I expected from you.”
BJ pulled his gloves off, and then clapped Hawkeye on the shoulder, his hand big and warm over the jut of his scapula. “Let’s go scrub out.”
“I’m finished here,” Frank said. “You’re set.”
“And so’s the wrist,” Hawkeye told the kid, who smiled at him, looking relieved. “Out through those swinging doors and somebody will get you set up with a bed.”
He stepped through into the scrub room, exhaustion pulling his shoulders low. He disposed of his gloves and scrubbed out. When he finished he moved out of the way to let BJ, Potter, and Frank wash up.
“Good work in there, everybody,” Potter said, shaking his hands dry.
Hawkeye sighed, pulling his cap off. He dipped his head and ran a hand through his hair, unsticking the sweaty strands that were clinging to his forehead. He could feel BJ watching him, so he looked up and smiled.
“Time for breakfast and bed,” BJ said, pressing the top of his left foot into the ground, stretching his shin.
Hawkeye pulled off his scrubs, tossing them into the laundry. He started to sit, and then gasped, stumbling hard into the scrub room wall. He stayed there for a long minute, his eyes closed, hand over his middle, breathing through another burst of sudden, inexplicable pain, more intense than before. He opened his eyes to find everybody staring at him.
“Alright, son?” Potter asked, his gaze shrewd.
“He’s lollygagging,” Frank said, pulling off his mask. “Pulling for a three-day leave. I can see right through you, Pierce.”
“Hawk?” BJ asked. His hair was flattened all along the top from his surgical cap. “What’s up? Hungry?”
Hawkeye winced as his stomach twisted. The thing about that question was that, objectively, the answer was yes. He was hungry. He had been hungry for weeks. Starving, really. But he couldn’t keep anything down. He wondered if this was shaping up to be a problem for Sidney, or if there really was something physically wrong that they’d all missed. Either way, though, the pain was really—it was just, really it was getting kind of—
“Pierce,” Potter said again, straightening up.
I’m fine, Hawkeye wanted to say. Unfortunately the only thing that came out of his mouth was “Nnnnngh .”
Every surgeon in the room, minus, of course, himself, immediately shot to attention. It was incredible, the way each of them had developed his own distinct doctor-isms, the nonverbal cues that signaled an internal shift into medical mode. Potter’s back went straighter, his shoulders dropping, a hand raised to adjust his glasses. Frank made himself broader, his arms crossed defensively, stance widening. BJ turned sharper, more attentive, his stare pinning a person flat as he looked them over for injury.
Hawkeye cringed under the full attention of the room. “Easy, fellas, there’s enough of me to go arou uuuuuagghh .” He dropped fully against the wall, curling instinctively around the pain in his gut.
BJ caught him around the waist, propping him up. “What’s going on? Where’s the pain?” he asked, beating Potter and Frank to the question by a millisecond.
“Ugh,” Hawkeye said, cautiously standing under his own power as the pain edged off. “I don’t know. Sudden pain, uh, right above the navel. It’s backing off.”
BJ frowned, looking to Potter and Frank.
Potter walked over and gently settled Hawkeye against the wall. “Sorry about this, son,” he said, before pushing the flat of his palm into his stomach, low and on the right. The pain didn’t flare again when he released the pressure.
“It’s not appendicitis,” Hawkeye said, relieved.
“Hmm,” Potter said, unconvinced. “If it is, we’ll take care of you.”
“I know,” Hawkeye said, patting BJ’s shoulder. “It’s gone now. Random cramp. I think I’ll go catch some sleep.”
Frank muttered “Lollygagger,” and then pulled his hat on.
“You’ll tell us if you feel worse,” Potter checked, setting his hands on his hips. “We don’t need you suffering if there’s something we can do about it.”
“I’ll be fine,” Hawkeye said, even as a subtle suggestion of pain brushed through him again. “I think I’m just dehydrated.”
BJ shot Potter a lingering look, and then moved to follow Hawkeye out of the OR. “Why don’t I stay with you for an hour or two,” he said. “Just to make sure you’re really okay?”
Hawkeye cracked his neck, riding out another minor pulse of pain. “I’ll be alright. Go. Get yourself some coffee. Knock the weevils out of your toast. When you’re done eating you can come watch me sleep, if it makes you feel better.”
“If you’re sure,” BJ said, swaying slightly on his feet. It had been a long day for all of them.
“Go,” Hawkeye shooed him. “If you need me, I’ll be napping.”