Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

September, 1954 

Arrival.

The clouds rolled below them, an even and glaringly white layer. The sky was a vicious blue. In the near distance a single massive cumulus cloud struck upwards through the skyscape, billowing with high-atmosphere wind.  

BJ ran his tongue over his teeth, and then readjusted his posture. His back hurt. He didn’t like to sit for so long.  

Erin was enchanted by the view. She’d had her face pressed to the plane’s window for solidly two hours now. There was a little trouble on takeoff—neither he nor Hawkeye had thought to warn her about changing inner-ear pressures—but things were alright now.  

Things were fine.  

He shifted again, and popped the knuckles in his left hand one by one. He repeated with the right, and then tried again with the left and winced. He crossed his legs.  

There was a thread hanging from the inseam of his slacks, just before the turn of his knee.  

Unacceptable.  

He pulled it taut and attempted to fray it loose with his thumbnail.  

Instead the thread pulled out another inch.  

Even more unacceptable.  

The only thing worse than showing up to Daniel Pierce’s house with a loose thread was showing up with a hole in the side of his slacks.  

He resolved to leave the thread alone.  

Hawkeye audibly turned a page in his book, the crisp sound of paper sliding over paper soothing.  

BJ glanced over his shoulder, trying to catch a spare paragraph without leaning in too obviously.  

 Hawkeye noticed anyway, and shifted obligingly. He was an awfully fast reader. And such a frequent one BJ was intimately familiar with his unconscious affectations of posture, the way he liked to prepare to turn a page even as he began the first paragraph on the left-hand side, his index finger tapping against the right-side page’s corner, the margin of it caught between his thumb and the knuckle of his middle finger. But he gave all that up when BJ read over his shoulder, keeping the book flat and level and giving him far too much time to finish each page, enough time it might have been insulting if it wasn’t such a clear declaration of care. 

Hawkeye moved the book to balance on his right thigh. 

Thus dread is the dizziness of freedom which occurs when the spirit would posit the synthesis, and freedom then gazes down into its own possibility, grasping at finiteness to sustain itself, BJ read. In this dizziness freedom succumbs.  

BJ pulled back and looked at the side of Hawkeye’s face, the clean-shaven slope of his cheek. “What are you reading?”

Hawkeye half-smiled, the corners of his eyes crinkling, and flipped the book closed, displaying the cover. 

The Concept of Dread, BJ noted. He decided he was too motion-sick to read. BJ leaned back in his seat as Hawkeye opened the book again, back to tapping at a page’s corner with the pad of his index finger. 

BJ sighed, and closed his eyes. He could feel, if he focused, the subtle machinic vibrations of the plane’s engines, the up-and-down oscillation of the plane’s pitch as they rode out minor turbulence. He listened to the regular tap-tap-tap of Hawkeye’s fingertip against his page, and the less-frequent frictioned sound of pages turning. He wasn’t anywhere close to falling asleep, but he managed to lull himself into a mild trance, successfully walling a building stress and nervousness just outside his conscious mind. 

Something brushed his leg. He cracked an eyelid, startled by the visual reality of the plane, and looked down. 

Hawkeye had aligned their shins, their ankles in contact. 

He risked a brief soft touch to Hawkeye’s thigh, and closed his eyes again as the pilot announced something about maximum altitude and halfway points, tail-winds and smooth sailing. Not long to go, then. He tried his best to relax. 

///

Of course Maine was gorgeous. BJ wished he was in a better state to appreciate it as they drove along the coast. It was a beautiful clear day, hot and bright, the waves calm to the horizon. The little towns they drove through were charming. Lots of colorful houses, which were sometimes on stilts out over the shore, small river and creek crossings every few minutes, and plenty of forest. Hawkeye had directed him down a mildly longer route, one that hugged the coast and gave them a gorgeous view of the water.

He sighed, and tried to relax again as Hawkeye stated that they were only a few miles out. BJ was probably making a nuisance of himself. He hadn’t been able to eat anything all day, had been agitated and tense and probably a terror through the whole of their flight. 

Hawkeye had even started feeding him tasks during the deboarding process. It was exactly the way he managed Erin in the kitchen, which might have felt condescending except for how embarrassingly well it worked.  

He’d named by request all of the tarsals, each step in a standard thoracotomy, and every identified structure in the human chest cavity in increasing confusion and concern before he’d caught on to the fact Hawkeye hadn’t come down with a sudden case of medical amnesia, and was in fact doing the linguistic equivalent of dangling a set of keys in his face.

Still, it had worked, and when Hawkeye had gently suggested BJ drive, even though Hawkeye was the one who knew the way, BJ had gladly accepted. It helped him feel a little more in control. 

“Hang on,” Hawkeye said suddenly, grabbing his shoulder. 

“What?” BJ asked, heart pounding. He was keyed up. The only thing keeping him calm was Erin speaking softly to herself in the backseat, and Hawkeye’s reassuring presence. If Hawkeye started to panic, the trip was lost. 

“Pull over,” Hawkeye said, face pressed against the window. BJ obeyed, pulling off the road—not quite a highway, but some sort of well-maintained connecting road. Hawkeye cranked the window down and stuck his head through. 

BJ ducked down, too, to peer around Hawkeye’s head. Hawkeye had pulled them over in front of a construction site of some kind. It looked like proceedings had stopped for a late lunch.

“Hello,” Hawkeye called, waving to a man in a hard hat. “Excuse me.”

The man waved back, and took a few half-jogging steps closer. 

“Sorry,” Hawkeye called, leaning up and out the window, putting his whole torso through. “I live—I’m from a few miles up the road. What are you folks building?”

“Clinic,” the guy called back. 

“A medical clinic?” Hawkeye asked, leaning so far out the window BJ considered grabbing the back of his belt to keep him from falling. 

“Yeah,” the guy called. 

“Thanks.” Hawkeye settled back into his seat. “Sorry,” he said to BJ, and then to Erin in the back, who tossed a stuffed toy at him. Hawkeye caught it, squeezed it, and returned it. “Looks pretty big. I thought Dad would have mentioned something like that so nearby. Surprised me.”

BJ signalled and merged back onto the road. He took a few quick side-glances at Hawkeye, trying to read his expression and focus on driving at the same time. “Maybe he didn’t know.”

“Maybe,” Hawkeye said, doubtful. He shifted, crossing his legs, leaning his knee against the dashboard. 

BJ eyed him, picturing with alarm the sorts of things a car chassis could do to a femur at an angle of ninety degrees and fifty miles-an-hour impact speed. “Don’t sit like that, you’re risking—”

“I know,” Hawkeye said, dismissive. He uncrossed his legs. He shifted again, and then started to joggle his knee. His shin was pressed against the car’s center console, so every minute movement was highly audible and highly annoying. 

“Hawk,” BJ said, trying to be calm, both to keep himself level and to avoid alarming Erin. “Is everything alright?”

“Uh-huh,” Hawkeye said. He folded halfway forward, jerking at his seatbelt. 

BJ thought about passing a slow-moving truck, and instead decreased his own speed. There was no rush, really. The weather was fine. They would arrive when they arrived. 

“This is going to be so great,” Hawkeye said confidently, twisting his seatbelt in his hands. “Really good. Exciting. Relaxing.”

“I hope so.”

Hawkeye fisted a hand in his hair, then pointed to an upcoming turnoff. “Take that.”

BJ obliged, and winced when they hit a pothole. “Sorry, everybody.”

“Still haven’t fixed it,” Hawkeye said, leaning forward in his seat. He was moving just as much as BJ wanted to. “Well, here we are. Crabapple Cove.”

BJ looked around. Outside was the same sort of pine forest they’d been driving in and out of for the whole trip. 

“How can you tell?” BJ asked. 

“There’s a cabin back there,” Hawkeye said, gesturing. “I should’ve pointed it out. It used to be bright blue. An eyesore. A landmark. Things are changing. Everywhere, obviously, but it’s finally catching up, I mean, new clinic, brown cabins, electricity, indoor plumbing, central air, left here.”

“What?”

“Left here,” Hawkeye said, pointing emphatically.

BJ braked hard and took them through the turn, braking again as the road turned from pavement to gravel. Erin giggled, enjoying the ride. 

Houses lined the new road, small, largely in disrepair, with rusted-out trucks and animal troughs in their yards. He even thought he saw a chicken coop. 

“Look, Erin,” he said, tapping his knuckle on his window. “Doggy.”

Erin craned left, looking at a mottled brown mutt laid out flat on somebody’s porch stairs. It didn’t move. He belatedly hoped it wasn’t dead. That felt like a bad sign for the start of their vacation.

“And again,” Hawkeye said, pointing right to another turnoff BJ nearly missed. He wasn’t even sure it was a turnoff. It looked more like a horse path. “Look out for deer.”

BJ slowed, leaning on the brakes as he tried to peer down the so-called road Hawkeye had indicated. He was worried about getting the car stuck. 

“It’s okay,” Hawkeye said. “It looks small, but the dirt’s well-packed.”

“What do you do if somebody comes through the other direction?” BJ asked, driving slowly and extremely carefully as the pine woods seemed to close in around them. 

Hawkeye laughed. “Well, one of you reverses.”

The road narrowed further, until it felt like being trapped at the bottom of a well. The sun was far up, distant, only coming diffusely through the trees. Eventually the road widened again, turning to gravel. The trees shifted from pines to more leafy, broad-branched things. 

“Here,” Hawkeye said, indicating the first house they’d seen in minutes. Deep in the woods, apparently directly on the coast, without anyone around for miles. 

BJ cut a brief look at Hawkeye. It was one thing to know Hawkeye had grown up rural. It was another to see it in person. It was hard to picture Hawkeye, who loved so much of what life in a densely populated area entailed—new food, museums, art, culture, exploring on foot—growing up somewhere so insulated from all of it. But then maybe that was why he appreciated it so much. He knew what it was to go without.

Hawkeye didn’t look back at him. He was busy tapping his foot, his pace manic. His hand flexed against the door handle as he started to crane out the window again. It was hard to tell if he was afraid or excited.

“There it is,” Hawkeye said pointlessly as BJ slowed the car. “Here we are. There it is, BJ, we’re here.”

“I’m aware,” BJ said, nerves spiking even as Hawkeye made him laugh with his frantic pointing. “Should I—”

“Dad!” Hawkeye shouted suddenly, full-volume, hanging out the rental car’s window. His accent on the single syllable was thicker than BJ had ever heard it, his voice bright. 

“Hey,” BJ said, startled as Hawkeye popped open the door, the car still moving. He slammed the brakes on and parked as Hawkeye tumbled out of the car, uncoordinated in his excitement. 

“Do you—” BJ started to ask, but Hawkeye had got his feet back under him and was already sprinting towards the house. A man—Daniel Pierce, it had to be—appeared abruptly in the open doorway, and then stepped through onto the house’s porch.

“Dad!” Hawkeye yelled again, waving frantically. 

BJ watched him through the door Hawkeye had left hanging open, fascinated by the way Hawkeye was suddenly, in movement, nearly a stranger. He’d almost never seen Hawkeye run. It was foreign and deeply endearing, watching the man lope across the yard, his elbows held away from his body, his gait untrained, strides long and strangely graceful. He thought perhaps Hawkeye had a great and entirely untapped potential for athleticism. He moved well.  

Daniel bounded down the stairs to meet Hawkeye, opening his arms. Hawkeye crashed into him at significant speed. 

“Ready?” BJ asked Erin, turning around to regard her in the back seat. She had already figured out how to undo her seatbelt and was working at the door handle. Probably she wanted to follow Hawkeye. 

“Uh-huh,” Erin said, and opened the car door, pushing at it with two hands. BJ got out and helped her down before she could trip and fall into the gravel at the road’s shoulder. He took her hand and led her across the lawn to where Hawkeye and Daniel were still wrapped up in a back-thumping hug.

“There’s my bird!” Daniel was shouting over Hawkeye’s laughter as BJ slowed to a stop beside them. “I won’t ask how the flight was, I know how you’ll answer.”  

“My arms aren’t too tired, but it sure did a number on my lower back,” Hawkeye replied, voice full of sun. BJ stayed silent, smiling politely as Erin held onto his pant leg. He wasn’t sure if it would be right to interrupt—after all, it was the first time Hawkeye had seen his father in a year. He’d wait to be acknowledged.

Daniel pulled back, framed Hawkeye’s face with his hands, and squeezed him, grinning brilliantly. Finally he slung an arm around Hawkeye’s shoulders and turned to face BJ.

BJ blinked hard through the sensation of his perception doubling. Daniel Pierce looked so much like his son that it imparted a nearly physical shock to see them standing beside each other. 

It took a moment to push past his surprise, but slowly he caught on to the most significant differences. Daniel’s face was longer than Hawkeye’s, his features subtly squarer, his hair greyer and more closely cropped. He wore round-rimmed tortoiseshell glasses, and had hazel eyes, not Hawkeye’s ice-chip blue. He hadn’t gone to the trouble of shaving. He was precisely Hawkeye’s height, and similarly broad, but was more softly built through the middle. He looked settled in his frame. 

“Dr. Pierce,” BJ said, holding his hand out. He wanted very badly to make a good impression. He was nervous. His mouth was dry. 

Daniel looked at his extended hand, and then up at his face. 

“I guess this is BJ Hunnicutt,” Daniel said, appraising him.  

“Yes, sir,” BJ said, hand still extended, feeling abruptly self-conscious of his airplane-wrinkled suit, his mustache, his receding hairline. He wanted to be deemed good enough for Hawkeye. 

Daniel shoved his glasses up into his hair, its grey sticking up in odd tufts, and grinned. “I can’t see a thing. Come over here and let me get a look at you.” 

“Dad,” Hawkeye complained, as Daniel took BJ’s hand. He didn’t shake it, though. Instead he reeled BJ into a hug, thumping him enthusiastically on the back.  

BJ became aware he was blushing. Nerves, confusion, an inexplicable embarrassment—he was on edge. He was going to spend the entire week unable to relax. It was a mistake to have made the trip with Hawkeye, he decided. He wanted to leave. But he’d be polite for Hawkeye’s sake.

“And stop with that doctor-sir nonsense,” Daniel said, clapping him on the shoulder. “Who’s sir? And we’re all doctors here.” 

“Not quite yet,” Hawkeye said, making a small gesture in Erin’s direction.  

“Soon enough,” Daniel said, crouching down to Erin’s level with a low noise of effort. “Miss Erin, you must be just about finished with medical school, isn’t that right?”  

Erin laughed, taking a tiny up-and-down step, apparently catching some of the Pierces’ effusive happiness secondhand. “No I’m not!” she said, reaching up for BJ.  

BJ gave her his hand. “This is Daniel,” he explained, though they’d already told her who they were going to visit a few times over the length of the trip. It was a relief to be able to turn his focus towards Erin. She was familiar. “He’s Hawkeye’s dad.”

“I met you when you were just a baby,” Daniel said to Erin. “I can’t say how tall you were, though, ‘cause you were so little they were still measuring horizontally.” 

“Okay,” Erin said agreeably, shifting to only hold BJ’s first two fingers in her fist. “Um. We saw clouds.” 

“Really?” Daniel asked. “Where at?” 

“Inside them,” Erin said.

“That sounds very exciting,” Daniel said, and rose slowly, accepting an offered hand from Hawkeye, who was still moving with a twitchy unsettled excitement. 

“We had a great deal of fun on the plane,” Hawkeye said, beaming at Erin. He placed his palm on BJ’s lower back. 

BJ tensed, and then stepped away, hiding the motion by pulling Erin up into his arms. He didn’t want to make Daniel crouch over every time Erin tried to talk to him, anyway. It was the polite thing to do.

“Tell me more inside,” Daniel suggested, slinging an arm over Hawkeye’s shoulder again. It was already becoming apparent where Hawkeye had got his tactility. “Sun’s a little high to be chatting on the lawn.”

Hawkeye gave BJ a brief look. “We’d better grab our bags. We’ll be right in.” 

“Sure,” Daniel said, and ruffled Hawkeye’s hair. “Anything I can take?”

“BJ would have a heart attack before he let you carry a bag,” Hawkeye said, and started towards the car. 

BJ followed him as Daniel walked back up to the porch. He let Erin down. She promptly bent double, looking at, he presumed, some sort of interesting bug in the lawn. 

“Here,” Hawkeye said, and passed Erin’s small bag over, followed by BJ’s battered old suitcase. Hawkeye hefted his own duffel over his shoulder, and shut the trunk. “And hold on a minute. I want to talk to you.”

“Sure.” BJ hovered awkwardly by the passenger-side door. 

Hawkeye resettled his duffel, and held his hand out. BJ shook and dropped it, feeling absurd, his blush intensifying. 

“Yeah, okay,” Hawkeye said. He shifted his bag again, holding the strap so tightly his knuckles went white. “Beej, he knows.”

“I know he knows,” BJ said, the house looming behind him, watchful. 

“So relax,” Hawkeye urged, craning forward. He looked very good. Hawkeye wasn’t ever really careless with his appearance, but he’d spent an unusually long time that morning putting himself together. He’d even bought and had tailored a new suit for the occasion, which he was wearing—a handsome piece in a cheerful deep brown. He’d gone to an awful lot of work to prepare for their visit.

BJ nodded in acknowledgement, and automatically shrugged off Hawkeye’s second attempt to take his hand. 

Hawkeye’s gaze went sharper. “Really, you can relax. He knows and he’s happy for us and he’s excited to meet you and Erin instead of calling across four time zones. And I’m excited for you two to meet him. He’s, he’s, he’s one of the most important people in my life. I want this to be good. It’s going to be good.”

“Right,” BJ said. He tried to feel reassured. He liked Daniel. They got along well on the phone. Talking to Daniel was like talking to a mildly mellower Hawkeye with a thicker accent and somehow even more opinions on Crabapple Cove politics. He’d never felt so informed of city council agendas in his life. 

And still he had the uncomfortable sensation that his skin was on too tight, plagued by a restless, driving energy, a trapped and unwilling feeling urging him back towards their rental car. He wanted to touch Hawkeye, and again felt the watchful eye of the house on him. Something was wrong. Something was off that perhaps Hawkeye couldn’t sense. He’d stay on alert for all of them, then. He’d stay vigilant. Somebody had to.

He let Hawkeye take his hand, and walked with him across the lawn, Erin following after with some sort of scraggly weed in hand, small and vividly blue flowers escaping from her fist. Speedwell or something. 

“Good find,” Hawkeye said, when Erin held them up for his inspection. “Very pretty. And who are those for?” 

“Can I water it?” Erin asked, toddling at Hawkeye’s side. 

“We’ll have to ask my dad for a vase.”

“You don’t have to do that,” BJ said, panicked at the idea of imposing. “It’s just a weed.”

“Hey,” Hawkeye said, sharp but under his breath, tugging at BJ’s arm. 

BJ cut a quick look towards Erin, who apparently hadn’t heard him, too wrapped up in speculating to herself about where the flowers had come from. He sighed. He hadn’t meant to sound so dismissive. And the speedwell was pretty, even if it was a weed. Erin didn’t know how to tell the value of plants—she just thought they looked nice. Daniel would understand that. 

“Sorry,” BJ said. He paused with Hawkeye at the base of the porch, noting the salt-bleached and flaking siding, the overgrown planters, a wild thicket of escaped parsley, and, of course—the stagnant heat of the day suddenly interrupted by a gust—what had to be dozens of wind chimes of all shapes and sizes hanging from every available branch, rafter, and railing. The racket was hair-raising and insane, overpoweringly discordant. 

Erin stopped short to watch the chimes hanging from the porch rafters rattle, tinkling glass ones throwing fractured rainbows in every direction, wood chimes clubbing together hollowly, a massive metallic collection of tubes at the back of the porch clanging like church bells, a green sea glass wind chime clinking unobtrusively nearest the stairs. 

Any other time BJ thought he might have found the clear eccentricity on display charming. As it stood the sound only heightened his nerves. It was otherworldly, and strange, and wrong. The sun was hot and he was starting to sweat, his undershirt clinging. He was nauseated, maybe motion-sick on a delay. He wanted to go home. But he couldn’t. Dread filled him, and he forced it back repeatedly, determinedly, until it collapsed into a hyperdense but manageably small core of emotion, which he expressed as best as he was able: 

“We should have brought a gift,” he said, throat dry with horror. 

“He’s my dad.” Hawkeye led him up the stairs, letting Erin take them first to ensure she didn’t slip. “I understand the sentiment, but I think it would have been strange to show up with a bottle of wine.”

“He’s always sending us things,” BJ said, getting quieter the closer they drew to the house’s front door. “We should have brought something. A, a—he sends syrup. We could have brought something like that.”

“Sourdough starter?” Hawkeye asked, dry. “Relax. We brought pictures and enough Ghirardelli to pave the township.”

BJ relaxed marginally, reassured at the reminder they hadn’t arrived completely empty-handed. And then tensed again, wondering if it wasn’t terribly overfamiliar to have brought pictures of their little family to Hawkeye’s father. What did Daniel care about BJ or Erin? They were peripheral to Hawkeye. Attachés. What would Daniel want with a photo of them, except that it featured his own son, too? 

He determined that they would keep the pictures to themselves unless Daniel asked. And—he thought, doubling down on justification—some of the photos were new, but a fair number were from the very beginning of the year and portrayed a distinctly ill-looking Hawkeye, which would only serve as a reminder of times that were maybe better off forgotten. At least they’d brought chocolate. 

And then a final bolt of terror: what if it had melted on the trip? It probably had. They’d been standing on the lawn in the mid-nineties heat for long enough it must have all turned to soup in their bags. Stupid. He’d made stupid mistakes at every turn. He wasn’t ready to be a house guest. He’d tripped up all his etiquette. His mother would be appalled. He had the fleeting and inexplicable urge to run to a bakery and buy a pie of some sort, even as another, deeper impulse snarled at him for imagining it was in any way acceptable to bring something not homemade to a house visit, who did he think he was, Mrs. Sisson? 

Mrs. Sisson—he hadn’t thought of her in years. A perfectly nice housewife who had moved in up the street when BJ was fourteen. She’d brought a refrigerated cake from the store to a bridge night. BJ’s mother had accepted it graciously, waved off her apologies for not making something from scratch, and then dumped the whole thing in the trash the moment Mrs. Sisson had left, laughing with the other block wives. He hadn’t realized it’d made such a strong impression on him.

“Ready?” Hawkeye asked, his hand on the door, which hadn’t been shut—only pushed to meet the jamb. 

“Is there a bakery near here?” BJ found himself asking, sweat beading on his brow. 

Hawkeye squeezed his hand. “Why? You want something?”

BJ paused, and tried to figure out how best to explain that if he stepped into another person’s home as a guest without an adequate gift, he would immediately turn into a pillar of salt. 

“We can ask my dad if he’s alright moving dinner up,” Hawkeye said, checking his watch. “Otherwise I bet he’s got snacks.”

“No,” BJ snapped. He tried to calm down. “I’m okay. I don’t need anything.” 

“Okay.” Hawkeye squeezed his hand again. “It’s boiling out here. Let’s get inside.”

No way out. The only escape was through. He just needed to buckle down and endure the week. He held Hawkeye’s hand tighter, focusing on the slenderness of his fingers, the texture of his palm, its calloused and surprising toughness.

Hawkeye pushed the door open, calling out to his father. 

BJ lost his nerve. He let Hawkeye’s hand slip from his grasp. Refused to meet his gaze.

“Come on in,” Daniel said, dropping something in the kitchen with a clatter. He half-jogged into the main room, holding out a hand for Hawkeye’s bag. Hawkeye kept it out of reach.

“Where do you want us?” Hawkeye asked, toeing his shoes off. 

BJ startled, and did the same. Shoes inside—what the hell had he been thinking? He was making every mistake in the book. What next—was he going to forget to use a coaster? Leave a cabinet door open? Accept a purely perfunctory offer of food or drink? 

“Well,” Daniel said, making another unsuccessful bid for Hawkeye’s bag, “I thought Erin could take your old room. It gets a little warm, but I bought a fan, and you can’t beat the view of the water. And if you take the guest room, that spares you having to deal with the twin bed.” 

“I can take the couch,” BJ offered. 

Hawkeye and Daniel leveled the same politely baffled stare at him. Hawkeye’s, though, was tinged with hurt. 

“Or not,” BJ said. He was making a mess of things. “I just wasn’t sure—anywhere’s fine.”

Daniel inclined his head. “I’ll let you two decide.”

“Can I water them?” Erin asked from behind BJ, holding her speedwell aloft. Another bolt of panic he tried to quell.

“Right,” Hawkeye said, and tugged fondly on Erin’s ponytail. “We come bearing a bouquet. Picked straight from the base of the mailbox.”

“Well, isn’t that lovely?” Daniel asked. 

BJ hefted his bags, and tried to tell himself that Daniel was being genuine. There was no trace of sarcasm or condescension in his tone. Things were fine. Everything was going great. There was no reason for him to feel so frantic and ill. 

“I guess we’ll have to find a vase for those pretty flowers.” Daniel was crouching to be eye level with Erin, a full-force and familiarly Piercean grin on his face. “I bet the two of us can probably manage to get these in water. And if it’s alright with you, BJ, I’ve made some lemonade…?”

BJ looked to Hawkeye for a cue before he realized Daniel was asking for permission to give Erin a glass. 

“Of course,” he said, and smiled thinly.

Daniel smiled back at him, but with less warmth than before, maybe. BJ bristled, and then tried to calm himself, looking away towards the corner of the room, gaze skimming over the eclectic interior. He suddenly understood, looking at Daniel’s home, a number of strange decorating choices Hawkeye had been making in their own. There, in the overstuffed armchairs and couch draped with extra blankets, was the source of Hawkeye’s propensity for soft furniture. The huge variety of color, too, the organized clutter, the enormous prominence of books—all of it had seeped into their home from all the way across the continent.

He trailed Daniel and Erin to the kitchen, Hawkeye at his side. Erin went straight for the table, hauling herself onto a chair. 

BJ rubbed his jaw and tried not to panic. Children didn’t understand it wasn’t polite to take a chair before being asked to sit. Daniel wouldn’t care. Or would he—would it reflect poorly on BJ as a parent? Would he assume BJ knew, and didn’t care, about good manners? Or knew and had failed to communicate them appropriately? After all, he had failed to communicate them. It had been an intentional choice, encouraging Erin to view their San Francisco house as her own as much as it was Hawkeye’s or BJ’s—she didn’t need to ask for permission to sit, or take a book, or use a blanket. He had hoped that sort of encouragement would help counteract whatever nervous tendency towards facade was inherent in the Hunnicutt genome. Now, though, he wondered if that had been a mistake, if he was setting her up for a difficult life full of missed silent rules of politeness, if he was dooming her to be viewed as brash or rude by casual acquaintances. But then, maybe that was better, for a woman? Things were difficult. A flash of memory featuring Margaret standing apart from the rest of the nurses—maybe it was better to raise somebody unapologetic and willing to go after—

“BJ?” Hawkeye asked, touching his shoulder. 

BJ moved to the side, instantly breaking contact. “Hm?”

Daniel was looking at him, he realized. 

“You get some sunstroke out there?” Daniel asked, apparently genuine, though BJ instinctively read it as a joke at his expense. “I asked if you’d like some lemonade too, kiddo. Or water? Anything you want.”

“No, but thank you for offering,” BJ responded, relaxing minutely. An obstacle successfully cleared. He was overwarm and could have used the drink, but it was politer to refuse.

Daniel looked at Hawkeye. “Anything for you? Need some water? I swear it’s like a lobster pot out there. The humidity…”

“Boiling,” Hawkeye agreed. He wandered over to the cabinets and grabbed a glass for himself, laughing as Daniel elbowed him lightly in the ribs. He seemed to have settled down some, the intensity of his energy shifting to a more manageable level the longer they spent in the house. 

Unfortunately BJ felt precisely the opposite.

To give himself something to do, BJ looked at Erin, who had a hand around a half-empty cup, and was watching Hawkeye pour himself lemonade from a pretty glass pitcher. Hawkeye finished and leaned back against the counter, mirroring Daniel’s posture. 

“So,” Daniel said, glancing between them. “Tell me about the trip. Miss Erin mentioned some very exciting clouds?”

“She did pretty good with the plane,” Hawkeye said. “Got surprised by the pressure changing. Didn’t hurt—just got surprised.”

“Oh,” Daniel said, smiling at Erin. “Is that the case? The first time I went on a plane, I got surprised when my ears popped, too. Silly, isn’t it?”

“Yeah,” Erin agreed, shifting to try to face Daniel more directly. 

“How about you, BJ? Okay trip?” Daniel asked. 

BJ folded his arms. “Uh-huh.”

Daniel nodded, and then, after a long beat, nodded again. “Oh. Right. Good, okay.”

“We actually had—it was real funny, at the desk, we had this—BJ, you can tell it better than I can,” Hawkeye said, and took a sip of lemonade. 

“It wasn’t that funny.” BJ knew what Hawkeye was referring to. A mixup with the bags. It hadn’t been funny at all, really, in retrospect. Not worth an anecdote.

An awkward pause. 

Erin broke it by upsetting her glass of lemonade, the rim of her cup audibly chipping. 

BJ startled badly. He looked up, spine electric with shock, and found Daniel’s eyes on him. 

“Oops,” Erin said, watching lemonade make its way towards the edge of the table. 

“Damn. Sorry,” BJ said, breaking out of his paralytic shock. He raised a hand in apology, and looked for a dish towel, before deciding he’d just use the sleeve of his suit. “I’ll clean this up. And we can replace your glass. Been in your house all of five minutes—”

“Hey, it’s just lemon water,” Daniel said, laughing. “Sorry, Miss Erin. I guess that glass might’ve been a little too heavy, huh?”

“Slippy,” Erin said. 

“Condensation. Gets me sometimes, too.” Daniel tossed a towel over the spill, lifting the glass carefully. “Let’s see if we can find a lighter cup. And maybe something to wrap around it.”

“Sorry,” Erin said belatedly.

Hawkeye reached over and flipped Erin’s ponytail. It was a favorite way of showing affection. “You didn’t do it on purpose.”

BJ tried to take over mopping up the spill, startling again when Daniel pushed his hands away. 

“I got it, kid,” Daniel said, patting his forearm. 

BJ pulled away, and decided to start chewing on a hangnail. 

“Hey, Hawk?” Daniel finished with the dish towel, and tossed it over the edge of the sink. 

Hawkeye extended a leg and bumped Daniel’s ankle with his foot. 

“Can I borrow you for a second?” Daniel asked.

Hawkeye nodded, finishing off his lemonade. “Don’t forget about your bouquet.”

Daniel glanced at the small clump of speedwell Erin had pulled up, and slapped his forehead. “How could I? Listen, BJ, would you mind? Just use anything in the glass cabinet.”

“Sure,” BJ said, intensely uncomfortable. Daniel patted his shoulder, the touch shattering through BJ like artillery, and led Hawkeye out of the room and up the stairs. BJ watched them disappear, and then turned back to the table.

“How are we feeling?” he asked Erin, not sure if she seemed anxious or if he was imagining things. 

“Good,” Erin said. She kicked her feet. 

He kissed her head and then opened the cabinet he’d seen Hawkeye retrieve a cup from. There were drinking glasses on the lowest shelf. Above it was an assortment of finer glass pieces: vases of varying sizes, wine glasses, tumblers, and another pitcher. 

He took down the smallest vase he could find, a blue-tinted piece not much wider in aperture than a quarter, and filled it with tap water. He placed the speedwell in it. Would it be appropriate to leave the flowers on the table? Or was it presumptuous to make them a centerpiece without asking? 

He compromised by leaving them on the counter. He thought about taking a chair, and decided against it. None of the other adults had sat down yet. 

He leaned against the back of a chair and considered Erin again. “You sure you’re feeling okay?”

Erin thought about it. “It’s hot.”

“It sure is.” Somehow Maine summers were hotter than San Francisco’s, despite the difference in latitude. It felt—

He swallowed sharply. 

It felt like Korea, he acknowledged to himself. The humidity, the high heat. Maybe that was what had him so on edge. Or part of it, anyway. 

Footsteps on the stairs. 

He tensed, and worked to make himself seem innocent. Guilt rose in him, apparently sourceless. He was an absolute mess. 

“Okay,” Daniel said, coming back down the stairs. He moved with a surprising youthfulness and ease for somebody over sixty. He hadn’t started to slow down yet. “Let’s get you your lemonade, Miss Erin.”

Hawkeye followed, a hand on the back of his neck. He looked unhappy. 

BJ tensed further, getting protective. Had there been an argument? Was Daniel angry with Hawkeye? And for what reason?

“Flowers look great, BJ, thank you,” Daniel said, moving the speedwell to the center of the table. 

Hawkeye reached over and touched BJ’s elbow. “Come on, let’s set our bags down.”

BJ nodded. The request to talk in private was silent, but evident, and it would do him good to be alone with Hawkeye for a minute, he thought. Might calm him down.

“Be right back,” Hawkeye said, stepping past Erin and Daniel. BJ followed, touching Erin’s shoulder as he passed, to reassure her about his leaving the room. 

A door on the right side of the kitchen opened onto what he figured was the guest bedroom. It was small and quiet, the bed simply made. Windows opened to the east with a phenomenal view of the water. The racket of the windchimes was far enough off to be soothing. BJ was so tense he thought he might throw up. 

Hawkeye shut the door behind them, and then opened his arms, silently inviting an explanation.

“We don’t have to stay,” BJ said, crossing his arms. 

Hawkeye dipped his head, eyebrows raised. “What?”

“We don’t have to stay,” BJ repeated. “If there’s been an argument, or you’re not getting along, or you’re not being treated well, there’s no reason we can’t drive right back to the airport and leave.”

Hawkeye gave him a look of total confusion. “He’s my dad. I love him. Why would we leave?”

“You were fighting.”

“No.” Hawkeye looked genuinely upset. “He was making sure I was okay. You are acting so patently bizarre he thought one of us was dying, or that—that we were having some sort of awful fight.”

“Sorry,” BJ said immediately, uncrossing his arms. He swallowed hard. He knew he was acting strangely. He couldn’t seem to stop himself.

“What’s going on?” Hawkeye asked, not angry but concerned. “You know, a girl could get her feelings hurt. You say you love her in private but you won’t hold her hand at the pictures?”

“We’re in your father’s house. It doesn’t feel appropriate.”

Hawkeye crossed his arms. “Appropriate?”

“Polite.”

“I’m asking you to hold my hand, not fellate me in the family room,” Hawkeye said, justifiably piqued. 

BJ’s face flamed, and he immediately reassured himself that the door to the room was shut.

“You offered to take the couch?” Hawkeye asked, and held his arms out again.

“Sleeping together,” BJ started, and then tossed his hands up. It felt obscene, suddenly, and embarrassed him. “I don’t—”

“Believe it or not, he’s aware of the concept of sex,” Hawkeye said, pointing back at the kitchen, his voice not nearly low enough for BJ’s comfort. “I exist, for one. Plus I’m over thirty and I lived with Carlye for a year and a half—he knows I’m not a blushing bride. We can share a bed without scandalizing anybody. This isn’t the nineteen-tens.” 

BJ rubbed his forehead. 

“And,” Hawkeye continued apace, “I love you. I like sleeping with you. In the conventional sense.”

BJ dropped his hand. “I love you, too.” 

Hawkeye set his duffel down. “Really, what’s going on?” 

“I don’t know. I’m—” he cut off to laugh, unhappy. He sat on the edge of the bed and put his face in his hands. 

The bed dipped with the addition of Hawkeye’s weight. Hawkeye slung an arm around his back, and then stilled. “You feel like you just got off a run.” 

BJ laughed again, and then tugged at his tie. He was sweating through his undershirt, his pulse pounding. “I feel sick.”

Hawkeye touched his forehead, not paying any mind to the sweat that probably slicked his palm. “Are you coming down with something? You’re boiling.” 

BJ breathed out harshly, and tried to calm himself down. The need to move was immense. He pushed down a sudden snap of rage. He wanted to leave. He felt trapped. His skin was settled all wrong. He wanted to peel out of it and redress in something less restrictive, like shucking his work clothes at the end of a long day, but he couldn’t escape himself. 

Hawkeye rubbed his back, his other hand resting on BJ’s thigh. BJ took and held it, trying to figure out what the hell was happening. He wasn’t frightened. Nor was he angry. He really only felt that he had been dropped into his body twisted ten degrees to the left. He needed to do something to resettle himself. But how, without being immensely rude, without risking a good first impression with the father of the man he loved—if he hadn’t already ruined his shot? Still, he’d only make things worse if he had to interact with Daniel as he was.

He couldn’t see a good way out of it. He was too keyed up. He gave in. 

“Would it be unforgivably rude,” he said, eyes closed, “if I went for a run.” 

“Right now?” Hawkeye asked, only pausing in rubbing BJ’s back for half a second. 

“Yeah,” BJ said. 

“You get stiff on the plane?” 

BJ started to answer in the negative, and then realized that his lower back ached. And he was tight from his hips to his knees. He was, in fact, in pain.

“Yeah,” BJ said. “And—I don’t know. Something else is going on.”

Hawkeye kept rubbing his back. “I don’t mind. And I’m sure my dad won’t, either. I’ll talk to him.”

“Thanks.” Relief bloomed within him, tentative but present, beneath a ridiculous humiliation. He wanted to be there for Hawkeye, wanted to help keep him level and at ease as he saw his father for the first time in a year. Instead Hawkeye was stuck trying to keep BJ from having a widowmaker after speaking to the man for less than five minutes. Useless. He resolved to do better as soon as possible.

He grabbed his suitcase, Hawkeye’s hand shifting down and then up his spine as he straightened. 

“If you follow this road north, you should be able to make it maybe four miles before it starts getting really hilly,” Hawkeye told him. “And south you’ll track back over the bridge. You can also run along the beach, but you’ll be racing the tide.”

“Thanks,” BJ said again, and stood to strip. Jacket, tie, button-up, undershirt—he felt cooler already. He unbuttoned his trousers, and then paused. 

Hawkeye was watching him. 

BJ smiled at him through the high tight uncategorizable feeling in his chest, and kicked out of his slacks. He slipped out of his undershorts, too, glad that it was so easy to be comfortable around Hawkeye, and exchanged them for a jock. At which point Hawkeye snapped the elastic against his ass. 

BJ held back on a yelp, and shoved at Hawkeye’s shoulder. 

Hawkeye caught his hand and kissed it. 

“Okay,” BJ said, and pushed Hawkeye’s face away with extreme gentleness. He bent to retrieve his running shorts, heroically ignoring Hawkeye pinching his flank, tickling the back of his thighs, poking his ribs, transparently a tactic to make him laugh, which, damn him, was working. It wasn’t settling him, but at least he didn’t feel all bad anymore.

He pulled his shorts on, and a light shirt, and sat on the bed to don his running shoes. 

Hawkeye draped himself over BJ’s back.

BJ’s strange feeling of confinement spiked, but he breathed through it, and tried to let Hawkeye’s warmth soothe him as he tied his laces.

“I won’t be gone long,” he said when he finished, stretching up and off the bed. Hawkeye prodded his stomach as his shirt rode up, which BJ ignored, too. He shook his legs out, trying to get a feel for what he needed. “Middle distance. Five miles. Six, maybe.”

“Mm,” Hawkeye said. He crossed his legs—he was terrifically attractive in his new suit. “Take your time. Clear your head.”

BJ leaned down for a kiss, and then froze. “Should I—should I go out through the kitchen?” He didn’t want to interact with Daniel again, not before he’d settled himself. The man terrified him.

Hawkeye breathed a laugh against his face, and pulled him in to finish the kiss. “I don’t know how else you plan to leave.”

BJ thought about exiting through the house, trying to explain to Hawkeye’s father why he was literally, physically fleeing when he’d only just arrived, and felt ill. He needed time to sort himself out, needed time to think. Needed to stop being so strange and reactive. 

“Back in an hour,” he said to Hawkeye, and pushed open one of the large, east-facing windows. “Give Erin a kiss from me.”

“Beej,” Hawkeye said, incredulous, “you are not—”

“Going out the window,” BJ confirmed with manic determination, and vaulted through. 

He hit the ground already running, orienting himself vaguely northward. He directed a wave over his shoulder, projecting as much reassurance as he could manage into the gesture as Hawkeye hung out of the window behind him, raising a hand in either a wave or a gesture of frustration. 

BJ nearly tripped over an abandoned spade in the yard, hidden in the overgrown grass. It looked like Hawkeye’s organizational habits were hereditary. 

By the time the Pierce house had disappeared behind him on the road, he was out of breath. The humidity, high heat, and intense afternoon sun weighed on him, and he’d failed to manage his pace. He’d been sprinting northward along the side of the dirt road. 

He forced himself to reel back into a comfortable jog, a pace he could sustain for the next six miles.

It was quiet. 

Gravel crunched underfoot. Some sort of loud, low-pitched bug was humming in the depths of the woods on either side of the road, and a few songbirds called to each other, but only at a distance—everything seemed to go still as he passed, leaving him in a bubble of near-silence.

Already he felt better. Less restricted, less tense, less like his vertebrae were made of knives. He always felt better in movement.

He exhaled slowly as his breathing rate returned to resting, settling into a level of exertion he could maintain nearly indefinitely. He liked running. It engaged a man in appealingly contradictory ways. 

There was the simple animal joy of movement, of stretching out and taking off and feeling his pulse rise, wind in his face and hair, sun on his back, the satisfying rhythmic slap of his feet against pavement or dirt or sand, the feeling of loping along wherever he chose to direct himself. It was good to fade into the physical. To remind himself that for millions of years there were no such things as bills or telephones or mortgages, no airplanes or guns or even blades, that the modern era, really, was an aberration of evolution, a total and fleeting fluke of circumstance, and that he was in many ways best and most purely suited to simple actions associated with hunting and foraging. He was an alive thing, an atypically complex organic mechanism, mostly a collection of pulleys and hydraulic systems and photoreceptors with an osseous foundation piloted by a piece of gelatinous and electrified fat, not optimized for a life of recurrent stress and intangible bureaucracy. 

And it felt good to push himself, to take his body for a test-drive, chasing the ever-receding goal-posts of maximum speed and distance, finding only apparently boundless improvement, pleased with the simple regular success of having run farther than the day before. When he’d really leaned into it, ran to the point he hummed with it, worked up a good clean pouring sweat and felt his pulse everywhere in him at once, sunstruck and dumb with endorphins, there was very little so satisfying as jogging up his own front steps, catching an enthusiastically willing Hawkeye in the kitchen or the living room or sometimes even still in bed and pinning him down, divesting him of clothes, barely taking the time to slick himself before he fucked between Hawkeye’s thighs, seeing how long he could keep it up even as he shook with the effort of an extra mile or more, Hawkeye murmuring something fond as he touched the hand BJ pressed into his stomach for leverage as he came, his mind wiped clean, body thrumming. As soon as he could think again he’d get Hawkeye off—if Hawkeye let him or wanted him to. Other times Hawkeye would only kiss him and then lead him through a few hip and quad stretches, because if he forgot to stretch he got tight and complained. 

He’d laid it out for Hawkeye once, that reason for the running, stuttering and uncertain as he explained about feeling connected to his body, and after Hawkeye had finished laughing at him he’d said it made sense, which BJ appreciated. He’d also immediately taken to calling BJ things like ‘beast’ and ‘animal’ to tease him, and sometimes did the same in bed for reasons he hadn’t disclosed. BJ tried his best to respond neutrally, even though they lit him up like a bonfire, the names, in only the way something ridiculous could in the heat of the moment. It was embarrassing, and he didn’t like what it said about him, liking something like that, something so patently silly on the surface, with its connotations of dumb physicality and lack of restraint. He shied away from it. He preferred to see himself as in perfect control.

And then there was the higher mind to contend with. Running was proof that he wasn’t only animal—anything really animal would stop when it was in pain or tired, if there were no stakes. It was denial of discomfort, a continual reassertion of will over instinct, the conquering of pain, pushing past the burning of his hamstrings and lungs as he propelled himself over the crest of a hill, denying achy feet, shin splints, one time even a nosebleed that he hadn’t noticed until it was too late to stem, his face and shirt smeared with so much red that Hawkeye had cried out in panic when BJ opened the door. Miles spooled out behind him as he wore the bottoms of his sneakers flat, four kicking up to six and then eight and then ten, and then a wall broke and it seemed like he could run forever if he kept himself in a comfortable gear. Just like cross-country when he’d been a teenager, gangly and skittish and burning with silent rage—it all came back to him, how to dismiss and deny and defer, how to ignore himself with perfect ease. It felt good to be in control, to bend his body and mind to his will.

He hadn’t explained that part to Hawkeye. 

Though he figured Hawkeye understood anyway from the gentle way he helped BJ through stretches, his loving, nervous insistence BJ make sure he was eating enough, the warm baths he drew when BJ had run too hard and ended up achy. The harder BJ pushed himself, the softer Hawkeye was with him—the man knew, he was certain.

Running was a mix of both, anyway, control and release, the experiences inextricable, and he haltingly thought that it was better to do it than to not. It kept him happier, more relaxed, less prone to irritation or sadness or waking nightmares, and all because he’d moved himself at an elevated velocity for a while. That was the same reason he figured Hawkeye liked to wander, walking long through San Francisco, finding patches of wilderness to melt into, rocks to scrabble over, hills to lope up and slide down. It worked for both of them, strangely, falling into physicality as a defense, leaning into simple replicable joys—running, playing, eating, sex, sleep. Sometimes a person needed to be the animal he was.

He hooked right on a whim and picked his way over a slope of rocks down to the waterfront, sand shifting precariously under his weight until he reached the edge of the water where the sand was still hard-packed and wet from the tide, firm under his feet. 

And then there was the simple fact that running gave him time to let his mind wander. He could worry or dwell if he needed to, and then let go and stare, like now, out at nothing in particular, the horizon a pale color, washed out in the afternoon’s sun. 

He dodged a washed-up jellyfish, its bell cracked and dehydrated in the sun. 

Maine really was lovely, he decided. The rocky beaches were unfamiliar, but pretty in a severe sort of way. He could picture Hawkeye, decades younger, leaping from rock to rock, Daniel and a vague outline of Mrs. Pierce watching over him. 

Another bolt of nerves. He let the feeling settle into his limbs and then fade away. He knew the problem. 

Daniel, he told himself sternly, is not your father. 

Knowing it didn’t do much to soothe him. God, what a nightmare. If only understanding a feeling was unreasonable caused it to stop. Sometimes the sound of keys in the door still caused a spike of panic in him, and then anger. But there was nothing he could do other than remind himself it wasn’t right to feel that way, and try to convince himself to relax. It worked, mostly. He’d never been so relaxed at home in his life as he was with Hawkeye. Things were going extremely well. 

He sighed, turning his face into a cooler breeze off the ocean. It was soothing. The weather was tremendously hot. 

He’d work things out with Daniel. He could already tell. He’d finish his run, shower, dress, and apologize. They could start over. Everything would be fine. After all—and the thought finally reassured him—Daniel had raised Hawkeye, who was kind, and patient, and understanding. Daniel was a good man, very gentle, and BJ already knew and trusted him. They talked on the phone every Sunday, for God’s sake. He would be fine. He just needed to make more of an effort. 

He turned his attention back to his feet, and then cut left, moving back towards the shady dirt road. Hawkeye was still at the house. Resting with Erin, having something to eat, sharing a joke with his father. Feeling good, if there was any justice in the world. Hawkeye deserved that, and much more. Only a few miles to go before BJ was back at his side. 

///

Daniel was peering out the window when Hawkeye returned to the kitchen. He did so quietly, trying not to draw too much attention to himself. He was nervous and trying not to be. A little frustrated with BJ, too, and now embarrassed—it didn’t say anything too positive about their relationship, he thought, if BJ had run away from him ten minutes into the visit.

“I guess you saw that,” Hawkeye said, and hopped up to sit on the counter, his father standing beside him. 

Daniel raised an eyebrow, amused. “He could’ve left through a door.”

Hawkeye checked up on Erin. She was occupied with a new cup of lemonade. He fidgeted with his cuffs, unused to his new suit, and tried to think of something to say. He was very, very glad to see his father again, and yet there was a lick of shame that was working to taint his happiness every time his mind was idle. BJ’s running away had brought his own flight from the house a year past to the front of his mind, and he wondered if Daniel was thinking of it, too. It loomed, unspoken, between them.

“Good lemonade,” Hawkeye said, at the same time Daniel asked, “You’re sure everything’s alright?”

“What?” Hawkeye asked, pulse tripling. He tugged at his tie, faint with heat.

“With BJ,” Daniel said to the sink. “I hope I didn’t offend him, pulling you aside. I get worried. If I need to apologize—”

“No, no,” Hawkeye cut in. “He’s just nervous. He’s been worrying over this for weeks. He wants to make a good impression so badly he’s falling over himself, that’s all.” Or maybe that was Hawkeye. Both of them, probably. For better or worse Hawkeye and BJ tended to be of a frequency with each other. What resonated with one moved the other.

Daniel laughed. “Did I ever tell you—the first time I met your mother’s family—”

“They ran out of mashed potatoes,” Hawkeye recalled, the anecdote warmly familiar. It put him more at ease. He left his tie alone. “Yeah. I love that story.”

“Her mother—grandma June, I don’t know if you remember her—took a spoonful off of everybody’s plate and redistributed it to mine. I’ve never been so embarrassed in my life. I thought her brothers were going to wallop me for it. And then of course my being embarrassed upset June, and there was somebody you didn’t want a grudge with. Especially when she’s the mother of your girl.”

“Of course you charmed your way out of it.” 

“Can’t do that anymore,” Daniel said, and winked. 

“Uh-huh. I’ve seen you turn it on at the diner. You haven’t paid for dessert in years.”

Daniel laughed again. “Somebody’s got to keep me in lemon meringue. I can’t make ‘em anymore unless I want to start feeding the Hodges up the road.”

“And you don’t want to,” Hawkeye surmised. 

“The Hodges?” Daniel asked, crossing his arms. “No. I’ll set their broken arms, I’ll remove fish-hooks from wherever they need removed, and I’ll pull dandelions out of their ear canals, but I won’t go out of my way to bring them pie.”

“Might encourage them to hang around,” Hawkeye teased. “Remind me why you don’t get along.”

“Hawk.” 

“One Hodges kid shoved me off my bike one time twenty-six years ago, and you still haven’t let it go.”

“It’s more than that,” Daniel said, mostly to himself. 

“Oh?”

“I tried to talk to Don about it after, and he didn’t see a problem with it, even though that fall busted your elbow open. Said it would toughen you up. I never liked them much after that. We don’t see eye to eye.”

Hawkeye contacted his shoulder with a lightly-closed fist. “That’s okay. You don’t have to get along with everybody.” 

Daniel gave him a half-smile, crow’s-feet crinkling.

“How soon is he going to be back, do you think?” Daniel asked, looking down at the counter. “Should I—should I acknowledge it, tell him he doesn’t need to be nervous? Or would that embarrass him?”

“You’re nervous, too,” Hawkeye realized. Of course he was. Hawkeye had disappeared for four months, reappeared on the other side of the country, and then showed up toting a fully-formed family. That would be odd for anybody to adjust to.

Daniel waved him off. 

“Hey, there’s nothing to be worried about. You two chat on the phone all the time. He’s the same BJ you call up and complain to about Maine levy allocations every week.”

“I know,” Daniel said, and pulled off his glasses, folding and unfolding them. “He means a lot to you, that’s all, and I owe him.”

“Owe him?” Hawkeye asked, confused until he realized in a mortifying rush his father was referring to—to a period of time he still couldn’t quite think about at length, because it tended to drag him back to—

—a maddening light outside his bedroom window, which was, of course, curtainless, all hours of the night a single glaring white beam shattering through the pane bright as day, keeping him from sleeping, sending him pacing around and around the boundaries of his apartment, hearing and trying to ignore the sound of cockroaches scattering somewhere in the dark, rubbing his bare arms, touching and then not touching the door, inexplicably but viscerally terrified of meeting anybody outside of it, the fear sourceless and irrational but so immense it penned him in for days at a time, made him a hungry, trapped animal, until he gave in and managed to force himself outside to retrieve the necessities, cigarettes and clear liquor and sometimes if he managed it a book, hating everyone he came in contact with, the disdainful suits and bright happy students and struggling young mothers and produce stand clerks, hating himself for hating them, suffocated by despair and a crawling sensation of wrongness, feeling wild-eyed and self-conscious of his own irrationality, knowing, knowing he was acting intensely strange as people shied away from him on the subway and still he was powerless to stop it—

“Hey,” Daniel said, shaking his elbow softly. “Sorry. I didn’t mean anything by it.”

Hawkeye managed a grin, working to make himself blink. He sat up straight and tried to look well-adjusted. He could feel his father’s eyes on the side of his face, observing, analyzing, probably trying to figure out if he was still as crazy as he’d been when he’d ran away. 

He wasn’t. But he had no idea how to prove it. Coming right out and stating that he wasn’t insane when he hadn’t been asked was, after all, maybe the worst thing he could do to start their vacation. Short of arson.

And where had that thought come from? He was exasperated with himself already. He wished his father hadn’t brought the topic up. It weighed on him. 

“Maybe we should talk about it later,” he said, noticing Erin listening in. He didn’t want to upset her. There were some things she could ask about in the future, if she was interested in how Hawkeye and BJ had fallen in together, the places they’d been and what they’d seen. This was one story he’d prefer not to share until she was older, and only then if she asked. And, selfishly, he was grateful for a way out of the conversation. 

Daniel reached up to stroke his hair. “That’s okay. Just so long as you know I love you.”

Hawkeye leaned into him. 

“You’ve got a cowlick,” Daniel informed him. 

Hawkeye laughed, and reached up to try to smooth his hair down. “It does that.”

“Getting long,” Daniel informed him, as though he might be unaware, tugging a strand behind his ear that liked to curl in direct defiance of gravity. 

Hawkeye brushed him off gently. He slid off the counter, and sat down beside Erin at the table. “I’ve got to keep growing it out. Erin likes to practice her hair styling on me.”

Daniel dropped into a chair, too, and regarded Erin. “Is that so?” he asked. “Are you wanting to be a hairdresser when you grow up? Or is Hawkeye just a passion project?”

Erin looked at him, and then back at her empty cup. She picked it up clumsily, and set it down again. 

“She’s really good at ponytails,” Hawkeye said, encouraging her with a smile. “Isn’t that right?”

Erin looked at both of them. She wasn’t usually so shy. He wondered if the absence of her father was worrying her. 

“Your dad just left to go on a run,” he assured her. “He’ll be back in a little bit. Probably in around half an hour, now.”

“Okay,” Erin said.

“How old are you now, Erin?” Daniel asked. “One? Two?”

“No!” Erin said, terribly offended. 

“Hmm. Seventy-five?” Daniel asked, pretending to think hard. “No, no. One-hundred-and-eleven, that’s my last guess.”

“Three and a half,” Erin corrected. The Maine humidity was doing ridiculous things to her fine blonde hair, wisps of it escaping her hairband to stick straight up in curlicue ringlets. It was a white-flaxen shade he rarely saw on adults, and it made him wonder if BJ had been towheaded as a child, too. It seemed unlikely they’d have access to any of his childhood photo albums anytime soon. They’d had no contact with the elder Hunnicutts the entire time Hawkeye and BJ had been living together. It was hard to imagine that changing, though the regular visits of BJ’s sister, KC, made it difficult to reject the possibility entirely. 

“Of course,” Daniel said, and put a hand to his face. “How could I forget? I guess that means you’re going to be starting school soon. Are you excited?”

Erin babbled something vague about reading, which she could already do to a limited degree with illustrated books Hawkeye and BJ and Peg and even, sometimes, the pastor Peg seemed to be thinking about marrying, helped her choose. Even if there were some things they’d never see eye to eye on, all of them doted on Erin terribly. 

“She’s starting part-time preschool in two weeks,” Hawkeye said, grinning, sad that BJ wasn’t there for the conversation. He got emotional and overwhelmed every time Erin and school came up in the same sentence. She enjoyed an awful lot of piggy-back rides out of BJ’s need to convince himself she was still small enough to be held. Hawkeye was certain his own parents had been precisely the same way with him. 

“That’ll be fun,” Daniel said to Erin. “You’re going to get to meet so many people your age.”

“She has some friends in Mill Valley,” Hawkeye said. “Lots of play-date deliveries, when BJ can stand to part with her for an afternoon. Not too many kids her age in our neighborhood. New family’s moving in down the block, though, so maybe that’ll change.”

“How’s it been?” Daniel asked him. “You like it okay in California? I get worried you’re going to get too hot down there.”

“It’s cooler than here,” Hawkeye said, dabbing sweat off his brow. 

“Unseasonable weather,” Daniel tried to claim, despite the fact that September in Maine was always stifling. “We’ll have to spend some time at the beach this week.”

Erin’s head snapped up, attention instantly engaged. “Beach?”

“Yeah,” Hawkeye confirmed, failing to resist the urge to flip her tiny ponytail up. “Not the sort of beach you’re used to. The ones up here have a lot of rocks. Less soft sand than at home. But it’s still nice to take a dip in the water when it’s hot out.”

“Can we go?” Erin asked, starting to wiggle out of her chair. 

Hawkeye looked at Daniel. 

“Thunderstorms in the forecast tonight,” Daniel said apologetically. “We might get rained out.”

“Maybe not today,” he told Erin. “But I’m sure we can go later this week.”

Erin seemed disappointed, but got over it quickly. She was a resilient kid, and hilariously laid back, far more so than her own father, or Hawkeye, or even Peg. Hawkeye liked to joke that she was the poster-child for a California mindset. 

“Can I go play?” Erin asked, eyes on the windows. 

“Really?” Hawkeye asked her. “It’s so hot out. You want to go outside again?”

“Yeah,” Erin confirmed, wiggling all the way off the chair. 

“Hmm,” Hawkeye said. “Well, you’re rehydrated on lemonade, and I guess we were cramped up in the plane and the car for a while, huh?” He stood and offered Erin his hand, leading her to the sunroom. “Same rules as at home. Stay in the yard where I can see you, okay? And if you get tired or thirsty or it’s too hot, come back inside.”

“What’s these?” Erin asked, pointing at a potted African violet as Hawkeye opened the outer door to the backyard. 

“Ask your granddad when you’re done playing, I’m sure he’d love to talk about them,” Hawkeye said, and grinned when Erin took immediately off into the backyard. It was only when he turned back and found his father’s eyes on him he realized what he’d said. 

“I can walk that back,” he said, self-conscious again at the strangeness of the situation, the suddenness with which he was springing so many new developments on his father. The fact of the matter was he’d never, in so many words, even told his father that it might not be a woman he settled down with. He had sort of assumed he’d end up with a wife, if anybody would have him at all. Carlye was the longest relationship he’d ever had. Men were usually—well, it was harder to have anything long-term, and more dangerous, when things were the way they were, and so he’d always sort of assumed—the point was, he’d never come right out and said that he was the way he was, even if he’d hinted and joked and more or less assumed his dad had been aware for years. And even if he hadn’t known before, well, Hawkeye had bought a house with BJ. That kind of commitment made a person draw conclusions.

“Don’t you dare.” Daniel held a hand out, and pulled him into a hug when Hawkeye took it, both of them standing just outside the sunroom. “Missed you, kid.” 

“Missed you, too.” It was good to be held. The first time he’d come home after being away for college, he’d hugged his dad for something like a full hour, the two of them chatting happily as they leaned on each other in the kitchen. The three years he’d been overseas was far and away the longest he’d ever gone without seeing his father, the year he’d been lost in the city and then patching himself back together in California the second-longest stretch. He never wanted to go so long without him again. 

“Proud of you,” Daniel said, which was ridiculous and made no sense. Hawkeye let it go anyway. “Everything okay with his—with Peg? She was sweet when I met her, though not exactly—she seemed a little lost.”

Hawkeye rotated slightly, pulling his dad around a quarter turn so he could look over his shoulder out the window at Erin without having to break the hug. “Yeah. Things were uncomfortable for a few months, but I think we’re settling in.” 

“That’s good,” Daniel said, patting his back. “Hell of a thing to have to settle into.”

“Uh-huh,” Hawkeye agreed. He watched Erin wind up and try to do a cartwheel, laughing when she mostly just succeeded in jumping around with her hands in the grass. She’d been working at it since she’d seen Hawkeye do one spontaneously on the sidewalk. 

He thought about BJ pushing his hand away as they’d entered the house, BJ throwing himself out the window, the distance he forced himself to maintain in the store and the library and on their neighborhood walks. He thought, too, of all the conversations Hawkeye’d never really had with his father. There was the big one, the one he still wanted to avoid, about his disappearance in any sort of depth. But there were easier options. Ones he could use to warm up for the harder talks later. 

He decided to be brave in increments. “Speaking of settling. I just wanted to ask—how’re you handling it?”

“Handling it?” Daniel asked, sounding confused, though Hawkeye wasn’t about to let go of him for something as small as checking his expression. 

“The news. BJ. BJ and I. I know we never really…I wasn’t sure if you were surprised or not. How much you’d figured out. I never worried that you wouldn’t—but like you said, it’s an adjustment, I’m sure, your son bringing home a war buddy instead of a wife.” 

“Oh, that’s all? It’s just fine, bird. I always had my suspicions.” Daniel held him just as tightly as ever, and didn’t so much as flinch or tense or even sigh.

Hawkeye smiled, relaxing. As certain as he’d been his father would react well, it was still a relief to have it confirmed. “I thought you might.”

“D’you remember when you were fourteen, and Evie Lapointe said she would rather kiss a turtle than you?”

“My first heartbreak.” 

“Well, you always—you had a way of talking about people out of the blue when you were that age. Not the usual cast of friends. Somebody would just pop into conversation I’d never heard of before, and that was usually a signal. For a while it was Evie Lapointe, and then, the next month, suddenly it was like all I was hearing about was this Bickford kid. You remember him?”

Hawkeye groaned, face flushing, even though it had been nearly two decades ago. He remembered Tanner Bickford vividly. He had been three years older, dirty-blonde, and a cross-country star. It seemed his type hadn’t changed much in the intervening years. “Don’t remind me. I had no idea what was happening. I wanted to be his friend so, so badly. I followed him around like a puppy. He was so nice about it, too. That’s the worst part, remembering how nice he was to me. What’s he doing now, anyway?”

“Something in ag, I think,” Daniel said. “I didn’t keep track. Anyway I kind of figured I knew. I didn’t want to push you into talking about it. I just tried to make sure you knew I loved you and you could tell me, if you ever wanted to. That it wouldn’t change anything. That I was, was, uh, sympathetic, if you will.”

Hawkeye abruptly recalled a period in his mid-teens when his father had very pointedly taken up reading Wilde and Whitman and Woolf and declaring that they were all very fine authors, and people, and that there was nothing wrong with loving the people they loved, and that if he himself had been friends with them he wouldn’t have minded a bit that Wilde was seeing Bosie Douglas except that Douglas hadn’t treated Wilde very well, and that it was important to remember it was never okay for anybody a person was in a relationship with to treat him badly or yell or hit, and so on—Hawkeye laughed, burying his face in his father’s shoulder. He couldn’t believe he’d never put it together before. “I remember that now. You weren’t very subtle.”

“Hey, it all worked out okay. You’ve got a great guy here. Well, here soon, if I haven’t scared him off.”

“If I haven’t scared him off, you’re not going to manage it.”

“I’m excited to get to really meet him. Would he feel better if we just pretended we were starting over? He didn’t make a bad impression. Just worried the hell out of me.”

Hawkeye thought about it. He figured BJ was probably having either a delayed attack of nerves, or, more insidiously, was working through his discomfort with a figure of parental authority. Maybe both. Either way, he didn’t want to embarrass him, or shunt him into a conversation he wasn’t ready for, one that might make him feel cornered or hurt. 

“I think you can probably bring it up once we’re all a little more settled,” he decided. “If you feel like you need to. I think he’ll calm down, though.” Hawkeye was calming down, at least. 

Daniel nodded against him. 

Outside Erin was laid out on her front, playing with a late dandelion puff. 

“He have some trouble with his own father?” Daniel asked, so quiet as to be almost unheard, muffled against Hawkeye’s shoulder. 

Hawkeye sighed. “Yeah. We don’t really—he doesn’t like to talk about it.”

“I understand,” Daniel said. “He jumped a mile when that glass tipped.”

Hawkeye sighed again. His chest hurt, as it always did when he pictured BJ younger, the sort of things that might have transpired to make him the way that he was: self-consciously gentle, afraid of his own capacity for anger, insistently anxious about his parenting in a way that nothing Hawkeye said or did ever seemed to soothe. 

He thought he understood that fear. He shared it, to a degree. He loved Erin, sweet kid that she was, and would do anything in his power to help her, but he worried that in spite of his care his presence in her life would tip towards detrimental. If he had ended up in a long-term relationship with a woman, he wasn’t sure, now, that he would have wanted to have a child. There was all of what had—he cut the thought off sharply. There were certain obvious problems, now, and besides that it seemed unfair—what if the kid ended up like him? That would have been cruel, maybe. He worried his influence, even just as a proxy parental figure, might hurt Erin in the same way. Give her the same troubles. Nothing BJ ever said to reassure him disappeared that fear entirely. 

Erin cried out sharply. 

Hawkeye and Daniel broke their hug, attention snapping to the window. 

BJ had returned. He was in the process of tossing Erin into the air, catching and then tossing her again as she shrieked with joy at a favorite game she’d soon be too big for. 

“There he is,” Hawkeye said, lighting up. He leaned over and knocked on the window over the sink. 

BJ turned around, tucking Erin under his arm. He squinted for a moment, brought a hand up to shade his eyes, and then met Hawkeye’s gaze through the window. He beamed and said something mostly inaudible. 

Hawkeye motioned him inside, pointing at the sunroom’s still-open door. BJ jogged out of sight, reappearing almost immediately in the sunroom’s inner doorway. 

“Look what I caught,” he said, holding Erin carefully upside down as she giggled. 

“We get some really interesting fauna out here.” Hawkeye poked Erin’s nose. 

BJ righted her and set her down, smiling as she made another bid for the back door. 

“Stay where we can see you,” he called, sweeping the inside of his wrist across his brow. He shone with sweat, and was putting off heat like a furnace. 

“Water,” Hawkeye reminded him, already reaching for the glass cupboard. BJ was bad at remembering to stay hydrated. “It’s over ninety out there.” 

Daniel beat him to it, pouring a glass of water from a pitcher that had been cooling in the refrigerator. “There’s still lemonade if you want it.”

“After this, maybe, thank you,” BJ said, downing most of his water immediately. 

“Make sure you stretch,” Hawkeye said, starting and then stopping an absentminded attempt to grasp BJ’s elbow. 

“Already did. Erin was using me as a jungle gym the whole time.” BJ set down his glass and took Hawkeye’s hand. He raised it determinedly to his lips, and bussed his knuckles. “Sorry for running out on you, Daniel. Long flight.” 

Daniel grinned, eyes flicking from Hawkeye and BJ’s linked hands up to meet Hawkeye’s gaze. “No problem, kiddo. Glad you’re feeling better.”

Hawkeye relaxed. He looped an arm around BJ’s waist and leaned into him, even though BJ was damp with sweat and uncomfortably warm. Everything was feeling righter by the minute. He wanted to keep it that way. He was good, he was happy, he had people he loved—and now he could show his dad that, too. He really was doing okay.

“I should probably bring her in,” BJ said, peering out the window. “The sun’s pretty intense.”

“Good thought,” Daniel said. “I’ve got Coppertone you should all use if you’re going to be outside long. Hawk burns easy—you burn easy, kid, you should be more careful—”

“I will.”

“I mean it,” Daniel said, pointing at him, and then BJ. “He really gets red. But all of you should wear some. It’s not healthy to get burned.”

“Right, Dad,” Hawkeye said, and smiled when Daniel nodded, his point made. Sun safety was something he took awfully seriously. 

“Right back,” BJ said, and jogged through the door. 

Hawkeye leaned over the sink to watch as BJ’s jog slowed significantly. He shouted something muffled about coming to get Erin, who took off at a full-tilt toddler run, laughing as BJ took tiny, tiny strides and pretended Erin was outrunning him. Eventually he caught up to her and bowled her over gently, doing a particularly athletic maneuver in which he half-fell over Erin while sweeping her up into his arms. He finished by flopping backwards into the grass, holding Erin up over his head. 

Right about now, Hawkeye knew from experience, Erin would ask for BJ to ‘fly’ her—and, as he’d expected, BJ shifted, tucking his legs up. He balanced Erin carefully, her torso resting on the soles of his shoes, and extended his legs upwards, careful not to let her fall as she looked down at BJ, hovering in mid-flight, their smiles mirrored. 

Daniel laughed, leaning over the sink with Hawkeye. “You remember when I used to do that with you?”

“Of course.” Hawkeye jostled their shoulders together. “I can’t remember what we called it. Not airplane.”

“You just asked for ‘up,’” Daniel said. “You’d toddle into the living room and stare at me, and that was your way of saying you wanted to play, so I’d get down on the carpet and—most of the time you were playing with blocks or those little wooden figures your mom got for you, or you wanted to show off the fact that you could read, or you wanted a hug, but sometimes you’d just say ‘up’ over and over and then jump on me. You were so small.”

“I wish I remembered,” Hawkeye murmured, struggling to recall. He remembered vividly the game, the sensation of jumping off the ground and trusting his father to catch him, but couldn’t recall the leadup. Only the flying. 

/// 

BJ showered and changed while Hawkeye made conversation with his father and overcompensated about his health by cracking a joke every ten seconds. He could feel himself performing. It wasn’t usually a problem with his father. And yet he was perched strangely over the kitchen table punning with a nervous intensity that had to make him seem even worse off than he was. He was grateful when BJ pulled him away, wanting help getting Erin set up in his old room, or maybe just wanting a tour of the place Hawkeye had spent so much of his childhood. Either way, he thought guiltily, it was a relief to get a break. 

“Here it is,” Hawkeye said, pushing the door to his childhood bedroom open, Daniel starting on dinner downstairs. He stepped to the side, letting BJ and Erin enter, and considered the room. It was essentially as he remembered. Twin bed, sloped roof, desk, closet, windows. A new stand fan spun in the corner, working valiantly to create an airflow through the room. 

Erin ran past him and immediately took to exploring, poking under the bed, opening a drawer in the desk. 

Hawkeye took another step in, and crossed his arms, letting his gaze unfocus to avoid looking too intently at anything. He wasn’t sure how he felt. It was complicated, and not all that good. There were a lot of memories here. Good old ones—waking up snowy mornings to rush downstairs, pestering his parents awake, or later when he was a moody teen Daniel bringing him a hot chocolate to drink as he cried over something he couldn’t even remember now. A heartbreak or a stressful school day or maybe even just the confusion of being a kid. He remembered sneaking a high school girlfriend home, too, kissing sort of imprecisely on the bed and chickening out before things went any further. And he remembered hunching over his little desk working at his college applications. Sitting there and watching the sun rise over the water. There was plenty of good at hand.

And yet the distressing memories were far more immediate. Coming home from Korea and immediately imploding. Trying to fit his six-foot frame into a twin bed again in the stifling heat, sleeping for hours and hours and not eating and not showering and drinking like he wanted to drown himself, getting weird and paranoid and skinny and intensely sad, suffocating under an invisible immense weight as every day brought him deeper into a listless apathy that would have frightened him if there was anything left in him capable of feeling anything besides despair. He unwillingly recalled waking up with Daniel kneeling over him, worried he’d died, and cringed physically, turning his face to the wall. He’d made so many mistakes. 

Even now he wasn’t sure how much to blame himself. It was a hard thing to balance. Sometimes he felt defensive, and upset—he wasn’t in his right mind, he thought, and if he had been he wouldn’t have been so sick, and worried his father so terribly, and made so many bad choices. He wouldn’t have scared BJ by mailing his will. He wouldn’t have started smoking. He wouldn’t have run away from the only people who loved him. If he was well, he wouldn’t have done any of it, and he had done all of it because he was unwell. It wasn’t fair to be angry with him, or upset that he had acted poorly and irrationally. 

But then he also figured there was no one else to blame. Could he have made different choices? Was he really in control? Could he really be held at fault for actions he had taken while out of his mind, paranoid and confused, more than passively suicidal, feeling the world stretch away from him as though he and it existed entirely separately from each other? He wasn’t sure. Sometimes he thought he was making the whole thing up, and that any time he could have shaken his head and snapped out of it and started acting sane again. And other times he felt as though it hadn’t been him at all. 

He’d ran it over and over in his head through the previous months, trying to puzzle it out: it wasn’t his fault his brain seemed to work in nontypical ways. He couldn’t control that, hadn’t caused it, and wasn’t responsible for when his moods swept up or down or sideways into energetic sadness, fast-paced despair. But he had to be responsible for how he responded to those moods, and how he managed them and worked to mitigate them, everybody could agree on that. Being ill didn’t mean he could scare or upset people without consequence. 

But then, if he wasn’t thinking rationally, how could he be expected to think his way to behaving reasonably? How was he supposed to think himself better, if the thing doing the thinking wasn’t working how it ought to? He knew he wouldn’t tell a patient having a heart attack to get better by making his heart beat correctly, but then that wasn’t a perfect metaphor, either.

He usually did alright at it, at managing himself, was getting better with age and practice, but the complexity of the issue made his head hurt. Made him curl around BJ on the couch sometimes and think long and hard about determinism, and quantum papers with math too multifaceted for even him to understand, and Freud, and lobotomies, and what it meant to have something formally written down in a medical file, something real and big and permanent that could have him refused employment or whisked away to be electrocuted or locked in an institution or held down as somebody icepicked his brain away through his eye until he was calm and quiet and agreeable and never had a complex thought again, or, or, or—the list went on.

He didn’t know what to make of any of it. How to hold so many ideas in his head about blame and responsibility, and management and cures, and sickness and natural variation, and paranoia and reasonable fear. Not to mention trying to consider so many conflicting ones. He’d hash it out with Sidney sometime, maybe, if they ever ran into each other again. He wasn’t sure he wanted to, not after Tokyo and the end of it all. He was still embarrassed that so many people had seen him that way. Sidney, Margaret, Potter, Charles, Klinger, BJ—all of them had seen him terrified and confused in the OR, failing at his work, finally and undeniably separated from reality. And then again, later, BJ in New York—and he was humiliated that he’d broken down so terribly in front of his father, that he’d been so ill for so long. Every time he thought about it, any of it, it filled him with shame, and a compulsive need to prove the fact that he was well.

He’d distracted himself. Anyway, the best logic he’d come up with, the closest sense he’d made of the question of guilt, was that, even if he couldn’t be blamed for what he’d done, for scaring his father and upsetting BJ and being all around thoughtless because he had been in terrible pain, he was still responsible for the consequences, because there was nobody else around to fix the damage he’d caused. So he was a victim of himself, too—maybe the primary victim, the person most drastically hurt by what had happened. So he had been sick and scared and in need of help. So he had only been trying, in his own confused way, to do the right thing. So even now he still recalled the subjective certainty of the correctness of his actions in the moment, found it hard to believe he had done wrong except that the fallout of his actions was so clear. Well, then, maybe it wasn’t his fault, precisely. But it was undeniably his responsibility. 

The point was, he thought, trying to drag himself into the present moment, trying not to imagine terrible things happening to him, trying harder not to find them a little bit funny, the point was the bedroom was upsetting him. He reached blindly sideways, finding BJ’s hand. 

BJ squeezed it. “How’d you have it decorated?”

“Hm?” Hawkeye asked, trying to only be where he was. A harder trick than it seemed. He was flighty. Pieces of himself liked to drift all the time across state and country lines, into the past, into old apartment buildings and beds and tents he’d never really belonged in.

“Did you decorate your room any as a kid?” BJ asked. He dropped Hawkeye’s hand in favor of holding his waist. 

Hawkeye leaned into him and closed his eyes. “I had a bookshelf,” he said, picturing it. “I kept a little wooden pony toy on there for years. I usually had a calendar. My mom made blankets for me. Those were always heaped on the bed. Mm, and I think I had—boy. We’ll have to ask Dad, but I think it was a boat. No, I remember. It was a picture of a sailboat on the wall. I liked it. I made up stories about it when I couldn’t sleep.”

“What kind of sailboat?” BJ asked. “What kind of picture?”

Hawkeye wrapped his arm around BJ’s waist in turn. “Standard sort of little painting. Bright, white, sails up. It was kind of—cutting through the water. Through a storm. These big waves.”

“Uh-huh,” BJ said, and bumped Hawkeye’s hip with his own. “Is that it?”

Hawkeye opened his eyes. “Where?”

BJ pulled him into a quarter-turn. 

“Ah,” Hawkeye said. His father hadn’t taken the picture down after all. There it was, right where it had always been. Facing his bed. 

“Doesn’t look so stormy to me,” BJ remarked, tilting his head. 

“No,” Hawkeye agreed. The boat was as he remembered it. Small, simple, bright. But the skies were clear, the water calm, the day apparently lovely and warm. That made sense. He couldn’t imagine, now, his father hanging a painting of a ship under duress across from his childhood bed. Couldn’t imagine his mother doing so, either. Of course they’d put up a nice piece of a boat on still waters. 

He tilted his head, too, mirroring BJ, trying to determine the source of the incorrect memory. He had no clue. It was disturbing to realize there were things he misremembered so completely. After all, he’d had that painting of a boat a lot longer than he’d known his mother. 

He shrugged, unsettled, and decided to try not to think about it anymore. “I guess the waves just seemed bigger back then.”

BJ patted his side. “Well, Erin, what do you think? Is this room going to be okay?”

Erin was busy standing on her toes to look out of the window, gazing out at the waves with a transparent longing. They’d have to make time for a beach day as soon as possible. But not, Hawkeye figured, looking out the west-facing windows at a set of gathering clouds, today. There was a storm on the way, and the water would be dangerous. That was alright. The house was sturdy and safe and far from the reach of even the biggest and wildest breakers.

///

Dinner came and went. BJ seemed to be settling in. Slowly, nervously, still reserved, but getting there. He was still polite to a fault. Hawkeye laughed at him when he was too well-mannered to turn down thirds of dinner, and then gave in and helped him finish, both of them sharing the plate, their ankles locked under the table. Daniel had made a number of Hawkeye’s favorites for their first meal together, which embarrassed him a little, and made him feel awfully cared for. The last time he’d been home he hadn’t been in any state to appreciate food. 

Not everything was easy. There was a minor hitch where Daniel absentmindedly brought out wine and then clearly instantly recalled how severe Hawkeye’s drinking had been last he’d seen him, extrapolated that tentatively onto BJ, and then asked, uncomfortable, looking at the wall, if anybody would mind if he had a glass. 

They smoothed it over. BJ had a single glass, and Hawkeye did, too. He had found that beer was okay, and wine, too—he could have a bottle or glass with a meal on occasion and not be compelled to drink more. He’d decided he had no interest in testing harder liquor again. 

Anyway, he ate well, and had a pleasant drink, and even better conversation with BJ and Erin helping to buffer any frightening topics. By the time they were clearing the table, it was time to put Erin to bed. BJ took the lead on that while Hawkeye chatted with his father about the new clinic going up at the edge of town—Daniel liked that it would make it easier to order tests, and didn’t like that he didn’t know the doctors—and stole bites of leftovers, even though he wasn’t really hungry. He’d just missed his father’s cooking.

Afterwards they settled into the living room, and Daniel did his best to embarrass Hawkeye by showing BJ all his old childhood photos: Hawkeye grinning, gap-toothed, on the beach, or covered in ill-gotten flour, or asleep and drooling prolifically on his mother. More recent ones, too, ones not yet relegated to albums: Hawkeye graduating high school, caught unflatteringly open-mouthed as he gave a valedictorian address, Hawkeye moving into his freshman year dorm, Hawkeye in different-colored gowns grinning with his degrees. BJ laughed, and made unserious comments about blackmail that made Daniel laugh, too, and promise to help—it felt good. It felt like it was supposed to, Hawkeye thought, having a partner meet a parent. Fond, a little nervewracking, lots of love.

There was a lull, then, when the photos were through. BJ threw an arm around him on the couch and tried to make conversation.

Only a few minutes passed like that before Hawkeye was struggling to keep his eyes open. There was an empty-headed and very pleasant drowsiness settling over him, a good meal, the house’s warmth, his single glass of wine, BJ’s touch, and the homey scent of the couch, even, all working to anesthetize him as surely as a ventilator full of pentathol. 

“You can relax,” BJ whispered, or maybe whispered—Hawkeye’s hearing seemed unreliable, both hyperimmediate and extremely difficult to focus on. Still, BJ went on touching his hair, stroking him softly as his head dipped. It felt good to close his eyes. He drifted for a few long moments there, vividly hallucinating—dreaming?—along to some anecdote his father was relaying about fishing with Hawkeye as a kid, vibrant technicolor trout arrowing through a mental stream, and—he tried to open his eyes, confused, made a noise of some kind, and then BJ’s hand was on his thigh and then his stomach and then his face, soothing him back into the river and then somewhere below it where he rested, warm, watching light play over the water far above.

“Hawk,” BJ said, soft, very close to his face. 

Hawkeye resurfaced. The light had changed. The sun had set, and a lamp had been lit. It was raining. He tried to speak, and managed a hoarse sound. 

“You fell asleep,” BJ said, working a hand behind his back. 

Hawkeye blinked, finding it difficult to stay awake. He was dizzy. “I’m sorry.”

BJ laughed quietly. “Why are you sorry?”

“I don’t know,” Hawkeye said, trying to get his limbs in order, trying to get everybody and everything aligned towards the common and BJ-directed goal of getting Hawkeye up and off the couch. 

“Don’t be sorry.” BJ was still whispering. Daniel must have gone to bed.

Hawkeye looked away, feeling embarrassed for no good reason. He wished he could have told his dad goodnight. He leaned heavily on BJ as they made their way back to the bedroom, turning off lights as they went. 

He brushed his teeth in sleepy silence, and showered while barely conscious, the warm water nearly knocking him out. He fell—literally fell—into bed, limbs loose, feeling exceptionally at ease. Warm, clean, full, very comfortable. He let his eyes close again.

Outside cicadas trilled, their volume rising and falling over the farther-off sound of the water. The rain was light, but audible. BJ padded around the room, steps light. Pipes clanked as the last of the heat from his shower dissipated, and the house settled, its creaking catapulting him into his kidhood. This was how the night had sounded for the first eighteen years of his life. 

The bed shifted as BJ lay beside him, the duvet lifting and then settling again, cool air skating over Hawkeye’s bare chest.

“Blanket and no shirt?” BJ asked, quiet, like he thought Hawkeye might already be asleep. 

“Uh-huh,” Hawkeye said, lips barely moving. 

“You’re knocked out,” BJ observed. 

“Mm,” Hawkeye agreed, wondering if he was imagining the far-off cry of an owl. A particularly loud wave broke against the shore, and he was reminded of a different bedroom. 

“Sounds like the beach house,” he said, listening. 

BJ paused, probably listening, too. 

Hawkeye pictured it, the ocean-facing windows, February’s grey skies, the disorder of their possessions, and, with a bloom of affection, his first time with BJ. Waking up, disoriented, sleepy, surprised and then pleased by BJ’s presence, face warm where it had been pressed against the man’s chest, feeling protective of BJ and his injured arm, wanting very much to take care of him, touching him softly, and then, gratified by the response—

“That was a nice house,” BJ said, the mattress shifting. “It was good to us.”

“You ever miss it?” Hawkeye asked, aching inexpressibly for a place they no longer lived. He loved their new home desperately, but there was something about the old beach house. Living there was only four months removed, but he could already tell it would be a site of nostalgia for the rest of his life. So many memories. So many changes.

“No,” BJ said. “I’m fond of it. I’m grateful for the time we had in it. But I don’t miss it.”

“Mm,” Hawkeye agreed, glad that BJ was still awake enough to articulate what he was too exhausted to put into words. He stretched, languorous, and melted into the mattress. He felt pleasantly heavy. Like he was entirely present. All of him was settled firmly in his body, no part of him was or wanted to be elsewhere. 

BJ passed his palm down Hawkeye’s torso, holding Hawkeye’s hip as he curled up next to him. The delicateness of his touch might have made Hawkeye shiver if he wasn’t so close to sleep. 

“This place seems good for you,” BJ said against his shoulder. “You seem really good here.”

He wasn’t sure it was true. But if it seemed that way, who was he to disagree? 

Hawkeye managed a single nod, the warmth and weight of BJ’s arm across his middle sinking him steadily towards unconsciousness. 

There was a long, unsteady pause, the sort that meant BJ was trying to decide whether or not to ask a question. Hawkeye tried hard to stay awake for it, wanting to listen, but the soft sound of BJ’s breathing and the waves on the rocks and the rain and the rise and fall of cicadas set him too quickly adrift.