Chapter Text
“Blue nights are the opposite of the dying of the brightness, but they are also its warning.”
— Joan Didion
The generator failed just after midnight. The operating room went dark, except for the weak emergency lamp that caught the edges of instruments and the sheen of sweat on their foreheads. Outside, rain fell in sheets—thick, determined, erasing the sound of everything else.
They had three patients on the table. There was no time to stop. Hawkeye found the hand pump by touch, the rubber cold and slick with condensation. Beside him, BJ kept working, voice steady, telling him when to squeeze, when to hold. The rhythm became mechanical—squeeze, release, breathe, cut, clamp. The war had been reduced to this sequence so often it barely registered as motion for them, anymore.
They started talking to stay awake, sometime around 3 A.M., though neither could remember what about. Baseball. Home. The way coffee always tasted like burnt rope after midnight. Somewhere near dawn, Hawkeye told a story about a girl he’d loved in Maine who put cinnamon in her coffee. Halfway through, he forgot her name and started laughing. BJ didn’t laugh.
It came out raw, too loud for the room. It startled one of the nurses, who looked up, eyes hollowed by hours without sleep. Hawkeye lifted a hand in apology, the motion slow, almost gentle. The rain kept drumming against the roof, steady as a pulse might be in some other room, some other cross section of Korea, not here.
The thread trembled once between BJ’s fingers, caught the edge of the light, and disappeared again. “You should get some water,” he said.
“Water’s for the living.” Hawkeye’s voice came thin through the mask.
“Water,” BJ repeated quietly. Just a word, an edict.
“Not thirsty.”
“Didn’t ask.” BJ’s voice was flat but firm. That tone hit Hawkeye behind the knees sometimes, twanging something tender, almost defensive.
He drank anyway, when the nurse pressed the tin cup to his mouth. The water was warm, metallic. He could taste powder in it, the rubber of his own gloves. Five-star dining. He really ought to leave a tip.
When the nurse set the cup down, the light flickered on for a brief, derisive moment. The room dimmed again to outlines: faces, hands, steel instruments glinting and vanishing. The air smelled of antiseptic and the damp fabric of their scrubs. Each breath raised a small ghost of condensation that drifted upward and was lost in the heat.
They worked by memory now. Hawkeye could hear the sound of the needle before he saw it, could tell from the change in BJ’s breathing when he’d found an artery or lost one. They stopped speaking again for a long time. The quiet grew until it felt solid, a second wind they could move through.
Somewhere near the far table a nurse whispered a number. Another replied. Someone coughed. The rest was the rain and the slow rhythm of the pump in Hawkeye’s hands. Squeeze, release. Squeeze, release.
He tried to remember the story he’d been telling—a girl, Maine, cinnamon—and found the details gone. Only the shape of it remained. He almost laughed again, but didn’t, opting instead for his most recently established vice:
“You’re doing it, again,” BJ said, pointedly.
“Am not.”
“Are too.”
“Am not.”
Frank’s voice came from the next table, sharp and nasal through his mask. “Is it possible for you two to stop talking for five minutes? Some of us work better in silence.”
“Some of us work better, period,” BJ murmured.
That earned the smallest breath of laughter from Hawkeye.
“You’re impossible!” Frank snarled.
“That’s Captain Impossible to you,” Hawkeye hummed.
BJ shook his head slightly, returning to the wound. The movement was practiced, elegant even in exhaustion. He worked as though the act itself were keeping him upright, as if every stitch might hold the night together a little longer.
“You’re singing again,” he continued, letting Frank fade into the background.
Hawkeye didn’t deny it. The pump in his hands kept its pulse—squeeze, release, breathe—and under his breath came the almost-silent thread of melody, just air and vibration. “‘Surry with the Fringe on Top.’”
“Better than the ‘Dies Irae.”
“Keeps the tempo steady,” Hawkeye said.
Frank made an audible noise of disgust. “This is a hospital, not Broadway.”
Hawkeye kept his eyes on the patient, voice a murmur. “Tell that to the audience.”
Then the lamp flickered—once, twice—and for a moment the O.R. was flooded with white light.
Hawkeye blinked against it, eyes catching on BJ’s face across the table, the sweat on his temple, the small crease of focus between his brows. Before he could register anything more, the light snapped back out, plunging them into dark again.
A sound followed—small, wrong. The monitor at the far table stuttered once, then went thin.
“Pressure’s dropping,” one of the nurses said, voice pitched low but urgent.
BJ was already moving, calling for more suction, his hand steady even in the near-dark. Hawkeye shifted the pump to his left hand, reached blindly for the clamp with his right, found it by instinct.
“Got it,” he said.
“Hold there,” BJ answered. The words came through the dark like coordinates.
The rhythm came back—slowly, unevenly at first, then stronger. The nurse read out numbers again, steadier this time. BJ exhaled, just once, and the sound of it found Hawkeye somewhere under the noise.
“Shoulda gone with the 'Dies Irae.’” Hawkeye said softly.
“Maybe stick with Oklahoma.”
Around 6 A.M., the generator coughed itself back to life. When the bulb steadied again, the patients were still breathing. Miracles, small and temporary.
A nurse wiped her forehead with the back of her wrist, leaving a thin streak of blood she didn’t notice, her doll’s lashes clumped and wet in the faint, absurd sweetness of relief. Someone dropped a scalpel, and it spun on the floor, throwing warped reflections across the walls as it slowed to a stop.
For a second, Hawkeye almost smiled. He could finally see what he’d been doing all night.
The last of the patients was wheeled out on a stretcher, sheets already damp from the humidity. For a moment, no one moved. The rain had slowed outside, traded its fury for exhaustion. The room smelled of alcohol and sweat and the faint, metallic edge of blood—the scent of victory, if you had a bad sense of smell.
Hawkeye stripped off his gloves, flexed his fingers. The skin underneath was pale, pruned. Across the table, BJ was pulling his mask down, leaving a raw indentation along his cheek. His hair was plastered to his forehead, dark with sweat.
The quiet landed heavy. It was the first true silence in hours, and Hawkeye didn’t trust it; it felt like the sort of calm that gets ideas. He reached for a rag, wiped his face, then stopped halfway when he saw BJ—really saw him, for the first time in hours; the drop of his shoulders, the look of someone remembering gravity. The lamp hummed again, not quite steady. The light made him look older. Or maybe just real.
“Some night,” Hawkeye said, and his own voice startled him.
BJ exhaled, rubbed at the mark the mask had left. “Some life.”
The nurses began cleaning the tables, quiet and deliberate, as if afraid to break whatever fragile truce the night had made with them. Hawkeye looked once more at BJ’s hands still resting flat on the metal, at the faint smudge of blood near his wrist. He turned back toward the sink, found a clean towel, and handed it across without thinking. BJ took it, murmured something that might have been thanks. The simple act of it—the passing of a cloth from one tired hand to another—felt absurdly tender, the kind of thing that would dissolve if named. Hawkeye sat down hard on the floor, his hand still trembling from the pump.
BJ joined him, back to the wall.
“You should sleep,” he said.
“And miss breakfast?”
“I’ll bring you something.”
“10 hours of surgery and you think you have the stomach for it?”
“You seem to think you’d be able to handle it,” BJ challenged—weakly, but with enough spark to count. He looked him square in the face, eyes wide, all whites showing. So wide, Hawkeye sometimes wondered if he pinned them open at night, the way girls do with their curlers.
“They’re making meatloaf for lunch, I bet I can shape some into a pillow and it won’t be much better than the one I have.”
“You might have better luck with the ham,” BJ whispered wryly.
When they laughed, it came out as quiet huffs that echoed each other—laughter without sound. Both leaned back against the wall, their heads finding the same rhythm as the silliness tapered out. The rain softened to a gentle patter—light, almost pastoral.
“Do you think the Swamp will still be there when we get back?” Hawkeye asked. His eyelids were suddenly heavier than the hours they’d outlasted. He was an anchor sinking, his head tipping onto BJ’s shoulder, which eased to meet it.
“It’ll probably be more like a reservoir.” BJ’s arm tensed for a beat against his own, then slackened as he yawned.
“I was hoping for a vast sea of some sort,” Hawkeye murmured. “I think you and I would do well together to invest in some waterfront property.”
And he’d be kidding himself if he insisted he couldn’t already smell the salt air beneath the stench of blood—Boothbay Harbor in the sun, golden swirls of blonde hair caught in the wind, that familiar crinkle in Beej’s brow poised to reel in a fish instead of another long piece of shrapnel.
BJ huffed another small laugh, the sound barely rising above the pitter-patter against the roof. “As long as you handle the paperwork.”
It was the last thing Hawkeye heard before he nodded off.
—
When BJ blinked awake, the light was softer than he remembered, still flickering. It came through the window in long, pale stripes, glinting off the edge of a half-packed suitcase on the floor. The air smelled like salt and pine—clean, sharp, almost too alive after years of other flavors, bodily and chemical.
Somewhere far off, through the wall, there was a muffled sound he could just make out—music, soft and low. Nat King Cole. He thought of Erin’s little hands pulling the comforter off him and Peg on his first Christmas morning after the war. Her gingery laugh. Her small, socked feet. And then the memory spun off with the record in the next room:
Those happy hours I spent with you
That lovely afterglow
Most of all, I miss you so.
It always took him a few minutes to reorient himself to the world. That would never change. A side effect of survival, maybe. The body returned first; the rest of you caught up when it could. He supposed that was fine. His body had always been more punctual than his mind anyway.
The ceiling above him was washed in trilling sunlight. Painted Alice blue, named for Teddy Roosevelt’s daughter, something Potter had told him once between puffs of tobacco, feet propped on a stool beside the still. To match her steely eyes. And for some reason, he hadn't been able to picture a young Gibson Girl, but a face all edges and laughter lines, eyes too alive for rest. Too bright, too knowing, the kind that gave everything away before the mouth had a chance to catch up.
In the now, he sat up slowly. On the nightstand to his left, a paper cup of coffee had gone cold. And somewhere just beyond it, there was always the faint expectancy of Hawkeye looking back at him from an army cot—an image that never quite materialized, no matter how long he waited.
Outside, a gull cried in answer—a sharp, high sound—a reminder that the wait was nearly over.
Welcome to Maine, Captain Hunnicutt. Doctor Hunnicutt. Mr. Hunnicutt. Sir.
The gull trailed off, and with it the faint, senile sense of being addressed.
I’ll always love you
And want you too
How much, you’ll never know
Most of all, I miss you so.
When his feet finally found the floor, he knew it was going to be a rough morning. Even after the war—and keeping himself as fit as he could manage—no man was immune to the backaches that came from leaning over a bike for days, sleeping on motel mattresses, and under Midwestern skies that were too wide and too unforgiving.
When he drew the curtains back, his bike was still there in the parking lot, waiting for him. Beyond it, the sea. It was the first thing that grounded him each morning—to see it, to know it hadn’t vanished. In Korea, you could set your beer bottle down outside and it might disappear immediately, consumed by a shadow or blown to smithereens by a sniper.
The bike had been his idea. The cross-country trip had been Peg’s. An idea for an idea. Both of them circling the same orbit: his wellness, his stability, his lack thereof.
“You might find something to do with yourself, darling,” she’d said to him one evening a few months after he came home, drying a dish at the sink. The late California light slanted through the window, making her look taller, her shadow stretching long and graceful into the den where he sat with a glass of bourbon.
He’d probably been sitting there for hours, but hadn’t registered it.
“Something other than sitting there like a houseplant,” she’d added, not unkindly.
He’d smiled then, just barely, and said, “I’m the kind that keeps dropping leaves on the rug.”
Peg had laughed—small, weary, but real. “Then do me a favor, Beej. Go be a cactus. Get some sun.”
After she went upstairs, he’d put on his shoes and gone for a walk, no direction in mind—just movement for the sake of it. The sky was bright pink, a wind coming off the bay that tugged at his collar.
Mill Valley, San Francisco, the edge of everything—it all blurred together these days. The streets were quiet, full of low bungalows with Christmas lights still tangled in their eaves, though it was March. He passed a service station, a liquor store, a row of shuttered shops. Then, at the corner where the sidewalk crumbled into dirt, he saw it.
The motorcycle sat half-buried behind a chain-link fence, sun-bleached and stubborn. A Triumph Thunderbird, maybe a ’51, maybe ’52—hard to tell through the rust. The tank still carried a ghost of its old blue, dulled to gray by weathering and time. One tire flat, seat torn, handlebars bent just enough to look defiant. It had the air of something that had once been proud of itself. He could relate.
He stopped. For a long while, he just stood there with his hands in his pockets, the wind threading through the fence, smelling faintly of oil and rain. The thing looked ruined. But not dead.
“How much for it?” he asked, when the old man in the yard finally came out, wiping his hands on a rag. The man squinted through the fading light. “That thing? Doesn’t run.”
BJ nodded once. “Neither do I. Not without coffee.”
The old man looked at him, expressionless.
He bought it for seventy dollars and the promise to haul it himself.
The weeks that followed took their shape around the bike. By day he worked at the hospital; by evening, he worked in the garage. He learned to measure time not by hours but by what he’d managed to loosen, clean, or coax back into alignment—himself included. Erin liked to hand him tools she couldn’t quite lift, her small fingers smudged with grease by the end of the night. She called it “helping Daddy fix the airplane.” He didn’t correct her.
Peg watched from the doorway some nights, a dishrag in her hands, the sound of the socket wrench keeping time with the crickets outside. The work steadied him. It steadied them all.
By early summer, the Thunderbird could almost breathe again. Its tank gleamed faintly, a blue-gray that caught the light just so when the garage door was open. Peg traced a hand along the seat one afternoon, the smell of oil and lemon polish thick in the air.
“It’s beautiful,” she said.
He shrugged. “It’s getting there.”
“You should take it somewhere,” she told him. “Somewhere that isn’t here.”
“You mean around the block doesn’t count?”
He looked up at her then, knowing what she meant before she said it. He wanted to argue, but her tone left no room for that. So instead he nodded, running his thumb along the curve of the gas tank, feeling its smooth, patient surface. The machine was ready. He was not.
Now it sat in the lot of a small Portland inn, waiting for him. The only thing he’d brought with him from San Francisco besides a rucksack and a few slices of banana bread Peg had baked special. She’d made him promise he’d save them for Hawk.
Through the wall came a slow hum—Nat King Cole again, faint and frayed, the record skipping on the last refrain—Most of all, I miss you so.
He closed his eyes and let the line sit there. After the closest thing to coffee the tavern next door could provide, he would shoulder his pack and step outside into the wind—the sea calling somewhere beyond the road, and somewhere down the coast, Crabapple Cove—though if it wanted him that badly, it could’ve met him halfway.
There was nothing left to do but go.