M*A*S*H Fanfiction
Title: Things That Fade and Things That Stay
Author: Liliths_Requiem (yeah, I am still alive.)
Rating: PG
Summary: Daniel Pierce watches as his son sheds his fatigues and becomes a civilian again.
Pairings: Trapper/Hawkeye, but only in the abstract
The first thing to disappear is Hawkeye’s smile.
Once upon a time, Hawkeye had a smile that could stop winter in its tracks. “Hereditary,” Daniel would tell the women who asked, “from his mother’s side.” The women ignored the bitterness in Daniel’s voice, as they all knew about crazy Mrs. Pierce and how she’d married too young and died too late to reclaim dignity with her death. All throughout the war, which wasn’t a war, but should have been, Daniel would think about his son, and wait impatiently for the day when he would again see Hawkeye’s smile.
Daniel picks up his son at the Maine airport and pulls him into a hug before the younger Pierce can so much as breathe in the New England air. Daniel’s jittery and laughing and just so damn happy to have his son back, that it takes him a moment to notice Hawkeye’s not smiling at all. “Hawk…what?” but he doesn’t really know how to phrase the question. Hawkeye offers him what should be a forced smile but what comes out as a snarl. He doesn’t mention the missing accessory for the rest of the trip home.
The next casualty of the War That Wasn’t is Hawkeye’s fatigues.
There are three other young men in town who were shipped off to a bloodbath that no one even had the decency to acknowledge as a war. They’ve all arrived within two weeks of each other, all their bones intact but their hearts broken in to two-hundred-and-six pieces to make up for that. None of them smile as they gather the wood from Maine’s forests, not a single upward turn of lip as they pour gasoline over eight pairs of army fatigues, two officers’ outfits, and four pairs of combat boots. But the maniacal laughter that follows the conflagration echoes through Crabapple Cove for days.
Daniel doesn’t tell his son that he could be drafted again. No one talks about The Great War and The Second World War and how they took place within half a generation of each other. The last thing on anyone’s mind is a broken country across the sea with a foreign name like Vietnam. And besides, Hawkeye’s gaze doesn’t seem so haunted anymore-at least, not whenever Daniel can work up the courage to meet his son’s eyes.
After the fatigues, everything else just seems to fade.
BJ calls, twice a week, once on Saturday morning around eleven o’clock and once on Wednesday evening around seven. Hawkeye refuses the phone calls nine times before his resolve is broken and he holds out his hand to take the receiver from his father. The loss of Hawkeye’s stubbornness is one that Daniel actually appreciates. He stands there for a moment, watching his son speak, but the moment Hawkeye whimpers “Beej I don’t know if I can do this,” the older Pierce leaves the room, for fear of what his son will say next.
Like clockwork, BJ calls. Twice a week for three months. But then the calls drop to once a week. And then they’re lucky if a month passes and BJ calls at all. Daniel tries to approach his son about it, even offers to finance a trip out to California, but Hawkeye refuses. “He has a life, Dad,” Hawkeye tells his old man, “It’s about time he gets to live it.”
The nightmares take the longest to fade away.
Nothing has to happen to set Hawkeye off at first. Every night for the first month of Hawkeye’s homecoming, the Pierce house is racked with screams that can’t be swallowed by the darkness. They’re pitiful and deep, desperate cries for men and women that Daniel isn’t sure he’ll ever get to meet. He takes to sleeping in the recliner across from Hawkeye’s bed, not because he can offer his son any solace, but because he needs to make sure that his son doesn’t son doesn’t do anything stupid. Daniel Pierce has been a doctor for long enough to recognize depression when he sees it.
There’s nothing he can do. So he calls in a specialist, one Sidney Freedman, whose name Hawkeye’s said a few times in his sleep and whose number is listed as a certified Clinical Psychologist in Veterans’ Affairs. Dr. Freedman drives up on a Friday afternoon and stays for a week, talking Hawkeye through every inch of Korea and back home again. Daniel tries not to listen to these conversations, but he finds it hard to turn away from the way Hawkeye talks about them-those people who helped in through Hell and then disappeared. By the time Dr. Freedman, who insists Daniel call him Sidney, leaves Maine, the nightmares have been reduced to nightly whimpers of an indistinguishable name.
The one thing Hawkeye never takes off is his dogtags.
The red bathrobe is hanged in the closet, the gin is poured down the drain, and Hawkeye can finally work at the office for a full day. It only took a year for things to normalize, if the lost eyes and unhappy laughter that follow his son like the plague can be considered normal. Daniel likes to pretend they can’t, but as time passes, he realizes some things aren’t going to fade.
Hawkeye takes a month off in July and flies out to California to see BJ. He calls twice while he’s away, the first time to tell Daniel that BJ named Hawkeye godfather of his new baby boy: Benjamin Charles Hunnicut. The second to tell his father he’s extending his vacation for two weeks so he can take Erin to Disneyworld. Daniel tries not to be jealous of how happy Hawkeye sounds; forces himself not to ask why this man Hawkeye’s only known for three years can make his son laugh, when Daniel can’t even get Hawkeye to smile.
There’s a third phone call, at the end of the month, from a small town in Iowa. Hawkeye yells over a faulty connection that he’s decided to drive back in BJ’s old car and he probably won’t be home until the third week in August. “I’m going to stop in Boston,” Hawkeye says, while they can still hear each other. Daniel doesn’t ask his son why it’s going to take him three weeks to make a two-day trip. He’s learned, in the past year, not to ask questions.
Hawkeye resurfaces at the end of August, driving something that must have passed for a car back when Henry Ford was still tinkering around in his family shed and wearing nothing but his slacks and those damn dog tags. He looks peaceful, happy.
“Why don’t you take them off?” Daniel asks, after he’s made Hawkeye a cup of coffee. Hawkeye looks confused for a moment, but then follows his father’s eyes to his dog tags.
“Oh,” Hawkeye says, fingering them for a moment before slipping them up over his head, “For a long time they were all I had left.” He gets up and leaves then, the dog tags abandoned on the table between his coffee and his father’s hand. Daniel watches him go and then picks up the metal chain.
He knows the information that should be on the tags:
Pierce.
They were tenth generation British-Americans. Their forefathers had fought in the American Revolution. In fact, there was a Pierce in every war America was ever in.
Benjamin Franklin.
It was a full first name. Hawkeye didn’t have a middle name. Benjamin Franklin, after the museum he and Lily fell in love at. Lily said it made a nine year old sound pretentious though, so they called him Hawkeye for most of his life.
O81086415
A bunch of numbers that didn’t describe his Hawkeye at all. But they’d been a part of his life since the start of the war, so Daniel figured they meant something.
T-49 B
He remembers how he’d insisted they got the Tetanus Shot in ’49, before the war even broke out. Hawkeye had called him paranoid, but after he’d been drafted, he thanked his father. “Your hands were a lot steadier than the terrified nurses they had giving them to draftees.” Blood type B, like his mother. Hawkeyed hadn’t inherited much from Lily-just his piercing blue eyes, his smile, his ability to actually read, and his blood type. The important things.
P
Only not really. Daniel doesn’t think his son’s ever believed in anything. Except maybe humanity, but the Hebrews already took H.
So Daniel thinks he understand when Hawkeye says “they were all I had left.” He doesn’t really know why Hawkeye would want to remember the war, but he guesses that dog tags were a much more viable souvenir than a red bathrobe and an addiction to bad alcohol. He runs his fingers along the chain, and then picks up the first tag.
McIntyre.
That isn’t right.
John Francis X.
He isn’t sure he’s ever heard Hawkeye say that name. BJ Hunnicut, which didn’t stand for anything, Walter O’Reilly, who always knew everything, even Maxwell Klinger, who tried to be everything-all those named meant something to him. But John Francis X McIntyre was definitely not a name Daniel had ever heard Hawkeye say.
O80789994
Just a number this time, incapable of telling Daniel anything more.
T-49 O
Must have known something about medicine. Maybe McIntyre was a doctor too. And a universal donor, but that didn’t seem to help with figuring this man out.
C
Catholic. Irish Catholic, if the last name was anything to go by. Those were the type of people who believed in something because their entire family did, and none of them knew how to go against the family.
Daniel drops the dog tag on the table and tries not to think about the implications of this. Who was John Francis X McIntyre? Was he a doctor? And more importantly: Why were his dog tags around Hawkeye’s neck?
Daniel ponders the question for days. By the end of the next week, he still hasn’t worked up the nerve to ask Hawkeye who Mr.-doctor?-McIntyre is. He knows all about switching dog tags-they did the same thing back in WWII. There was a nurse then, Becca Johnson. God how he’d loved her. But she got blown to bits during an ambush and Daniel hadn’t thought about her since. He still had her dog tags, upstairs in the attic, away from Lily’s prying eyes. He doesn’t want to think about what it means.
But then there’s a knock on the door, and Hawkeye’s at the office, so of course Daniel’s going to have to answer it. When he pulls it open, there’s a blond, curly-haired man staring at him, wearing a grin that’s half cockiness, half terrified, and completely mischievous. “Dr. Pierce,” he begins, “I’m Trapper. Hawkeye’s friend?”
Blond curls, brown eyes, and there’s a gold chain around his neck, most likely attached to some saint. Daniel feels his gut kick out in defense as he moves out of the way to let the younger man in.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t get your name,” he says, after he tells the man that Hawkeye is still at work.
“Trapper,” the man replies, “Trapper John McIntyre.”
Yes, Daniel thinks to himself, I was afraid of that.
Author: Liliths_Requiem (yeah, I am still alive.)
Rating: PG
Summary: Daniel Pierce watches as his son sheds his fatigues and becomes a civilian again.
Pairings: Trapper/Hawkeye, but only in the abstract
The first thing to disappear is Hawkeye’s smile.
Once upon a time, Hawkeye had a smile that could stop winter in its tracks. “Hereditary,” Daniel would tell the women who asked, “from his mother’s side.” The women ignored the bitterness in Daniel’s voice, as they all knew about crazy Mrs. Pierce and how she’d married too young and died too late to reclaim dignity with her death. All throughout the war, which wasn’t a war, but should have been, Daniel would think about his son, and wait impatiently for the day when he would again see Hawkeye’s smile.
Daniel picks up his son at the Maine airport and pulls him into a hug before the younger Pierce can so much as breathe in the New England air. Daniel’s jittery and laughing and just so damn happy to have his son back, that it takes him a moment to notice Hawkeye’s not smiling at all. “Hawk…what?” but he doesn’t really know how to phrase the question. Hawkeye offers him what should be a forced smile but what comes out as a snarl. He doesn’t mention the missing accessory for the rest of the trip home.
The next casualty of the War That Wasn’t is Hawkeye’s fatigues.
There are three other young men in town who were shipped off to a bloodbath that no one even had the decency to acknowledge as a war. They’ve all arrived within two weeks of each other, all their bones intact but their hearts broken in to two-hundred-and-six pieces to make up for that. None of them smile as they gather the wood from Maine’s forests, not a single upward turn of lip as they pour gasoline over eight pairs of army fatigues, two officers’ outfits, and four pairs of combat boots. But the maniacal laughter that follows the conflagration echoes through Crabapple Cove for days.
Daniel doesn’t tell his son that he could be drafted again. No one talks about The Great War and The Second World War and how they took place within half a generation of each other. The last thing on anyone’s mind is a broken country across the sea with a foreign name like Vietnam. And besides, Hawkeye’s gaze doesn’t seem so haunted anymore-at least, not whenever Daniel can work up the courage to meet his son’s eyes.
After the fatigues, everything else just seems to fade.
BJ calls, twice a week, once on Saturday morning around eleven o’clock and once on Wednesday evening around seven. Hawkeye refuses the phone calls nine times before his resolve is broken and he holds out his hand to take the receiver from his father. The loss of Hawkeye’s stubbornness is one that Daniel actually appreciates. He stands there for a moment, watching his son speak, but the moment Hawkeye whimpers “Beej I don’t know if I can do this,” the older Pierce leaves the room, for fear of what his son will say next.
Like clockwork, BJ calls. Twice a week for three months. But then the calls drop to once a week. And then they’re lucky if a month passes and BJ calls at all. Daniel tries to approach his son about it, even offers to finance a trip out to California, but Hawkeye refuses. “He has a life, Dad,” Hawkeye tells his old man, “It’s about time he gets to live it.”
The nightmares take the longest to fade away.
Nothing has to happen to set Hawkeye off at first. Every night for the first month of Hawkeye’s homecoming, the Pierce house is racked with screams that can’t be swallowed by the darkness. They’re pitiful and deep, desperate cries for men and women that Daniel isn’t sure he’ll ever get to meet. He takes to sleeping in the recliner across from Hawkeye’s bed, not because he can offer his son any solace, but because he needs to make sure that his son doesn’t son doesn’t do anything stupid. Daniel Pierce has been a doctor for long enough to recognize depression when he sees it.
There’s nothing he can do. So he calls in a specialist, one Sidney Freedman, whose name Hawkeye’s said a few times in his sleep and whose number is listed as a certified Clinical Psychologist in Veterans’ Affairs. Dr. Freedman drives up on a Friday afternoon and stays for a week, talking Hawkeye through every inch of Korea and back home again. Daniel tries not to listen to these conversations, but he finds it hard to turn away from the way Hawkeye talks about them-those people who helped in through Hell and then disappeared. By the time Dr. Freedman, who insists Daniel call him Sidney, leaves Maine, the nightmares have been reduced to nightly whimpers of an indistinguishable name.
The one thing Hawkeye never takes off is his dogtags.
The red bathrobe is hanged in the closet, the gin is poured down the drain, and Hawkeye can finally work at the office for a full day. It only took a year for things to normalize, if the lost eyes and unhappy laughter that follow his son like the plague can be considered normal. Daniel likes to pretend they can’t, but as time passes, he realizes some things aren’t going to fade.
Hawkeye takes a month off in July and flies out to California to see BJ. He calls twice while he’s away, the first time to tell Daniel that BJ named Hawkeye godfather of his new baby boy: Benjamin Charles Hunnicut. The second to tell his father he’s extending his vacation for two weeks so he can take Erin to Disneyworld. Daniel tries not to be jealous of how happy Hawkeye sounds; forces himself not to ask why this man Hawkeye’s only known for three years can make his son laugh, when Daniel can’t even get Hawkeye to smile.
There’s a third phone call, at the end of the month, from a small town in Iowa. Hawkeye yells over a faulty connection that he’s decided to drive back in BJ’s old car and he probably won’t be home until the third week in August. “I’m going to stop in Boston,” Hawkeye says, while they can still hear each other. Daniel doesn’t ask his son why it’s going to take him three weeks to make a two-day trip. He’s learned, in the past year, not to ask questions.
Hawkeye resurfaces at the end of August, driving something that must have passed for a car back when Henry Ford was still tinkering around in his family shed and wearing nothing but his slacks and those damn dog tags. He looks peaceful, happy.
“Why don’t you take them off?” Daniel asks, after he’s made Hawkeye a cup of coffee. Hawkeye looks confused for a moment, but then follows his father’s eyes to his dog tags.
“Oh,” Hawkeye says, fingering them for a moment before slipping them up over his head, “For a long time they were all I had left.” He gets up and leaves then, the dog tags abandoned on the table between his coffee and his father’s hand. Daniel watches him go and then picks up the metal chain.
He knows the information that should be on the tags:
Pierce.
They were tenth generation British-Americans. Their forefathers had fought in the American Revolution. In fact, there was a Pierce in every war America was ever in.
Benjamin Franklin.
It was a full first name. Hawkeye didn’t have a middle name. Benjamin Franklin, after the museum he and Lily fell in love at. Lily said it made a nine year old sound pretentious though, so they called him Hawkeye for most of his life.
O81086415
A bunch of numbers that didn’t describe his Hawkeye at all. But they’d been a part of his life since the start of the war, so Daniel figured they meant something.
T-49 B
He remembers how he’d insisted they got the Tetanus Shot in ’49, before the war even broke out. Hawkeye had called him paranoid, but after he’d been drafted, he thanked his father. “Your hands were a lot steadier than the terrified nurses they had giving them to draftees.” Blood type B, like his mother. Hawkeyed hadn’t inherited much from Lily-just his piercing blue eyes, his smile, his ability to actually read, and his blood type. The important things.
P
Only not really. Daniel doesn’t think his son’s ever believed in anything. Except maybe humanity, but the Hebrews already took H.
So Daniel thinks he understand when Hawkeye says “they were all I had left.” He doesn’t really know why Hawkeye would want to remember the war, but he guesses that dog tags were a much more viable souvenir than a red bathrobe and an addiction to bad alcohol. He runs his fingers along the chain, and then picks up the first tag.
McIntyre.
That isn’t right.
John Francis X.
He isn’t sure he’s ever heard Hawkeye say that name. BJ Hunnicut, which didn’t stand for anything, Walter O’Reilly, who always knew everything, even Maxwell Klinger, who tried to be everything-all those named meant something to him. But John Francis X McIntyre was definitely not a name Daniel had ever heard Hawkeye say.
O80789994
Just a number this time, incapable of telling Daniel anything more.
T-49 O
Must have known something about medicine. Maybe McIntyre was a doctor too. And a universal donor, but that didn’t seem to help with figuring this man out.
C
Catholic. Irish Catholic, if the last name was anything to go by. Those were the type of people who believed in something because their entire family did, and none of them knew how to go against the family.
Daniel drops the dog tag on the table and tries not to think about the implications of this. Who was John Francis X McIntyre? Was he a doctor? And more importantly: Why were his dog tags around Hawkeye’s neck?
Daniel ponders the question for days. By the end of the next week, he still hasn’t worked up the nerve to ask Hawkeye who Mr.-doctor?-McIntyre is. He knows all about switching dog tags-they did the same thing back in WWII. There was a nurse then, Becca Johnson. God how he’d loved her. But she got blown to bits during an ambush and Daniel hadn’t thought about her since. He still had her dog tags, upstairs in the attic, away from Lily’s prying eyes. He doesn’t want to think about what it means.
But then there’s a knock on the door, and Hawkeye’s at the office, so of course Daniel’s going to have to answer it. When he pulls it open, there’s a blond, curly-haired man staring at him, wearing a grin that’s half cockiness, half terrified, and completely mischievous. “Dr. Pierce,” he begins, “I’m Trapper. Hawkeye’s friend?”
Blond curls, brown eyes, and there’s a gold chain around his neck, most likely attached to some saint. Daniel feels his gut kick out in defense as he moves out of the way to let the younger man in.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t get your name,” he says, after he tells the man that Hawkeye is still at work.
“Trapper,” the man replies, “Trapper John McIntyre.”
Yes, Daniel thinks to himself, I was afraid of that.