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“You’re looking a lot better than the last time I saw you. How ya feeling?” BJ asks, seemingly unaware of how inane a question that is.
“In the pink,” Hawkeye responds immediately, and his tone is impossible to miss - acid covered in a layer of felt, thorns layered in silk. It’s none of BJ’s goddamn business how he is, he’s proven that.
BJ being BJ, immediately switches to the placating tone that Hawkeye has come to know and hate. “I wanted to leave you a note when I left, but I just didn’t have time.”
This, from the man who knows better than anyone how much it ate at Hawkeye when Trapper left the same way. This. So Hawkeye does the only thing he can do, the only thing he knows how to do - meets that bullshit comment with implacable disdain, hidden in a joke. “I didn’t even know you were gone. I thought you went to the bathroom.”
The depths of Hawkeye’s rage is scaring even himself - it feels endless, and painful, and he doesn’t meet BJ’s eye again. There’s no way he’s going to be able to look at him without losing it, and he doesn’t need to give anyone the idea that his stint in the loony bin didn’t fix him. He can’t go back there. He can’t be here. He’s not sure he can be anywhere at all.
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Closing his eyes has never shut off his brain, and this is true of now too, with his head in his hands in the mess tent. He’s been back to surgery, and it was simultaneously as bad as he expected, and easier than he expected. As long as he let his hands do the work, and not think too much…
There’s a clink of coffee cups, the sound of someone settling down at the table with him, and the smell of the tar the Army calls coffee wafting past his nose. “You want a sandwich?” It’s BJ, of course, it’s always BJ, the man can’t leave him alone.
“What’s in it?” Hawkeye asks without raising his head from his hands. Even now, he can barely bring himself to look at BJ. His best friend, he once thought.
There’s a pause from BJ, and then a joke, “Let’s see. Cucumbers, watercress, a little French mayonnaise.”
And of course, Hawkeye quips back, because he doesn’t know how to do anything else. “Is the crust cut off?”
“No,” comes the reply.
“Forget it,” Hawkeye retorts, and even that has the feeling of rage in the back of his throat that he can’t seem to swallow. He finally lifts his head to BJ taking a bite of his sandwich. He wraps his fingers around his coffee cup - it’s hot, but he knows it’s not good.
“I tell you, one thing I’m not going to miss is bologna,” BJ says, his mouth half full, and that’s it for Hawkeye, he can’t take this shit for one more second.
“Shut up,” he says, and it comes out in a calm way, as if he’s discussing the weather, instead of boiling over with hurt. Something in the way he says it must tip BJ off though, because he looks up at Hawkeye in surprise.
“Look, Hawk,” he starts, but Hawkeye waves a hand in the air to cut him off again.
He shakes his head and looks BJ in the eye. “Look, BJ,” he mimics, and even that feels like shards of glass in his throat. “Just shut up. You’re making it worse, pretending everything is the same as it was.”
There’s silence for a second - either BJ is shocked, or taking it in. Maybe Hawkeye has managed to piss him off, wouldn’t that be something? Finally he pisses off the endlessly implacable man. “Hawk, I’m sorry, I said I was sorry about not leaving a note.”
The man literally jumps as Hawkeye slams his cup down on the table. Harder than he intends, but it is what it is. “No, you didn’t,” he says, and he feels a tremor in his voice that he tries to cram back down. “You never said you were sorry. You said you were going to leave a note, but you didn’t have time. That’s not an apology. Hell - that’s not even an explanation, BJ. That’s just appeasement, and I’m done with that sort of shit.”
Everyone in the mess tent is looking at them, and he might normally care - his feelings about BJ are too personal for him to put out into public - but he can’t help but feel this is the last chance he’ll have to get this poisonous feeling out of him. After they go home, he’ll never see BJ again, and the wound will just fester, and fester, and fester. Every doctor, good or bad, knows you can’t just let a wound rot. So he lances it, even though it hurts.
“I mean, for god’s sake, BJ, we’re supposed to be friends! Best friends! The best friend I’ve ever had, and you just left. I would have been happy with a note that just said ‘bye’, you know?” He’s riled up, and gesturing madly, but in the face of BJ’s shock and guilt, he feels suddenly deflated. “Nevermind,” he mutters, looking back down into his coffee. “I think I just made more of us than there was. Thought it was more than it was.”
“Hawk, no, that’s not it at all,” BJ protests, but Hawkeye waves him down again as he unfolds himself from the table. Best to quit while the quitting’s good, he thinks.
“Just…” Hawkeye looks at him once more before he leaves. BJ’s face is full of concern, but it’s hard for Hawkeye to believe that now. Not after this. It’s just despair Hawkeye feels, he’s used to that. He’ll be fine. “Just nevermind, BJ. Best of luck when you get home, okay?”
He’ll be fine.