yankeedoodle_dr | (no subject)

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"Damn," says Hawkeye, "damn, damn, damn!"

Somewhere in the back of his mind, he recognizes that he has not just stepped into the scrub room, that the piece of furniture he just threw his surgical cap down on wasn't the sink.

(He's in short-sleeved scrubs, red down his front and up his bare arms from the wrist to the elbow. He's moving slow and a little unsteady. His face is lined with the kind of exhaustion that only hits after the second, third, and fourth winds have come and gone.)

One bloody arm wrapped around himself, his head hanging: "Damn."

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"Who was that?"

He figures Hawkeye wouldn't have brought it up if he didn't want to talk about it; and if he's wrong, he has every confidence in the man's ability to change the subject.

Absently, he takes another sip of his drink.

He smiles sharply. "She called herself Death."

He was pretty damn convinced, at the time.

Simon goes very still.

After a long beat he swallows, and slowly lowers his glass.

Hawkeye chuckles, low.

"Crazy, right?"

"Was she ... very pale? With black hair? Wearing a silver ankh around her neck?"

His hand comes up, unconsciously tracing the shape of the symbol on his own chest.

His head rises swiftly. He looks at Simon for a long moment, then --

"That'd be the one."

He starts to say something, stops, then tries again.

"We've met."

"Under highly auspicious circumstances, I'm sure," says Hawkeye, and his voice is as dry as he likes his martinis, but it's low; it's subdued.

"Most recently it was roughly similar circumstances, in fact."

He eyes the level of liquid in his glass, considers drinking it faster than he has been.

"I'm sorry to hear that," he says, and most of his glass goes down the hatch at once. He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. "Does she make house calls a lot? 'Cause," he laughs, low and brittle, "I've got to tell you, Simon, you'd think I'd have seen her more than once."

Hawkeye doesn't lose a lot of patients; the 4077th has the best record of any medical unit in the operating theater, and there is a reason that he is its chief surgeon. But he does lose them.

(Rule number one of war is that young men die.)

"She ... she's told me she's there every time. Every death."

A small sip that turns into a larger swallow. Yeah, he's going to want more.

"What's unusual is to see her when you're not the one dying."

"Oh good," says Hawkeye, light but not, and he recklessly pours more Scotch into his glass. "Happy to hear we stand out of the crowd."

Simon holds out a hand for the bottle after Hawkeye pours.

"It may just be that we're here."

"Here at Milliways, or here in a more existential way?" he asks, and he slides the bottle across the table.

"Here at Milliways." He refills his glass, sets the bottle down.

"It gives her an opportunity to ... talk to people outside of her normal line of work."

And if there's bitterness there, it's very muted.

"Yeah." He stares into his glass for a long moment. "Funny thing was, I recognized her, you know?" He glances up, at Simon. "Not who or what she was, not right away, but it was like I'd known her for years."

His mouth twists upward. "Guess I have," he says, with wry black humor (if it can even be called humor), and he tosses back a good couple inches of his drink.

"She said something like that."

There are little golden highlights in the liquid, at this angle. He's studying them as though trying to memorize their pattern.

"That we ... know her in life in a way that most people don't."

"Lucky us."

Hawkeye's tolerance level is a thing of legend; he drinks the kind of alcohol that can peel paint using only its fumes, and he drinks it regularly. But this is the good stuff, and he's pounding it back, and he's been awake for 26 hours with his hands in kids' intestines for 17.

The bottle shakes, just enough for the scotch to splash inside the glass, as he tops off his drink.

He puts the bottle down with a clink; looks at Simon. "You know what somebody told me once?"

He shakes his head silently.

"It gets easier, losing patients," he says. He gives an incredulous snort, something that isn't quite a laugh, over the rim of his glass. "It gets easier!

"I don't know which was worse -- that he honestly believed it, or that for a minute--" Hawkeye is gesturing now with the scotch, with the ease of someone grown accustomed to talking with a glass in hand. "I wished it was true.

"It doesn't get easier." He shakes his head, swirls his drink with a clumsy flick of the wrist. "If anything, it gets harder every time." He scrubs his face with his free hand; sets his chin in his hand. "If I could've gotten the ribs spread quicker--"

By the end, it's hard to say whether Hawkeye is talking to Simon or to himself.

That incredulous snort after the first words ... it spares Simon the necessity of covering his own distaste. (Distaste is too mild a word, really; horror might be closer.)

"Do you," he starts slowly, and then reconsiders and begins the sentence again. "You always go over it again afterwards. Trying to find what you did wrong."

That part isn't a question; it's said as though stating a natural law.

"What do you do when there isn't anything?"

His mouth curls upward.

"Refuse to believe anyone who says so," he says, scotch poised in hand.

The long drink that he takes is something of an answer, in and of itself.

"Even if it's true?"

It's a response he can understand, but ...

Hawkeye shrugs once.

"You know, it's funny; there's never a shortage of decisions to second-guess."

He's quiet for a moment, studying his glass again.

"The first time I lost a patient was just off a battlefield," he says, low and reflective. "In Yuna's world. I can't remember if I ever told you about it..."