(no subject)

[usedusername.livejournal.com]

Insomnia
Pairing: Hawkeye/Potter Friendship. I have to bold the friendship, because I'd wanted it to be 'more than', but it didn't really wasn't possible or plausible in the story.
Notes: In case someone's innocent enough to miss it, 'camp follower' and 'streetwalker'= prostitute. Also, even when I finally give him a chance to talk, my Potter is painfully, painfully OOC.
Rating: Very Eish, though I guess prostitute-mentioning could bump it up to 7+.

He'd never had a real nightmare before Korea. Had fake, slip-sliding nightmares that flitted away. Solved by crawling in his father's bed at night after the monsters came out in his sleep. But so unmemorable that he wouldn't know why he woke in Dad's bed the next morning.

But here, the nightmares are ceaseless. Running, re-running, from morning to night. And things he sees so often shouldn't be so frightening, because they are familiar. Because they are as real as they are fake, and reality shouldn't worry him so much. But it's getting used to something he can never get used to. Frightful monsters that shouldn't be; that are only people, not creatures from other-worlds, not crawling from lagoons and not hiding beneath his bed. Just people, clinging to his clothes and filling his shoes with blood, dropping dead because he can't help them. But it's Korea--it's in Korea-- where people can explode and their insides can slide out, where, maybe, he really can't help them before they die.

It's chronic insomnia; he doesn't mind it because it's more reassuring than his nightmares. It's more human, more stress-at-the-office than stress-at-the-war.

And insomnia, it seems, is as common a disease as measles.

"Walking the streets tonight, are we, Pierce?"

"Been following this camp since '50, and I can tell you I'm the cheapest girl around." Hawkeye answers without looking. "What're you doing up, Colonel?"

"Thought I'd take a midnight stroll, but seems like somebody beat me to it."

"You were close." Hawkeye offers with a tilt of his shoulders. Their stride now matching each others, they come to the end of the camp and turn around.

"Close only counts in hand grenades and horseshoes."

"So if I were throwing hand grenades at a horse and a horse were throwing his shoes at me, who'd win?"

"The horse."

"Why's that?"

"He's got more sense." Potter says, and Hawkeye turns to smile wryly at him. "What would you say to a nightcap?"

Drinking would mean sleep, eventually. And with a strange defiance that comes only from gripping at straws when all is utterly hopeless; when there is only inevitable defeat, Hawkeye refuses both, "No thanks, Colonel. I've had about as much of the night as I can stand."

Colonel Potter regards him calmly, and he has years of knowledge to give him the edge of the conversation. Their walk crawls to a stop, "Night terrors, huh?"

"You could say that."

"You can't stay up forever."

"I can stay up until I fall down, and then I'll be so tired I'll forget to dream about anything."

"Go ahead, son, but I expect to have you working when those choppers pull in."

Hawkeye sighs, and as though a trigger, their walk resumes. Thick, quiet footfalls that seem too loud in the absence of bombs: so loud, that Hawkeye finds himself walking more softly with every step. Quietly, quietly, until he can't hear his own feet hitting the ground; only the colonel's clothes rustling, only Potter's boots sticking in the mud. They walk together in strange, quasi-silence that's too laced with tension to be companionable.

He grabs Potter's wrist, and once more they draw to a hault, "It won't work, will it?"

"No."

And Potter marches on, leaving Hawkeye to catch up.

"Colonel?"

"Yes?"

"How about that drink?"