mash_slash | NEW FIC: "Marigold Wine" 4/? by Aura218 (Reply)

Title: "Marigold Wine" part 4/?

Author: aura218

Pairing: Hawkeye/Trapper, Hawkeye/others

Genre: Drama, romance, longfic, postseries, 60s

Summary: In the 60s, Trapper visits his old army buddy at a hippie commune, where Hawkeye has retreated to find peace.

Rating: R/M

A thousand wildflowers to my proofreader and encourager Todash

Read: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

Click through for: Part 4

"Hope you didn't mind me pulling you out of there," Trapper said as they bumped up the path. "Where had all those drums come from? They all had them hidden somewhere, maybe up their big skirts. It was like a musical monster, you know? A rhythmic wraith."

"S'all right. Once they get to the drumming, it's all downhill." Hawkeye stumbled on the ruts in the path. Trapper grabbed his elbow and pulled him closer, supporting him.

They'd left the candle in the coffee can with Lena because she was taking Sunny tonight. Once lightened of his kidly burden, Hawkeye spent the last half hour with his head stuck in the marigold wine barrel.

"You really shouldn't drink so much, you're a family man now," Trapper said.

"I'm not that blunk," Hawkeye said. He giggled. "Did you hear what I said?"

"Yeah, I heard it."

"I'm no fambly man, not tonight," Hawkeye announced to the world.

He knew Hawkeye wasn't that drunk because he had been fine when he'd been sitting still; a thoughtful sitting Hawkeye and troublemaking standing Hawkeye is a Hawkeye with less than half a bottle in him. He'd sleep it off and be irritatingly bright in the morning.

Hawkeye's porch light was a welcome destination at the top of Mount goddamn Olympus, who the hell planted this place in the Himalayas? Hawkeye leaned on Trapper's shoulder while he took his sneakers off. Trapper didn't mind so much holding on to Hawkeye while he toed off his own shoes. There were all kinds of marigolds in his belly, too.

"Nightcap?" Hawkeye said.

Trapper shrugged. "Sure, why not."

"Wait out here. I don't do them in the house."

Puzzled, Trapper hitched himself into the only furniture on the porch, a frame hammock. He leaned back and rested on a folded crocheted afghan. The hammock went two ways and the porch went two more so did that mean he was in 4D?

When the door opened again and Hawkeye emerged, Trapper was struck dumb. Hawkeye hadn't brought out glasses or a bottle, but wood box the size of a deck of cards. He shook it and something inside rattled. He pulled a Zippo lighter from his shirt pocket.

"Do you wish to partake?"

Trapper sat up to give Hawkeye room on the hammock. "Are those marijuana cigarettes?"

The little box was carved wood and shut with a little eye clasp. Hawkeye shook one out, gazing at Trapper up from under his bangs like the cat who found a nest of canaries and didn't feel a bit of guilt. "Is this your first time?"

Trapper licked his lips. "Just since college. One of the guys always had some, but I only did it once. We sat around reading Alice in Wonderland to find hidden meaning. It was the worst high of my life."

"Really?"

Trapper smirked. "I was a good boy."

'I'll bet." Hawkeye put the little rolled cigarette between his lips and lit up.

"I didn't want to screw up my ride." Trapper watched the end light up as Hawkeye puffed it. "Give that here."

Hawkeye passed the cigarette over. Trapper took it awkwardly. It was smaller than a tobacco cigarette, he'd never held a rolled one before. He almost dropped it on his pants.

"Are you sure it's okay to mix these?" Trapper gestured in the general direction of the drumming noises where the marigold wine lived.

"A little nonsense now and then is cherished by the wisest men," Hawkeye said.

"How much wine did you have, anyway?"

"Just a glass," Hawkeye said.

"Really?"

Hawkeye gave him weird eyes, like he was caught with his hand in something. "Yeah."

Trapper realized Hawkeye was waiting anxiously for Trapper to take a drag. Hawkeye lit the end of it again and Trapper inhaled.

Pain. It felt like tiny hot knives going down his lungs. He coughed, trying to hack up the painful pieces. Did he suck in the seeds or something?

"Are you trying to kill me?" Trapper said.

"Relax." Hawkeye put a hand on his chest. "Take it slow. You have to get used to it."

Eyes watering, trusting Hawkeye more than he thought wise, Trapper tried again. He sucked softly this time, not expecting it taste smooth like a commercial cigarette. He watched Hawkeye's approving gaze looming just inches from him.

"Now hold it in," Hawkeye said softly.

Trapper held the hot smoke inside him for a beat. He exhaled slowly. His head seemed to unscrew just a little. Hawkeye seemed both far away and very, very relevant.

"That better?" Hawkeye said.

Trapper grinned. "Finest kind."

Hawkeye smiled in approval. "That's my boy. C'mere."

Hawkeye, a wriggler at heart, arranged them on the hammock. Trapper moved to lie at opposite ends, but Hawkeye pointed out that they couldn't pass the cigarette that way. "No one ought to support their own body weight when smoking one of these," Hawkeye decreed. So instead they laid comfortably shoulder to shoulder, passing a joint on a balmy June night.

Hawkeye wanted to talk about why they were here, as in the Sitsips Commune as a whole. Also pollution, nuclear power, and single-sex education. Trapper was having a hard time following; fortunately Hawkeye liked to poke a body when he was high and pontificating. Trapper took that as his cue to say "that's interesting" or "I see what you mean." Trapper considered this was a pattern of his -- someone pokes him and out pops a response. Louise liked to poke. And boy, could she get the response she wanted.

"Do you see what complete insanity that is?" Hawkeye said. Possibly. It sounded like something Hawkeye would say, or had said this evening, possibly several times.

"That's interesting."

"You think it's interesting that the government can still draft these kids at eighteen but they can't vote to not be drafted until they're twenty-one?"

"I don't want to talk about that."

Hawkeye blinked, twisting to get a look at him.

Trapper looked up at the porch ceiling. "How come you don't put a windchime or something out here? This whole camp is artistic except for your front porch."

Hawkeye settled down again, brushing his shoulder against Trapper's. "I'm sorry. I don't know how I got on that."

"You were talking about asbestos in schools." Trapper rooted around in Hawkeye's jacket pocket, not bothering to ask for that little box. If he had to listen to this, he was starting another cigarette.

"It's true, you know," Hawkeye said. "We fought for freedom and apple pie and we get asbestos in our building materials."

"Look, do you think we can moor you onto one subject heading? I'll provide the rope. Where's the Zippo?"

Hawkeye passed it over. "Are you high enough to talk about Louise?"

"No."

"All right. How're the girls taking it?"

Trapper took a long pull off the cigarette. He passed it over.

"Cathy's okay," he said. "She's in nursing school at Boston College, full tuition on account of my veteran status. Isn't bringing any boys home, but that's all right with me. She's too smart for any jokers at her age. She'll be done in a year, I know a guy who's going to put her to work right away. She wants to work in pedes."

"Good department," Hawkeye said with a little less enthusiasm than people usually mustered up for Trapper's daughter the brilliant nurse.

"Yeah," Trapper said. "Kids are good work. Easy."

Hawkeye didn't respond to that.

A loud group of teenagers scuffed up the road beyond Hawkeye's yard, kicking up stones and singing loudly. Gradually, their exuberance faded into the night.

"How about Becky?" Hawkeye said.

"Becky. . . ." Trapper took a long draw from his cigarette. "Says to call her 'Rebecca' now. I don't know what's going on with her."

Trapper watched Hawkeye flick the first joint off into the bushes, and passed over the second one. He tucked one arm behind his head and stared off at the sky. He'd never seen so many stars, not since he was a kid and they'd visit his grandparents at the beach on Cape Cod. He could almost smell the sand and the dune grass.

Hawkeye hitched himself up onto his elbow, a great feat for someone with as many seditative chemicals in his brain. He touched Trapper where the lines intersected on his forehead with the cool end of the lighter. "What're you seeing in there?"

Behind closed eyes, Trapper felt the cool metal smooth the furrows on his brow. Tension he didn't know he was carrying ebbed away. There's approximately ninety muscles in the human face. Each one was attached to a nerve.

"I'm thinking that I came back home and my family was going on without me, and I didn't have a place in it. So I stayed away. I gave them all the -- the junk they needed. But I wasn't around for any of the important stuff." Trapper opened his eyes.

Hawkeye looked down at him, curious and concerned. "Was that why you traveled?"

"Yeah." Europe, South America. Trapper had been everywhere but home.

Hawkeye fiddled with the hem of Trapper's overshirt. "My dad's disappointed that I moved away from him. Really, he's scared that there won't be anyone for him when he's old. Well, when he starts to die. He's already old. Getting sick and dying is just the next part, right? That's what we doctors predict."

"It's what we see."

"I stayed away too," Hawkeye said. "At first, it was because normal life seemed so boring and simple."

"The fifties were boring and simple," Trapper said.

Hawkeye chuckled and they shared a moment. It wasn't easy to find many people who agreed that an automated kitchen doesn't make everything all better.

"I wanted to make a difference," Hawkeye said, "go somewhere that really needed me. So I did that, and now . . . Now I want to reflect on it. I want to write about it. I don't think I even know how to live in Crabapple Cove, or New York City, or anywhere else where there's normal people."

Trapper looked up over Hawkeye's head at the plank ceiling, thinking, drying out his prickling eyes. "Did you think we came here to run away from something, or run to something?"

Hawkeye smiled, wiping his face. "I came here to raise my kid away from all the assholes who . . . "

"Say it."

"All the assholes I'm afraid of."

Trapper thought back to the reunion, how out of place he felt around Margaret the accomplished diplomat, Radar and his wife, not to mention all those strangers who came after him, that Hunnicutt and his perfect family and big smile. And how in his element Hawkeye was, how quick he was with the fond remembrances, as if the shelling and the disease, the twenty hour surgery shifts, hadn't happened. How much he drank as the night started to close. Hawkeye did best in replications of Korea because the best part of him was built in Korea.

"What happened to you?" Trapper said.

Hawkeye shook his head. "I'll tell you another time."

"Oh." Trapper started to sit up.

"No," Hawkeye laid his hand on Trapper's chest. "I wasn't putting you off. I'm just so tired. Thank you. I appreciate all this listening you're so good at."

Trapper wasn't sure what to say to that, so instead he said, "I talked to Lena at the party."

"Yeah?"

Trapper wasn't sure if he should say anything. "Nothing."

"What?"

"Nothing. I just don't get this, where you got your new ideas about marriage and all."

"Because my old ones were so traditional?"

"Last I remember, you didn't have any," Trapper said.

"Maybe you just weren't listening."

"So tell me now."

Hawkeye nodded. "You saw Lena and Siva together. They can do whatever they want, it's good for her to have someone when I'm being such a prince to her."

"But he's her ex."

"Trapper. . . ." Hawkeye sighed. "He's my ex too."

Trapper glanced up at him. Looked away. "So you say."

"We were a family," Hawkeye said. "We're still a family, even if Mommy and Daddy said Daddy has to live in the suburbs."

"Yeah, but I didn't get -- I mean . . ."

"That's the point of free love."

"'Free' or 'cheap'?"

"Hey."

Trapper's mind turned over this new lifestyle that had grabbed Hawkeye like a duck to water. Sure, there was that time at the geisha drag bar in Tokyo. But your best buddy disappearing into the gents' for thirty minutes with a heavily made up geisha who's got an Adam's apple while you lost a hundred bucks at Go was one thing. A relationship? How . . . real.

Trapper closed his eyes, imagining this life. It coalesced as his daughter's old pink and yellow Barbie Dream House. Two Kens and a Barbie, baby Skipper and little Ricky. One Ken to make the mommy Barbie happy and another Ken to wrangle Skipper and Ricky. It sounded like a game for girls who had too many dolls.

Hawkeye found Trapper's hand in the darkness. He poked it, a little playfully and a little not. "Do you really think there's so little love in our hearts that we can only stingily give it to one person?"

Trapper flopped back. He passed the cigarette. "I don't know. It happened, okay? I'm not saying it didn't happen."

"What didn't?"

"Don't play dumb." Trapper took the cigarette back, grumpy and needing something to make him pretend this conversation wasn't happening.

Hawkeye blew smoke into the air, in more ways than one. "If you're afraid homosexuality is retroactively communicable through kiss --"

"Hawkeye, shut up, will you? You're not gay, you're just . . . open minded. If you were any more open minded, squirrels would build nests in your brain."

'Gay.' That new word. It sounded both old-fashioned yet hip, something light and casual you could be but it didn't have to end you. A few of his patients had been saying it for a while, but you knew a word had really come onto the scene when the AMA advised using it in discussion with patients, as "homosexual" sounded like something they'd get locked up for. A lofty goal when the APA still stuck them in the rubber room and shocked them 'til they passed for normal.

"Look, she'd be better off without me," Hawkeye was saying.

"What's eating you?" Trapper demanded, impatient with the self-pity.

"Nothing." Pierce's tone had a threatening edge on it.

Well, forget that. Trapper knew what he'd been playing at. He'd seen this Hawkeye before -- lonely and frustrated, conflicted and indecisive. The little touches, holding hands under the table, that speech before the party. Hawkeye was testing him, pulling him in and pushing him away just to see what he'd do. Hell, the entire invitation had come out of that Piercian inability to know what to do with his life, and Trapper had come because Hawkeye was Hawkeye, they were the kind of friends who had a really important, deep down bond. But if Trapper was going to get 'involved,' in any capacity -- and that was a big 'if' -- he wanted to know the score.

"Why'd you break up with Lena?" Trapper persisted.

Hawkeye turned away, looking into the night. Trapper didn't know when he'd taken Hawkeye by the arm, but he was filled with a sticky sense that if he let go, the hammock would tear in two and Hawkeye would drift away from him.

"We had a disagreement," Hawkeye said.

"Over what?"

"Over marigold wine. She thought a glass of wine with dinner was nice and I wanted to marry it and love it and make it our god."

In his smokey brain, it took Trapper a second to separate the wheat from the gobbledygook.

"Do you think you're an alcoholic?" he asked.

"No. Yes. Of course I am. That doesn't mean I'm not a groovy person, of course. It just means if I so much as look at a glass ever again, I'll irreparably destroy my kid forever." These weren't Hawkeye-words.

Trapper leaned in, resting his chin on Hawkeye's shoulder. "I'm sorry."

"She moved out." Hawkeye waved his arm in the air, and Trapper realized he was trying not to cry. "She said when I hadn't had a drink for a year, she'd come back. I guess I just reset that clock on that. Again. I should just leave them, find somewhere I can live alone."

"She's okay with the marijuana cigarettes?"

"Pot isn't addictive," he said.

"But --"

"The army lied, forget all those training videos," Hawkeye laughed, a harsh sound. "They let us drink ourselves into oblivion but they told us this stuff, which is practically harmless, would kill us dead if we tried it once."

Trapper stretched his arm across Hawkeye's chest and mingled their sneakers. Hawkeye's head came to rest against his cheek, his hand curling around Trapper's. They both knew what they were doing, and they both pretended -- under the cover of darkness, the brain haze of THC, the fragrance of summer -- that they didn't.

"Why can't you stop?" Trapper asked.

"I don't know," Hawkeye said miserably.

Hawk did know. Hawkeye was a man who ruminated, obsessed, dealt with, moved on. Trapper was discovering that this Hawkeye wasn't so different from his Hawkeye, Korea edition. He had a reason for everything he did. But if he didn't want to talk about it, Trapper didn't see a reason to press him.

Hawkeye leaned into the embrace, being the affectionate, social bear type that he was. He slipped his knee between Trapper's legs and lounged across him. Trapper ran his hand through Hawkeye's hair and rolled his ringers at the muscles at the base of his neck. Hawkeye nearly purred.

"Hawk," Trapper whispered.

"Hm? Don't stop."

Part of Trapper was annoyed that Hawkeye just couldn't get it together. It had been hard for all of them when they came home, rebuilding their regular practice, catching up on the newest techniques, having a family. People did it. Sure, Trapper's marriage had gone to pot but there was the sainted B.J. Hunnicutt; Radar and his wife had the farm, four kids, six dogs, three cats, two potbelly pigs, and a hutch of bunnies they raised for the angora fur (combed, not skinned). Why should Hawkeye have the luxury of being a basketcase when everyone else had to work so hard to be normal?

But Hawkeye was one of those unfortunate people who had a poor emotional immune system. He caught every feeling that was going around and it took him longer to get over them. Trapper remembered Hawkeye as wild, full of life, craving new experiences; but he did it all with a frantic energy, a need to fill up some deep lacking inside him. It was as if Hawkeye went around with his soul half-empty and needed a fill-up that only alcohol could provide. Trapper had never seen Hawkeye not use alcohol to numb that inner energy, so maybe it was a little unrealistic to expect him to kick the habit in peacetime.

And if it wasn't alcohol, it was sex.

"What're we doing?" Trapper said.

"What you came here for."

Trapper sighed. Had he really had any doubt what was going on this whole evening?

"Hawk, this won't solve anything."

Hawkeye moved in for some active snuggling. Hawkeye's nose and lips were ghosting along Trapper's throat, leaving soft whiffs of air, not quite kissing, just being there. Just enough not being there that Hawkeye could say he was asleep or dreaming or high if Trapper backed out.

He could back out. It had been a long, long time since he'd done anything like this. Twenty years since school, almost fifteen years since he and Hawkeye . . . well. Nothing happened, did it? But it could have. In another world, maybe it should have. But a kiss was just a kiss back then and Trapper's future had been a marriage to go home and destroy. Maybe this was making up time or maybe this was making more trouble. What the hell were the rules? Was there a counter culture commune etiquette book on love he should have consulted before he arrived? This was what Hawkeye had meant when he pulled him aside before the party, hadn't he? There were rules even in polyamory.

"Hawk," Trapper whispered. "I don't . . . Your life is already really complicated."

"Lena likes you," Hawkeye said.

Trapper searched Hawkeye's disingenuous expression for some explanation to that non sequitur. "Huh?"

"She read you right away," Hawkeye whispered into the sensitive skin below Trapper's ear. Trapper suppressed a shiver. "That conversation about dinner? You were chicken. Celibacy was beef."

Trapper looked up at Hawkeye just as Hawkeye looked down at him, his eyes denim in the dim light. A lightening bug blinked in Trapper's peripheral vision. Hawkeye leaned on Trapper's chest for better leverage. Despite the many, many good reasons telling Trapper to stop, the louder voice was saying that this felt really, really good. And he hadn't had the kind of sex where he cared about the other person's name in a long time.

Trapper would never admit this to anyone, not even Lena, much later when he understood how she could be his best friend: he kissed first. He had always said that on the Kinsey scale -- which Hawkeye was fond of quoting -- Hawkeye was farther to the sixes than Trapper was. But that wasn't true; or to make a point, it wasn't relevant, not when describing how two immovable bodies became in motion. The body with the greatest mass turned out to be the one carrying the greatest burden of loneliness. Hawkeye and Trapper kissed until they found their center of gravity, also known as their home.

~*~