Chapter Text
Their first mornings together barely qualified as mornings at all. Every day began half an hour later than planned, every plan dismantled somewhere between the kitchen and the front door.
The house felt too small for the noise they made; coffee sputtering on the stove, laughter spilling through open windows, footsteps doubling back down the hall. Hawkeye tried to measure out grounds, failed, and found himself lifted clean off his feet onto the counter, breathless against BJ’s shoulder, before the kettle even thought about boiling.
They’d steadied one another after the war—patched each other’s seams, coaxed sleep out of a hostile dark—and as time ticked on, they found they needed new things to hold on to. Little domestic fragments became anchors, tiny rituals that kept them from drifting. The turntable in the den kept skipping on a Dorothy Dandridge record they’d worn thin. The needle caught and sighed, caught and sighed, but they never replaced it; the flaw had become part of the song. When BJ finished the dishes, he always tossed the towel over his shoulder, a bright red flicker in the dim kitchen light. Someone kept bringing home lilacs, setting them in the vase by the door until the whole house smelled like spring, and then a few days later, syrupy and old.
This morning was calmer than most. The kettle behaved, the radio found its station on the first try, and they’d both woken up at the same time without meaning to. It was a Saturday, and they’d each planned something separate—small, self-appointed activities meant to keep them from driving each other crazy, and then let them come back together later, loose-limbed and ready to be joined at the hip again.
BJ sat at the table, the newspaper open and neatly folded into impossible squares. Hawkeye stood beside the counter, pretending to make coffee but mostly watching him.
“You’re very serious today.”
“I’m reading the news,” BJ said. “I’d like to know what the weather’s going to be like if I’m going fishing.”
“Stay home. I’m easier to hook anyway,” Hawkeye said, stretching his arms, long and feline, over BJ’s shoulders.
“Sure, but you thrash,” BJ said against Hawkeye’s bare arm, a smile forming, lighting up his skin.
“There it is,” Hawkeye said. “Sun’s up.”
He said it every morning when BJ smiled for the first time, that bright, break-the-horizon smile Hawkeye would wait for the way other men waited for weather reports. It never failed him. It rearranged the room, shifted the air, made the coffee smell sweeter, and the floorboards seem less cold. Hawkeye swore the whole house changed temperature when BJ grinned like that, as if the day only truly started once he did. He would squint theatrically and wave a hand in front of his face like he was being assaulted by the brightness, which only made BJ smile wider.
BJ sat half-turned toward the window, one ankle hooked over the other, Henley unbuttoned, hair a soft mess. He had that quiet, steady look when Hawkeye plucked one of the pages from his hand, ducking away with it before BJ could pull him back by the tie of his robe.
“Hey!”
“Yes, hi! Good to see you, too,” Hawkeye said, “I’m honored to be competing with the San Francisco Chronicle for your affection.”
“You’re losing,” BJ said, already rising from the chair, slow but certain.
“Rats. I’d better fight dirty, then,” Hawkeye said, grinning—too sharp, too pleased with himself for a man cornered between the table and BJ’s chest.
BJ reached out, plucked the page from between them, and tossed it aside without looking. Then he leaned in and kissed him, slow enough that the rest of the paper slipped off the table behind them and hit the floor with a sigh.
He tasted coffee and toothpaste and something citrus, maybe grapefruit or the clementine they’d split before bed. BJ’s cheek was colder than Hawkeye expected, or maybe it was his own face that was still too warm. He pressed in closer and only thought about the coffee pot when a thin plastic whine announced it was trying to boil dry on the stove. Hawkeye broke away, laughing, and grabbed the handle just before it could melt on the gas. He spun off the burner, poured out two haphazard cups.
“Proceed with caution, it’s scalding,” he said, setting BJ’s mug in front of him with a parental flourish. The mug read RACKETEER in block blue stencil, won from a county fair a year prior, and all the nicks made it look chronic and beloved. Hawkeye couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen someone else’s hands hold it, or if he would ever let anyone else.
BJ cradled the mug by its hot sides instead of the handle—It would’ve scorched anyone else, sent the whole thing clattering to the floor, but he held it steady, unbothered. He was always like that: lifting toast from the burner with his bare fingertips, strolling barefoot over sun-hot stones in the yard without so much as a wince. There was something about the careful precision of his touch that made pain bend to his will, that made anything bend to his will, really.
He could touch Hawkeye like that, and it would be exactly as gentle or as merciless as needed, depending on the day. In a former life, those hands had meatball stitched arterial walls, patched up the strange and silent workings of the human chest. On the weekdays, they dealt with joggers who’d misjudged the early-morning mist, line cooks with knife slips from the breakfast rush, and office workers whose bodies always seemed to revolt the moment the weather got nice. But here, in their home, they were just hands. Real and unhurried, pouring coffee, brushing crumbs from the table, plucking cat hair from the sleeve of a borrowed robe. Sometimes Hawkeye caught himself watching them too long. Like there was an invisible thread between his own ribs and the spaces between BJ’s knuckles, and pulling one only made the other ache.
As the clock on the wall had crept toward nine and sunlight found a way in, BJ’s hands were steady and familiar, so at ease that Hawkeye only realized he was staring when he cleared his throat, a low, polite ahem that splintered the quiet.
The first few times, Hawkeye played at not noticing, just to see how long he could tease out the game. This time, he didn’t bother. He ran one palm down the line of the counter, each finger catching on the chipped tile edge—half a second, a hesitation—then crossed to the table and sat in BJ’s lap, a little too heavy, smug with it. The heat of him, the lazy tangle of their knees, the way BJ stiffened and then gave in, a wordless negotiation already familiar enough to go unlabeled. It was a kind of morning handshake.
“After fishing, what then?” Hawkeye said, one arm slung, loose and possessionless, across BJ’s shoulders. The line of his wrist brushed the nape of BJ’s neck, thumb idling at the first vertebrae. “Going to come home, reeking of trout, and expect me to welcome you into my arms like a prodigal son?”
“No, it’s worse,” BJ said, setting the mug down, holding onto him by the backs of his thighs, “I’m going to eat the trout raw, right there at the water’s edge, and leave the scales behind as a warning to any other fish who might consider crossing me.”
“Raw trout,” Hawkeye said, mapping out BJ’s laugh lines, taking stock of his favorites. “Bold choice. Very primal.”
“I could probably splurge for something more refined. Perhaps the salmon.”
“No,” Hawkeye said, almost before the sentence finished. He lifted an eyebrow. “Don’t class it up on my account. I prefer you primal.”
He watched the slow smile roll back through BJ’s face, the careful way he tried to hide it by bringing the mug back to his mouth. Hawkeye, never patient, pushed at BJ’s knee with his own, nudging him open, brash and familiar. He wanted to see where the day might go if they didn’t leave the kitchen at all.
“You’re going to spill that,” BJ said, voice rougher than Hawkeye expected, and the mug sloshed a little as Hawkeye leaned in with a grin. His robe fell half-open, and the morning air was cool across his chest, but BJ’s hand on his hip was steady, thumb pressed tight. It was a subtle thing, how BJ could steer him without appearing to move, how his hands occupied space with purpose. Hawkeye always admired the precision, the quality of motion that seemed as if it were only resting until the next crisis.
He kissed BJ on the mouth, let it last, let it darken just a touch toward hunger in the places they both pretended not to catalogue. He could taste the difference when BJ gave in—there, the press of his hand, the clutch at Hawkeye’s waist notched just past decorum. He let Hawkeye have the victory, a small one, then reclaimed it by anchoring his other thumb under Hawkeye’s chin and holding him there a second longer. BJ was always the better one at holding back; Hawkeye’s restraint was a threadbare curtain at best. When the kiss ended, Hawkeye lingered close, feeling his pulse—calm, unmoved—under his jaw. Always steady, clockwork, a gentle metronome. Even when they’d been stitched together by nothing but adrenaline and compress, he’d envied it.
Here, beneath the kitchen light, he wanted to see it skip.
He could have said something, a joke or a dare, but he’d rather see where silence led. So he sat in BJ’s lap, heavier than before, and let the robe slip farther, a bit of performance he hoped would telegraph. BJ’s hands stayed on him, fingers flexing, muscle memory from old triage.
“I’d like you to stay,” Hawkeye said, suddenly so sincere it felt offbeat. He looked away, out the window at the tree in the yard, covered in small white blossoms. “Only if you wanted to, I mean.”
The morning light caught the part in BJ’s hair, the gold in it, and there was a moment—just the length of a breath—where Hawkeye wanted to lean in and lick it, see if it tasted like honey or just like hair.
BJ didn’t answer at first, only lifted Hawkeye a little higher on his lap, those hands spanned Hawkeye’s waist like they were measuring him for a secret purpose. “I can’t even begin to articulate what I want,” he said finally in that almost-melodic cadence of his—gentle, teasing.
His hand moved under the robe, grazing the edge of Hawkeye’s hip, a line of skin so pale from winter it seemed to glow where the sun struck it. Hawkeye shivered, a performance for their benefit, because he liked the way BJ’s thumb hesitated before continuing. He wanted to say something back—god, something stupid—but BJ’s hand had found its way farther under the robe, and now Hawkeye could only focus on the place where skin met skin, a slow press of palm and then a gentle rake of fingernails at the small of his back. He exhaled harder than intended, the sound embarrassing, but BJ didn’t call attention to it. Instead, he stood, carrying Hawkeye with him—awkward and inelegant, but so confident in how he did it that Hawkeye almost believed they’d been born this way, locked together, meant to pass through every room as a single ridiculous organism.
They made it as far as the hallway before BJ leaned him against the wall, breath warm just under Hawkeye’s ear. He could hear the faintest vibration in BJ’s chest—deeper, almost a warning, or a promise—and then BJ’s lips, the tickle of his mustache, was on Hawkeye’s jaw, his throat, the curve of his shoulder.
The wall was cold, but BJ’s hands weren’t, and neither was his mouth. Morning through the window flung a spill of pattern over the jaundiced hallway plaster, and Hawkeye pressed one palm to it, steadying himself against the way BJ mapped his collarbone with a deliberate tongue. He could feel the tick of BJ’s pulse, almost a nervous rhythm behind his teeth. It was the only thing betraying him, everything else steady.
He slumped against the wall, letting the robe drift fully open. The inside was still warm from bed, and he could smell detergent and the faintest trace of cedar from the dresser drawer. BJ’s hand covered his chest, fingers splayed, thumb stroking down his sternum. Hawkeye let his own hand tangle in BJ’s hair, gentle at first, then less so, just to see if his hypothesis would pay off, if BJ would grip his hips with his distinctive steadiness. When the hunch paid off, he let himself be held up, arched against BJ’s body, pinning him solid.
It was a study in opposites: Hawkeye unstrung, shameless as a dropped shirt, BJ wired through with force and intent, holding him steady and upright in a way that made Hawkeye laugh under his breath, not from amusement but from the shock of being so thoroughly desired.
BJ said finally, huskier than he probably intended, “I want you right here, if you’d let me. Only if you’d like me to, I mean.”
BJ’s gaze was as clinical as a surgeon’s but softer, so much softer, like he was assembling the sum of Hawkeye from a thousand tiny observations, a thousand ordinary mornings. Hawkeye wanted to let him; to be taken apart and put back together by the only man who knew the order of his bones.
His knees buckled in a way that would have shamed him if he were anyone else, but in this house, in this hallway, he could give up the ghost of dignity and let himself be held. BJ’s hands rode up his ribs, thumbs pressing either side of his spine, then slipped lower, gentle at first but gaining confidence, the insistence that always followed his carefulness.
“Beej, darling, I can’t even begin to articulate what I’d let you do to me.” Hawkeye’s voice kept that familiar warm rasp, but it buckled mid-sentence—as if the structure of it couldn’t quite hold under BJ’s hands.
BJ dropped to his knees without ceremony, robe slinking off Hawkeye’s shoulders like it wanted to be out of the way, too, and Hawkeye looked down and saw the top of BJ’s head, the cowlick at the back that never behaved, the gold in his hair gone almost silver in the early light. He let his own hand fall to BJ’s jaw, not to guide but to anchor himself, because the hallway had tilted around him and the wall was suddenly not enough.
He tried to be clever—say something about the floor needing a good polish—but the words were gone, replaced by an electric flutter behind his ribs. BJ’s hands bracketed the backs of his knees, thumbs pressing small crescents into his skin. Hawkeye’s robe hung open, a red drape around his hips, and he could see himself reflected in the window: two men in a sunlit hallway, one kneeling, one standing, both half-ruined by want.
If he looked past them into the yard, he could see the small plot where BJ had surprised them both by turning up dirt, neat rows he had planned and replanned, diagrammed in pencil on the back of prescription pads. In a few weeks, he’d plant the little starters Erin had picked out at the greenhouse in North Beach, though she’d only had eyes for the earthworms.
It was odd, he thought, how BJ could cultivate anything—this, or him. Odd how mornings here always circled back to the same soft ground. Through the glass, sunlight caught on the trembling branches, and the pattern of them was fractal, infinite, as if the entire world was a map of fragile connections. BJ’s hand, steady at the back of his knee, was a reminder that some things—some wants—were survivable. Maybe even necessary.
BJ looked up just once, almost shy, then lowered his head and took Hawkeye in, slow, careful, like a man testing the temperature of bathwater before sinking in. Hawkeye’s hand tightened reflexively in BJ’s hair, and he muttered something—he didn’t know what—maybe a curse, maybe a thank you, maybe the coordinates for his favorite lighthouse in all of Maine, as if that would help. It hardly mattered.
BJ’s mouth was hot and sure, and the first glide of it made Hawkeye’s head tip back against the plaster, breath catching on a sharp laugh that wanted to be a gasp. He could see, in the periphery, the gentle tremor of his own hand in BJ’s hair, the way the color of the sunlight shifted with the movement, dappling everything in gold and blue shadow. There were things he wanted to say: encouragement, praise, complex gratitude, but nothing arranged itself in time. Hell, maybe he’d go out into the yard and spell out every exclamation building at the back of his skull with the stones. Would that be funny or foolish? Who could say? Every other sense crowded out the articulate.
He folded, vertebra by vertebra, against the wall. His hips jerked forward, a betrayal, and for a wild moment, he braced himself to apologize, but the look BJ gave him—steady, unflinching—made him feel like it was all right to lose the thread.
Hawkeye always half-expected clinical detachment from BJ—the kind of reverence you give a grand piano or an unfamiliar firearm—but there was hunger in it, too, the grip of fingers tightening, the pressure of hands pulling him in. Each motion was measured, patient, but there was nothing reserved about the way BJ anchored him in place, the blunt want of it.
In Korea, he would move through camp like a shadow when he wanted to—quiet, observant, letting everyone believe his hands were clean while he mildly replaced Charles’s shampoo with bleach or rewired a lamp so it hummed “Anchors Aweigh.” His mischief had been small, private, almost medicinal.
He moved through their domestic life in much the same way, only inside-out: the same quiet motion, the same half-hidden touch, but instead of tricks and pranks, it was small, steady acts of care. Tightening the radiator valve before Hawkeye even noticed the cold. Restitching the fraying corner of Hawkeye’s robe without a word. Turning the porch light on when Hawkeye came home late, and turning it off the second he stepped inside. His adaptability in this respect had always surprised Hawkeye, given that in many other contexts, BJ was about as flexible as glass.
BJ’s mouth left him just long enough for breath. “You’re loud in the mornings,” he said, not quite a whisper, not quite a taunt, and if Hawkeye had been making any noise, he’d only just realized it. A humiliating, glorious truth. BJ dragged his teeth up the inside of Hawkeye’s thigh, slow, deliberate, the scrape electric. The gentle sweep of his mustache made the whole thing feel unbearably tender, still, like BJ was memorizing him one touch at a time. “Keep going. I want to hear it.”
Hawkeye wanted to make a joke about that, too, to ask if BJ had any idea what it did to him hearing that voice too soft to be decent and too steady to be fair, say words like that, but any attempt at wordplay came out as a low, broken “Jesus.” He reached for something to ground himself, found only the cool wall behind, and let another sound escape, half-laugh, half whimper, entirely unselfconscious.
BJ’s hands, always so precise, slid up the backs of his thighs, thumbs tracing half-circles. He could feel the smirk of it, the intention, even if he couldn’t see BJ’s face. “You’re always so sensitive,” BJ said, mouth right against the inside of his hip, the words thrumming through skin to bone. “I barely have to touch you and you melt.”
“You could at least try to make it difficult,” Hawkeye said, breathless, “make me work for it. Right now I feel like I’m in the microwave.”
“Where are my manners? I’ll take you out,” BJ said, and after one last deep bob, he retreated, tongue circling the tip, the tease almost worse than the fullness. It was slow and devastating, and Hawkeye could hear his own pulse in his ears now. Then, with a practiced, showman’s smoothness, BJ wrapped his hand around the base and stroked him in time with the rhythm of his mouth, so coordinated it was almost unfair, a kind of double exposure: pressure, then heat, then wet, then pressure again, in a cycle so tight it left Hawkeye with nothing to do but hang onto the moment and try not to let his knees give out entirely.
BJ was looking up at him, not with smugness or challenge, but a kind of calm curiosity, like he wanted to see what happened if he just kept going, didn’t stop, didn’t let up until Hawkeye’s legs deserted him entirely. Maybe that was the secret: BJ always wanted to see how long he could hold Hawkeye in the grip of a thing, how far he could chase it toward the edge before the thread snapped or ran out.
Hawkeye wasn’t new to pleasure, not by a dozen lifetimes, but this was a new kind of undoing—BJ’s mouth was better than memory, as if every time he did this, he learned some new trick of tongue or pace. Hawkeye had started to speculate that BJ was reading medical journals all night just to extract new ways to drive him mad. He wanted to say it, how good it was, how unfair, but the words collapsed in his mouth: all that came was “Don’t stop.” It shattered in the air between them, loud enough he was sure anyone in the street could hear, but the only witness was the dust mites drifting through the angled sun from the window.
He could feel his own pulse thumping wild in his chest, desperate and unsteady, and the next time BJ sucked him in, a ripple tore through every muscle in his thighs. He grabbed the doorframe—there was nothing else—and came harder than he meant to, with a gasp that started too loud and ended in a whisper. BJ swallowed him down, steady to the last, and then drifted back, a look of polite inquiry on his face as if to ask, “Would sir like anything else with his order?”
His knees knocked together, and he slid down the wall like a man shot, giggling at his own helplessness. Was this what it was to be known—truly known, dismantled molecule by molecule by someone who’d spent years watching you breathe in a tent in hell? He wasn’t sure he’d ever been so seen in his life, or so totally lost to being seen.
BJ nudged Hawkeye’s knee, gently, and the motion was so ordinary—so utterly married to the life of this kitchen, this hallway, their battered mornings—that Hawkeye almost laughed again, except for the fact he was, for the moment, unable to refill his lungs. BJ rose, a little creaky, and left Hawkeye slouched on the floor, robe pooled like the contents of his heart, hair a riot. “You’re a mess,” he said fondly, and thumbed the corner of Hawkeye’s mouth until he remembered how to close it.
Hawkeye stayed on the floor anyway, elbows on his knees, the texture of the old wood cold and a little sticky under his calves. It was good, being taken apart like this, being allowed the luxury of collapsing. He could taste the salt of his own skin and the faint aftershock of BJ’s tongue, and for a minute, he hoped the moment would never unspool.
Until BJ’s hand was under his chin again, tipping it upward. He was on his feet now—dressed for the day ahead in a soft flannel and rolled sleeves, the ridiculous sort of outfit that made “going fishing” look like a magazine spread instead of a hobby. The only concession to chaos was a flicker of red wool sock peeking out above his heel like an afterthought Hawkeye could just catch out of the corner of his eye.
“I’d like to see you try that with the Chronicle,” Hawkeye said finally.
“I wouldn’t want a papercut,” BJ answered, deadpan. He helped Hawkeye up—slowly, steadying him by the waist—and pressed a soft kiss to the top of his head, like he was settling him back into place.
“You’re still going fishing?” Hawkeye asked, incredulous. “Haven’t you landed your biggest catch already?”
He could hear himself again—finally sounding like someone upright and articulate instead of a man held together by the backs of BJ’s hands. And yet he already knew the moment BJ stepped outside, he’d curl up on the couch like a cat in a sunbeam and be asleep within five minutes, the blanket Margaret had knitted them as a housewarming gift pooling around him, the house going too quiet too fast.
“So it would appear,” BJ said with a shrug, almost bashful in his certainty. He reached for Hawkeye’s chin, thumb brushing once along the jaw he’d just kissed. “Seafood’s an aphrodisiac,” he added, gentle as anything. “And I would very much like to do this again when I get home.”
He leaned in again, and the kiss stayed with Hawkeye the way warmth lingers in a kitchen after the oven’s been shut off, still clinging to him when he heard the car door shut later that afternoon.