The bathroom tiles were cool against my hand

[notinflictthem]

CHARACTERS: Hawkeye and you! Yes, you!
DATE: November
LOCATION: Hawkeye’s Clinic
SITUATION: Settling in, making waves, shaking hands, making friends
WARNINGS: Blanket warning that war and injury may come up

Press my corpse against the wall

Hawkeye wakes up to sunlight instead of Radar yelling for helicopters. He has his coffee unhurried, plans out his day. No Frank to yell at him for not shaving, but no Trap to chew the fat with, either. Nobody to complain with about breakfast. It’s too quiet. If he doesn’t see a human person in the next hour, he’s going to start gnawing his own limbs off.

So from about 8am-6pm, the clinic is staffed. The sign out the front reads ‘Hawkeye’s Clinic, happy hour 6-7pm’, and underneath that, more recently, a smaller sign reads ‘100% satisfaction rate; just ask the survivors!’
Inside, Hawkeye is either cleaning, running his tabletop still for alcohol to disinfect with (or drink), or organising his small array of client notes.

I told the band to leave without me

If you actually visit during the signposted happy hour, the table in the middle of the clinic has a tablecloth draped over it, and Hawkeye stands there polishing the couple of glasses he owns. Someone should get him some decent barware. There’s a couple of stools, and he grins as you enter. He’s playing bartender. Indulge him?

I'll get the next flight

After happy hour, the ‘bar’ gets packed up and the clinic gets scrubbed down. If you’ve got a standing invitation for cards, a date, or just want to check in on him off-hours, this is the time to do it. Find him out on his front doorstep with his nose in a book, leaning out the window with a martini in hand and watching the street, or doing something upstairs, the sound of a pleasant baritone muddling through something jazzy.

And if I make it to the mornin' (wildcard)

(Hit me!)

Comments

[notinflictthem]

"Ah," he exhales, "don't- don't worry about it. That's... it's hard, yeah? Sorry to bring it up."

He shakes his head.

"Anyway. Not all it's cracked up to be, sometimes. I had to pretend I was interested in running around and catching a ball every weekend for ten years. He would've jumped for joy if my mother had a dog instead."

[batteryacid]

Eddie nods, and lets that topic of conversation drop in favor of the topic change. He visibly considers the description that Hawkeye gives, smiles a little wryly, and asks,

"You mean he put you in a sport, or he actually took you out to play fetch in the park?"

[notinflictthem]

"Usually in our backyard but yeah, most weekends we'd go out and throw a ball around. It would've been easier putting man on the moon than getting me into a sport. He wanted to put me in scouts, too, but there wasn't a 'pansy scout' division at the time."

CW: language stigmatizing mental illness

[batteryacid]

"Oh boy, do I have news for you about 1969."

It's kind of a smartass comment, and it pops out of Eddie's mouth without him even thinking -- but Eddie is a bit off kilter thanks the 'pansy scout' comment. (It's the kind of insult that Henry Bowers and his gang of bullies would've tossed Eddie's way, had they been a little more clever.) He adds, more on topic,

"Parents really are shit sometimes, aren't they? I always figured my Ma was a special kind of headcase, but I guess not."

[notinflictthem]

"Why, what happens in 1969, other than presumably a spate of orgies across the country?"

So Eddie's further ahead than him, huh?

"No, no, I don't mean to- my dad is great. Really, fantastic, both of my parents are. I just was never a very sporty kid, that's all."

[batteryacid]

"Men walk on the moon," Eddie answers.

At Hawkeye's protests, Eddie looks sheepish. He scratches the back of his neck and says quietly, "Man, I'm getting as bad at tripping over the things I say as Richie was, and we called 'im Trashmouth." Pause. "I don't mean to speak ill of your folks. I just... got similar insults thrown at me, and I made assumptions."

[notinflictthem]

"THEY WHAT?!"

Good news Eddie, that whole business is firmly on the backburner.

"THE MOON IN THE SKY?!"

to steal from Vox... Damn canon characters and their one liners

[batteryacid]

....

"Oh shit, I probably should've eased you into that."

[notinflictthem]

"Now listen Eddie, there's one thing I need to know and I need to know it now."

Hawkeye leans in uncomfortably close.

"Did they find. Aliens. On the moon."

[batteryacid]

Oh, Hawkeye. You remind him so much of Richie.

Eddie can't help but pull a somewhat exaggerated frown, as he reaches out and pats Hawkeye on the shoulder. "I'm sorry. There were no aliens on the moon."

[notinflictthem]

"Goddamnit!" Hawkeye peels away, "I owe one of my buddies $100 when I get back!"

Which in 50's money is basically half a house.

"To think, all of those b-movies preparing us for the alien menace! Wasted! I oughta get a refund on every ticket to the movies I ever bought."

[batteryacid]

Eddie nods understandingly. "Yep. No radar men from the moon. Talk about false advertising. And, uh... depending on when you're from, you sound like you've got some time to save up for that lost bet."

[notinflictthem]

Aw. Man he misses Radar. Misses everyone, but especially misses Radar.

"1951," he explains, "so it's two decades away, more or less. Might need to dip into my retirement fund but I'll make it work."

He scoffs lightly, "Toby will never let me live this down. When are you from? Much later than that?"

[batteryacid]

"Huh," Eddie says, "I was five years old in 1951. As for when I died, before coming here, it was 1985."

(He remembers the year that he was five years old particularly. Not because of any real memory on his part, but because his mother often brought it up as proof of his delicate health -- how he'd nearly died of bronchitis, and that so soon after his father had passed away. If he thinks back on it now, those two events are probably what shaped his mother into the overprotective, smothering woman he knows.)

It's a tiny little overlap of time, but it's more than the almost nothing or the 'I wasn't even born yet' that Eddie hears from other newcomers.

[notinflictthem]

"And if you listen closely, you might be able to hear the arthritis settling in."

Hawkeye does not want to run the numbers on how old that would make him in 1985. So he simply will not.

"Anyway uh- just to circle- circle back, it's nothing my dad said about me. Just what I say about me, that's all. Got distracted with the aliens. Or lack of aliens. Say- we didn't get blown up by the Soviets, did we? New Hampshire isn't Novvy Hampshenberg?"

[batteryacid]

"To circle back and explain myself," Eddie replies, "when I was younger, the kids I ran with were called the Losers by just about everyone. And there was somethin' about each of us that the bullies loved hassle us for. I was the one that got 'girly boy' most often." Does he have to say more than that? Eddie doesn't think so.

But the last couple questions from Hawkeye get a grin from Eddie. "All that comrade crap is throwing you off, too? According to Angel, there was no Soviet takeover, and I'm pretty sure he's the furthest along of all these folks from the future."

cw period typical homophobic language

[notinflictthem]

Hawkeye huffs a little in sympathy.

"I get it- I mean, I got called a sissy when I was younger, all the time," a shrug- "better to be a sissy than a neanderthal who hassles people for being one. There's worse things to be."

He mirrors the grin for just a moment, but it falls just a little when he asks-

"Does that mean the cold war isn't... over? By your time?"

[batteryacid]

"No, it's not. In the 70s, both sides decided that the nuclear warheads and missiles they had weren't good enough and replaced them with more powerful ones." Eddie scowls. "Which is fucking stupid, and nobody really wants it that way, but we're all scared that the other side is gonna kill us, and 'bigger guns to kill 'em back with' seems to be the order of the day."

[notinflictthem]

Hawkeye sighs, feeling every minute of his age, if not older.

"Classic well-reasoned logic of the US army. Someone ought to get all the generals into a room with a couple of blunt knives and let them work it out themselves. Leave all the rest of us out of it."

Oy yoi yoi.

"I mean what- that's decades. There'll be kids who are old enough to join the army who've never lived in a world without the Cold War. That's... nuts."

[batteryacid]

"Yeah..." Eddie says softly, "nuts is the word for it."

War is a business. More war means more need for weapons, to say nothing of 'beans and boots' to keep the human element going, and there's money to be made in it. (And to capitalism, as long as the profit line goes up, what does the human cost matter?) Eddie isn't sure how to express his discomfort with the parallels between those concepts, not without possibly getting into a deeper conversation than a first meeting really calls for.

"But the others... they're further along than us, when they come from similar places? And the Cold War is over for them."