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

[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."