Chapter Text
BJ eased the car around a curve in the highway. On one side rose the rounded peaks of the Santa Lucia mountains, a verdantly rolling line pushing into the clear and perfect blue of the sky. On the other the sandy loam cliffs fell away into the Pacific, which stretched to the horizon, the late afternoon sunlight catching on its surface and setting it glittering like a thousand shards of glass. The highway shimmered in the haze of reflected heat, but the sea-breeze was cool and smelled of salt.
Big Sur. California 1. The ever-present mist along the route had burned away under the atypically intense force of the August sun. It was a good day for a drive; he was glad he’d put the roof of the convertible down. He’d bought a little Porsche a week and a half after he’d shipped back home, and—
No. After he’d shipped to the States.
After he’d shipped to the States, he’d bought a car. A Porsche. It was a deep red. With racing stripes. It had two doors. And two seats. Only two seats. He’d already made his decision by then.
Ahead of him and behind the highway cut along the rolling faces of the mountain range, a lateral, even slash through the landscape. He frowned, briefly disconcerted. The view was beautiful, but at what cost? Were there going to be long-term ramifications, environmentally, for cutting seven hundred miles’ worth of tar into the untouched coast? Was the beauty of the scenic drive marred by the visible black snake of the highway strangling the base of the mountains? And, if so, did he have a right to complain? To worry?
After all, he’d chosen to drive this highway himself.
He shook his head and breathed in deeply, the maritime air tugging at something in his chest. It brought him back to his childhood, to long summer drives up the coast on the then-newly constructed highway, to hot white-sand beaches and sea spray. There was a tang of iron in the air, too. Imagined. Maybe.
He glanced over at the passenger seat under the guise of checking the rearview mirror.
Hawkeye was staring down the highway, his eyes unreadable behind his black-lensed sunglasses. His skin was pale. His crow-black hair blew attractively in the breeze, swept back from his forehead. He was beautiful.
Like he could sense the direction of BJ’s thoughts, Hawkeye turned and smiled slowly, a liquidly seductive smirk. “Enjoying the view?” he asked.
BJ smiled back, and offered his hand.
Hawkeye took it, interlacing their fingers. His hand was lukewarm.
“Always,” BJ said, aiming them straight and true down the highway. The steering wheel’s leather was hot against his palm.
Hawkeye leaned back, kicking his long legs up onto the dashboard. BJ didn’t bother to tell him not to. What good would it do to indulge his knee-jerk reaction to conjure up images of shattered tibias, car-wreck victims, long nights in a Palo Alto ER? There was no point.
The sun was very, very bright.
“Doing okay?” BJ asked. “Need me to stop and put the top up?”
“Nah,” Hawkeye said, turning his face into the sun. “Feels good. Warm.”
BJ stroked the back of his hand with his thumb. There was no traffic. The Porsche was eating up the miles of highway smoothly, propelling them down the coast towards L.A. Towards home.
(“Are you sure?” BJ had asked him. “L.A.’s hot. It’s desert down there. I think you’d like it better back east.”
“Are you trying to get rid of me?” Hawkeye had asked in return. And that was the thing of it—BJ wasn’t. It might have been better if he had. But, for better or worse—and BJ tried desperately to ignore the voice in his head that informed him in no uncertain terms it was for worse—Hawkeye was a part of him. Would be a part of him forever. He was strange and silent and dangerous and eerie, the living shadow he’d dragged back from the war, the thing he knew now he’d never be able to shake.)
“And you? You doing okay?” Hawkeye asked him, gaze piercing, even hidden as it was behind mirrored lenses. “We can stop if you need a break. There’s good sightseeing out here, anyway.”
BJ shrugged, watching the world go by.
There was good sightseeing, Hawkeye was right. They rounded another curve, trending slightly downhill, and the coastline opened up before them, green- and umber-covered hills rolling down to meet the water, where waves dashed themselves into oblivion on the rocks. Another sports car passed them, headed in the opposite direction, its brief silver flash minnow-like against the merging blues of the horizon.
BJ let his mind wander, briefly, imagining himself free of his body, existing only as an observer. He skimmed out across the sunlit and sapphire water, out to the place the sun would recede behind him, and leave him hurtling across the silent and night-blackened ocean, pitch-dark except for, maybe, the far down galaxial glimmer of bioluminescent sea life, algae, jellyfish, worms, and stranger things, then farther, farther, and, yes—abruptly out of the black there would rise a glimmering coast, a lambent network of gold—Tokyo, Nagoya, and then the black water again—the Sea of Japan, far below it the corpse of a plane and a colonel he’d never known, and before very long he’d arrive where he’d always known he was going, the place he was beginning to suspect he’d always been from, where he’d been born and where he’d come of age and learned and loved and, he figured, died—War.
“Hey,” Hawkeye said suddenly. “Would you look at that?”
You could leave War. But War would never leave you.
BJ followed the direction of his pointing. Off in the distance, at the top of a hill, the highway’s heat-shimmer had refracted the sunlight so dramatically that, as they passed over the peak of the incline, cars seemed to climb vertically into the air and then disappear all at once into the depths of the sky.
As he watched, another car, a little blue thing, rose into the air and vanished.
Hawkeye laughed, his feet coming briefly off the dashboard.
“What?” BJ asked, watching cars float up into nonbeing.
“Nothing,” Hawkeye said. “It’s only that there’s so much beauty in the world.”
BJ looked at him again, at the smooth, unwrinkled skin of his face, the jet black of his hair, the lissome shape of him. At the light catching on his teeth. His fangs. He wondered if anything would ever be alright again, and then figured that things were more or less as good as they could ever be. After all, he was happy. Few could ask for more.
So he couldn’t go home again. It wasn’t a special tragedy. Not any literary, arresting sort of sadness. It wasn’t even unique. So he couldn’t go home again. Nobody could. That was the universal truth of it. The hell of it. To hell with it.
“What are you thinking about?” Hawkeye asked him.
BJ looked at him, and then looked away, up towards the top of the hill where the car soon would lift, ferried effortlessly by the hand of God or fate or who knew what else, into the infinite blue above.
Death, BJ thought. Inevitability. Continuity. Meatball surgery. Bloodwet boots. The fact he couldn’t look at a pair of Chucks for longer than a minute without feeling ill. Arable land. Iowa. Old friends. The things we leave behind. The things we try to, and can’t. The things we wish we could. The things we’d like to hold forever. Forgeries. Dear John letters, and Janes, and the ones who never heard anything at all. Kansas. The plains, strange and changeable as the ocean. Sun. Rain. Gravity, and other states of perpetual falling. The axial tilt of the Earth. Time zones. Black water, and blue. Forest fires. Mountains, local and global. Environmentalism. Imperialism. Colonialism. The end of the world, and what happens after. The Protestant work ethic. Politics. Personhood. Life. Laughter. Love. Korea. But most of all death. Among other inevitabilities.
“Taxes, I guess,” he said, and when Hawkeye laughed, the sound whipped away with the wind, out over the Pacific’s shining sunlit surface and its submerged darknesses, where all manner of the alien and unknowable lurked.