Chapter Text
I - Trapper John McIntyre
The dreams of Trapper had started even before the war ended, but Hawkeye had always assumed - for whatever reason - that they would stop once he got back home.
He was sadly mistaken.Even in safe little Crabapple Cove, a world away from that Korean hell where he and Trapper had met and laughed and drank and parted, the dreams followed him.
He would come home from the clinic pleasantly weary from his day spent patching boo-boos and giving inoculations. He'd eat his dinner - anything but liver or fish - and then have a sensible number of drinks for a healthy young man who had to be at work by nine the next day.
And then he'd have a couple more.
So he was always somewhat woozy when he climbed into bed, and maybe that was what triggered it. Or perhaps there was a mosquito in the room buzzing in his ear or a chopper flying overhead or maybe it was the smell of his unwashed laundry if he'd been a bit lazy; he could never figure out exactly what the trigger was. But he'd close his eyes and drift all the way back to The Swamp.
It was like it had been in the early days, with Frank sneering in the corner and Radar's voice on the tannoy. He would look around and see Trap, propped against a pile of pillows, grinning cheekily as he read his copies of Field and Stream. And even though he was suddenly back in a place that he'd been happy to leave forever, he was glad to see his old friend, and so he smiled and waved.
Trapper didn't wave back.
In fact, he never even acknowledged Hawkeye's presence. He went about his duties and his pleasures, checking on patients and performing surgeries, flirting with nurses and tormenting Frank, while never once seeing or hearing his Hawkeye. For his part, Hawkeye drifted along beside him, as helpless and insubstantial as a ghost, unable to make his presence known.
At first, this merely confused Hawkeye. Then it frightened him. He became more and more desperate to be seen, screaming and hollering, knocking things over. It was all to no avail.
The rage came next.
Without thinking he raised a fist, ready to strike Trapper, to punch some sense into him. He lunged forward, more than ready to cause pain if that was what was needed.
His fist passed, unnoticed, through Trapper's chest.
That was the point at which he always woke up. And then, covered in cold sweat and tangled in the bed sheets, he ached for a friendship that had meant so much, and yet had been abandoned, forever unfinished, half a world away.
If that hadn't really mattered, what did?