Title: Envy
Author: Am-Chau Yarkona
Feedback: Please! amchau@popullus.net
Summary: Henry thinks about Hawkeye.
Rating: PG
Pairing: Hawkeye/Henry (UST)
Disclaimer: They’re not mine.
Thanks to iolanthe and Meredith for the wonderfulness of their beta reading.
I envy you, so much it makes me feel sick at times. I envy the ease you have with others and yourself. You’re a better surgeon than I am, a better leader, and you have a better love life than me. You keep this camp together, and you can have your pick of the nurses—or the doctors.
Perhaps more than anything else, I envy you your relationship with Trapper. You’re both so comfortable with your sexuality. With each other, too, with touching and holding and kissing and… well, I imagine you’re as comfortable alone as you are in public. Oh, I envy you that.
Wait, that’s not quite true. I envy Trapper more than you. I want to be the one you’re touching with those clever hands. You flirt with everyone, but you only mean it when it’s with Trapper. That’s very unfair of you.
I’m doing my best to be open to you, even to make advances, but you seem to be blind to me. You’re blinded by Trapper. My envy could turn into hate for that.
I thought I might get somewhere the other day, when you saw my film from home. But no. You sat there next to Trapper, even told him to keep his hands to himself, and I had to watch my wife and daughter (and then myself—really, if the pictures of me kissing the next-door neighbours, both of them, didn’t give you a little clue, what would?) knowing all the time that he would be disobeying your order.
It’s a good thing it was a bit of film worth watching, or I might have been very distracted by the thought of him reaching out his hands in the half-dark, touching your legs, or side, your back and shoulders, down again to find… it’s also a good thing my wife’s still beautiful.
I have to hold on to that: she’s still beautiful. I still want to be with her, when all this is over; when I go home, that’s where I’ll go.
Sometimes thinking that works, and sometimes it doesn’t.
Today, I sit in my empty office and stare my doll or at the pictures of my wife, trying to fantasise about the day she’ll hold me again, not about being in your arms. I want you to notice me, but it isn’t going to happen, so I might as well try and stop wanting it. I won’t succeed but I really ought to try.
End.