#and hawkeye is like trap?? you don't even know him wtf??

[thebreakfastgenie]

Oh shit I forgot to send an ask for the wip game so if you're still doing it elaborate on "seeing ghosts" please?

Hell yes! Ironically, this one doesn't have any actual ghosts, or even any actual deaths... It's called seeing ghosts as a placeholder because in the opening, Trapper feels like he's seeing ghosts from his past. I'm usually not totally wild about the "Trapper thought Hawkeye was dead" trope, but this is my spin on it.

Trapper went home and started working as a general surgeon at Boston Mercy Hospital. Shortly after, he learns that Hawkeye is dead; this will most likely use the device of Trapper trying to write and having his letter sent back during The Late Captain Pierce, though that involves some creative liberties as mail would have been forwarded to the next of kin. If I can think of something succinct, I may use a different device; maybe Trapper had a chance encounter with someone who just got back from Korea who told him about the death certificate but didn't know it was false. Maybe he tried to use an official army channel for some reason and was informed Hawkeye was deceased. I don't know. Why he thought Hawkeye was dead isn't important, it just has to be believable.

Trapper is good enough to be chief of general surgery, but he doesn't have any interest in pursuing it. He's sort of keeping his head down, doing good work, and focusing on his girls. He's still married to Louise. He's a little depressed and because of the circumstances he hasn't really dealt with his grief over Hawkeye's supposed death. He's friendly with his coworkers and good friends with one of them. He very rarely talks about Korea, but mostly because none of them were there and they don't understand. Two years later, he's forced to attend a reception for the newly hired chief of thoracic surgery. He has no interest in the pomp and circumstance of it, and he's on edge because he's thinking about how it should be Hawkeye starting a job like this. And then his friend tells him the new chief of thoracic surgery served in Korea. This snippet is a rough draft, but it gives you the general idea: “He’s a Beacon Hill Winchester,” Pete replied, and this time there was no question that he intended it as an insult. “Blue blood. Sounds like a total drag to me. You might get along with him better,” he added thoughtfully.  Trapper frowned. Pete’s description didn’t sound like someone he would get along with. He sounded like someone whose shoes he would fill with paint while he was in the OR, if the thought of it didn’t make him miss Hawkeye terribly.  “Why?” “He served in Korea.” Pete said. He lowered his voice. “Actually, I heard he only got this job because one of his army buddies called in a favor with Bob Harwell.”  “Figures,” Trapper muttered. “Who’d you hear it from?” “Tony Maxwell. He said the board was all set to go in a different direction, then Bob gets a call from a Major Houlian.”  Trapper nearly spat out his drink.  “Hot Lips Houlihan?” he blurted out before he could stop himself.  “When I knew her, she went by the name Margaret,” said a new voice.  Trapper and Pete both turned, finding themselves face-to-face with the guest of honor. It was clear from his face that he’d heard everything, but he seemed unbothered. He extended a hand.  “Gentlemen. Charles Emerson Winchester III.”  Trapper couldn’t respond, still trying to process the shock of this man knowing Margaret Houlihan.  Pete shot him a lock.  “Indeed,” Charles said, smirking.  Pete shook the offered hand.  “Pete Dillinger. I’m the head of general surgery.”  He dropped Winchester’s hand, and shot Trapper another look. Trapper knew a warning when he saw one. He took the hand Pete had dropped.  “John McIntyre,” he tried to keep his voice even, but his eagerness betrayed him. “How do you know Major Houlihan?”  Trapper knew this didn’t have to mean anything—Margaret could have been transferred after he left—but that didn’t stop his heart from pounding in his chest.  “We served together in a putrid corner of hell,” Winchester said dryly.  “The 4077th!” Trapper exclaimed before he could stop himself.  “Yes,” Winchester said, surprised.  “I was there for a year!” Trapper explained excitedly. “Right at the beginning. I guess we missed each other.” 

Charles doesn't connect John McIntyre with Trapper until much later, because even though Hawkeye did talk about Trapper occasionally, Charles didn't really care. What follows is a series of misunderstandings and Trapper and Charles having two very different conversations. Trapper assumes since they had the same specialty, Charles replaced Hawkeye. Trapper says his closest friend at the 4077th died and Charles, having not been there for The Late Captain Pierce but knowing the previous CO was killed, assumes he's talking about Henry. Charles mentions his annoying bunk mates and Trapper assumes he means whoever replaced him (BJ) and Frank. This continues until Charles finally says the name Pierce:

"Benjamin Franklin Pierce?" "His friends called him Hawkeye. I did not."

At which point Trapper is like I have to go to Maine right now immediately. He gets reasoned down to going home, telling his wife what's going on, and packing a bag first. It probably ends with Hawkeye opening the door and seeing Trapper.

The main conversation is just really, really hard to write. All the dialogue has to have a passable double meaning.

[bornforastorm]

U are so mysterious about your writing hannah bornforastorm!!! I have 2 for the fic specific ask game about "crabapple crabs": gimme a BTS of your fave scene (im gonna guess that it is either BJ and hawk at the rocks or the scrabble game).

aaand i have a million dollar question for you about offscreen events: how do you imagine hawkeye and trapper's postwar reunion went, which in your fic led to them living together :)

oh beloved ben majorbaby!!!! you are so nice to send these!! to be called mysterious is so funny

to save space because boyyyy do I blather:

BTS:

lol so my favorite scene is actually the “are you fucking my man??” scene between Trapper and BJ. I'd be so happy to deconstruct BJ and Hawk on the rocks (which is as much about the two of them as it is about Hawkeye's relationship to his hometown to me), or the scrabble game (I did sooo much scrabble score calculating lol), which probably had more active thought put into them. Here, I don’t know if there’s good behind-the-scenes work to share, except that the early part of that scene where Trapper is like, "wtf is wrong with you" was absolutely fixed by you!! Personally!! You were so right that it needed clarification on the conversation Hawkeye and Trapper have already had off-screen (the burden of the limited BJ perspective!). Initially I had imagined BJ goes to bed the night before and Hawk and Trap immediately talk before going to bed themselves. So Trapper has been stewing on it all night and getting more and more pissed off at BJ, and so in the morning, he's already mad as hell. But it needed a little more finesse in the overheard conversation to make that all clear. Figuring out when Trapper is nice regarding BJ (to Hawkeye's face, because he clearly needs the reassurance), when he's trying to have a productive conversation with BJ (the "be nice why don't ya" section) and then when he actively turns against BJ (after BJ tries to pull the "you weren't there!" card again) took some tinkering. The very first draft of this scene was a lot meaner to BJ a lot quicker.

as a side note on this scene-- I am p pleased with my little "the coffee is exactly how I like it but it tastes too good to be right" bit between BJ and Hawkeye, because I think the difficulty of continuing things post-war for everyone is that the things that felt right over there do not translate to back home. Is the underlying connection even still there? I'm obsessed with the scene in Mash Goes to Maine where Trapper shows up in Maine for the first time and Hawkeye is so scared things will be irreparably different between them. And things are different, but they are the same. So I tried to bring that into a lot of moments in the fic, including this one!

And then of course Trapper is mean to BJ, BJ tries to push back but he's in the wrong so he can't win. I do like writing BJ as someone ready to get into a physical altercation here. It feels right for him-- as a defense to his masculinity, against his underlying attraction to Trapper (bc Trapper is undeniably hot and is walking around shirtless and totally confident about it and BJ loathes it), against Trapper's implication that BJ doesn't care about Hawkeye in a healthy way.

Then Trapper is smug about BJ’s insecurity, and happy to rub it in BJ’s face a little. At this point the scene sortof wrote itself. The power of that iconic tumblr post 🙏. BJ working himself up into a fit at the concept of Hawkeye and Trapper fucking, and Trapper like, "yeah man" is inherently powerful.

I am however VERY proud of the "I wouldn't have thought I'd have to explain it to you" bit, which I think feels in character with Trapper while also being like, so fuckin mean and biting. I like that Trapper can be mean sometimes. He's not a mean person, like I think BJ often is, but he sure can turn on some cruelty when the situation calls for it and I liked writing that.

I actually love all the Trapper-BJ scenes, where it's just the two of them trying to suss the other one out. Like the scene where they decide to get drunk together I really like too! Both the moment of understanding on the stoop and then the afternoon of toasts. Love to write this dynamic that has no precedent from the show to mirror or ape! Fun!

OKAY! Moving on!

The Off-Screen Reunion!!

I have written 9,000 words of this that I hope to actually finish as a real fic someday. So you may get all this in real story form at some point bUT here's the gist: basically Hawkeye gets back, is having a weird time, staying with his dad because the house he owns doesn't really feel like home (he barely lived in it before being drafted). One night he re-reads the letters Trapper sent him (which are part of Crabapple Crabs. For the sake of this, Trapper wrote and Hawkeye just kept it to himself. Too personal! But he also never wrote back. Too painful!) and then digs out the tape-recorded letter he sent his dad that has Trapper's voice on it. Wanting more of that voice, he calls Trapper in Boston and they have the most stilted, uncomfortable, who-are-we-to-each-other conversation where Trapper is like, "I figured you didn't want anything to do with me" and Hawkeye says "Well I was pretty mad at you but I want to do with you, I love you." Trapper hangs up sortof abruptly and Hawkeye is like, okay that was it, I blew it, I'll never see him or hear from him again.

But Trapper shows up on his doorstep the next day, in the rain of course, and they talk all night about this and that and BJ and it's easy and comfortable and by the morning it's like... yeah things aren't the same, but we can be. We want to do the work to make it work. We care about each other more than the hardships.

Meanwhile Trapper's already divorced and is having a hard, miserable time in Boston. It's too busy, he's still operating on meatball time, working too hard and too fast and it's fucking him up. So when Hawkeye suggests he stay for a while, he does. And then he just... doesn't leave.

He fixes up Hawkeye's house, makes it a home for him, for them (cleaning and furnishing a house as a metaphor). Having Trapper around creates an excuse to introduce him around town, gets Hawkeye out of his head and back into the community. They decide they can do good by starting a clinic, which is an invigorating project for Hawkeye. Another instance of me being really into Mash Goes to Maine lol. Trapper likes the town and the weirdo people, and now they have something to work towards together. They play scrabble and eat lowkey vegetarian at home and the town is like, well those Pierces have always been weird so why shouldn't Hawkeye have a war buddy come live with him? Ain't any weirder than the other weird stuff. And we like the war buddy, he's a good fella and his kids are nice girls and ain't it nice they come up sometimes.

So that's how I imagine it happens, more or less!! Someday I'll finish the full fic version, which honestly so far is hugely about the rest of the town and Hawkeye's relationship to the town too lmao I can't help myself