A/N: In honour of M*A*S*H fanart day, I give you Chapter 9! I'm sorry I suck at updating regularly, but I promise you guys, no matter how long it takes between updates, I will never abandon this fic. I'm in it 'til the end. Many thanks to rosiesbar (hawkeye-piercentyre on tumblr) for being the most wonderful beta a girl could have, and to tumblr's captain-transvestite for helping me out with the history :)

22 veterans commit suicide every day in the US. That's 2,772 deaths since I first posted this fic. If you can, please be generous and support your veterans, wherever you live.

Hawkeye quickly turned to face the back of the couch, shielding his face with his arm as he cried. Anger, sadness and guilt swelled inside of him, intertwining in a way that made each one more painful than he could ever have imagined. More than anything he wished he could drown them in something far stronger than tears. Margaret had moved to kneel on the floor beside him, knowing there was little she could do at that moment but be there, and though he could not tell her then, he was grateful for her presence.

Eventually his sobs fell into gasping breaths, eerily quiet now as he struggled for air. It was then that Margaret reached out to him, placing a steadying hand on his shoulder and encouraging him to roll onto his back and face her. As panic rose inside of him Hawkeye turned into her touch, his face a mess of emotion. Though she had seen him cry more than once before, Margaret was unprepared for what faced her; his bloodshot eyes were red and swollen, his cheeks stained with the passage of tears, and his mouth gaped open in a silent scream.

"Breathe out," though it shook slightly as she spoke, Margaret's voice came to Hawkeye as a point of clarity within the chaos, and she repeated herself in a steady rhythm as he fought to comply. "It's alright. Just breathe out."

Eventually he managed to let the air he had been searching for so desperately escape his lungs, and soon he was able to regulate his breathing to the gentle movements of Margaret's hand on his arm. All that emotion was still bubbling inside of him, burning like acid into his heart, and though he seemed to have calmed somewhat, a shadow of pain hung over his face.

Margaret let the silence linger for several long seconds before she spoke again, grateful that she would have control of the conversation for once. "Trapper's okay, Hawkeye. He got through life just fine before he met any of us. I'm sure his family is looking after him. Now you just need to start letting yours look after you." There was a softness in her voice, a familiar lilt that for a moment, Hawkeye couldn't place. It was a tone he had heard only a few times before, one she reserved for the worst of her patients: those in the most pain, and those waiting to die.

"I know you're afraid, we're all afraid. There are things we've lived through that no one else will ever understand. But we went through it together, remember?" As Margaret spoke, she could hear Hawkeye's breaths coming more evenly, and she stilled her hand on his arm. "You don't have to forget for it to get better, you just have to deal with what you remember. Why don't you tell me what you remember?"

After minutes of silence just listening to himself breathe, Hawkeye felt a strange sense of calm come over him. He opened his eyes, though he hadn't realised he'd ever closed them, and stared blankly at the ceiling. When he answered her, his voice was flat and emotionless. "What I remember? How about the face of every kid that didn't make it home. Every body that went out of that camp in a truck."

"That wasn-"

"Don't tell me we weren't responsible," he plowed on, tone unchanging. "We stood out there in triage and picked who lived and who died. He's first, he's second, that guy'll have to wait even though another hour could well kill him, don't even bother with that one, he might as well already be dead. Who the hell were we to play God?" The lack of emotion as he posed the question was eerie.

"Every one of those boys would have died if we hadn't been there. Think about how many lives you saved." Margaret repeated the lines she had spoken countless times to herself, though after so long they now seemed somehow unreal.

"Yeah, 'saved'. How many kids did we send back to the front just to have them wind up dead?"

"None of that was our fault! None of it. Death is a part of life, Hawkeye, and there's nothing you can do to change that. No matter how hard you work, or how much you care, you'll never be able to save everyone!" Though she fought to control it, Margaret found her voice slowly rising.

"Why the hell not?!" Hawkeye sat up furiously, swinging his legs down from the arm of the couch in one swift movement and staring down at the still kneeling Margaret. "I'm a doctor for Christ's sake, I know how to fix them, so why the hell can't I?!"

Before she could stop herself she was yelling back at him, "Because not everyone can be fixed!"

The waiting room at the Crabapple Cove clinic was never empty, a steady stream of patients passing through every day. With a population of barely 4,000 in the town, Daniel had his side of the market cornered. He knew even his most infrequent patients intimately, having delivered most of them himself, and he was prone to falling desperately behind schedule chatting with them all. Between endless discussions of fishing and golf, and tales of children and grandchildren who had ventured interstate, the conversation would inevitably turn to him. When at first Hawkeye had returned Daniel had faced a standard list of questions, how was he, when would they be seeing him, nothing out of the ordinary. But after weeks had passed with little sign of his son in the town the questions had turned into politely masked judgements, or been forgotten entirely.

When Dotty Armstrong had walked into his office, hand in hand with her little girl of no more than five, Daniel had been all smiles. She was only a few years younger than Hawkeye, and he had known her well as a child, but since marrying she had moved in circles beyond that of the simple doctor.

"How are you Dotty? Having a nice time?" Daniel asked, gesturing to young Nancy as he spoke. His smile grew even more as he noticed the way she swung her little legs playfully on the tall chair.

"Dorothy, please," she corrected, her words as neat and well chosen as her dress. "Things are going very well for us, thank you, aren't they Nancy?" Her daughter simply giggled in response. "Children aren't nearly so difficult as some people make them out to be, if they're raised properly. Don't you think, Dr Pierce?"

Somehow Daniel managed to keep himself from laughing, but only just. "Oh, I don't know. Children have a habit of surprising you, I've found, when you least expect it."

"Yes, I suppose so," for less than a second a shadow of thought could be seen in her face, though her tone remained unchanged. "It must be nice for you to have Haw-Benjamin at home again. Is he planning to return to Boston? Or another hospital, perhaps?"

"No, no, not for the moment," though his smile remained intact, there was a slight shift in Daniel's tone; an almost fatherly note of warning. "We're both content for him to be at home for the time being, I think."

"Of course, hospital work isn't for everyone. Perhaps he would be better suited to a… less demanding environment."

Daniel turned his attention abruptly to Nancy, "Now, what seems to be the matter today, young lady?"

When Mary Clemons had been helped into his office by Nurse Evelyn, Daniel had stood to take her arm and her cane, not leaving her side until she was comfortable in her chair. He saw her quite regularly, as with many of his older patients, but in this instance it had been almost two weeks since her last visit.

"How are you feeling this morning Mrs Clemons?" Daniel asked, sorting through her papers on his desk to find the most recent.

"Terrible," she answered bluntly, her nasal voice just a fraction louder than it needed to be.

"I'm sorry to hear that," Daniel feigned concern, she was always feeling terrible.

Mary didn't give him a chance to continue, preferring to take the lead in the conversation, "This is the first time I've been out since Thursday, you know! All weekend I've been stuck in that house, nothing to do but play canasta with Jim! There's nothing worse than playing a nice card game with someone who can't tell a club from a spade! But of course Joey won't take me out, too much effort to take his own mother for a drive into town now that he lives all of five streets away!"

"I'm sure he's doing his best, Mrs Clemons, he does have a lot of mouths to feed," Daniel interjected, recalling the last time he had seen Joe, looking completely exhausted with five squealing children pulling at his sleeves.

The old woman ignored him, continuing her tirade, "After all we did for him growing up, going without so he could have, you'd think he'd look after us properly in our old age! Ungrateful, children, they're all ungrateful. Take my word for it Danny, that boy of yours won't be much better! He's already taking advantage, and of course you're letting him. Terrible shame for that boy to grow up without a mother, she'd have set him straight." She paused for a moment, shaking her head at the thought of such waste. "It's downright un-American to let him make such a fuss about this Korea business. Why, when my Jim came back from the great war he was straight back to work without so much as a days rest! I'd send him off, if I were you, let him see what it's like for them that's really gone in the head, then he'll be back to his normal self, you'll see."

Daniel, who had initially been listening only out of politeness, was by this point ready to end the appointment without another word. But, being the man that he was, he chose instead to take a deep breath, and interrupt her speech, which had returned to the topic of her own son's failings.

"What exactly can I help you with today, Mrs Clemons?"

When George Preston had limped through the door, without any assistance, as usual, Daniel had stood to shake his hand. George was a quiet man, always to the point, the sort of patient many a doctor would dream of. He didn't bother to engage in small talk, preferring simply to take his diagnosis and be on his way. Only, on this particular day, just before he had reached the door to leave, he had stopped.

There was a moment of silence before he spoke, in which Daniel could clearly see him turning the words over in his mind. When he did speak, his voice was low and gruff, more so than it had been minutes before, "Hawkeye did his duty, that's all. Tell him not to expect anyone to thank him for it."

Before Daniel could find a reply, George was gone.

So it was that when Daniel reached his office that early Tuesday morning he didn't feel any more at ease than he had in the chaos of his home. With at just over an hour to wait until the surgery opened, he left the door locked behind him and sat at his desk. For a second he considered doing some paperwork, but as he struggled to read the print in front of him he realised he hadn't bothered to turn on the lights on his way in. Leaning back in his chair, he closed his eyes and sighed, the thinly veiled judgement of the town swirling in the darkness behind his eyes; it was going to be another long day.