the betrayal is a landmark in tim & hawk’s relationship and what i think is important to understand before judging hawk and the choices he made in that situation is that at it’s core, it was a sacrificial act. he didn’t only sacrifice tim and his trust, despite what it might've seemed like. he also sacrificed his own happiness, or the closest thing he knew he could’ve had to that— being with tim. he sacrificed their love because, just a little too late (as they’re already intertwined in possibly one of their most intimate, fragile moments, tim pressed up against him, telling him that actually, they’re going to see each other every day) he realized: they go down this path, it will blow up in their faces and hurt more, destroy much more than just the two of them.
still, he didn’t do it to hurt tim. of course he knew it would, the decision to go forward with it was huge and the impact catastrophic, but anyone with sense will understand; a simple conversation about “not seeing each other anymore” would never have sufficed. he knew he had to take extreme measures to keep tim, who literally had to join the army to get away last time, away from him. i’m sure that in hawk’s mind there was no other option than to do something so drastic it would completely throw their worlds off their axes. it was a hasty attempt to shatter something all-consuming. to disrupt their gravitational field so completely that it would stop pulling them towards each other like it had for years.
tim is devastated when he finds out hawk reported him. who wouldn’t be? jackson, who is pivotal to their story, has now been born and in all his symbolic newborn glory he truly changes everything. in the hospital tim sees jackson for the first time and the innocence of new life, i think, helps him understand why hawk chose to do what he did. i’m not sure it allows him to forgive though. not until he meets jackson again at the cabin years later.
from that moment on hawk’s life descends into a chaos that is, atleast in his mind, a controlled one. a tame, familiar chaos. (he grew up in it, after all.) we later on find it spiraling beyond his control and he loses himself in it. this is when tim comes back around to anchor him, as he’s done from the moment they met and will keep on doing until the end and beyond that. tim is the one fixed point in hawk’s life and you understand this as you find out that even after ruining them both, he'd still kept tim close for years. hawk had gone to extreme lengths to keep tim away from himself when all along, he was the one who couldn’t let go.
