#hawkcahy

Mulcahy is still a priest (and would canonically be feeling Extremely Weird about functioning as a priest while joyously making love with Hawkeye). And that's mostly what I've been having fun with in past writings, because I love torturing my favourite little holy pot of rage just on the brink of boiling over.

But. Equally. Hawkeye is, not very far under the surface, an absolute romantic, a man who wants very much to be married and committed to the love of his life.

My own headcanon about Hawkeye is that the rushing from nurse to nurse (and orderly to Marine) in the first few seasons was due to the year he turned 30 being the very worst damn year of his life, even worse than the year his mother died: in January 1950 he was six months from finishing his thoracic surgery residency, he was living with Carlye whom he loved and intending to marry her and start a family just as soon as he qualified, and then:

Carlye left him. The US army drafted him. He became Chief Surgeon of a MASH unit. His best friend since fifth grade died on his table. The year Hawkeye turned 30 was a no-good very bad awful year.

And then sort of, gradually, Hawkeye pulled himself out of feeling like he was in the pits. It didn't help that Henry Blake died and Trapper left and the army declared him dead, but by the fifth season - moving along through 1951, we all know dating MASH is difficult - Hawkeye has done what he usually does when things are the pits: he has pulled himself together and he's found something new to do.

Which is, of course, fall in love with the chaplain and see if he can get the chaplain to love him back.

Hawkeye of course knows this is going absolutely nowhere once they get out of Korea. It can't. It's okay. Mulcahy isn't going to leave him flat and inexplicably the way Carlye did: Francis will leave him for entirely obvious reasons and Hawkeye even knows when, just as soon as the war is over, so that's all right then. Meantime, the group of people at the 4077th who have absolutely realised that Hawkeye Is In Love (even if no one else has, even if Hawkeye himself hasn't quite realised yet) are the nurses. Because Hawkeye has gone from Camp Bicycle, always good for an energetic ride, to a champion flirt who's actually quite hard to pin down.

And they know (because they'v'e seen it before) that whenever Hawkeye gets devoted to one person, Hawkeye goes monogamous until she dumps him.

They just can't work out who that one person is, this time. Hawkeye's really being very discreet.

Maybe Father Mulcahy knows...

In this version of the Hawkahy timeline, they were already having sex (and both of them were romantically attached though neither of them were admitting it) maybe even before Trapper and Henry Blake left.

But I don't think Hawkeye would have tried to convince Carlye to stay, in "The More I See You," in late fourth season, if he hadn't been absolutely sure that Mulcahy would never be romantically attached to him.

So Father Mulcahy is watching Hawkeye wind himself up round and about Carlye, and he can't talk to Hawkeye about it and he can't remonstrate with Hawkeye about an affair with a married woman and he shouldn't even disapprove because obviously it would be morally better if Hawkeye returned to the straight and narrow and Father Mulcahy remembered his vows of celibacy. But he's bashing the hell out of his punching-bag because what else can he do?

(Father Mulcahy literally disappears from the scene during that episode. Clearly he is desperately trying to avoid Hawkeye.)