New Fic: He Tries To Speak (And Can't Begin To Say)
Title: He Tries To Speak (And Can't Begin To Say)
Author: joe_pike_junior
Characters/pairings: House/Wilson friendship, House/Cuddy, mentions of House/Stacy. Members of the old and new teams make an appearance.
Warnings: Major character death, strong language and themes.
Summary: He tries to tell himself that this doesn't feel like atonement. House remembers, even when he doesn't want to.
Disclaimer: House and characters belong to Fox. No infringement is intended.
Notes: Shout-outs to nomad1328, pwcorgigirl, nightdog_barks, and shutterbug_12. Plot bunny yoinked from here. The title is from the Out On The Weekend, by Neil Young. I wrestled with this one, so concrit will be gratefully accepted.
When he feels like this, he notices everything. Not just the things that curiosity and then medicine stamped onto him (pallor, speech patterns, shaking hands, prescription bottles, sweaty palms). Those are the things he absorbs, the things that worry at him until they coalesce into a whole.
He can see, feel, hear everything: the hum of the air conditioning, a photocopier running off copies somewhere, the little Blu-Tac circles on the wall, her perfume. Sometimes it's interesting, something he can fall into. But now, when they lapse into silence, it's faintly claustophobic, oppressive.
He feels restless, chafing away in this room. He knows she doesn't, and he feels irrationally that she's chosen to sit here for so long to gain a psychological edge. She's fine. She doesn't have to tell, only listen.
She's staring at him, her eyebrows raised expectantly. He clears his throat.
"When I was a kid we lived on a few airbases -- did I tell you that? -- and I used to lie awake, all these planes would fly over, and when I couldn't sleep I'd listen to them taking off and landing. When I was eleven, twelve, it just seemed endless."
There's a small thin cut on the ball of his left thumb. He can't remember how he got it. He presses the index finger against it.
"I think you should start at the beginning," she says, her eyes on his hands.
Some variation in the thermostat brings about a change in the air conditioning. He can hear something rattling in the duct. His senses feel frayed. He scratches his chin, his hands cold to the touch.
Once, he thought hurt was being in a tiny tract house backyard, trying not to scream as his father meted out punishment. Not caring was so important to him, and so he did it again and again, skidding to his knees in backyards on three different air bases, cringing, waiting for his father to take out the razor strop. When he was older, he'd just stay out all night, sitting barechested in summer and shivering in winter, nestled in the lee of the house.
After that, hurt was Stacy leaving him, the empty pain that left in his chest. The roaring silence of her absence. But Stacy's still alive.
This. This is worse.
...
When Cuddy arrives, House is sitting on Wilson's stoop with his head in his hands.
After Cuddy parks her car, she takes some change out of the centre console and feeds it deliberately into the metre. She takes a deep breath. Then she turns toward Wilson's apartment, toward House sitting outside. There's an edge of panic to her mood, the same bitter hurt that's been there for months. Ever since this began.
When House hears her approach, he puts his head up. The sight of his face seeds something cold and anxious in the pit of her stomach. He starts to lever himself up, his hand white-knuckled at the railing, and she starts to run.
His eyes are red, and there's a sort of guilty shock on his face, the expression so empty and expansive that it sends goosebumps like icewater down her spine. This is it, she thinks.
She's about to speak, but before she does he raises a hand and points at the door. His hand is shaking slightly. It looks like he's in shock.
"I-" he says. Then he shakes his head. She realises he can't speak.
She moves closer. She doesn't know what to say.
"House? Is he-"
He looks away, his brow creased. It's that detachment that breaks her heart, like there's a part of him that isn't present. When she thought it wasn't possible for them to hurt any more, this.
She hesitates, then puts her arms around him and draws him close. She can't remember the last time they did this. She half-expects him to make a joke, but instead it's as if any residual strength he had just drains away. He's exhausted. They sit slowly, House bracing himself against her, muscles quivering. She kneels on the pavement, her knees stinging.
They stay like that for a long time, and she thinks of how much he must be hurting, how for all this time he hasn't asked her for help.
When they're both ready, they go inside.
...
"You must remember what happened before that."
That sort of condescension is one of the habits those in her profession fall into easily. He can think of others.
House swallows down on the annoyed and rather incisive remark he was about to make, and takes a sip of coffee instead. It's not particularly fresh, but it's strong and hot.
"Of course I do."
She holds her hands out. "Well, why don't you-"
"-Look," he says, actually angry now, at her flip gestures and annoying questions. "You're getting two hundred bucks an hour for this, but I'm telling it the way I want to. If you want it chronological and tied up in a neat bow, read the damn newspaper."
Princeton doctor dead at 38. Died after a long illness. He thinks now of all the newspaper articles he read back then with a strange and almost disquieting lack of feeling.
He walks quickly through the cafeteria. He's walking away from the questions, the stuff she doesn't know. Right now the questions seem too big a big price to pay for unburdening himself, for telling the truth. He curses his leg for hurting him because he got up so quickly.
Ten years ago he would have burnt off this hopeless anger by running. Tonight the years weigh particularly heavily. He drinks too much Red Hook and spends most of the night on the bathroom floor, courtesy the beer and the coffee and the Vicodin and the fact that he forgot to eat.
The floor is cold, and his leg starts to cramp unless he shifts his position a lot, but he stays on the floor, listening to the sounds bounce off the tile, looking at the water-light pattern cast on the ceiling.
He dozes for a while and wakes up suspecting, just for a moment, that he's dreamt all this. He gets up and splashes water on his face, moves stuff around, rattles a pill bottle, just so he knows he hasn't.
He calls Cuddy and leaves a message on her machine. He regrets it.
He thinks of what Wilson would say now. Drunk as he is, he can't conjure up his voice, and that makes House feel empty.
...
In diagnosis, the puzzle pieces are always tiny. It's a matter of compiling microscopic details and turning them into something macroscopic. That's what he likes the most about the process: translating the things he sees and feels and hears into a picture that dictates disease and action and intent. Sometimes he doesn't even know where the answers come from.
It makes sense. Even when it's something he doesn't want to know, it always makes sense. Whether in relief or vague horror there is always that welcome flash of inspiration, of clear inner vision. When the lights seem to flicker for a moment, when the smallest details are magnified so he can see them for what they are.
He's the first to notice, and it's such a small thing.
House is standing in front of Wilson's desk, watching him sift through paperwork, passive-aggressively. He's annoyed that House stuck a knife into an electrical outlet two weeks ago, annoyed that House is still messing around with six team members, annoyed that House is trying to provoke the Mormon into attacking him. Wilson's just pissed.
"C'mon," House says. "My team is busy trying to be heard above one another. Let's go."
"No, House." More prim collating of already-organised sheets of paper. "I actually have work to do."
House would have left then, for the OTB, or the cafeteria or the bar a ten-minute zoom on the motorcycle away. He would have left because he knew he could wait out this aberration in Wilson's mood, just as he has always done.
But just before he's about to turn away he notices that Wilson screws one eye up slightly as he reads the open page of his planner. House sits back on Wilson's couch with what he hopes is a disinterested grunt, and he watches.
It takes four days to be sure. On Saturday evening Wilson can't get his key into the door at ten-thirty, and House is the drunk one. On Monday Wilson rubs his eyes when he passes from the gloomy hallway to the bright fluorescent bars lighting the clinic. On Tuesday he misses his mug with the coffee pot.
On Wednesday, House goes into Wilson's office and quietly puts a CT booking form down on the desk, as serious as a heart attack. He's already filled in the space allotted for the patient's name: James Wilson.
"I don't need that," Wilson says as he injects a flippant little laugh into his voice, but House knows he's whistling in the dark.
...
They're sitting at the picnic bench in the jogging park, the same place he bought Little Miss Crisis of Faith. The same place he used to run, a long time ago. House has sunglasses on, and he's lying back on the table looking up through patterns of dappled shade.
She has her legs crossed, jiggling one sandal-clad foot. Today her hair is dark brown again, cut short, and occasionally she runs one hand through it, her fingernails bright crimson. He wonders who's hiring her with that look, then he decides he doesn't want to know.
"You'd done it before, hadn't you?" House turns his head to the side to glance at her. She's watching the runners.
"Yeah." He watches the runners, too.
"How many times?"
"Once in 1995. And once about five years ago." He can still remember everything about them, the look on their faces, the pleading, the way he vomited up acid the second time because all he could think was I thought I wanted that once. They were both terminal. And so was Wilson.
House wasn't terminal. On days like this he doesn't want to die.
"How do you live with that?"
He doesn't say anything. He just turns his head to stare up into the dome of sky above him, the air refreshing, cool blue and light green. Life is a cost-benefit analysis, always.
He whaled on some poor kid once, when he was in college. He has provoked other people into hitting him plenty of times, but this was the other way around. He doesn't even remember what the kid said. He was drunk.
All House remembers is the loud scratchy pulse of the cheap speakers, bunching his hands, and the way everything seemed like slow-motion, even his fist colliding with this kid's face. It was over in maybe a minute, the bouncer throwing him roughly outside and telling him not to come back, separating he and the sophomore, who looked more scared than angry.
He woke up the next morning to find himself wearing a t-shirt with blood dotted down the front. He gingerly washed and dressed the reddening cut on his chin. Then he stood by the window of his tiny apartment, worried he was turning into his father, wondering where that flash of violence came from, wondering why he enjoyed it.
After a long time she shifts and rummages in her bag for a cigarette. He hears her light it and exhale, a thin sibilant sound.
"You should call her," she says. She's looking in the other direction now, into the trees.
"Who?" He sits up slowly. She doesn't turn around. She never watches him get up or sit down. When he undressed, she turned away demurely, as if she didn't want to embarrass him.
"Cuddy."
He thinks a little about that. He asks her if he can have a cigarette, and she holds out the pack. His head swims as he inhales. He holds the cigarette downwind so he doesn't smell of smoke if he goes to Cuddy's place later. If. The taste is strong and kind of bad, but he enjoys it, anyway.
...
"I'm changing my next-of-kin assignation," Wilson says, his voice steady. He's sitting in his office, at his desk. It's more bare than usual. House is looking out the window, at the tree just outside. The view from my office window is better, he thinks. He's used to that view, used to standing there with too much noise bouncing around his head.
"Why are you telling me this?" House breathes on the window and draws something. A crude little stick figure. A zig-zag of lightning above the head.
"Because I want you." You'll do the right thing, Wilson's calm gaze says. But House doesn't know what to do. There's no right thing in this. He tries to work up spit and swallows, his mouth suddenly dry.
"You're making a mistake," House says as he turns from the window. His voice isn't rough at all. He's about to get a lot more forceful when Wilson's PA knocks on the door.
"Thanks, Laura," Wilson says. "I'll sign that right away." She smiles and leaves.
Wilson still has his left hand in his trouser pocket. He can't pick up his pen.
House leaves him alone. He tries not to think about exactly how long it'll be until Wilson doesn't recover from these setbacks. Yet everywhere he goes, to the liquor store, the Chinese takeaway, he can't stop thinking about it, his stomach churning sickeningly.
That weekend, Wilson asks House to drive him to New York. "We'll work out what to do when we get there," he says.
House realises that Wilson has begun to say goodbye to things. He tries to act normal, to have fun, but it's hard. As they drive House picks out landmarks from his life, places he went with Wilson, with Stacy, with Cuddy, with Crandall.
He has a strange feeling, like he does when he wakes up sure that he's dreamt something important, right before it slips through his fingers. It's a stupid way to feel.
They stop in on Wilson's parents on the way home. House is tired, but he pretends he isn't, because it would be petty even for him to complain about your tired feet in front of a guy with a terminal fucking disease. House stands in the Wilson's living room, feeling awkward.
Wilson sits with his father and drinks coffee as his mother takes House outside. House can never work out why Wilson's mother likes him, but she does. He thinks about Wilson's brother, in a halfway house in upstate New York.
Mrs. Wilson asks little things about Princeton and the hospital, and then she says "How you holding up, kid?" House shrugs, staring at the neat little well-kept garden. He doesn't understand Wilson's family, never has.
...
He's in Cuddy's kitchen. She has her back to him, her hair tied back. She's fixing them both sandwiches. He has a suspicion she isn't hungry at all, that she's just making food because she thinks he hasn't been eating enough. That's probably true; he can't remember anything he ate today, apart from that cookie from the coffee shop near the park.
"Did you have a good talk to so-and-so?" Cuddy doesn't approve, but she asks about their discussions, anyway. House doesn't want to feel sick. He just wants to talk.
"Yeah."
"I hope you weren't smoking weed with her again. I'm your boss. Little thing called ethics."
"Cuddy," he says, and then he moves forward to stand just behind her, bending down to rest his cheek against the back of her shoulder, his hands on the kitchen bench at either side. And then she turns around and he's putting his arms around her, grasping her at the shoulders. Jesus, he's crying. He's getting not one jot of enjoyment out of having his face in Cuddy's boobs, either. All he can say is "I'm sorry," and then he's ridiculously worried that she thinks he's crying about smoking pot, but he isn't, he's trying to apologise for helping Wilson. He had no choice. He doesn't know if she realises that he had no choice.
His throat hurts, his stomach, too. She has one of her hands on his arm at the deltoid, and he concentrates on that feeling. He shakes his head.
Ten minutes later he's leaning against the kitchen bench, staring at her feet, his face red. "I want to tell you," he says.
They talk for a long time, House picking at his sandwich and sipping Cuddy's gourmet tea. They talk until House's throat just feels kind of hoarse, until he feels full and empty at the same time. It's a strange feeling, kind of lightheaded.
She leans forwards as if she wants to hug him but isn't sure, and he leans forward to kiss her, forgetting until that moment that he probably should have cleaned his teeth after smoking that cigarette. But then she's unzipping his jeans and pulling at his Jockeys and he's pulling at her blouse, and his heart is pounding hard.
After they've moved to the bedroom, he sits up with his back at the headboard while Cuddy sleeps beside him, until he can hear birds calling outside the window, one of her neighbours mowing the lawn. He tries to tell himself that this doesn't feel like atonement.
...
"If you're caught with more morphine, you'll go to jail." Fall. Wilson hasn't worked for weeks.
Wilson is sipping apple juice from a lidded cup with a straw. He spills a lot of stuff on himself now, his movements jerky, the muscles twitching under his skin. House thinks of the patient he just finished with, the woman who just needed to eat more chocolate cake.
"I know," House says, sitting on Wilson's couch. "Why do you care?"
"When the time comes," Wilson says, "I need to know you'll do it."
Something starts ringing in House's ears. No. Wilson can't be saying this, he thinks. No-
"I've got the morphine and the syringe. I've handled them. The pharmacy tech, too. You can just put on gloves and put the syringe in my hand. They won't know I couldn't do it. I was determined to die, they'll say."
This is insane. It's like CSI. House gets up off the couch and stares at Wilson. He wants to punch him, punch the stupid hopeful smile off his face.
A month later, Wilson has all his wills and letters written. A wall of paper that won't hold back his death, only regulate it. He asks House again. "Tell me you'll do it, House. Just tell me."
His voice breaks a little bit, he's so desperate. So House says yes. He's standing by the door when he says it, his shoulder aching because his cane arm is so tense. He watches Wilson trying to pull a sweater on, and feels awful for thinking of Doctor Strangelove. He goes for a walk, past the grey little park and on to the convenience store a couple of blocks from Wilson's apartment. Once he gets there he doesn't know what to buy.
...
Fall rolls on into winter, and House is always cold. He works from home a lot now, so he can be at Wilson's place if something happens. He even works at Wilson's, spreading files on the table. Wilson calls if he wants something. The squawk of the television is ever-present, tuned to TCM.
Wilson's brother comes to read aloud, and when that happens House slips out and goes somewhere else. When he visits the hospital he brings home reports of Cuddy's clothes, her Cleavage Factor. Wilson smiles his now-lopsided smile and says "Go on being an insufferable ass. It's comforting."
When House goes into the hospital people say nice things. That's unnerving. Chase and Cameron send care packages. Foreman comes around with a CD he's burnt for Wilson. "I know House is glad to finally have a captive audience for all those scratchy John Henry Giles bootlegs," he says, "So I brought you something else." Most of them leave quickly, and House doesn't blame them.
One day House is sitting on Wilson's couch, flipping a bottlecap up in the air and thinking about his patient, when Thirteen comes around to deliver some test results.
"It's a negative result," he says. "It's only one word. You could have phoned."
"I know," Thirteen says, and she goes over to where Wilson sits in the patch of sun on his tiny balcony. House can see her shoulders, carefully held upright in the patch of light. She's looking at a much slower decline, every bit as horrible. House lets them sit in silence, but later on at work he needles Thirteen harshly because he's an asshole and Wilson is dying and he doesn't want to feel like he's going soft, like he's losing a part of himself with his friend.
He sits on Wilson's couch a lot, drinking beer and watching TV like old times, but only to make Wilson feel better. If this man wasn't the shell of his friend, he would have run away long ago. There's nothing to find out here. All the questions are answered. Soon Wilson can't stand up any more, even braced against the forearms of the nurse or his brother's broad shoulders.
They don't have a night nurse yet. Wilson's brother comes every weekend, now. He's a good guy, and Wilson seems to enjoy his company, but he talks too loud and spreads too much false cheer.
House starts sleeping at Wilson's. He knows that soon it'll get to be too much, and they'll have to move him into a care facility. Sterile food smells and bland little farmhouse prints on the walls, a blank room for Wilson to die in.
Wilson can't talk now, hasn't been able to for the last month. He'll be on a breathing tube soon. House is reading at the table. The nurse is feeding Wilson some awful blended muck when he spits a whole lot of it down his front. "Oops," she says. "I'll just go to the kitchen to get a cloth -- can you go on feeding him?
It's the last thing House wants to do. He feels like screaming. Feeding this stuff to Wilson. On the television, two actors he doesn't recognise who are probably dead scream at each other in that hyper-real way that old movies have. Wilson has a three-day growth of beard. There's hardly any grey in it.
House gathers the warm plastic bowl and soft silicone-and-plastic spoon in his hands, then he sits in one of Wilson's dining chairs and leans over the wheelchair.
He's dithering, raising the spoon, when one of Wilson's hands snakes out and knocks the bowl to the floor. House starts to lean over slowly to pick it up, and when he leans across Wilson to do it, he hears a noise.
House straightens, looking into Wilson's eyes. He's trying to move his hands again, and they twitch slowly, moving toward House. Wilson's eyes are still clear, and hard. House knows what he wants, knows it absolutely. He feels cold.
After Wilson has been lifted into bed, his legs twisted with muscle contractions, the nurse leaves. House finds the morphine and syringe, still in the hospital pharmacy's paper bag and made out for one of Wilson's patients. It's inside a cigar box sandwiched between Casarett and Doull's Toxicology and Tumor Angiogenesis and Microcirculation, on the top shelf in Wilson's study. They last spoke of this months ago. Wilson knew House wouldn't be able to forget where it was.
House switches the light on in Wilson's room and watches as his eyes move jerkily in the mask of his face, following him across the room.
"Is this what you want?" Wilson's eyelids flutter madly. He moans. House takes the vial of morphine out of the bag and sticks the 1mL syringe into it. Wilson has no tolerance.
And then he does it. They sit for a while, House in the chair by Wilson's bed. There's no sound, apart from Wilson's ragged breathing.
After a while he says "I guess this is goodbye." More fluttering. A moan. He inserts the syringe into the IV, and then he looks into Wilson's eyes and wills himself not to look away. That's the hardest part, not looking away. He wants Wilson to know that he cares. He decides that Wilson probably knows. It takes less time than he was expecting, for the pulse at his fingers to go. He feels empty.
He doesn't remember what he does next. The first thing he remembers is standing in Wilson's kitchen with Cuddy. His hands are cold, so he must have been outside. All he's wearing is a t-shirt and sweatpants.
Cuddy is on the phone, lying to someone. "Dr. House was sleeping," she says. "He must have stopped breathing." The morphine is in her bag. She'll throw it away, breaking the glass so the liquid runs down the sink. "Yes," she says, and she turns to look at House, the receiver of Wilson's phone at her ear. Sit down, she mouths at him, her eyes concerned, her mouth creased at the corners in sadness.
He goes outside. He can see his breath, he's shivering. The sun is rising, he thinks. That's the only thought that will come, standing on Wilson's quiet dawn street, the air so cold it hurts to breathe. It tingles at his chest and hands and feet like icewater. He breathes deep.
The part where Wilson can't use his dominant hand was shamelessly stolen from an episode of The West Wing where Bartlet suffers from a similar thing.
Author: joe_pike_junior
Characters/pairings: House/Wilson friendship, House/Cuddy, mentions of House/Stacy. Members of the old and new teams make an appearance.
Warnings: Major character death, strong language and themes.
Summary: He tries to tell himself that this doesn't feel like atonement. House remembers, even when he doesn't want to.
Disclaimer: House and characters belong to Fox. No infringement is intended.
Notes: Shout-outs to nomad1328, pwcorgigirl, nightdog_barks, and shutterbug_12. Plot bunny yoinked from here. The title is from the Out On The Weekend, by Neil Young. I wrestled with this one, so concrit will be gratefully accepted.
When he feels like this, he notices everything. Not just the things that curiosity and then medicine stamped onto him (pallor, speech patterns, shaking hands, prescription bottles, sweaty palms). Those are the things he absorbs, the things that worry at him until they coalesce into a whole.
He can see, feel, hear everything: the hum of the air conditioning, a photocopier running off copies somewhere, the little Blu-Tac circles on the wall, her perfume. Sometimes it's interesting, something he can fall into. But now, when they lapse into silence, it's faintly claustophobic, oppressive.
He feels restless, chafing away in this room. He knows she doesn't, and he feels irrationally that she's chosen to sit here for so long to gain a psychological edge. She's fine. She doesn't have to tell, only listen.
She's staring at him, her eyebrows raised expectantly. He clears his throat.
"When I was a kid we lived on a few airbases -- did I tell you that? -- and I used to lie awake, all these planes would fly over, and when I couldn't sleep I'd listen to them taking off and landing. When I was eleven, twelve, it just seemed endless."
There's a small thin cut on the ball of his left thumb. He can't remember how he got it. He presses the index finger against it.
"I think you should start at the beginning," she says, her eyes on his hands.
Some variation in the thermostat brings about a change in the air conditioning. He can hear something rattling in the duct. His senses feel frayed. He scratches his chin, his hands cold to the touch.
Once, he thought hurt was being in a tiny tract house backyard, trying not to scream as his father meted out punishment. Not caring was so important to him, and so he did it again and again, skidding to his knees in backyards on three different air bases, cringing, waiting for his father to take out the razor strop. When he was older, he'd just stay out all night, sitting barechested in summer and shivering in winter, nestled in the lee of the house.
After that, hurt was Stacy leaving him, the empty pain that left in his chest. The roaring silence of her absence. But Stacy's still alive.
This. This is worse.
...
When Cuddy arrives, House is sitting on Wilson's stoop with his head in his hands.
After Cuddy parks her car, she takes some change out of the centre console and feeds it deliberately into the metre. She takes a deep breath. Then she turns toward Wilson's apartment, toward House sitting outside. There's an edge of panic to her mood, the same bitter hurt that's been there for months. Ever since this began.
When House hears her approach, he puts his head up. The sight of his face seeds something cold and anxious in the pit of her stomach. He starts to lever himself up, his hand white-knuckled at the railing, and she starts to run.
His eyes are red, and there's a sort of guilty shock on his face, the expression so empty and expansive that it sends goosebumps like icewater down her spine. This is it, she thinks.
She's about to speak, but before she does he raises a hand and points at the door. His hand is shaking slightly. It looks like he's in shock.
"I-" he says. Then he shakes his head. She realises he can't speak.
She moves closer. She doesn't know what to say.
"House? Is he-"
He looks away, his brow creased. It's that detachment that breaks her heart, like there's a part of him that isn't present. When she thought it wasn't possible for them to hurt any more, this.
She hesitates, then puts her arms around him and draws him close. She can't remember the last time they did this. She half-expects him to make a joke, but instead it's as if any residual strength he had just drains away. He's exhausted. They sit slowly, House bracing himself against her, muscles quivering. She kneels on the pavement, her knees stinging.
They stay like that for a long time, and she thinks of how much he must be hurting, how for all this time he hasn't asked her for help.
When they're both ready, they go inside.
...
"You must remember what happened before that."
That sort of condescension is one of the habits those in her profession fall into easily. He can think of others.
House swallows down on the annoyed and rather incisive remark he was about to make, and takes a sip of coffee instead. It's not particularly fresh, but it's strong and hot.
"Of course I do."
She holds her hands out. "Well, why don't you-"
"-Look," he says, actually angry now, at her flip gestures and annoying questions. "You're getting two hundred bucks an hour for this, but I'm telling it the way I want to. If you want it chronological and tied up in a neat bow, read the damn newspaper."
Princeton doctor dead at 38. Died after a long illness. He thinks now of all the newspaper articles he read back then with a strange and almost disquieting lack of feeling.
He walks quickly through the cafeteria. He's walking away from the questions, the stuff she doesn't know. Right now the questions seem too big a big price to pay for unburdening himself, for telling the truth. He curses his leg for hurting him because he got up so quickly.
Ten years ago he would have burnt off this hopeless anger by running. Tonight the years weigh particularly heavily. He drinks too much Red Hook and spends most of the night on the bathroom floor, courtesy the beer and the coffee and the Vicodin and the fact that he forgot to eat.
The floor is cold, and his leg starts to cramp unless he shifts his position a lot, but he stays on the floor, listening to the sounds bounce off the tile, looking at the water-light pattern cast on the ceiling.
He dozes for a while and wakes up suspecting, just for a moment, that he's dreamt all this. He gets up and splashes water on his face, moves stuff around, rattles a pill bottle, just so he knows he hasn't.
He calls Cuddy and leaves a message on her machine. He regrets it.
He thinks of what Wilson would say now. Drunk as he is, he can't conjure up his voice, and that makes House feel empty.
...
In diagnosis, the puzzle pieces are always tiny. It's a matter of compiling microscopic details and turning them into something macroscopic. That's what he likes the most about the process: translating the things he sees and feels and hears into a picture that dictates disease and action and intent. Sometimes he doesn't even know where the answers come from.
It makes sense. Even when it's something he doesn't want to know, it always makes sense. Whether in relief or vague horror there is always that welcome flash of inspiration, of clear inner vision. When the lights seem to flicker for a moment, when the smallest details are magnified so he can see them for what they are.
He's the first to notice, and it's such a small thing.
House is standing in front of Wilson's desk, watching him sift through paperwork, passive-aggressively. He's annoyed that House stuck a knife into an electrical outlet two weeks ago, annoyed that House is still messing around with six team members, annoyed that House is trying to provoke the Mormon into attacking him. Wilson's just pissed.
"C'mon," House says. "My team is busy trying to be heard above one another. Let's go."
"No, House." More prim collating of already-organised sheets of paper. "I actually have work to do."
House would have left then, for the OTB, or the cafeteria or the bar a ten-minute zoom on the motorcycle away. He would have left because he knew he could wait out this aberration in Wilson's mood, just as he has always done.
But just before he's about to turn away he notices that Wilson screws one eye up slightly as he reads the open page of his planner. House sits back on Wilson's couch with what he hopes is a disinterested grunt, and he watches.
It takes four days to be sure. On Saturday evening Wilson can't get his key into the door at ten-thirty, and House is the drunk one. On Monday Wilson rubs his eyes when he passes from the gloomy hallway to the bright fluorescent bars lighting the clinic. On Tuesday he misses his mug with the coffee pot.
On Wednesday, House goes into Wilson's office and quietly puts a CT booking form down on the desk, as serious as a heart attack. He's already filled in the space allotted for the patient's name: James Wilson.
"I don't need that," Wilson says as he injects a flippant little laugh into his voice, but House knows he's whistling in the dark.
...
They're sitting at the picnic bench in the jogging park, the same place he bought Little Miss Crisis of Faith. The same place he used to run, a long time ago. House has sunglasses on, and he's lying back on the table looking up through patterns of dappled shade.
She has her legs crossed, jiggling one sandal-clad foot. Today her hair is dark brown again, cut short, and occasionally she runs one hand through it, her fingernails bright crimson. He wonders who's hiring her with that look, then he decides he doesn't want to know.
"You'd done it before, hadn't you?" House turns his head to the side to glance at her. She's watching the runners.
"Yeah." He watches the runners, too.
"How many times?"
"Once in 1995. And once about five years ago." He can still remember everything about them, the look on their faces, the pleading, the way he vomited up acid the second time because all he could think was I thought I wanted that once. They were both terminal. And so was Wilson.
House wasn't terminal. On days like this he doesn't want to die.
"How do you live with that?"
He doesn't say anything. He just turns his head to stare up into the dome of sky above him, the air refreshing, cool blue and light green. Life is a cost-benefit analysis, always.
He whaled on some poor kid once, when he was in college. He has provoked other people into hitting him plenty of times, but this was the other way around. He doesn't even remember what the kid said. He was drunk.
All House remembers is the loud scratchy pulse of the cheap speakers, bunching his hands, and the way everything seemed like slow-motion, even his fist colliding with this kid's face. It was over in maybe a minute, the bouncer throwing him roughly outside and telling him not to come back, separating he and the sophomore, who looked more scared than angry.
He woke up the next morning to find himself wearing a t-shirt with blood dotted down the front. He gingerly washed and dressed the reddening cut on his chin. Then he stood by the window of his tiny apartment, worried he was turning into his father, wondering where that flash of violence came from, wondering why he enjoyed it.
After a long time she shifts and rummages in her bag for a cigarette. He hears her light it and exhale, a thin sibilant sound.
"You should call her," she says. She's looking in the other direction now, into the trees.
"Who?" He sits up slowly. She doesn't turn around. She never watches him get up or sit down. When he undressed, she turned away demurely, as if she didn't want to embarrass him.
"Cuddy."
He thinks a little about that. He asks her if he can have a cigarette, and she holds out the pack. His head swims as he inhales. He holds the cigarette downwind so he doesn't smell of smoke if he goes to Cuddy's place later. If. The taste is strong and kind of bad, but he enjoys it, anyway.
...
"I'm changing my next-of-kin assignation," Wilson says, his voice steady. He's sitting in his office, at his desk. It's more bare than usual. House is looking out the window, at the tree just outside. The view from my office window is better, he thinks. He's used to that view, used to standing there with too much noise bouncing around his head.
"Why are you telling me this?" House breathes on the window and draws something. A crude little stick figure. A zig-zag of lightning above the head.
"Because I want you." You'll do the right thing, Wilson's calm gaze says. But House doesn't know what to do. There's no right thing in this. He tries to work up spit and swallows, his mouth suddenly dry.
"You're making a mistake," House says as he turns from the window. His voice isn't rough at all. He's about to get a lot more forceful when Wilson's PA knocks on the door.
"Thanks, Laura," Wilson says. "I'll sign that right away." She smiles and leaves.
Wilson still has his left hand in his trouser pocket. He can't pick up his pen.
House leaves him alone. He tries not to think about exactly how long it'll be until Wilson doesn't recover from these setbacks. Yet everywhere he goes, to the liquor store, the Chinese takeaway, he can't stop thinking about it, his stomach churning sickeningly.
That weekend, Wilson asks House to drive him to New York. "We'll work out what to do when we get there," he says.
House realises that Wilson has begun to say goodbye to things. He tries to act normal, to have fun, but it's hard. As they drive House picks out landmarks from his life, places he went with Wilson, with Stacy, with Cuddy, with Crandall.
He has a strange feeling, like he does when he wakes up sure that he's dreamt something important, right before it slips through his fingers. It's a stupid way to feel.
They stop in on Wilson's parents on the way home. House is tired, but he pretends he isn't, because it would be petty even for him to complain about your tired feet in front of a guy with a terminal fucking disease. House stands in the Wilson's living room, feeling awkward.
Wilson sits with his father and drinks coffee as his mother takes House outside. House can never work out why Wilson's mother likes him, but she does. He thinks about Wilson's brother, in a halfway house in upstate New York.
Mrs. Wilson asks little things about Princeton and the hospital, and then she says "How you holding up, kid?" House shrugs, staring at the neat little well-kept garden. He doesn't understand Wilson's family, never has.
...
He's in Cuddy's kitchen. She has her back to him, her hair tied back. She's fixing them both sandwiches. He has a suspicion she isn't hungry at all, that she's just making food because she thinks he hasn't been eating enough. That's probably true; he can't remember anything he ate today, apart from that cookie from the coffee shop near the park.
"Did you have a good talk to so-and-so?" Cuddy doesn't approve, but she asks about their discussions, anyway. House doesn't want to feel sick. He just wants to talk.
"Yeah."
"I hope you weren't smoking weed with her again. I'm your boss. Little thing called ethics."
"Cuddy," he says, and then he moves forward to stand just behind her, bending down to rest his cheek against the back of her shoulder, his hands on the kitchen bench at either side. And then she turns around and he's putting his arms around her, grasping her at the shoulders. Jesus, he's crying. He's getting not one jot of enjoyment out of having his face in Cuddy's boobs, either. All he can say is "I'm sorry," and then he's ridiculously worried that she thinks he's crying about smoking pot, but he isn't, he's trying to apologise for helping Wilson. He had no choice. He doesn't know if she realises that he had no choice.
His throat hurts, his stomach, too. She has one of her hands on his arm at the deltoid, and he concentrates on that feeling. He shakes his head.
Ten minutes later he's leaning against the kitchen bench, staring at her feet, his face red. "I want to tell you," he says.
They talk for a long time, House picking at his sandwich and sipping Cuddy's gourmet tea. They talk until House's throat just feels kind of hoarse, until he feels full and empty at the same time. It's a strange feeling, kind of lightheaded.
She leans forwards as if she wants to hug him but isn't sure, and he leans forward to kiss her, forgetting until that moment that he probably should have cleaned his teeth after smoking that cigarette. But then she's unzipping his jeans and pulling at his Jockeys and he's pulling at her blouse, and his heart is pounding hard.
After they've moved to the bedroom, he sits up with his back at the headboard while Cuddy sleeps beside him, until he can hear birds calling outside the window, one of her neighbours mowing the lawn. He tries to tell himself that this doesn't feel like atonement.
...
"If you're caught with more morphine, you'll go to jail." Fall. Wilson hasn't worked for weeks.
Wilson is sipping apple juice from a lidded cup with a straw. He spills a lot of stuff on himself now, his movements jerky, the muscles twitching under his skin. House thinks of the patient he just finished with, the woman who just needed to eat more chocolate cake.
"I know," House says, sitting on Wilson's couch. "Why do you care?"
"When the time comes," Wilson says, "I need to know you'll do it."
Something starts ringing in House's ears. No. Wilson can't be saying this, he thinks. No-
"I've got the morphine and the syringe. I've handled them. The pharmacy tech, too. You can just put on gloves and put the syringe in my hand. They won't know I couldn't do it. I was determined to die, they'll say."
This is insane. It's like CSI. House gets up off the couch and stares at Wilson. He wants to punch him, punch the stupid hopeful smile off his face.
A month later, Wilson has all his wills and letters written. A wall of paper that won't hold back his death, only regulate it. He asks House again. "Tell me you'll do it, House. Just tell me."
His voice breaks a little bit, he's so desperate. So House says yes. He's standing by the door when he says it, his shoulder aching because his cane arm is so tense. He watches Wilson trying to pull a sweater on, and feels awful for thinking of Doctor Strangelove. He goes for a walk, past the grey little park and on to the convenience store a couple of blocks from Wilson's apartment. Once he gets there he doesn't know what to buy.
...
Fall rolls on into winter, and House is always cold. He works from home a lot now, so he can be at Wilson's place if something happens. He even works at Wilson's, spreading files on the table. Wilson calls if he wants something. The squawk of the television is ever-present, tuned to TCM.
Wilson's brother comes to read aloud, and when that happens House slips out and goes somewhere else. When he visits the hospital he brings home reports of Cuddy's clothes, her Cleavage Factor. Wilson smiles his now-lopsided smile and says "Go on being an insufferable ass. It's comforting."
When House goes into the hospital people say nice things. That's unnerving. Chase and Cameron send care packages. Foreman comes around with a CD he's burnt for Wilson. "I know House is glad to finally have a captive audience for all those scratchy John Henry Giles bootlegs," he says, "So I brought you something else." Most of them leave quickly, and House doesn't blame them.
One day House is sitting on Wilson's couch, flipping a bottlecap up in the air and thinking about his patient, when Thirteen comes around to deliver some test results.
"It's a negative result," he says. "It's only one word. You could have phoned."
"I know," Thirteen says, and she goes over to where Wilson sits in the patch of sun on his tiny balcony. House can see her shoulders, carefully held upright in the patch of light. She's looking at a much slower decline, every bit as horrible. House lets them sit in silence, but later on at work he needles Thirteen harshly because he's an asshole and Wilson is dying and he doesn't want to feel like he's going soft, like he's losing a part of himself with his friend.
He sits on Wilson's couch a lot, drinking beer and watching TV like old times, but only to make Wilson feel better. If this man wasn't the shell of his friend, he would have run away long ago. There's nothing to find out here. All the questions are answered. Soon Wilson can't stand up any more, even braced against the forearms of the nurse or his brother's broad shoulders.
They don't have a night nurse yet. Wilson's brother comes every weekend, now. He's a good guy, and Wilson seems to enjoy his company, but he talks too loud and spreads too much false cheer.
House starts sleeping at Wilson's. He knows that soon it'll get to be too much, and they'll have to move him into a care facility. Sterile food smells and bland little farmhouse prints on the walls, a blank room for Wilson to die in.
Wilson can't talk now, hasn't been able to for the last month. He'll be on a breathing tube soon. House is reading at the table. The nurse is feeding Wilson some awful blended muck when he spits a whole lot of it down his front. "Oops," she says. "I'll just go to the kitchen to get a cloth -- can you go on feeding him?
It's the last thing House wants to do. He feels like screaming. Feeding this stuff to Wilson. On the television, two actors he doesn't recognise who are probably dead scream at each other in that hyper-real way that old movies have. Wilson has a three-day growth of beard. There's hardly any grey in it.
House gathers the warm plastic bowl and soft silicone-and-plastic spoon in his hands, then he sits in one of Wilson's dining chairs and leans over the wheelchair.
He's dithering, raising the spoon, when one of Wilson's hands snakes out and knocks the bowl to the floor. House starts to lean over slowly to pick it up, and when he leans across Wilson to do it, he hears a noise.
House straightens, looking into Wilson's eyes. He's trying to move his hands again, and they twitch slowly, moving toward House. Wilson's eyes are still clear, and hard. House knows what he wants, knows it absolutely. He feels cold.
After Wilson has been lifted into bed, his legs twisted with muscle contractions, the nurse leaves. House finds the morphine and syringe, still in the hospital pharmacy's paper bag and made out for one of Wilson's patients. It's inside a cigar box sandwiched between Casarett and Doull's Toxicology and Tumor Angiogenesis and Microcirculation, on the top shelf in Wilson's study. They last spoke of this months ago. Wilson knew House wouldn't be able to forget where it was.
House switches the light on in Wilson's room and watches as his eyes move jerkily in the mask of his face, following him across the room.
"Is this what you want?" Wilson's eyelids flutter madly. He moans. House takes the vial of morphine out of the bag and sticks the 1mL syringe into it. Wilson has no tolerance.
And then he does it. They sit for a while, House in the chair by Wilson's bed. There's no sound, apart from Wilson's ragged breathing.
After a while he says "I guess this is goodbye." More fluttering. A moan. He inserts the syringe into the IV, and then he looks into Wilson's eyes and wills himself not to look away. That's the hardest part, not looking away. He wants Wilson to know that he cares. He decides that Wilson probably knows. It takes less time than he was expecting, for the pulse at his fingers to go. He feels empty.
He doesn't remember what he does next. The first thing he remembers is standing in Wilson's kitchen with Cuddy. His hands are cold, so he must have been outside. All he's wearing is a t-shirt and sweatpants.
Cuddy is on the phone, lying to someone. "Dr. House was sleeping," she says. "He must have stopped breathing." The morphine is in her bag. She'll throw it away, breaking the glass so the liquid runs down the sink. "Yes," she says, and she turns to look at House, the receiver of Wilson's phone at her ear. Sit down, she mouths at him, her eyes concerned, her mouth creased at the corners in sadness.
He goes outside. He can see his breath, he's shivering. The sun is rising, he thinks. That's the only thought that will come, standing on Wilson's quiet dawn street, the air so cold it hurts to breathe. It tingles at his chest and hands and feet like icewater. He breathes deep.
The part where Wilson can't use his dominant hand was shamelessly stolen from an episode of The West Wing where Bartlet suffers from a similar thing.