(no subject)
Title: Each to Each
Author: magie_05
Pairing: House/Wilson established
Rating/Warnings: PG-13 - a little bleak, sick!House-ish
Summary: Fluffy angst, if there is such a thing: a moment set in the not-so-far-off future. Just when he thinks he's losing everything, Wilson gets a reminder of all that he has left.
The hardest part of the day is watching him sleep.
Lying next to me on his stomach, he breathes easily, seventy-five percent of the covers bunched up around his shoulders, one cheek pressed into the pillow. He always did lose ten years in his sleep, all the daytime lines etched by pain and age and concentration blending back into his skin. As I watch, the rhythm of his breathing breaks, and he sighs, rubbing his cheek against his forearm and snuffling a little before sliding in closer, holding on to the last throes of sleep.
I smile, watching him settle subconsciously against me. Twenty years, and still he manages to drool only on my pillow.
It isn’t the view that makes these mornings so difficult. I could watch him like this for hours, could never get enough of the side of him reserved only for me. I’d be a fool not to soak up these rare moments of peace, to miss this chance to believe it’s ten years ago, in a different bed - that my friend is only resting after a late night, after one of our nights, and when he wakes, he’ll greet me with a kiss and one of his gently sarcastic good-mornings.
Instead, I have to watch his still, calm features break into a slight grimace as his pain breaks through, feel his breath hitch, hear the soft, protesting grunt in his throat. Cautiously, he opens his eyes, and I watch them swim in confusion, scanning the dimly lit walls of our room, over his own crumpled body to the arm he’s got wrapped around my waist - tired machinery working, putting together where he is and why there’s someone close to him.
Then his eyes sweep up to my face, and I watch their faded blue darken in understanding. “Wilson,” he says slowly, and I have a reason to get out of bed.
“Hey.” He smirks a little when I reach up to touch his face, and a little more when my thumb slips into the small trail of saliva at the corner of his mouth. “Thank God you’re up; a few more minutes, and we’d need a row boat to get out of here.”
“Little late for you to start bitching about waking up in a pool of my bodily fluids,” he says, crooking his eyebrows, and even though the hair beneath my fingers is thin and silvery, even though the hands sliding up my chest are dry and twisted slightly with arthritis, he’s still House. He’s still here.
For now, at least.
‘For now’ is sometimes the only thing that keeps me going. We don’t talk about the future. We don’t talk about the days when he turns the house upside down looking for his long-lost motorcycle keys, screaming at me to get him to the hospital before some imagined or half-remembered patient starts bleeding out her eyeballs. We don’t talk about the morning I woke up alone, spending two hours in a blind panic before the cops picked him up at our old apartment. Or about the nights he sits alone in a fog, not speaking, not moving, not thinking…
And we definitely don’t talk about the fact that the bad days are getting more and more frequent.
We’re making it, for now, so I press my lips to the corner of his mouth, savoring the way he leans into me. “What do you want for breakfast? Eggs?”
“Had eggs yesterday,” he says when he pulls back several seconds later, resting his head on my arm. “I know they’re edible and incredible, but what do you say we kick it up a notch, hmm?”
We had cereal yesterday, and bagels the day before that.
But he always did fall for my poker face. “Good point. What do you suggest, then, O Punctilious One? Your choice.”
Small decisions are important, Foreman tells me. Keep him engaged, let him feel like he’s still in control.
I wonder if that lie works on anyone else.
“Pancakes,” he says brightly, and tugs me a little closer. “And don’t give me that crap about your blood pressure.”
I make sure to grumble and roll my eyes a little, let him wheedle me into seeing things his way, try not to make it too obvious that I’m willing to give him anything he asks for.
“Fine,” I finally sigh, and squirm a little against him. “Gotta let go of me first.”
“Make me,” he says, arms tightening around me, and I catch a glimpse of the man who once bailed a stranger out of jail for inciting a small riot, who’s saved hundreds of lives by accident, just being himself. Someone I’ve watched go through Hell and back, sometimes dragging me with him, too often alone. Too often throwing away what could have made him happy, casting it aside with everything he’s lost.
And now I get to watch him lose the only thing that has always mattered to him.
“Okay,” I breathe into his collarbone, extracting myself from his grip while I can still summon up the will. “It’s getting late…House.” He’s out again, for now unaware of what the day might hold, and for a second, I wonder if I should let him sleep -
“C’mon,” I say - selfishly. “Time to get up.”
He grumbles as I slip out from underneath him, and with my back turned, I can pretend it’s just a sleepy Monday morning before work - that in an hour, he’ll be in his office antagonizing his team and I’ll be seeing patients down the hall.
But my back reminds me the moment I stand up who we really are now - a couple of old men with nowhere to be but here, and no one to see but each other.
I tug on a bathrobe and take a few wary steps, my joints protesting every move. Glancing past my own weathered reflection in the wardrobe mirror, I can't help but notice the way his eyes roam over me from the bed - telling me in no uncertain terms he still likes what he sees. I hide a grin, and keep my eyes away to ask a question both of us hate. "You want your chair?"
I busy myself gathering his clothing, let him decide what stock answer to give. His response will give me a hint of what to expect later. "Not today," he finally mumbles, and I breathe again.
"Okay." I make my way to the bed and deposit fresh clothes next to him, arranging them in order before dragging out the boring, aluminum cane that has replaced his more fashionable models in the last few years.
The wheelchair in the corner gets more and more use these days.
"Come out to the living room," I tell him once he's sitting on the edge of the bed. "I'll bring your meds."
I'm pulling away when he suddenly grabs my wrist. "What's for breakfast?"
My heart sinks toward my stomach. "Pancakes," I tell him quietly.
"You can't make pancakes," he says, a vague little smile on his face while his thumb traces circles into my skin. "As you very forcefully reminded me yesterday, we're out of syrup."
I try to lie again, but I break under that clear blue, trusting gaze. "We went shopping last night."
He blinks, and I watch him thinking, watch him fail to retrieve the memory and drop his head a little in defeat. He nods to the floor, and his hand slips from my fingers.
"Come on out to the living room." I keep my voice low and soothing, slide my palm over his bare shoulder.
It's unfair that I have to lose him by degrees.
I make my way through the hall of our one-story home - wide and open, with no high shelves or low couches. Of all the places we could've ended up, I never would have imagined this scenario. Never would have imagined that something that began so suddenly, so unexpectedly, would lead us here, to our last chapter, with life slowly trickling through our fingers.
I never imagined that the tall, lanky stranger I pretended not to notice across that hotel bar would turn out to be the one I never knew I was looking for. That the most flawed, the most fundamental friendship of my life would suddenly erupt into something I never knew I needed. More and more often, I find myself lost in those memories, comforted by them, re-examining them with an old man's eyes.
I remember the first night.
I remember the way his fingers skimmed across the keys, focusing on certain unfamiliar notes the way only he could, coaxing beauty out of silence. I remember those same fingers raking through my hair as we kissed, trembling as they unknotted my tie, trailing hungrily across my flushed, heated skin. And I remember the morning - waking up with his head on my chest and his song in my ears, and knowing that I never wanted to wake up anywhere else again.
He doesn't play much these days. It's something else age has taken from him - music and mobility and his answers. It was a long time before I heard that tune again - a year of complications, wondering nearly every day if this was all just some colossal mistake, if all I had really done was ruin our friendship for sex.
Albeit great sex.
But there were times when touching him wasn't enough - when my supposed 'need for neediness' and his distrust of human connection threatened to break whatever fragile thread that kept us dangling between love and hate. I remember another quiet night almost two decades ago, another night when I thought I was losing everything.
He had barely spoken to me all day. It always seemed that some things were harder to talk about after we crossed that line - that he could either fuck me or talk to me, but not both.
It didn't take a genius to figure out which option he preferred.
I was living with him by then, having accepted the irony of sharing his bed not so long after hiding out on his couch. He hadn’t put hot sauce on my toothbrush - much - in the past several months, but on this particular night, it was hard to feel like we weren’t right back where we started.
“What’s up your ass today?” was the first thing he said to me on the night of our sort-of anniversary, had we chosen to think of what we had back then in those terms.
“Nothing, thank you,” I told him - and I may have added a mumbled remark about objects that wouldn’t be going up there for a while. “Yours?”
“Sweet of you to ask,” he said edgily. “Nothing my pal Johnnie Walker can’t fix.”
He spent the evening nursing an ever-refilling glass, hiding behind his piano, plunking out increasingly random notes as the whiskey disappeared.
I remember telling myself it meant nothing that he was at his most bitter on that arbitrary date, that he for some reason felt the need to drink himself into a stupor three-hundred-and-sixty-five days after the first time we kissed. Stupid of me to expect anything different, or to tell myself that maybe this could make him a little happier, but -
“You know what today is, House?” I asked him…after a considerable amount of Mr. Walker’s ministrations.
“Apparently Let’s-Be-a-Bitch-to-House-for-No-Reason Day.”
“Forget it,” I said, peeling myself off the sofa, barely glancing at him from his hiding place behind the piano. “Doesn’t matter.”
And really, it didn’t - it was just another day, and I could accept that this was the way things were going to be. He didn’t care about his own birthday, barely ever acknowledged my birthday - it made sense that today wouldn’t be any different…
Because it wasn’t any different.
I was in the hall before a sudden flare of sense-memory stopped me in my tracks. “When did you get this Scotch?”
He took another drink and stubbornly avoided looking at me. “Why? Afraid it’s expired?”
That tone of voice always meant I was on to something. “If all you wanted was to drink yourself into a coma, there are cheaper ways to do it.” Already drawn back to the piano, I reached over to drag my finger across the embossed label of what had to be an expensive bottle of aged whiskey. “Special occasion?”
He said nothing, but his fingers kept moving, and what had seemed like random notes formed into a dark, provocative tune I hadn’t heard in a year - exactly a year.
Warmth pooled in my stomach, and I somehow doubted it was just from the Scotch he had bought us to commemorate a year of functional chaos. “So you remembered the date, remembered this song…why didn’t you just say something?”
“I remember you being a lot less annoying back then,” he told his piano keys, but I thought - or I maybe I hoped - I caught a hint of a smile playing around his lips.
“Well, I’ve been sleeping with you for a year; only natural for some of your traits to start rubbing off.”
After that, I knew he was smiling.
“This song,” I asked him at some point, when I could be sure I didn’t sound too pleased, “did you write it?”
He shrugged and kept his eyes downcast. “It doesn’t have an ending.”
I remember the way his shoulders relaxed under my palms as I stood behind him, the way he molded himself almost imperceptibly against my abdomen. “It’s perfect,” I told him, and let my hands trail down his chest.
But I couldn’t resist indulging in a little good-natured mockery. “You really are a romantic, you know that?”
“Don’t read too much into it,” he said, and let the notes trail off, freeing his hands to tug me in front of him. “I’m just trying to get into your pants.”
It worked - year after year.
I never wanted to be that old man, nostalgic and misty-eyed over tired memories - but if I don't think about the past, all that's left to focus on is the future.
I hear him shuffling down the hall, the familiar rhythm of his steps slowed by years of trying too hard. I turn the stove down to focus on his breathing, the old warning signs I would know in my sleep. It's only a matter of time until his pain will overcome his stubbornness, taking away his last grab at independence.
I don't like to think about what might happen then.
I hear him stop and glance back over my shoulder; he's leaning on the doorframe, watching me, tired but accomplished. "Excuse me, sir, but I ordered uncharred pancakes.”
“I’m not burning them,” I say with mock defensiveness. “Think you could do a better job?”
“I wouldn’t want to embarrass you.” He looks at me for a moment, that same penetrating stare, and I give him a minute before shifting the pan off the burner and walking towards him, wordlessly offering my shoulder.
We move together towards the kitchen table, his arm over my shoulder, mine around his waist. “‘Course, I think we both know that proving you wrong would be con…con…”
I don’t prompt him today; he’s still himself enough to translate it as pity.
“…would depend on you actually letting me touch the big metal hot thing.” He knows the word stove, but sarcasm was always the only way he could cope.
“Let’s not do this today, alright?” I phrase it as a request, in a tone I know he hates, but we’ve wasted enough time arguing in circles. I get him settled in his chair and rub his back a little in apology. “Coffee or juice?”
It was never supposed to end this way, not for him. Not reduced to this, his most complex mental exercise involving breakfast. Some days, I almost hope he can’t remember, because then he wouldn’t know how much he’s lost…
On these days, I hate myself.
I’m pouring the last of the batter into the pan when I hear his chair scrape the floor, hear the table take half of his weight. “Where’re you going?”
“Oh, you know me,” he says, wheezing a little from the effort, slumped but standing across the room. “Just going to go eat some paint chips off the wall, after I’m done setting my hair on fire and soiling my undergarments…” I look at him, and he drops the sarcasm with a sigh. “I need to pee, okay? You can’t worry about me every second of every day.” He nods his head towards the dripping spatula in my hand. “Makes you a lousy cook.”
I nod and bite my lip, suddenly overwhelmed. I know I can’t protect him forever, but trying is the only way to put off the inevitable, the day when I’ll wake up with someone who doesn’t know me -
The day when I’ll wake up to silence.
He shuffles off as soon as my back’s turned, as soon as I’m staring blankly at a (slightly smoking) pancake. I know he hates what he's become, and hides from it behind the bitter sarcasm. I know he's scared. I know he thinks he has to struggle to earn respect. These issues aren't new - they're both the origin and the flaw in our relationship. But in past years, he has always given me some inkling that he knows why it bothers me. That my protection matters to him.
Now, with his forgetfulness and his pain and his waning identity, I can only hope he feels anything for me but resentment.
A door closes and I can’t help but turn around. I want to trust him; he’s lost enough without me making him feel like he’s losing his dignity, one thing he’s clung to more than anything.
But if something happens while I’m giving him space, I’m not sure I could live with myself. “House?”
Fear, never far below the surface these days, balloons once again in my chest when he doesn’t answer, when I’m left with nothing but the sounds of butter sizzling and the ticking of the hall clock. “House? Answer me.”
Another second of silence is too much, so I abandon the mess I made in the skillet to wipe my hands on the nearest towel, shuffling out to the den. I never know if he does this to me on purpose or not - if he’s wandering because he’s confused, or because he’s cognizant enough to wish he could escape.
The blinds over the patio door are swaying slightly, and I’m across the room before I can talk myself out of it.
He’s just sitting in one of the deck chairs, hands folded in his lap, staring out across the lawn.
I wonder where he is.
“Come inside,” I tell him softly, offering him my hand. “Breakfast time.”
He looks up, and for a brief moment of panic I watch his washed-out eyes swim in confusion, my breath freezing in my chest until he blinks, his brow furrowing, control coming back into his features. “Wilson,” he says, using my name to anchor himself. “It’s going to rain.”
I glance up to the gray-lined clouds. “Yeah, looks like it. Come inside with me.”
He smiles. It’s strangely heartbreaking. “In a minute.”
My ‘okay’ comes out more like a sigh, and I leave the door open on the way back inside.
He doesn’t have bad days anymore, but bad weeks, his confusion broken only by increasingly rare good moments. I don’t know how to deal with his questions, his mood swings, his anger. I want him to hang on to what we had together. I want him to be happy.
I want my friend back.
I set out his breakfast with slightly trembling hands, ever aware of the sound of his movements, awaiting the first hint of trouble. He’ll be more like himself after a meal, I tell myself; he’ll come back to me after his meds. From the living room, I hear his labored steps, brace myself for a curse, a fall…
Instead, I hear music.
I drift into the living room with a spatula still clasped in one hand, dumbfounded at the sight of him hunched over the keys, at the halted but familiar notes coming slightly out of tune from his knotted fingers.
Something hits me and I spin around towards one of the many calendars I’ve placed for his benefit - not that I should have needed to look, not like this date, this song, aren’t etched permanently in my veins.
“House.”
He tosses me a crooked grin. “Getting forgetful in your old age.”
It’s hard to speak over the lump in my throat. “You remembered.”
“Why wouldn’t I?” His fingers can’t hold the right tempo, but it’s the same tune he was writing the night that changed my life. “This baby’s gotten me laid without fail for twenty years.”
I drop down the bench next to him and slide close, insinuating myself under one of his arms. “It’s a good song,” I whisper, hiding my eyes in his neck.
He laces his fingers in mine, and continues the halting version of our song with one hand. The song nears the end of its never-completed melody, and he grumbles a little, his cheek resting on the top of my head. “Still not finished.”
I close my eyes and hope it never will be.
Author: magie_05
Pairing: House/Wilson established
Rating/Warnings: PG-13 - a little bleak, sick!House-ish
Summary: Fluffy angst, if there is such a thing: a moment set in the not-so-far-off future. Just when he thinks he's losing everything, Wilson gets a reminder of all that he has left.
The hardest part of the day is watching him sleep.
Lying next to me on his stomach, he breathes easily, seventy-five percent of the covers bunched up around his shoulders, one cheek pressed into the pillow. He always did lose ten years in his sleep, all the daytime lines etched by pain and age and concentration blending back into his skin. As I watch, the rhythm of his breathing breaks, and he sighs, rubbing his cheek against his forearm and snuffling a little before sliding in closer, holding on to the last throes of sleep.
I smile, watching him settle subconsciously against me. Twenty years, and still he manages to drool only on my pillow.
It isn’t the view that makes these mornings so difficult. I could watch him like this for hours, could never get enough of the side of him reserved only for me. I’d be a fool not to soak up these rare moments of peace, to miss this chance to believe it’s ten years ago, in a different bed - that my friend is only resting after a late night, after one of our nights, and when he wakes, he’ll greet me with a kiss and one of his gently sarcastic good-mornings.
Instead, I have to watch his still, calm features break into a slight grimace as his pain breaks through, feel his breath hitch, hear the soft, protesting grunt in his throat. Cautiously, he opens his eyes, and I watch them swim in confusion, scanning the dimly lit walls of our room, over his own crumpled body to the arm he’s got wrapped around my waist - tired machinery working, putting together where he is and why there’s someone close to him.
Then his eyes sweep up to my face, and I watch their faded blue darken in understanding. “Wilson,” he says slowly, and I have a reason to get out of bed.
“Hey.” He smirks a little when I reach up to touch his face, and a little more when my thumb slips into the small trail of saliva at the corner of his mouth. “Thank God you’re up; a few more minutes, and we’d need a row boat to get out of here.”
“Little late for you to start bitching about waking up in a pool of my bodily fluids,” he says, crooking his eyebrows, and even though the hair beneath my fingers is thin and silvery, even though the hands sliding up my chest are dry and twisted slightly with arthritis, he’s still House. He’s still here.
For now, at least.
‘For now’ is sometimes the only thing that keeps me going. We don’t talk about the future. We don’t talk about the days when he turns the house upside down looking for his long-lost motorcycle keys, screaming at me to get him to the hospital before some imagined or half-remembered patient starts bleeding out her eyeballs. We don’t talk about the morning I woke up alone, spending two hours in a blind panic before the cops picked him up at our old apartment. Or about the nights he sits alone in a fog, not speaking, not moving, not thinking…
And we definitely don’t talk about the fact that the bad days are getting more and more frequent.
We’re making it, for now, so I press my lips to the corner of his mouth, savoring the way he leans into me. “What do you want for breakfast? Eggs?”
“Had eggs yesterday,” he says when he pulls back several seconds later, resting his head on my arm. “I know they’re edible and incredible, but what do you say we kick it up a notch, hmm?”
We had cereal yesterday, and bagels the day before that.
But he always did fall for my poker face. “Good point. What do you suggest, then, O Punctilious One? Your choice.”
Small decisions are important, Foreman tells me. Keep him engaged, let him feel like he’s still in control.
I wonder if that lie works on anyone else.
“Pancakes,” he says brightly, and tugs me a little closer. “And don’t give me that crap about your blood pressure.”
I make sure to grumble and roll my eyes a little, let him wheedle me into seeing things his way, try not to make it too obvious that I’m willing to give him anything he asks for.
“Fine,” I finally sigh, and squirm a little against him. “Gotta let go of me first.”
“Make me,” he says, arms tightening around me, and I catch a glimpse of the man who once bailed a stranger out of jail for inciting a small riot, who’s saved hundreds of lives by accident, just being himself. Someone I’ve watched go through Hell and back, sometimes dragging me with him, too often alone. Too often throwing away what could have made him happy, casting it aside with everything he’s lost.
And now I get to watch him lose the only thing that has always mattered to him.
“Okay,” I breathe into his collarbone, extracting myself from his grip while I can still summon up the will. “It’s getting late…House.” He’s out again, for now unaware of what the day might hold, and for a second, I wonder if I should let him sleep -
“C’mon,” I say - selfishly. “Time to get up.”
He grumbles as I slip out from underneath him, and with my back turned, I can pretend it’s just a sleepy Monday morning before work - that in an hour, he’ll be in his office antagonizing his team and I’ll be seeing patients down the hall.
But my back reminds me the moment I stand up who we really are now - a couple of old men with nowhere to be but here, and no one to see but each other.
I tug on a bathrobe and take a few wary steps, my joints protesting every move. Glancing past my own weathered reflection in the wardrobe mirror, I can't help but notice the way his eyes roam over me from the bed - telling me in no uncertain terms he still likes what he sees. I hide a grin, and keep my eyes away to ask a question both of us hate. "You want your chair?"
I busy myself gathering his clothing, let him decide what stock answer to give. His response will give me a hint of what to expect later. "Not today," he finally mumbles, and I breathe again.
"Okay." I make my way to the bed and deposit fresh clothes next to him, arranging them in order before dragging out the boring, aluminum cane that has replaced his more fashionable models in the last few years.
The wheelchair in the corner gets more and more use these days.
"Come out to the living room," I tell him once he's sitting on the edge of the bed. "I'll bring your meds."
I'm pulling away when he suddenly grabs my wrist. "What's for breakfast?"
My heart sinks toward my stomach. "Pancakes," I tell him quietly.
"You can't make pancakes," he says, a vague little smile on his face while his thumb traces circles into my skin. "As you very forcefully reminded me yesterday, we're out of syrup."
I try to lie again, but I break under that clear blue, trusting gaze. "We went shopping last night."
He blinks, and I watch him thinking, watch him fail to retrieve the memory and drop his head a little in defeat. He nods to the floor, and his hand slips from my fingers.
"Come on out to the living room." I keep my voice low and soothing, slide my palm over his bare shoulder.
It's unfair that I have to lose him by degrees.
I make my way through the hall of our one-story home - wide and open, with no high shelves or low couches. Of all the places we could've ended up, I never would have imagined this scenario. Never would have imagined that something that began so suddenly, so unexpectedly, would lead us here, to our last chapter, with life slowly trickling through our fingers.
I never imagined that the tall, lanky stranger I pretended not to notice across that hotel bar would turn out to be the one I never knew I was looking for. That the most flawed, the most fundamental friendship of my life would suddenly erupt into something I never knew I needed. More and more often, I find myself lost in those memories, comforted by them, re-examining them with an old man's eyes.
I remember the first night.
I remember the way his fingers skimmed across the keys, focusing on certain unfamiliar notes the way only he could, coaxing beauty out of silence. I remember those same fingers raking through my hair as we kissed, trembling as they unknotted my tie, trailing hungrily across my flushed, heated skin. And I remember the morning - waking up with his head on my chest and his song in my ears, and knowing that I never wanted to wake up anywhere else again.
He doesn't play much these days. It's something else age has taken from him - music and mobility and his answers. It was a long time before I heard that tune again - a year of complications, wondering nearly every day if this was all just some colossal mistake, if all I had really done was ruin our friendship for sex.
Albeit great sex.
But there were times when touching him wasn't enough - when my supposed 'need for neediness' and his distrust of human connection threatened to break whatever fragile thread that kept us dangling between love and hate. I remember another quiet night almost two decades ago, another night when I thought I was losing everything.
He had barely spoken to me all day. It always seemed that some things were harder to talk about after we crossed that line - that he could either fuck me or talk to me, but not both.
It didn't take a genius to figure out which option he preferred.
I was living with him by then, having accepted the irony of sharing his bed not so long after hiding out on his couch. He hadn’t put hot sauce on my toothbrush - much - in the past several months, but on this particular night, it was hard to feel like we weren’t right back where we started.
“What’s up your ass today?” was the first thing he said to me on the night of our sort-of anniversary, had we chosen to think of what we had back then in those terms.
“Nothing, thank you,” I told him - and I may have added a mumbled remark about objects that wouldn’t be going up there for a while. “Yours?”
“Sweet of you to ask,” he said edgily. “Nothing my pal Johnnie Walker can’t fix.”
He spent the evening nursing an ever-refilling glass, hiding behind his piano, plunking out increasingly random notes as the whiskey disappeared.
I remember telling myself it meant nothing that he was at his most bitter on that arbitrary date, that he for some reason felt the need to drink himself into a stupor three-hundred-and-sixty-five days after the first time we kissed. Stupid of me to expect anything different, or to tell myself that maybe this could make him a little happier, but -
“You know what today is, House?” I asked him…after a considerable amount of Mr. Walker’s ministrations.
“Apparently Let’s-Be-a-Bitch-to-House-for-No-Reason Day.”
“Forget it,” I said, peeling myself off the sofa, barely glancing at him from his hiding place behind the piano. “Doesn’t matter.”
And really, it didn’t - it was just another day, and I could accept that this was the way things were going to be. He didn’t care about his own birthday, barely ever acknowledged my birthday - it made sense that today wouldn’t be any different…
Because it wasn’t any different.
I was in the hall before a sudden flare of sense-memory stopped me in my tracks. “When did you get this Scotch?”
He took another drink and stubbornly avoided looking at me. “Why? Afraid it’s expired?”
That tone of voice always meant I was on to something. “If all you wanted was to drink yourself into a coma, there are cheaper ways to do it.” Already drawn back to the piano, I reached over to drag my finger across the embossed label of what had to be an expensive bottle of aged whiskey. “Special occasion?”
He said nothing, but his fingers kept moving, and what had seemed like random notes formed into a dark, provocative tune I hadn’t heard in a year - exactly a year.
Warmth pooled in my stomach, and I somehow doubted it was just from the Scotch he had bought us to commemorate a year of functional chaos. “So you remembered the date, remembered this song…why didn’t you just say something?”
“I remember you being a lot less annoying back then,” he told his piano keys, but I thought - or I maybe I hoped - I caught a hint of a smile playing around his lips.
“Well, I’ve been sleeping with you for a year; only natural for some of your traits to start rubbing off.”
After that, I knew he was smiling.
“This song,” I asked him at some point, when I could be sure I didn’t sound too pleased, “did you write it?”
He shrugged and kept his eyes downcast. “It doesn’t have an ending.”
I remember the way his shoulders relaxed under my palms as I stood behind him, the way he molded himself almost imperceptibly against my abdomen. “It’s perfect,” I told him, and let my hands trail down his chest.
But I couldn’t resist indulging in a little good-natured mockery. “You really are a romantic, you know that?”
“Don’t read too much into it,” he said, and let the notes trail off, freeing his hands to tug me in front of him. “I’m just trying to get into your pants.”
It worked - year after year.
I never wanted to be that old man, nostalgic and misty-eyed over tired memories - but if I don't think about the past, all that's left to focus on is the future.
I hear him shuffling down the hall, the familiar rhythm of his steps slowed by years of trying too hard. I turn the stove down to focus on his breathing, the old warning signs I would know in my sleep. It's only a matter of time until his pain will overcome his stubbornness, taking away his last grab at independence.
I don't like to think about what might happen then.
I hear him stop and glance back over my shoulder; he's leaning on the doorframe, watching me, tired but accomplished. "Excuse me, sir, but I ordered uncharred pancakes.”
“I’m not burning them,” I say with mock defensiveness. “Think you could do a better job?”
“I wouldn’t want to embarrass you.” He looks at me for a moment, that same penetrating stare, and I give him a minute before shifting the pan off the burner and walking towards him, wordlessly offering my shoulder.
We move together towards the kitchen table, his arm over my shoulder, mine around his waist. “‘Course, I think we both know that proving you wrong would be con…con…”
I don’t prompt him today; he’s still himself enough to translate it as pity.
“…would depend on you actually letting me touch the big metal hot thing.” He knows the word stove, but sarcasm was always the only way he could cope.
“Let’s not do this today, alright?” I phrase it as a request, in a tone I know he hates, but we’ve wasted enough time arguing in circles. I get him settled in his chair and rub his back a little in apology. “Coffee or juice?”
It was never supposed to end this way, not for him. Not reduced to this, his most complex mental exercise involving breakfast. Some days, I almost hope he can’t remember, because then he wouldn’t know how much he’s lost…
On these days, I hate myself.
I’m pouring the last of the batter into the pan when I hear his chair scrape the floor, hear the table take half of his weight. “Where’re you going?”
“Oh, you know me,” he says, wheezing a little from the effort, slumped but standing across the room. “Just going to go eat some paint chips off the wall, after I’m done setting my hair on fire and soiling my undergarments…” I look at him, and he drops the sarcasm with a sigh. “I need to pee, okay? You can’t worry about me every second of every day.” He nods his head towards the dripping spatula in my hand. “Makes you a lousy cook.”
I nod and bite my lip, suddenly overwhelmed. I know I can’t protect him forever, but trying is the only way to put off the inevitable, the day when I’ll wake up with someone who doesn’t know me -
The day when I’ll wake up to silence.
He shuffles off as soon as my back’s turned, as soon as I’m staring blankly at a (slightly smoking) pancake. I know he hates what he's become, and hides from it behind the bitter sarcasm. I know he's scared. I know he thinks he has to struggle to earn respect. These issues aren't new - they're both the origin and the flaw in our relationship. But in past years, he has always given me some inkling that he knows why it bothers me. That my protection matters to him.
Now, with his forgetfulness and his pain and his waning identity, I can only hope he feels anything for me but resentment.
A door closes and I can’t help but turn around. I want to trust him; he’s lost enough without me making him feel like he’s losing his dignity, one thing he’s clung to more than anything.
But if something happens while I’m giving him space, I’m not sure I could live with myself. “House?”
Fear, never far below the surface these days, balloons once again in my chest when he doesn’t answer, when I’m left with nothing but the sounds of butter sizzling and the ticking of the hall clock. “House? Answer me.”
Another second of silence is too much, so I abandon the mess I made in the skillet to wipe my hands on the nearest towel, shuffling out to the den. I never know if he does this to me on purpose or not - if he’s wandering because he’s confused, or because he’s cognizant enough to wish he could escape.
The blinds over the patio door are swaying slightly, and I’m across the room before I can talk myself out of it.
He’s just sitting in one of the deck chairs, hands folded in his lap, staring out across the lawn.
I wonder where he is.
“Come inside,” I tell him softly, offering him my hand. “Breakfast time.”
He looks up, and for a brief moment of panic I watch his washed-out eyes swim in confusion, my breath freezing in my chest until he blinks, his brow furrowing, control coming back into his features. “Wilson,” he says, using my name to anchor himself. “It’s going to rain.”
I glance up to the gray-lined clouds. “Yeah, looks like it. Come inside with me.”
He smiles. It’s strangely heartbreaking. “In a minute.”
My ‘okay’ comes out more like a sigh, and I leave the door open on the way back inside.
He doesn’t have bad days anymore, but bad weeks, his confusion broken only by increasingly rare good moments. I don’t know how to deal with his questions, his mood swings, his anger. I want him to hang on to what we had together. I want him to be happy.
I want my friend back.
I set out his breakfast with slightly trembling hands, ever aware of the sound of his movements, awaiting the first hint of trouble. He’ll be more like himself after a meal, I tell myself; he’ll come back to me after his meds. From the living room, I hear his labored steps, brace myself for a curse, a fall…
Instead, I hear music.
I drift into the living room with a spatula still clasped in one hand, dumbfounded at the sight of him hunched over the keys, at the halted but familiar notes coming slightly out of tune from his knotted fingers.
Something hits me and I spin around towards one of the many calendars I’ve placed for his benefit - not that I should have needed to look, not like this date, this song, aren’t etched permanently in my veins.
“House.”
He tosses me a crooked grin. “Getting forgetful in your old age.”
It’s hard to speak over the lump in my throat. “You remembered.”
“Why wouldn’t I?” His fingers can’t hold the right tempo, but it’s the same tune he was writing the night that changed my life. “This baby’s gotten me laid without fail for twenty years.”
I drop down the bench next to him and slide close, insinuating myself under one of his arms. “It’s a good song,” I whisper, hiding my eyes in his neck.
He laces his fingers in mine, and continues the halting version of our song with one hand. The song nears the end of its never-completed melody, and he grumbles a little, his cheek resting on the top of my head. “Still not finished.”
I close my eyes and hope it never will be.