verbal_kint | Ficlet: Out There

Title: Out There
Rating: PG
Summary: After Wilson dropped off House. A Post-finale fic, because I felt like being cliched.
Word Count: 561

Out There

It rained on Sunday. By Tuesday, there was only one puddle left, in the small pothole where two nameless streets met, next to a manhole and beneath Wilson’s feet. It still smelled like rain—dusty rain, stale rain, Utah rain, and for a second Wilson thought it was just the street, as if there’d been some great sandbox debacle on this corner years ago, and this particular pothole never recovered. But it was the rain, thick with the lime it carved from the large building before him and the dirt it stripped from the atmosphere on its way down. If House were out there he’d tell him that, spare him thinking it through all by himself. But House was in there, so Wilson waited instead.

He watched the water ripple to the edge of the puddle with an anxious shift of his weight, and when the rain felt it had nowhere else to go, it came back. He couldn’t help thinking it was sort of a waste, when it came back. All that kinetic energy spent staying exactly the same. Because nothing changed, but everything was different.
He kicked at the puddle again and again until the image it reflected was not that of the Mayfield Psychiatric Hospital, but nothing at all beyond his own face and the blurry sky. He thought if he tried hard enough, he could make House’s face appear too. But he couldn’t and thus he didn’t, so he waited. It looked like rain.

He never cried, not once, and he felt guilty because he thought that meant neither of them meant enough to each other to be completely devastated. He felt hopeful, too, because that’d mean that they’d both be okay, in a little while when everything was back to normal. He couldn’t imagine himself in there, in that great big building with the faded marble and the mismatched bricks, just like he couldn’t imagine House out there. His shoes scuffed against the asphalt as he made his way to the car, realizing that only one thing was ever going to be free of this place and it was never going to be either of them.

He got into his car as the first few drops of rain fell, some misrepresentative tease of the downpour to come. He closed his eyes and listened, and after it’d been pouring for fifteen minutes and his windows were cloudy and the gutters were overflowing with God’s spit, he looked back at the building, expecting to see that something had changed. It was wet now, that was all—no more cheerful or gloomy than its picture on Google.

He waited just one more hour, and when House didn’t show up, when he didn’t break the cripple land speed record fleeing from the orderlies, when he didn’t demand cigarettes from Nurse Ratched so that he could share them with Wilson while recounting this great escape, when he didn’t say he changed his mind, Wilson drove away.

Afterward, he didn’t go to a bar. He went to a gelato shop downtown where the blueberry sherbet was the exact shade of House’s eyes, because he’d rather feel everything at once than nothing at all. Wilson had always been the crazy one, but now nobody was there to ask him if he was okay. Fair enough; he wasn’t sure what his answer would be.

Going to put this all in one post because I don't feel like spamming the f-list.
Hey folks,
Just wanted to send out a great big thanks to all those who wished me luck for hosting the Pygmy Awards on Friday. It actually wasn't a complete disaster, people seemed to enjoy themselves, and I even won Pygmies for Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress (...not in the same show, obviously). So, all's well that ends well I suppose. In other news, the new Star Trek is awesome. Yay for my generation getting some good reboots for once. Brandon and I have been watching reruns of the original series and TNG almost every Friday for two years, so we were pretty excited.

This ficlet, yes, this one right up there, is born of my guilt. That's right, I've felt insanely guilty for not contributing to fandom lately, thus I wrote this. Let's be honest, it's a little meh but the only way to clear my conscious. Oh well.
Verb