FIC: The Waiting Place
Jun. 22nd, 2009 11:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
verbal_kintTitle: The Waiting Place
Rating: PG-13
Summary: No matter which way she chose, she was still out of gas.
Warning(s): Major Character Death, AU as of "House's Head"
Word Count: 3,124
Thank You:nightdog_barks and blackmare_9 for seemingly neverending awesomeness. You ever read a fic and think, "Wow, I shudder to think what this was like pre-beta?" This is that fic. And if you read it and still, shudder...well, that's my fault, not theirs.
Notes: This is inspired by Dr. Seuss' Oh, the Places You'll Go. *hides*
You can get so confused
that you'll start in to race
down long wiggled roads at a break-necking pace
and grind on for miles cross weirdish wild space,
headed, I fear, toward a most useless place...
The Waiting Place
They were in a car. An ‘82 Pontiac Firebird, red except for the tiny patches of grey body that frowned out from every dent and scratch on its exterior, announcing to the world that it was a thing simultaneously ignored and well-loved.
The car sat just short of a stop sign at a 4 AM fork in the road. It was now 5:30 AM, and the arrow on the fuel gauge lay sleepily on its left side against the capital E. The gas light glowed on despite the approaching dawn, a silent warning unheeded specifically for the purpose of not choosing, for sitting here and arguing.
House looked to the right, and Amber to the left, leaning heavily on the steering wheel as she strained to see the road sign. It was straight ahead, large and green, and House couldn’t seem to take his eyes off the word Cheyenne. Amber looked at the word beneath it, Denver, and the 242 miles they’d have to drive to get there from here, the middle of fucking nowhere. Cheyenne was only 212 miles away. The rest of that hour she spent looking at the road itself, like she could see the mountains already, microscopic anthills on the horizon.
And when the sun finally did rise, she saw there were no such anthills. Just light. A hot, orange sliver of light that padded the separation between the ground and the sky. And nothing obstructed her view, indicating that this was, in actuality, the edge of fucking nowhere and that there yonder was the middle. Unless.
Unless, unless, unless.
She turned and faced House, who didn't look dead, face pressed against his window like an adventurous pug. In her defense, she didn't look crazy, eyes bright and face calm as she watched him peer out at what he believed to be his destination. The sky was black about a mile down the road, beyond the sun's reach. Thunder groaned and tumbled atop the writhing cluster of rain clouds, and he stared, jaw slack with exhaustion, hot breath coating the window.
Just beyond was more road. More fucking nowhere. And there would always be more road; more nowhere to get to and no time constraint on when to do it. No edges, no middle, just it, nestled in some invisible crater where somewhere used to be, and Christ, she was thinking about it again.
The paper bracelet around her wrist was there to remind her that her name was Amber Volakis, that she was female, 34 years old, and patient 24601 of the Mayfield Psychiatric Hospital. It was itchy, painful, intrusive--more reminders, just in case.
“What are we doing here?” she said.
House groaned and cracked an eyelid into the sunrise, glancing at the stop sign and the dashboard before finally setting his gaze on her. “Sitting.”
“I meant you. Why are you here?”
“You’re the boss. Why am I here?”
She leaned back as far as the bucket seat permitted, scrubbing her palms over her cheeks. The sun stung in her eyes. “May was four months ago.”
“Apparently you…” He sat up, opening both eyes. “What’s the date?” he asked.
She took the liberty of checking his watch for him. “Tuesday, September 23. 5:52AM.”
“Figures.”
“Figures what?”
“It figures that May was four months ago because it’s been four months since May,” he said, closing his eyes once more. “You're losing it, Volakis. Again.”
Losing it. Too vague a phrase with the possession of hindsight. She wanted to talk until he looked at her, until his eyes met hers and she knew that they, the two of them, were both really there. “You want me to apologize? Fine, I apologize. Now can we please step out of the goddamn car and flag down someone for gas?” she said.
He didn’t look at her, though. He shifted his neck against the headrest, too tall for his own good and too lazy to adjust its position just below his head, and continued to watch the impending storm.
“You know what’s weird,” he said, opening his eyes and looking out at the darkening sky, “is that when you feel guilty, and your name’s not Wilson, it normally means you deserve to feel that way.”
“You know what’s weird?” said Amber. “I don’t feel guilty. Neither does Wilson. About anything.”
“You do realize that I actually know Wilson, right? And as for you, well, I think we both know how pointless this discussion is.”
“I’ve said and done everything I needed to do and say. At Mayfield. I’m finished.”
“Then what?” said House. “Things went back to normal? You learned how to cope with all your new coping skills? The world became stagnant once more and you got really good at playing hide and seek?”
The sun was too hot. Heat seeped into her seat and the steering wheel in her hands and lightly boiled her insides until it all became too much and her eyelids began to melt into her face.
There wasn’t anything she particularly wanted to look at anyway.
“Of course you did,” he continued, “You learned from the best. Tell me, when you wake up after a night of angry, mind blowing sex and he’s not there, do you ever think ‘Thank God for cancer’? Thank God I don’t have to look him in the eye and see House one last time.”
“Shut up!” Her palm connected with the horn, and the resulting honk caused her to jump. “I mean, Jesus, don’t sit there and pretend this was a cakewalk for me. Four months, and I still can’t sleep.”
“Oh, I doubt that,” said House. “The sleep part, not the cakewalk.” He tilted his head and finally looked at her. “You’re different than I remember.”
“It wasn’t that long—“
“But it feels so much longer, doesn’t it? Don’t lie. We’re sharing a mind here.”
She let her voice crack with a certain intent, but House’s eyes didn’t soften, and he wasn’t buying. No way she’d start crying now. It was pretty here. Beautiful even. Perfect, except for the heat. “I’m sorry,” she said.
“You have no reason to be.”
He unstrapped his seatbelt and straightened up in his seat, looking like a good little schoolboy, looking like Wilson. “There’s a gas station a few miles back. I’ll go get us some Snickers.”
She didn’t ask about the gas. He opened his door and said, “In the meantime, decide right or left.”
“Wait.” She grabbed his wrist, sharing the heat but not the warmth. He closed his door and sat still, melting under her grasp as she melted under the sun’s. It wasn’t comfortable. It was constricting, nauseating, suffocating, and she knew this because she was feeling it all with him, had been since mid-May, 2008. “Where’s your cane?”
He looked down at the bare floor mat as if just noticing it wasn’t there. “Who knows?” he said, eerily calm as his eyes met the horizon and he didn’t attempt to move. She let him go, sitting back herself. “You pick. I don’t know where to go,” she said. He shrugged, speaking to his window and obviously no one else, some slow, steady chant too low for human ears.
“What?” she said.
“You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself any direction you choose,” said House, faintly smiling.
The dark clouds settled above them, shielding them from the sun as it morphed and blinked, thrusting its light haphazardly through the storm in a struggle to be seen.
A muted sort of purr crept up on their silence—thunder in training, perhaps. It took Amber three rings to figure out it was her phone. It was set to vibrate (no embarrassing ringtones, nor telling pet names). Just a name on the screen and a candid snapshot of the man eating his latest delicious creation.
Amber reached for it with a breathy curse, even managed to touch it as the plastic casing slid from the cup holder to House’s hand. “Don’t answer this just for my sake,” he said.
“I’m not. I’m answering it because I want to talk to him.”
He held it up. “You have,” he said, admiring Wilson’s picture, “a whopping half a bar of service. Hell of a conversation this’ll be.” She watched as House tossed the phone over his shoulder, where it took a bounce against the leather upholstery, vibrated once more, and fell silent. “He’ll leave a message.”
She didn’t want him to leave a message, didn’t want him to call at all. She wanted him to be here, to remind him how okay everything was when House was around. The screen went dark. She sighed and twisted back to face House. “Why did you do that?”
He frowned. “Because you had half a bar and it actually wouldn’t have been a hell of a conversation. Or, because I stole Wilson’s phone and called you just to see what you would do, and got my answer. You know, whatever floats.”
“You stole Wilson’s phone?”
“No,” he said, “but if I had, that’s probably what I would do with it.”
He probably knew she knew, but just in case, she said it anyway. “I know.”
“I’m proud of you,” said House, his eyes staring through hers. An attempt at honestly, gentle candor, something. And Amber wasn’t buying it. She didn’t say “What?” or inquire further. House brandished every word on his tongue as if it were food for the starving and he were Mother Teresa. He wasn’t going to stop here and she wasn’t going to show interest.
She listened wordelessly as he continued. “You still think that you were right. Good for you.” Raindrops gently pattered against the roof of the Firebird, sounding like a faraway stampede. “The night you told Wilson I called, you said, ‘Life is not the phone calls we answer. It’s the phone calls we ignore.’ For a minute, I thought maybe you were just an idiot, but then I remembered who you were talking to.” He paused, licking his lips. “He ate that up, didn’t he?”
“You would know.”
“I want to hear you say it,” he said. “Tell me how you pulled it off. How you kept your phone within a pinky’s reach for four months. How you addressed the guilt without addressing the fact that had you known what would’ve happened that night, you wouldn’t have done anything differently.”
The growing sizzle of the rain reminded Amber of bugs, smothered against windshields and crushed beneath feet. Hundreds and hundreds of dead bugs, and no one to mourn them.
“Mayfield,” she said. “Wilson didn’t ask questions.”
“And now…?”
“I’m fine,” said Amber.
“Of course you’re fine,” said House. “Why wouldn’t you be?” He leaned his head against the window, tracing his finger along fresh raindrops until they fell beneath his view. “You’re just fine,” he repeated.
A gust of wind caught the dark clouds off guard, exposing the sun. It had its somewhat glorious reprise, strobes of light ricocheting off bits of broken glass in the road, miniature rainbows entangled in unions of raindrops, spotlights on every weed and rotting field mouse.
And the heat was back. It worked its way into Amber’s gut until she swore she could feel it cooking her most recent meal, preparing her to be eaten alive by some animal she couldn’t identify.
The two roads still sat, still as the day they were paved and still as the day the sun will die, or explode, or engulf the entire world in its heat. And as the clouds rolled over the sun once more, and everything was dark, they remained just as still, quietly pointing towards their respective destinations.
“Wilson’s winning,” said Amber.
“The International Eunuch Squash Championship?” said House. His eyes were closed.
She chuckled as the cool of the rain flooded her body with relief. “I have this…system,” she said, “for keeping track of relationships. You’re either winning, losing, or tying.”
“How you,” House said.
“The object is to tie. Because, when you’re winning, it means you have the upper hand. That the other person could…douse himself in gasoline and light a match, and you couldn’t care less. It’s better than losing, but it’s not love.” House opened his eyes and she continued. “When you’re losing, you’ve already lost. There’s nothing you can do or say to make things go back to the way they used to be.”
Unless, unless, unless.
The phone sat in the back seat. Just sitting, not moving, like Denver and Cheyenne and House. In the middle of fucking nowhere.
“But when you tie…” she said, “When you tie, none of it matters.”
“Sounds boring,” said House.
“It’s not,” said Amber, “when you lose”
“You didn’t lose. Not yet, at least.”
“How would you know? Are you in his head, too?”
House leaned closer, peering around the back of Amber’s seat and drawing the same conclusion. The phone had not moved. “You ignored his call.”
And now she sat still, and not moving proved much easier than she had imagined. “What about you?” she asked.
“What about me?”
“The system applies to stupid, screwed-up friendships, too.”
House frowned as the rain picked up, and it seemed to Amber to be the first time he’d actually thought about anything in four months—a difficult feat, but somehow achievable after he stopped giving a damn. “I think that between Wilson and I,” he started, “there was only going to be one winner, and it was never going to be either of us.”
She nodded, listening to the rain, feeling simultaneously present and very far away. “I can’t give him freedom, not like you could. I’m scared he’s going to…start playing the guitar or something, slit his wrists with the B string.”
“Don’t sweat it,” he said. “Just means he always cared more for me than for you.”
“I know,” she said, and she did know. She knew it by their first drink, by their first word. And now, she consciously reassured herself of it about as often as he accidentally reassured her of it. He hadn’t cried though, and neither had she. That was the worst part, watching House’s office turn into Foreman’s office and watching the Great James Wilson do nothing but fill out paperwork and comfort the dying. Nothing changed. The Equally Great Gregory House got his last answer right.
She waited for the phone to ring again, but it never did. The rain was slowing down.
“What now?” said House, right hand resting on his rumbling stomach.
“I could stay here with you.” Here. The rest of Wilson was here.
House smiled, eyes glassy in the odd light. “No, you can’t.” He opened his door and leaned out, letting the dying rain freckle his head and face. “I’m getting myself a Snickers bar,” he said. “You shouldn’t be here when I get back.”
He stepped out onto the slick pavement and stood awhile, as if mesmerized by a lack of friction in his otherwise frictionful existence. “There’s a wrong answer, I think. But I know just as much as you.”
And he was gone. She didn’t watch him go, scared she might see a bus on the horizon, and she couldn't imagine he ever looked back. She couldn't help thinking it was better that way. He'd never know what might hit him, and he'd never be bored. There were, of course, Snickers to be eaten, and she wasn’t about to get in his way.
She made a choice, and it was the wrong one, for somebody else. Somebody else could go to Cheyenne, sit in Lions Park and watch the ducks dive for slices of bread, die in rodeos or horrific Union Pacific train wrecks, visit Hawthorne Abendsen in his High Castle. She was going to Denver.
Amber walked until the Firebird was gone and the stop sign was gone. She walked to where the rain ended, then to where the sun came out, and the searing heat returned. But it wasn’t brutal anymore. It was restraining, like a stale hug or a comforting sunburn. It was awful and wonderful, wrapping around her stomach, and she closed her eyes so she could feel more of it. She didn’t see anthills, but if need be, she’d make her own, then move them. She left her phone behind.
She walked until four the next morning, when she woke up.
The room glowed red under the alarm clock’s spell, save for Amber’s phone. It didn’t glow at all, but if she touched it, it’d glow white, or green, or any mating of the two. It’d also say One New Voicemail 5/12 10:56PM, which was why she had no intention of touching it.
Next to her, Wilson stirred. Her eyes stung in the light, and she realized she was crying.
“What’s the matter?”
Wilson’s arm slid out from around her waist, and suddenly the heat was gone. She didn’t answer, just stared at his figure in the dark, listened to him breathing.
“Huh?” he repeated, sliding his hand along her cheek, destroying her tears as they fell, cupping her chin as if preparing to do some more battle. “What’s wrong?”
“I had a bad dream.”
“Tell me.”
She wondered, as she had often wondered, which Wilson was real. Was it this Wilson, the Wilson who only did things because he felt he was supposed to? Or was it House’s Wilson, the Wilson only partially tamed by time, never tamed by experience?
But then he repeated it; “Tell me about it,” like he really wanted to know. And she couldn’t help thinking that very occasionally, they were the same person. Tying, in their own right, because she loved them both, if for different reasons.
“I was in a car, at a fork in the road, and I couldn’t decide which way to go, but it didn’t matter because the car was out of gas. He was there,” she said.
He nodded, the large gesture about the only thing visible despite the glow, and yet she knew that had it been bright, she would’ve looked in his eyes and seen envy.
He wrapped his arms around her again, drawing her close. Warm, like a sweater fresh from the dryer. Warmer than the sun, it seemed. “It’s okay,” he whispered.
He repeated it over and over again until the words were no longer audible, just air and lips against the back of her neck as sleep finally caught up to him and his breathing slowed. She allowed herself to hope he’d be there in the morning.
In the darkness, a different voice said, “He’s right. You’re just fine.”
She slept a dreamless sleep.
Rating: PG-13
Summary: No matter which way she chose, she was still out of gas.
Warning(s): Major Character Death, AU as of "House's Head"
Word Count: 3,124
Thank You:
nightdog_barks and blackmare_9 for seemingly neverending awesomeness. You ever read a fic and think, "Wow, I shudder to think what this was like pre-beta?" This is that fic. And if you read it and still, shudder...well, that's my fault, not theirs. Notes: This is inspired by Dr. Seuss' Oh, the Places You'll Go. *hides*
You can get so confused
that you'll start in to race
down long wiggled roads at a break-necking pace
and grind on for miles cross weirdish wild space,
headed, I fear, toward a most useless place...
The Waiting Place
They were in a car. An ‘82 Pontiac Firebird, red except for the tiny patches of grey body that frowned out from every dent and scratch on its exterior, announcing to the world that it was a thing simultaneously ignored and well-loved.
The car sat just short of a stop sign at a 4 AM fork in the road. It was now 5:30 AM, and the arrow on the fuel gauge lay sleepily on its left side against the capital E. The gas light glowed on despite the approaching dawn, a silent warning unheeded specifically for the purpose of not choosing, for sitting here and arguing.
House looked to the right, and Amber to the left, leaning heavily on the steering wheel as she strained to see the road sign. It was straight ahead, large and green, and House couldn’t seem to take his eyes off the word Cheyenne. Amber looked at the word beneath it, Denver, and the 242 miles they’d have to drive to get there from here, the middle of fucking nowhere. Cheyenne was only 212 miles away. The rest of that hour she spent looking at the road itself, like she could see the mountains already, microscopic anthills on the horizon.
And when the sun finally did rise, she saw there were no such anthills. Just light. A hot, orange sliver of light that padded the separation between the ground and the sky. And nothing obstructed her view, indicating that this was, in actuality, the edge of fucking nowhere and that there yonder was the middle. Unless.
Unless, unless, unless.
She turned and faced House, who didn't look dead, face pressed against his window like an adventurous pug. In her defense, she didn't look crazy, eyes bright and face calm as she watched him peer out at what he believed to be his destination. The sky was black about a mile down the road, beyond the sun's reach. Thunder groaned and tumbled atop the writhing cluster of rain clouds, and he stared, jaw slack with exhaustion, hot breath coating the window.
Just beyond was more road. More fucking nowhere. And there would always be more road; more nowhere to get to and no time constraint on when to do it. No edges, no middle, just it, nestled in some invisible crater where somewhere used to be, and Christ, she was thinking about it again.
The paper bracelet around her wrist was there to remind her that her name was Amber Volakis, that she was female, 34 years old, and patient 24601 of the Mayfield Psychiatric Hospital. It was itchy, painful, intrusive--more reminders, just in case.
“What are we doing here?” she said.
House groaned and cracked an eyelid into the sunrise, glancing at the stop sign and the dashboard before finally setting his gaze on her. “Sitting.”
“I meant you. Why are you here?”
“You’re the boss. Why am I here?”
She leaned back as far as the bucket seat permitted, scrubbing her palms over her cheeks. The sun stung in her eyes. “May was four months ago.”
“Apparently you…” He sat up, opening both eyes. “What’s the date?” he asked.
She took the liberty of checking his watch for him. “Tuesday, September 23. 5:52AM.”
“Figures.”
“Figures what?”
“It figures that May was four months ago because it’s been four months since May,” he said, closing his eyes once more. “You're losing it, Volakis. Again.”
Losing it. Too vague a phrase with the possession of hindsight. She wanted to talk until he looked at her, until his eyes met hers and she knew that they, the two of them, were both really there. “You want me to apologize? Fine, I apologize. Now can we please step out of the goddamn car and flag down someone for gas?” she said.
He didn’t look at her, though. He shifted his neck against the headrest, too tall for his own good and too lazy to adjust its position just below his head, and continued to watch the impending storm.
“You know what’s weird,” he said, opening his eyes and looking out at the darkening sky, “is that when you feel guilty, and your name’s not Wilson, it normally means you deserve to feel that way.”
“You know what’s weird?” said Amber. “I don’t feel guilty. Neither does Wilson. About anything.”
“You do realize that I actually know Wilson, right? And as for you, well, I think we both know how pointless this discussion is.”
“I’ve said and done everything I needed to do and say. At Mayfield. I’m finished.”
“Then what?” said House. “Things went back to normal? You learned how to cope with all your new coping skills? The world became stagnant once more and you got really good at playing hide and seek?”
The sun was too hot. Heat seeped into her seat and the steering wheel in her hands and lightly boiled her insides until it all became too much and her eyelids began to melt into her face.
There wasn’t anything she particularly wanted to look at anyway.
“Of course you did,” he continued, “You learned from the best. Tell me, when you wake up after a night of angry, mind blowing sex and he’s not there, do you ever think ‘Thank God for cancer’? Thank God I don’t have to look him in the eye and see House one last time.”
“Shut up!” Her palm connected with the horn, and the resulting honk caused her to jump. “I mean, Jesus, don’t sit there and pretend this was a cakewalk for me. Four months, and I still can’t sleep.”
“Oh, I doubt that,” said House. “The sleep part, not the cakewalk.” He tilted his head and finally looked at her. “You’re different than I remember.”
“It wasn’t that long—“
“But it feels so much longer, doesn’t it? Don’t lie. We’re sharing a mind here.”
She let her voice crack with a certain intent, but House’s eyes didn’t soften, and he wasn’t buying. No way she’d start crying now. It was pretty here. Beautiful even. Perfect, except for the heat. “I’m sorry,” she said.
“You have no reason to be.”
He unstrapped his seatbelt and straightened up in his seat, looking like a good little schoolboy, looking like Wilson. “There’s a gas station a few miles back. I’ll go get us some Snickers.”
She didn’t ask about the gas. He opened his door and said, “In the meantime, decide right or left.”
“Wait.” She grabbed his wrist, sharing the heat but not the warmth. He closed his door and sat still, melting under her grasp as she melted under the sun’s. It wasn’t comfortable. It was constricting, nauseating, suffocating, and she knew this because she was feeling it all with him, had been since mid-May, 2008. “Where’s your cane?”
He looked down at the bare floor mat as if just noticing it wasn’t there. “Who knows?” he said, eerily calm as his eyes met the horizon and he didn’t attempt to move. She let him go, sitting back herself. “You pick. I don’t know where to go,” she said. He shrugged, speaking to his window and obviously no one else, some slow, steady chant too low for human ears.
“What?” she said.
“You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself any direction you choose,” said House, faintly smiling.
The dark clouds settled above them, shielding them from the sun as it morphed and blinked, thrusting its light haphazardly through the storm in a struggle to be seen.
A muted sort of purr crept up on their silence—thunder in training, perhaps. It took Amber three rings to figure out it was her phone. It was set to vibrate (no embarrassing ringtones, nor telling pet names). Just a name on the screen and a candid snapshot of the man eating his latest delicious creation.
Amber reached for it with a breathy curse, even managed to touch it as the plastic casing slid from the cup holder to House’s hand. “Don’t answer this just for my sake,” he said.
“I’m not. I’m answering it because I want to talk to him.”
He held it up. “You have,” he said, admiring Wilson’s picture, “a whopping half a bar of service. Hell of a conversation this’ll be.” She watched as House tossed the phone over his shoulder, where it took a bounce against the leather upholstery, vibrated once more, and fell silent. “He’ll leave a message.”
She didn’t want him to leave a message, didn’t want him to call at all. She wanted him to be here, to remind him how okay everything was when House was around. The screen went dark. She sighed and twisted back to face House. “Why did you do that?”
He frowned. “Because you had half a bar and it actually wouldn’t have been a hell of a conversation. Or, because I stole Wilson’s phone and called you just to see what you would do, and got my answer. You know, whatever floats.”
“You stole Wilson’s phone?”
“No,” he said, “but if I had, that’s probably what I would do with it.”
He probably knew she knew, but just in case, she said it anyway. “I know.”
“I’m proud of you,” said House, his eyes staring through hers. An attempt at honestly, gentle candor, something. And Amber wasn’t buying it. She didn’t say “What?” or inquire further. House brandished every word on his tongue as if it were food for the starving and he were Mother Teresa. He wasn’t going to stop here and she wasn’t going to show interest.
She listened wordelessly as he continued. “You still think that you were right. Good for you.” Raindrops gently pattered against the roof of the Firebird, sounding like a faraway stampede. “The night you told Wilson I called, you said, ‘Life is not the phone calls we answer. It’s the phone calls we ignore.’ For a minute, I thought maybe you were just an idiot, but then I remembered who you were talking to.” He paused, licking his lips. “He ate that up, didn’t he?”
“You would know.”
“I want to hear you say it,” he said. “Tell me how you pulled it off. How you kept your phone within a pinky’s reach for four months. How you addressed the guilt without addressing the fact that had you known what would’ve happened that night, you wouldn’t have done anything differently.”
The growing sizzle of the rain reminded Amber of bugs, smothered against windshields and crushed beneath feet. Hundreds and hundreds of dead bugs, and no one to mourn them.
“Mayfield,” she said. “Wilson didn’t ask questions.”
“And now…?”
“I’m fine,” said Amber.
“Of course you’re fine,” said House. “Why wouldn’t you be?” He leaned his head against the window, tracing his finger along fresh raindrops until they fell beneath his view. “You’re just fine,” he repeated.
A gust of wind caught the dark clouds off guard, exposing the sun. It had its somewhat glorious reprise, strobes of light ricocheting off bits of broken glass in the road, miniature rainbows entangled in unions of raindrops, spotlights on every weed and rotting field mouse.
And the heat was back. It worked its way into Amber’s gut until she swore she could feel it cooking her most recent meal, preparing her to be eaten alive by some animal she couldn’t identify.
The two roads still sat, still as the day they were paved and still as the day the sun will die, or explode, or engulf the entire world in its heat. And as the clouds rolled over the sun once more, and everything was dark, they remained just as still, quietly pointing towards their respective destinations.
“Wilson’s winning,” said Amber.
“The International Eunuch Squash Championship?” said House. His eyes were closed.
She chuckled as the cool of the rain flooded her body with relief. “I have this…system,” she said, “for keeping track of relationships. You’re either winning, losing, or tying.”
“How you,” House said.
“The object is to tie. Because, when you’re winning, it means you have the upper hand. That the other person could…douse himself in gasoline and light a match, and you couldn’t care less. It’s better than losing, but it’s not love.” House opened his eyes and she continued. “When you’re losing, you’ve already lost. There’s nothing you can do or say to make things go back to the way they used to be.”
Unless, unless, unless.
The phone sat in the back seat. Just sitting, not moving, like Denver and Cheyenne and House. In the middle of fucking nowhere.
“But when you tie…” she said, “When you tie, none of it matters.”
“Sounds boring,” said House.
“It’s not,” said Amber, “when you lose”
“You didn’t lose. Not yet, at least.”
“How would you know? Are you in his head, too?”
House leaned closer, peering around the back of Amber’s seat and drawing the same conclusion. The phone had not moved. “You ignored his call.”
And now she sat still, and not moving proved much easier than she had imagined. “What about you?” she asked.
“What about me?”
“The system applies to stupid, screwed-up friendships, too.”
House frowned as the rain picked up, and it seemed to Amber to be the first time he’d actually thought about anything in four months—a difficult feat, but somehow achievable after he stopped giving a damn. “I think that between Wilson and I,” he started, “there was only going to be one winner, and it was never going to be either of us.”
She nodded, listening to the rain, feeling simultaneously present and very far away. “I can’t give him freedom, not like you could. I’m scared he’s going to…start playing the guitar or something, slit his wrists with the B string.”
“Don’t sweat it,” he said. “Just means he always cared more for me than for you.”
“I know,” she said, and she did know. She knew it by their first drink, by their first word. And now, she consciously reassured herself of it about as often as he accidentally reassured her of it. He hadn’t cried though, and neither had she. That was the worst part, watching House’s office turn into Foreman’s office and watching the Great James Wilson do nothing but fill out paperwork and comfort the dying. Nothing changed. The Equally Great Gregory House got his last answer right.
She waited for the phone to ring again, but it never did. The rain was slowing down.
“What now?” said House, right hand resting on his rumbling stomach.
“I could stay here with you.” Here. The rest of Wilson was here.
House smiled, eyes glassy in the odd light. “No, you can’t.” He opened his door and leaned out, letting the dying rain freckle his head and face. “I’m getting myself a Snickers bar,” he said. “You shouldn’t be here when I get back.”
He stepped out onto the slick pavement and stood awhile, as if mesmerized by a lack of friction in his otherwise frictionful existence. “There’s a wrong answer, I think. But I know just as much as you.”
And he was gone. She didn’t watch him go, scared she might see a bus on the horizon, and she couldn't imagine he ever looked back. She couldn't help thinking it was better that way. He'd never know what might hit him, and he'd never be bored. There were, of course, Snickers to be eaten, and she wasn’t about to get in his way.
She made a choice, and it was the wrong one, for somebody else. Somebody else could go to Cheyenne, sit in Lions Park and watch the ducks dive for slices of bread, die in rodeos or horrific Union Pacific train wrecks, visit Hawthorne Abendsen in his High Castle. She was going to Denver.
Amber walked until the Firebird was gone and the stop sign was gone. She walked to where the rain ended, then to where the sun came out, and the searing heat returned. But it wasn’t brutal anymore. It was restraining, like a stale hug or a comforting sunburn. It was awful and wonderful, wrapping around her stomach, and she closed her eyes so she could feel more of it. She didn’t see anthills, but if need be, she’d make her own, then move them. She left her phone behind.
She walked until four the next morning, when she woke up.
The room glowed red under the alarm clock’s spell, save for Amber’s phone. It didn’t glow at all, but if she touched it, it’d glow white, or green, or any mating of the two. It’d also say One New Voicemail 5/12 10:56PM, which was why she had no intention of touching it.
Next to her, Wilson stirred. Her eyes stung in the light, and she realized she was crying.
“What’s the matter?”
Wilson’s arm slid out from around her waist, and suddenly the heat was gone. She didn’t answer, just stared at his figure in the dark, listened to him breathing.
“Huh?” he repeated, sliding his hand along her cheek, destroying her tears as they fell, cupping her chin as if preparing to do some more battle. “What’s wrong?”
“I had a bad dream.”
“Tell me.”
She wondered, as she had often wondered, which Wilson was real. Was it this Wilson, the Wilson who only did things because he felt he was supposed to? Or was it House’s Wilson, the Wilson only partially tamed by time, never tamed by experience?
But then he repeated it; “Tell me about it,” like he really wanted to know. And she couldn’t help thinking that very occasionally, they were the same person. Tying, in their own right, because she loved them both, if for different reasons.
“I was in a car, at a fork in the road, and I couldn’t decide which way to go, but it didn’t matter because the car was out of gas. He was there,” she said.
He nodded, the large gesture about the only thing visible despite the glow, and yet she knew that had it been bright, she would’ve looked in his eyes and seen envy.
He wrapped his arms around her again, drawing her close. Warm, like a sweater fresh from the dryer. Warmer than the sun, it seemed. “It’s okay,” he whispered.
He repeated it over and over again until the words were no longer audible, just air and lips against the back of her neck as sleep finally caught up to him and his breathing slowed. She allowed herself to hope he’d be there in the morning.
In the darkness, a different voice said, “He’s right. You’re just fine.”
She slept a dreamless sleep.
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Date: 2009-07-17 09:42 pm (UTC)I did want to tell you thank you though. You always leave such sweet comments.
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