Right. The first thing I'm going to say here is this: This story is unbelievably angsty. I mean, it's so angsty it should be put out of it's misery before someone gets hurt. Seriously.
And just because I feel that I have to justify unleashing such a wallow-fest of angst, I'll explain.
I had a lot of good fic ideas a short while ago. I wrote some one-shots, and had the idea for something multi-chaptered, because I'd never experimented with that writing House. I had the ideas for two stories (bad idea). One was to be what I called an 'angsty fic', the other my 'sarcastic' fic. Needless to say, predicting how a story is going to end based on the tone of the first couple of paragraphs was a dumb thing to do. January turned out quite angsty enough for my liking (it was the sarcastic fic originally). So what to do with the first little bit of the first fic?
This was, as I have laid out in the same heavy-handed way above as angst presents in the story, originally meant to be an exploration of the House-Cuddy relationship, perhaps having a focus on the episode Humpty Dumpty. It didn't turn out that way, but I'm posting this anyway, because it kind of surprised me.
What it is: Not much. Short. Angst, angst, angst. I don't like it, (actually kind of embarrassing), so I figure throwing it in the deep end to sink-or-swim is a good a way as any to try and kill it. Or not.
I've taken some notes, things I was unsure about. One of the major things is that I haven't really touched on the passing of time, what happens in this timeframe.
I had some ideas for what elso I could do to it, but as I've said it's a fiddling kind of story. Now I'm going to stop typing because I may have more introduction than story.
I think I need to take up bowling or something. Fishing. Fishing is good.
FALLING
(De Profundis)
I've fallen
But you can't break my fall
I'm broken don't break me
When I hit the ground.
- Dave Matthews, Some Devil.
There are twenty years to go
Twenty ways to know
Who will wear
Who will wear
The hat.
- Placebo, Twenty Years.
House awoke in the early hours of Saturday morning stretched out on the couch in front of the TV, the light off, blue light flickering in the walls. He blinked. One of those looping infomercials for acne soap murmured softly, the sound gradually rising to his consciousness, gradually making itself known, as he became aware of himself and where he was, the gleam of the streetlight outside shining through the crack in the blinds and onto the floorboards, the way that he had slept.
He brought one hand up and lay it on his face, breathing out. Warm breath condensing on his palm. His fingers were cold. He felt his mind seek out and try to illuminate dark corners, stumbling and rolling. How did he feel? How the fuck did he feel?
It was like this. He’d been heating up pasta on Tuesday, standing at the kitchen bench as Neil Young sang about packing it in and buying a pickup, takin' it down to LA, through the living room. He was still wearing work clothes. It was about 8 pm. His bag was sitting in the living room, on the little table that was just right for keys and bags and dumping everything. He’d literally sailed in from work, set Mr Young’s Harvest spinning and sailed through to the kitchen. No new patients, last diagnosis had passed out the door the day before, lunch with Wilson and an unsatisfactory argument with Cuddy. He hadn’t even seen Stacy.
His leftover Arrabiata had bubbled, he had looked at it, looked at the circle of bubbles and holes and all of a sudden he had felt the storm clouds rolling in. He held on. He thought it was ok. He’d grabbed a bowl and dumped the pasta in it. He’d rummaged through the dishwasher for a fork. He’d limped through to the lounge, unsupported, because today was a good day and he had felt fine and everything was fine and dandy and he liked to be able to carry all his dinner stuff in one go, thank you very much.
He sat down, the couch soft and warm, leather creaking contentedly.
It hit him, like a blunt blow to the chest. Despair had rolled in and blinkered his eyes, and all of a sudden he was breathing fast, sitting on the couch with a hot bowl of pasta burning his left leg while his back arched and his head rocked back, eyes screwed shut, throat bobbing with difficulty because of the angle. His hands were suddenly slick on the hot ceramic. The fork clutched between his fingers smelled of metal and sweat.
His butt scooted forward until he almost slid off the couch altogether. Because he was on his own, he was alone, no one could see him.
He grunted. The subaudible ...rushing... subsided. He took a huge breath, almost shuddering, and thought in one overriding monosyllable.
Fuck.
Then House imagined himself crossing the River Rubicon, saw the dingy water swirling around his feet, saw that he had walked across as the floodwaters rose, stumbling and falling to his knees at the shallows, over the line.
So, House felt like old coffee grounds, like an old dingy piece of chewing gum that has been chewed up and spat out. Like a used band-aid. Like a whole number of unspeakably ragged and ghastly things.
He didn’t sleep that night. He half ate his dinner then left it to congeal and harden on the coffee table as his guts roiled and tightened. He went to the kitchen to grab a glass of orange juice and spilled half of it all over the bench and tiles and didn’t bother to clean it up. He left the milk out of the fridge. He wrote three endings to the article he was writing and screwed up two other half-finished attempts. He watched TV then listened to music and read at the same time until his eyes were sore and hurt to move, to blink. He went on the internet and aimlessly clicked until he felt like trashing his whole hard drive to see what would happen. He entered an online poker game, and just as suddenly lost interest. He played Tetris until he felt sick and his hands hurt.
At 1:30 he finally took his shirt off, and in the process of doing so drifted through to the bedroom and eventually the bathroom. He took a cold shower, gasping and doing more standing than actual washing. He felt like putting REM on and crawling into a dark corner and sleeping until the malaise left him to find a different prey, left him until next time, that is. Left him so he could get on with his normal life, because what passed for normal for him was not a life lived in fear of some fictional black being. A dark man.
The dark man in a Stephen King novel, his worn down bootheels clicking on the blacktop.
God. What a cliche.
His dark man was himself. He felt like laughing too.
But he still didn’t sleep. He paced and listened to music up really loud and then muted it down soft, played with his Duncan vintage butterfly Yoyo until he was sure that his finger was about to fall off.
He played piano for about twenty minutes until he lost what little patience he had, because he couldn’t play like this. Yes, it had come to this. He knew he had a problem, he knew there was no going back when he was like this. He had passed the point of no return as soon as he thought that he had, as soon as he saw the raging river and the dismayed troops in his mind, felt his own rough words.
Alea iacta est. The die has been cast.
The die was long cast.
Like this. Stacy, I can’t drive like this… You know how Greg is when he gets like this… I was going to- then I realized you were- Like This.
When he thought of it in that accusatory phrase he was still a while from home. He was still down the bottom of the pool, shocked from the dive, holding his breath as he thought he’d never rise to the surface. He was asleep in the backseat of the car, squashed in with books and linen and clothes and the good crockery, as his dad cursed in the front and another state line passed by. He was still far away, still out of earshot, out of calling distance. He was still rounding the last corner, passing by the marker as the bell rang, the bell lap.
He roughly drew one finger down the cold keys with a staccato of sound and a small, clean-glass squeaking noise, then launched up from the piano bench with such savagery that he almost fell over. Of course, it was almost 4 AM, so that might have been a contributing factor.
Now the sick mantra bounced it’s way through his mind, but he’d been living in his own skin long enough to know how to quiet it.
I’m Fucked. I’m fucked. Fucked.
House held on through Monday, and if his staff noticed that he was more red-eyed than usual, more snap-happy, happier to retreat into his office and bounce a ball interminably (bump-thock-thud, bump, bump-thock-thud, bump), they didn’t say anything. At lunch he mostly talked in monosyllables and picked at his sandwich, the first thing he saw under the glass counter, but Wilson didn’t say anything, either. He avoided Cuddy, because she would say something.
He sniped at people more than usual, cutting remarks that were almost defensive, like he was a wounded animal lashing out with a last reserve of energy. He didn’t think about that. Thank God for humour, he thought. Thank God for sarcasm.
The kids probably knew that whatever they said he’d ward off with a joke anyway, or maybe they were scared that he’d either fall off the edge and deck one of them or pass out in their face. He didn’t miss those looks, or the fleet half-whispered conversation that passed when he passed through the door into his office. Hello? The walls are glass, people, he thought, as he closed the cheap hospital vertical blinds, the beaded plastic string passing roughly over his fingers.
He knew Wilson wouldn’t say anything. There’s was a friendship of meaningful looks that they passed and both knew how to decode, of things that they both knew and didn’t talk about because they both knew. When House said my pain Wilson knew what he meant, and when House passed into a sulk or a period of depression Wilson knew what that was too. When Wilson had that pained look in his eyes, the one that said that he didn’t know the answer to any question inside him any more than House did, House would blink it off and change the subject.
One of his strengths.
Of course, Stacy knew – had known – exactly what the difference was between your common garden variety sulk and the mother of all bad moods. She knew how to bring him back, how to say the right thing at the right time. Wilson did too, but there’s a world of difference between a best friend and the woman you love.
So House hung with Wilson, but even as he joked around and gobbled House’s fries from his plate in the cafeteria, House could feel himself drifting away. No, falling away, because to say that he was drifting away somehow implied that he was enjoying this, that it was some casual reverie. He knew that he should be talking, trying to hang on, but even as some alive part of him screamed that he should turn around, that he should try to salvage himself from his black mood, a more cynical part asked him why he should bother, why he shouldn’t just let it run its course, let his life run its course. The cynical part always won in these situations.
That was him, Mr Depressed cynic. Let’s watch him drink vodka from a coffee mug in his office late at night and laugh at the comedy of the human angst-ridden soul. Ha, ha, fucking ha.
He hated that term. Run its course. That’s what they had said to him, hadn’t they? When he was curled up in bed with the sheet sweaty and creased, every nerve ending screaming as he heaved and retched? Let it run it’s course, here are some bug-killers and a hot water bottle, swallow them down and suck it up, princess.
He sighed, and there was no way that Wilson could miss that, if he hadn’t already added that up mentally with the rather one-sided conversation and no doubt the many other clues that House had let slip about his mood.
Wilson was cautious and diplomatic, but he always let his love for House override things when it got too far. So, because some invisible line between watching him suffer and intervening had been reached, House spoke just as Wilson took a deep breath and opened his mouth.
Bad Day, he said. I’m cool.
Wilson asked if he was sure.
House said yes, It’s good. I’ll page you as soon as anything happens, Doctor Vigilance.
He replenished his emergency cigarette stash, and smoked a thin, rich cigar while he watched Wheel Of Fortune. He was out of practice, but it felt good. He woke the next morning with the taste of it still in his mouth, and he swore that he could still smell cigar in the room a week later, but hey, it was good while it lasted, that first toxic puff of blue-grey smoke.
He drank neat scotch (from his for-good bottles) from a thick tumbler, savouring the burn in his throat and belly, rolling the Scots-Gaelic (he assumed) name around on his tongue. Being careful not to drink himself to the point where he would no longer care whether he got drunk or not.
Wilson came to see him, saying that if it was the leg, they could organize something – they didn’t even need to see Cuddy. House had turned away for a moment, not caring to reply, and when Wilson had pushed him, he had shouted that it was not the leg, Wilson, and could he please butt out and fuck off before he got ANGRY!
On Friday night he got serious. He called his mother and said hi, how are you, blah blah blah, then took a long, hot shower, washing all over and even shaving quickly, then standing there until the water ran cold. He did all the right things. He put quiet music on and relaxed. He didn’t think about sleeping or being depressed or work. It was hard, but he was exhausted, so that made it easier. He lay down on the couch and watched TV for approximately fifteen minutes before he turned the mute on and nothinged himself to sleep. It was hard, but he had practice.
When he woke on Sunday morning, he felt a lot better. He staggered through to bed without turning the lights on and slept until hunger and his bladder woke him up after lunchtime, feeling like his feet were back on the ground.
He went for a walk down to the shop a block away because he really did feel pretty damn good, probably just because it was just in direct contrast to how he’d felt for the last couple of days, and bought something to eat. (There was no food in his place anyway, nothing in the fridge but a jar of gherkins and one of peanut butter. Not even anything to spread it on).
Three days of hell and the week stretched before him. He might sleep in on Monday morning just for the hell of it.
He came out the other side.