Phew. Just a short one-shot. Many many thanks to Nomad for the beta.

House, Stacy, Blythe House, Wilson.

Reference to spoilers from One Day, One Room.

House is owned by Fox. I do not speak Spanish.




Four conversations. What he says, and what he can't say.



Thank you for reading.




DISCLOSURE



There was a bar of warmth across his forearm: Sun. A fuzzy, stale ache in his head: Hangover. His eyes were hurting.

He staggered out of bed, surveying the shambles of the hotel room floor. Tuxedo jacket. Shirt. Mr Wilson's best man cufflinks sitting on top of the dressing table.

By the time he’d dealt with pissing away all that champagne, feeling bilious and guilty in the bathroom, Stacy was awake. She smiled at him weakly as he sat down on the edge of the bed, naked. He imagined that she felt just as sleazy as he did.

Lying back on the bright white hotel pillow, he thought about charging a greasy hotel buffet breakfast to their account, and of Wilson flying to Majorca with the hangover from hell.

Stacy leant across and kissed him on the cheek, and he didn't think about much else for a while.


He was flicking through the cable TV channels, Stacy beside him. It was nice. They should probably get up soon to be out of the room by check-out time, but he was tired and content, and he didn't really care. He could doze here and maybe think about what he'd have for lunch, or watching the game, but he didn't really care. He liked not caring. He liked the quiet ease that Stacy could give him. He thought he might take a sick day on Monday before the moron of a department head could saddle him with more boring cases. Go for a run. Read TV Week. Why not?


“Greg.”

“Mm hmm?”

“What kind of a father do you think you’d be?” A fat TV chef was talking eagerly to the camera about the right way to sauté onions, while he chopped and scraped and stirred furiously.

It was interesting, because she could have phrased that question so many different ways, but she had to pick that way; so direct and obliviously blunt. House was angry because he was hungover and he didn’t for the life of him know what to say. Was she thinking of Wilson and his beaming parents and House's best man speech? Was she thinking of the two of them, House rocking a baby in his arms, a reliable responsible father?


He mumbled something noncommittal and sunk his chin into the bedspread.

Stacy’s hand was on his arm. He focused on the cold hand, her soft fingers. It was telling him that he should talk, say something.


“Stacy, I don’t know…”


She waited, their silence loaded. The fat TV chef was adding his caramelised onions to some sort of lamb dish.

He made a small scoffing noise in his throat. “I could never be the father -- be a good father. Not just because I’m a jerk, but because… Because I feel like I need a better example to follow."

He paused. Stacy raised her eyebrows.

"I mean, I've got my dad, and then I got these dumb guys I see three times a week in the clinic, asking me what to do because Junior swallowed a bottlecap.”

He'd predicted a conversation like this, but he didn't know what to say. Just like he didn't know what to do.
Stacy opened her mouth, then closed it again. He turned his face back to the TV.



He didn’t say anything more, but the look in her eyes was enough. Old habits die hard. He could never -- had never been able to -- explain this stuff in any sort of detail. Nothing more than the occasional intimated shadow on a passing comment. Why bother?


But he didn't need to paint a picture. One cheek-burning comment as he stared out the window hurtling down the interstate to his parents’ house, and you could cut the realisation in the car with a knife.
He didn't know what he thought about that, either. Stacy, his father, children.
Sometimes it was just better to try to forget.



Twenty-five years old, drunk and in a strange place. The bar was full of babbling foreign accents, and sauced as he was he could only understand what was coming to him in pieces. Like a puzzle. The guy sitting next to him had something clear. Ice and a wedge of lime. The sleeves of his shirt were crumpled like they'd been rolled up.
House looked at the water stain on the ceiling in the shape of Antarctica, and smiled weakly, because the guy next to him was saying something about a toast.

To my wife, the man said thickly. House didn’t catch the sentence in the middle, but he finished off with she is a bitch.

House wrapped his fingers around his bottle of sweet cold local beer, and his hands were wet with condensation as he drew his sentence out in fragments, his head sagging at the end of his shoulders.


“A mi padre… él es un híbrido, uh, uh, abusivo y lo… odio.”

To my father. He is an abusive bastard, and I hate him.


The drunk next to him was nodding, only half-comprehending. House nodded stupidly and broke his last banknote on a rum and coke and a packet of cigarettes.

Because of that, he hardly understood anything else, people’s faces and shouts swimming at him through the fog, this cocksure med student with an empty wallet.


The next morning he tore the postcard addressed to his mother into fragments, letting these drift from the seedy fire escape to the street below. The communal bathroom in the second-rate youth hostel was waterstained and musty.
He splashed water onto his face, his hands cold on the smooth edge of the porcelain basin, trying to wash away the headache beneath his temples. The guilt taken root in his stomach.




Wilson said the same thing that Cuddy did.


“You hate your parents?!?”

Of course Wilson wouldn’t understand. House thought of his father, a quiet bespectacled guy with a heart of gold. A Rotarian, probably. Ridding the world of polio and building swingsets in rest stops.
Of what House had learned he seemed to hand out corny jokes and nervous laughs with the same frequency that House’s father threw out stolid, enforced camping trips and cutting criticisms.


He hated the conversation. Wilson had that condescending, advising tone of voice. House couldn't see him, standing at the door facing the balcony. He probably had his hands on his hips, a harried expression on his face.
"Of course I don't hate my parents."
Wilson sighed pointedly. House could just leave, of course, but he didn't.
"I hate my dad."
House shifted slightly so he could see Wilson's reflection in the window. He had his head up now, his hands resting by his side.

Fuck. Anger burned in House's stomach, and he pushed through the door. The last thing he heard was Wilson's sigh.




He would have liked to say that he wasn’t nervous. But he was. He’d signed in and carried his bag up to his room and listened to them say how proud they were, and now he was just sitting in the passenger seat of the car next to Mom in the driver’s seat, a box of last-minute things perched on his knees. He was glad it was just the two of them.

He swallowed and put his hand on the door handle, before allowing her to pull him into a smothering hug. He could smell soap, the fabric softener she used on the woolens. He stared down at the box in his lap as she sniffed a little bit. He had to say something.

“Mom?...”

It would have been so easy. But that was the catch. These things never are. We need to talk about Dad seemed too accusatory, and I have something to tell you too dramatic. How can you ever tell? Who was he to even think about dumping this on her at that moment, then and there? What did it matter? A little voice inside his head whispered forget about it, a voice so similar to his father’s. It's ancient history, the voice said. She probably knows, anyway. Why bring it up now?

He loved his mom, and he loved that he was doing this, and that was enough.

“I love you. Thanks for the ride.”


That night, Blythe House cried because her son was eighteen and in college and going to be a doctor.


It was so easy to ignore things, the teary look on his mother's face that made something tug at the bottom of his stomach, the gasoline-and-grass clippings smell in the backyard in Pensacola, but later on he locked himself in a bathroom stall and clamped one hand over his mouth, his back against the cold concrete wall. He wasn't guilty at all.
He hadn't wanted to hurt her, and he didn't.


No harm, no foul.



.- .