It took me a long time to get this one up anywhere. I wanted to let it mellow, to see if I could get an ending on it and make it more than an echo of the last story I wrote.
Thanks go to my LJ f-list for comments and encouragement.

The title is the first song on Led Zeppelin's Houses of the Holy.


Gen, House/Wilson friendship.


Like one of those dreams where you dream that you're dreaming, and when you wake up you're still dreaming. You wake up.
2059 words.

House belongs to Fox. And my ol' mate Rupert.




THE SONG REMAINS THE SAME



He drifts.

The sharp bite of the intra-muscular injection and the slow numbing burn of the Demerol. Running on a crisp spring morning along a perfect college footpath.

Wilson. Wilson standing in the living room as he grips the doorframe in one hand. You ok? You’re getting old, that’s what it is.

This time it happens, there's a gradual tightening in his chest. Not unlike the time in Second Grade he was walking home from school and a bigger kid (his name was Thomas, never Tom or Tommy) came and sat on him, shouting stuff like you think you’re so smart? This is what my dad says happens to smart-assed kids, for so long his face was red and tear-streaked from trying to scream past the black dots floating in his eyes.

His squeaky child’s voice and the terrible trapped winded feeling.

It doesn’t matter what catalogue of images his mind displays before he is immersed in the memory, because they aren’t real.

If he knew that it was going to be his last, he would have remembered every second of that lacrosse game. If he knew he was going to be laid up with a muscle sprain for a time period that rapidly snowballed into forever, he would have kept running for that extra twenty minutes instead of turning home. If he had known that in the space of two weeks his life would change with such finality, he would have paid more than a cursory glance at that leaflet advertising the Appalachian Trail.

But that’s regret. That’s perfect 20/20 hindsight.
That's the dream.

It’s not exactly true that after you almost die your life changes for about two months. His life changed forever.
What changes is the way you think. For so long after it happened he wasn’t sure what to think. Cycling between gratitude and hate. Between shock and moments of sudden realisation.
By the time he went outside, nothing was cool or new. Any novelty in seeing something green and living after a week and a half of being inside was overshadowed by the fact that he couldn’t walk and was in tremendous pain, and everything everyone said to him sounded so absurdly censored that it was almost funny.

Realising that he couldn’t climb stairs. Realising that a trip to the bathroom was a major exercise in logistics. Realising that the look of false hope on the physiotherapist’s face was the same look he’d watched doctors give for years.

After you almost die, your mind changes.

Screaming at the nurse. An odd, dull pain in his chest. Then nothing.

He’s driving in a car with someone from college. Crandall, that’s it. Crandall was probably the first real friend he’d made since he was twelve. He respected Crandall, in a way. Not just because he was a great bass player with enough smarts to know how to bullshit his way into gigs and paychecks.

They’re driving. Sometimes Crandall drives, sometimes he does, sometimes it’s just two seats and the grainy blurry landscape flashing by on a loop, tree sign sun, tree sign sun. Telephone lines snake by beside them.

There’s something playing on the radio. It’s there, but he can’t hear it. There it is. He can’t place that song.

The song is in his ears like static. Over and over, but he can’t place the song. The landscape outside starts flashing by with such an intensity that he can’t see anything but a colourful blur.

They drive through a tunnel, a dark rushing tunnel, and when the car emerges he can hear rushing shrieking waah noises, like when you twist the dial on an AM radio.

The nothing ends. His chest hurts. There’s a ringing in his ears and his eyes hurt, and then all of the other pain, the pain in his leg, rushes over him like a freight train.
He’s back.

Dr House?
He’s staring. They’re resuscitating a patient in the next room, he can hear them, and he’s staring and staring. Two months back at work and a couple of green fellows. The occupational therapist tells him that the first year back is the hardest.

He tightens his grip on the handle of his cane and tells them to keep going on about the patient's rash.

The intensity of the dream increases. He falls asleep on the bus one morning and wakes up with one hand tightened around his leg, barely suppressing a yelp. The sun flashes through the windows, and he can almost hear the song. Almost. Like when he’s listening to a song he knows well when the power cuts out or the stereo shuts off, and for a second it echoes there in his memory.

The song is always there, always on the edge of his consciousness.

The dream never stops. It melts slowly into the everyday, into life.
He still can’t place the song.

He hears the song over scenes from his childhood, the cracked pavement and the summer heat in Pensacola, the Japanese winter.
He hears the song as a part of the running dreams, the music dreams, even the kaleidoscoping dreams that don’t mean anything.

Then he almost misses one. He almost kills a guy because he's in pain and he's spent so long not working, sitting at home. He can't think, like there's a screen in his brain up against everything he knows, and he doesn't think of the three courses of Erythromycin the guy had for long enough to realise it's cholestasis.

So he dreams of missing them. Dreams of not being able to find the answer. And the song is there, too.

Almost three months back, he quits. Fuck it, he thinks, I’ll go back home early and sit on the couch and get drunk. By this time, his brief foray into domesticity has shuddered to a halt with the departure of Stacy from his life, the end sad and silent and not climactic at all.

He signs out of the clinic and all of a sudden the music is everywhere. That’s it, he thinks. I’ve finally cracked.

He just wants to sleep. To go home and sleep in a darkened room in silence, and when he dreams he wants it to be muted and murky, the sort of dream that will slip through his fingers as he swims up into wakefulness.

Then he’s standing outside the main entrance of the hospital. It's looks cold. It's snowing. He can't feel anything.

He’s lying on the linoleum in the clinic, and everything is in slow motion except for the song, which grows louder and louder and louder. He puts his hands to his ears. They're wet.
He’s bleeding. Then he realises he’s bleeding because he’s been shot. There’s a bullet in his hand.

Oh, God. He wakes up in bed and that noise is in his ears, fuck, for a second he thinks he’s going to have a heart attack and die in bed, but then he realises it’s just the alarm. Just the alarm.

He wakes up and gets up and goes to work but he’s the only one there. The only person in the entire hospital. It’s night time and it’s dark. He’s walking without a cane. He must be asleep.

He’s sleep-walking, then. He was a sleepwalker as a child. He wonders what it'd be like sleepwalking now, with the leg.

He puts his hand to his stomach and takes it away, and he’s bleeding. But he doesn’t know where he’s bleeding from. It’s soaking through his shirt and dripping from the hem. The blood is dark on the floor.

But then he’s lying on the floor curling up because his leg hurts so much, so much, lying next to a puddle of coffee and a broken coffee mug, the handle of his cane hard against his elbow where it fell.

It’s almost funny. He’s fallen, and he can’t get back up.

He puts his head back against the floor, takes a shaky, shuddering breath and screams. The silence of the hospital explodes into chaos.





House starts awake to see Wilson standing at the half-open glass door of his office. The world expands back to Dolby Digital Widescreen, and he's awake.
Jesus, he thinks.
Wilson comes through the door and shuts it behind him. His eyebrows are slightly raised.

“What? I cut myself shaving?”

“Ha. I don’t think so.”

He puts his hand against the armrest of his chair, then puts a hand against his mouth. His fingers are cold. Reaches for his cane, and prepares to get up.

He stares at the patient files scattered against the conference room table. He looks at his watch. He’s been sleeping for just about twenty minutes. Christ. All that, and he was barely asleep long enough for all those stains to come back negative.

“You were dreaming, right?”

“What, did I call out your name?”

“No, when I came through the door you woke up like – Do you remember that scene in Apocalypse Now where-"

House cuts in, making his way across his office and into the conference room. His legs are stiff and on the verge of cramping.
“Don’t remember it.”

“You’ve never seen Apocalypse Now?”

House stops to give Wilson a scathing look.

“Of course I have.”

Wilson wrinkles his brow, following House halfway towards the coffee machine, leaning against the table.
“Did you solve the case?”

House shakes his head as he takes a sip of coffee. It’s not fresh, but it’ll do. Those test results should be skittering through the fax any minute now.
“No.”

Wilson shrugs, and crosses the balcony back to his office. He’s trying to drum up patients for the clinical trial of a leukaemia medication protocol.

House sits down in the corner of the conference room, spinning a wooden coffee stirrer between his fingers and rolling the symptoms over and over in his head.
You can’t get all the answers all the time. But if there’s one thing he’s good at, it’s not taking ‘no’ for an answer.

Very well written! I really liked the description of everything, House's emotions, him lying on the hospital floor after being shot, fantastic job!! :)

God and peace
Vanessa :)

Thank you. I'm glad you enjoyed it.