Work Text:
-Four-
You smile at your father, dirt on your face and blood in your teeth. He’s fretting, fluttering about the kitchen as he frantically asks what is wrong with you and why you decided to fall and face plant into hard, dry soil. You just keep smiling, scuffed knee kicking absently at the air while your fingers clench around the edge of the counter.
Muttering something about you always playing too rough and not paying enough attention while he skitters about, your father’s phone rings in his pocket. He answers it, quickly, barking something to the person on the other side before making a ‘hmm’ noise and hanging up. You know it wasn’t your mother, because he always finishes calls to her with ‘Hope your day is going well’.
(Your mother works Saturdays: if she were here, your knee would be bandaged and your mouth already washed out.)
Your father is still telling you off, even as he wipes your knees and hands you water to rinse your mouth out so he can look at it, and you are already four so you can tune him out very well.
Your knee is bandaged and you are no longer thirsty when you start listening to him again.
“…and who was that boy your were playing with when you fell?”
You look up, smile only widening, and your father pales as more blood and dirt is revealed on your teeth. You don’t really care about it.
Your new friend is loud and fast and a lot of fun, even if he is rough and does push you down onto the floor just to watch when you get back up and start chasing him again.
“His name is House and he wants to be a doctor!”
-Ten-
He pulls your hair and you shout in pain and anger, whirling around to face him with small fists clenched and fury coursing through your veins instead of blood. “That was mean! You can’t be mean and be a doctor, doctors are nice!”
He sticks his tongue out at you and you feel hot, angry tears start welling up in your eyes. Laughing, he cruelly pulls your hair again and you flail, lashing out and striking him in the neck with your fist.
Your mother is the one who treats him when he goes to hospital because he’s having trouble breathing.
She puts him in strange pyjamas and puts a needle in his arm, all the while he watches with wide eyes, taking in everything around him.
“Now, Gregory,” you mother begins, her voice gentle as she starts to push a needle into the long tube attached to his arm. He interrupts her.
“House.”
Looking at you, your mother asks a silent question with her eyes. You are ten now, and very good at deciphering the messages she sends you without any words, so you shrug. Not because you don’t understand, but because as far as you can tell there is no real reason House prefers to be called House.
You had asked him once if he didn’t like his name because it was the same one as his uncle, and he had hit you and run off and refused to speak to you for a week. You haven’t asked him about it since.
Standing up and walking out to his mother, you sit down very quietly on one of the soft chairs and curl your fingers around the edge. She doesn’t look at you, eyes fixed on where your mother is explaining to House that his neck is bruised and he’s going to be in pain for a while.
You refuse to cry in the hospital.
“I’m sorry.”
She doesn’t look at you. You’ve never really liked his mother.
-Eighteen-
You laugh brightly as you tug a tired and disgruntled House outside and towards your parents’ car. You are all going on a family holiday, and you begged enough times that eventually your parents caved and asked his parents if they could bring him along.
You want to go to Med School, which means this will probably be your last free summer for a while, and you’ve always wanted to go to Greece.
“It’s three in the morning. Fuck off.”
You only laugh louder, ignoring your father’s frown as you shove your friend into the car and pile in beside him, but he begins to smile as you needle at him, tugging his coat until he looks at you only to stick your tongue out.
You get to the airport three hours before your flight leaves and eat breakfast, something in a bun, before looking through a nearby bookshop to find anything to buy and read on the plane.
You are eighteen now, and care more about finally falling back asleep than a good book. Still, you spot an interesting looking science text, non-fiction, and pass it over to House, who just grunts.
He takes it up to the counter to pay for it.
Smiling, you link his arm with yours and rejoin your parents at the gate, who tell you with a complete lack of joy that they have seats in two pairs, one pair in row eight and one in row twenty. You call the pair near the back with House immediately.
Your father looks ready to object and honestly, so does House, but before either of them can say anything you’re hauling your friend up and dragging him, his passport and his boarding pass with you to the desk. The man behind it is nice and scans the paper, checking at the same time that your passports match you.
He lets you through and you laugh again.
“No escaping me now,” you mutter to House, “I’ll be with you all summer.”
-Twenty Three-
You wince as your attending snaps at you again, already making to walk away. You take the folder gingerly from her hands and send your fellow intern a look, already clearing your eyes as you move onto the next patient on your rotor for the day.
You will not ask for help.
You get through the day without many more hiccups, but there is one particularly lecherous man that makes you scrub your arm extra hard where he grabbed you that morning when you are in the shower.
There is an email on your laptop when you redress and sit on your couch.
“Who the fuck is Ian Hicks?”
Homesickness barrels into you like a tidal wave, crushing your lungs as you read and reread the stupid sentence. You laugh wetly, eyes glistening, typing out a couple of question marks and hitting send.
(Not to be irritating, you genuinely have no clue who he is.)
The response comes within minutes.
“My captain keeps trying to tell me he was the guy who invented the CT scan.”
You laugh. He definitely wasn’t.
You send back a garbled hunk of laugh emojis made of colons and brackets, and he artfully crafts a middle finger from slashes, dashes and some very well placed equals symbols.
Smiling you type out the message and only realise what you’re doing when you’re about to click send.
‘I miss you.’
Three words. But being heartfelt or genuine with House has never gone over well. You remember the time you tried to tell him you admired him and he threw your phone out the window in retaliation. Or when you said that he looked good the day of you graduation party. For that, he ignored all your calls and messages for a week and then burst back into your life when you both got acceptance letters to your schools of choice.
You don’t know how he’ll respond if you send this message, and you really can’t stand to lose the last link to home that you have when you’re all the way out in Chicago.
You’re so busy thinking that you don’t notice the message he has sent you until five minutes after it’s arrived. You stare at it for another ten, no thoughts, head empty.
“I miss you.”
There is no way he meant to send that to you. None. The high you feel is probably from exhaustion, but you feel like even if he doesn’t contact you again for a week or two weeks or even a month, you’ll be fine, because he misses you.
You smile, add a word to your own message before you send it and think about him and his stupid blue eyes until you fall asleep.
‘I miss you too.’
House doesn’t contact you again until Christmas of that year. You send him that message in June.
-Thirty Three-
You haven’t been home in three years when you get the news. You’re back in hours, throwing yourself at your father as he holds your shaking shoulders, whispering the same things he used to say to you when you were four and still scared of thunder.
Your mother is still in the hospital, and you go there first, curling up on her bed next to her and weeping into her shoulder as her fingers rake through your hair. She hums very softly to you as the doctors come in and out but you hardly pay any attention to them. The thing your attending used to say to you surfaces very briefly in you mind, and you double down your efforts to stop crying and be there for the dying woman, not the other way around.
Your father is in the chair in the corner, and your mother passes away that night in her sleep, age sixty.
House arrives the next day
He bursts through your door, now with a cane for a reason you are too tired to try and decipher, and he sweeps through your house like a vengeful storm searching for you. Your father sees him and leaves, heads upstairs to cry on his double bed that’s now only ever going to be used on one side, leaving you alone and vulnerable with a man who is either going to tell you an ugly truth or a brutal fact.
He does neither.
He drops his cane, limps over to you and wraps his arms around you in a hug.
Any other day you would be overjoyed that the prickly boy who used to push you over and pull your hair was hugging you, but today you just grip the back of his ugly brown jacket and cry into his shoulder.
“I missed you,” you manage to choke out between sobs. No verbal response comes from him, but his arms go tighter and his hand finds the back of your neck, which is answer enough.
The funeral is a month later. House doesn’t show.
-Forty-
Your new workplace is clean, lots of fake wood walls and dying people in every corner. You have a dying person in front of you who refuses to believe they are dying, instead desperately trying to fight their restraints despite the fact that you are staring at data that says they are one of the sickest people you have ever met.
“Sir,” you say, completely deadpan, “if you stand up in your condition your heart will probably stop. As in no more beats. Blood will not be getting around your body and your organs will die and then where will we be? You’ll be dead and your family will be angry at me, and because they know what I look like, they’ll chase me through the streets with pitchforks and flaming torches.”
The man still keeps shouting profanities at you, fighting his restraints and spitting insults like water from his mouth. You sigh, prepared to fill out forms for him to sign that state he is leaving against medical advice if just to get him out of your hair, but before you can he starts seizing.
His head jerks and his arms flail and you’re shouting at someone to help you, and by the time you’ve drugged him he needs to be intubated.
You groan as you stare at the inert man on the bed. You have no idea what is wrong with him. When you say as much to the psychologist who’s helping you with him, you get a referral that makes your blood run cold.
You can’t have heard that name right.
“Let’s get Dr. House on him, since we have no clue what to do.”
You nod, only half listening as you follow your colleague through the halls towards a floor that you have yet to be put on because you specialise in cardiovascular health, and a glass door with an unmistakeable name written on the pane.
There are four people inside, three men and one woman, and when the man with the cane turns around and fixes you with piercing blue eyes, you legitimately cannot fucking breathe.
Because there is House, right there, silent and still but in the same room as you for the first time in nearly seven years, and you want to hug him and slap him at the same time.
Instead, you hand him your chart and slip seamlessly back into work mode, going through all the symptoms you’ve been able to find. It’s almost a hello.
House mocks his team mercilessly, but they are a good, balanced group, and even though they don’t find the answer watching them has been enough to get you over that last hurdle and figure it out yourself.
“I know what’s wrong with him,” you say, jerking to your feet and making for the door. You hear House, voice a clear knife through the silence, and you want to laugh and cry at the words that come out of his mouth.
“He’s not your patient anymore. You couldn’t figure out what was wrong with him until I helped.”
You smile and turn, pushing the door open with your back. “One day, House, we’re gonna be old and grey, and when you need help getting to the bathroom to take a shit, I’m still going to be competing in climbing competitions. Thanks for the help.”
The surgery to remove the mass (you still don’t fully understand how a mass got to his brain and his heart, you just know it happened) from the guy’s heart and brain is successful, and he should wake up in two days and be out with his family in a week. Seven days, and then the asshole will no longer be your problem.
Unfortunately, he as been replaced by a bigger one.
The woman who works with House, the girl, has been trying to subtly follow you whenever she has a free moment. It is making it harder for you to concentrate on saving people’s lives, though, so when you finally choose to address it, you decide to be petty and mean.
And you grew up with Gregory House, so petty and mean come very easily to you.
You hear her shoes follow you as you finish up your evening shift, two hours later than normal because one woman just absolutely refused to get better, and it’s the last straw.
“He’s too old for you. And too mean. And you’re too pretty for him.”
She stops moving and you try very hard to fight the vindictive smile that comes onto your face, but oh is it hard. Her name is Cameron, you think, which suits her, and she looks sheepish when you finally turn around to stare her down.
“How do you know him? I didn’t think he had any friends and then all of a sudden you just appear.”
“I’m not his friend.” You smile at her and laugh when her face pales. “He knows it too. “I haven’t been his friend since I took him to Greece. Athens is a really lovely city, you should go some time. Take that Australian boy with you, that’s more your scene.”
Cameron looks at you and doesn’t say anything. Either she is pitying you, which you find hard to believe, or she has just realised that House is not, in fact, as pathetic as he looks.
Either way, you’re done torturing the poor girl. “You can do better than House,” you say, already walking down the corridor, “so do better.”
(You don’t see him leaning against the wall around the corner behind Cameron.)
-Forty One-
The first time you’re alone in a room with House since the day after your mother died, his hands are trembling, he’s snappy and you can’t remember ever being this angry.
“You’re an addict. Fucking hell, House.”
The silence is answer enough.
“House,” you say, nearly pleading, taking on step towards him only for him to take two back, “please. You have to let me help you.”
“Why should I? You’ve been nothing but a nuisance the last thirty seven years, why should I stay alive and endure you any longer?”
It hurts, because this is House, and he knows how to push your buttons and tug on heartstrings nobody else in the world can. Unfortunately, him knowing you means that you know him just as well, and you turn his argument around in record time today.
“I’ve been the nuisance? Me? I have been kind and fair and pleasant to you since I was four years old and all you have ever fucking done, House, is beat me and insult me and fucking disappear until it’s convenient for you! This is not about you being better, or smarter, or right where I’m wrong, this is about staying alive and for once in your life not being a selfish, stupid, petty little man!”
You breathe deeply, and this time when you lurch forward to grab onto him and manhandle him into a hug, he either isn’t fast enough or strong enough to stop you.
“I’m not asking you to save yourself, House. Stay alive to save me. Please . Think of me and think of Wilson.”
He doesn’t move, and you let go of him. When you turn to leave, he doesn’t stop you, and you pass Cameron in the hallway. Her eyes follow you and their weight settles a stone in your gut. You turn the corner and leave her sight at the same moment you feel an odd pressure on your chest.
You lean against the wall and try to breathe deeply through it, but the weight doesn’t lift and your vision starts clouding.
That is not a good thing, and you try to call out for help when you feel your knees start to give out. A pair of arms hook under your shoulders and a feminine voice starts shouting for a crash cart over the sound of a cane thumping against fake wood that hides dying people.
You’re one of them now.
-Forty One-
You wake up to white lights, crumpled sheets and Gregory House pulling your hair. You hiss through you teeth and try to jerk away from his grip but it does nothing except make the pain worse, so you give up.
You mentally take stock of all your body parts. No bandages on any of them, an IV in one arm and four working limbs plus one head. At least, you think the head is working, because you also don’t ever remember the hospital having such warm blankets to drape over patients.
“Your dad brought them in. We said that if he let us sterilise them then he could give them to you.”
You smile down at the knitted wool and cotton blankets all over your bed, and stifle a laugh when you realise that House has one draped over his own shoulders. He watches you blankly, eyes uncharacteristically unreadable as he looks you over.
“Why did I collapse?”
He flinches at the question, but doesn’t answer. You try again.
“House. Why did I collapse?”
He avoids your eyes, looking across the hall to a girl with no hair and a blinding smile. You know her. You advised her parents when she was younger about what to do to manage her arrhythmia. Then she was diagnosed with Leukaemia and there wasn’t really anything you could do about that.
Her mother looks happy, and her doctors look happy, and you smile. Maybe she’ll make it.
“You had a heart attack.”
The words are very simple. Nothing about the sentence structure or grammar even resembles the mumbo jumbo you churn out on a daily basis just trying to keep people alive, but House is watching you. He’s studying you, taking notes on every micro expression that passes across your face as you process and turn over the words in your mind.
You had a heart attack.
You mother died of an internal bleed as a result of a heart attack. You take a deep breath in and will the mist in your eyes to disappear, but he is too fast and spots it, closer now and suddenly without his cane.
“You don’t have any internal bleeding yet,” he says, strangely gentle, “but you are at risk of going into cardiac arrest if we don’t figure out why the first heart attack happened. We just have to figure out what the symptoms mean.”
House steps away and grabs his cane as he hobbles towards the door, and you aren’t sending him an email this time so when the words tumble out you don’t have a moment to decide whether or not he will hear them.
“I missed you.”
He stops, back to you and hand on the door.
“I’m going to figure this out.”
You lean back and stare at the ceiling again, pointedly ignoring House’s colleagues as they watch him leave your room.
“I know,” you whisper into the empty air.
-Forty Two-
Six months after you’re discharged from the hospital and four months after you’re allowed to come back to work, you reach the ripe old age of Forty Two.
You call your father and he says he sent his gift yesterday at six in the evening, so it probably won’t arrive until next week and you laugh. He asks you about House, and about how long it’s going to be until you legally become his problem, and if your laugh is a little strained there he has the wisdom and experience to leave it alone.
You get a visit from your new friend Cuddy and Wilson even writes you a birthday card and asks you to babysit his daughter, and you aren’t remotely surprised when House doesn’t turn up and seems to be actively avoiding you all day.
When Cameron, Chase and Foreman arrive to give you their good wishes, all of them act oddly surprised when you tell them.
“House has never been good with sincerity and genuine emotions. He’ll be fine in a couple of days, I don’t mind.”
Cameron looks ready to protest, and you wave her off.
“I don’t want him to change. House will see me if and when he wants to, and the same goes for me to him. If I want to see him I will, trust me.”
“Hello.”
You start slightly, leaning to the right to see past Chase and spotting the subject of your conversation. House is standing there, slightly awkward but hiding it well, and his three colleagues have the good sense and mental acuity to high tail it out of there really fucking fast.
You lean back in your chair and link your fingers together on your desk.
“Hello. To what do I owe the pleasure?”
House makes a face, feigning confusion mixed with frustration.
“It’s your birthday. Happy birthday.”
“Thank you.”
The following silence is long but comforting, and your eyes settle somewhere by House’s right shoulder.
“Reminds me of Greece,” he says suddenly, and you snap your eyes back to him, lost for words.
“You made me swear never to mention what happened in Greece to anyone for as long as I live. Why are you bringing it up?”
House smiles one of his rare, real smiles, and you are powerless to deny him.
You laugh.
“I think we should go back there.”
The laughter stops abruptly, and you slam your head into your desk.
“It’s my birthday, House. Now is not the time to gaslight me.”
“I’m not,” he says, and then you get a text message from him.
“Have you figured out who Ian Hicks is yet?”
You can’t help it.
You smile.
“Keep this up and you’ll be stuck with me for more than just the summer, House.”
“Maybe that’s the idea.”
The words hit you hard but you laugh through it, and as people pass outside your office and patients leave and arrive at the hospital, you are safe in your four walls with House beside you.
-Forty Three-
The beam falls and you see it through the window, see House and then don’t see him, which is infinitely worse. In the last year he has gone from bad to worse and you have weathered the storm with him, but you can’t follow him past death.
House is dead, Wilson is dying, and you have never been more alone.
The eulogy is yours and you don’t know what to say until you’re there, avoiding looking at his mother and vindictively staring his father down. Your father is there too, though you aren’t sure why, because he did not like the boy you grew up with, and you are eternally grateful that Wilson is standing next to you.
You both get a text when you’re halfway done.
‘Oh my god shut up.’
You want to cry so you do, and people mistake that for you breaking down and let you end your speech early, Wilson ‘helping’ you out as you sniffle. Then you look up and he’s there.
Alive and breathing and alive and holy fuck you’re running, and when he stands up you collide with such a force it’s mildly painful.
Wilson is jogging after you but you can barely see him, too caught up in bright blue and a real smile, getting closer and closer to your face. Wilson is still behind you.
You’ve kissed House before, but never like this.
He’s smiling and you think he might be laughing, you can’t tell because you definitely are, holding him by the shoulders and keeping him close. His hand finds the back of your neck and he presses your foreheads together, still smiling, eyes never leaving yours.
Wilson claps him hard on the back and he makes a face, and suddenly all three of you are on the run, and you’re sharing a motorbike seat with the prickly boy who used to pull your hair and you are loving every second.
You pass over bridges with barely anything on you, and Wilson starts to grow a beard, and your father calls and you tell him you love him and then you throw your phone into a river. Your boys put their helmets on and throw you your own, all of you smiling, and everything is okay.
House is dead and driving you around and Wilson is dying and a year and a half ago you had a heart attack, and you have never been happier.