Work Text:
Part 1 - Checkmate (Goodbye, Suffering, And Ultimately Suicide)
House is still standing, he won. He won the chess game, the game of life, and the game of doom. So why doesn’t he feel like he’d won?
Well the answer is simple, his win was due to the death of the only person who has ever stood by his side no matter what the conditions were.
Wilson was the only person who loved him for who he was and unconditionally. He didn’t expect House to be different for him and that’s why he was special. That’s why House fell head over heels for him.
House was always codependent, his entire dynamic with Wilson was built on codependency. So what happens when the codependency abruptly comes to an end? What happens when it halts?
The simple answer, chaos.
The day after Wilson died House couldn’t handle it. His soul felt empty, his heart was shattered into millions of pieces. And those pieces felt like glass, like glass that was poking him from the inside. The pain of losing Wilson was ten times worse the pain of House’s leg on bad days.
House was broken and no one was there to pick up the pieces, because the one who did was Wilson.
So the guilt eats House alive. The Diagnostician knew that he hadn’t said “I love you” enough. And he regrets it, the guilt of not saying it more is tearing him further apart, his souls is now in shreds. His soul might as well have been put through a shredder.
And in the end what does House do?
He takes a handful of Vicodin into his mouth and swallows dry. He can’t live without Wilson, he doesn’t want to live without him. His eyes close, his breathing slows, his heart rate drops, and his body becomes limp.
Now he will join Wilson.
Six feet underground.
Part 2 - Draw (The Afterlife)
House stirs and finds himself lying on a white floor. The man sits up and looks at the floor, where is he? He knows he died with Wilson, is this an afterlife?
House hated the fact that this is possibly an afterlife. It means he was wrong about there being none. House continues his internal epiphany while staring at the white floor.
That is when the Diagnostician realizes it looks oddly familiar, as well as the smell of the endless hallway.
The smell is some kind of disinfectant, and that’s when it clicks, this is a hospital.
The afterlife is personalized, the different sceneries are based on where someone felt the safest and happiest.
House’s consist of the hospital (specifically the Princeton Plainsboro Teaching Hospital) and his condominium that he lived in with Wilson.
Fortunately for him those two places are also the only sceneries in Wilson’s afterlife.
House gets up and walks down the endless hallway. Turns out it isn’t actually endless, at the end of the very long hallway House finds himself standing in front of a door, a door that is tempting to be opened.
The man opens the door by twisting the doorknob and enters the new scenery. It’s his condominium, as he enters the living room he finds Wilson.
Wilson sits on the couch staring at the TV although it wasn’t on. Wilson feels a change in the air and he looks away from the TV to be met with House’s piercing blue eyes. Wilson gapes at him with shock and happiness, he gets up from the couch immediately and hugs House.
House uncharacteristically hugs the younger man back. After staying in a tight hug House pulls away. Wilson looks up and kisses the older man passionately but still with chaste.
When the kiss ends both men say in unison, “I love you.”
And for the rest of eternity they spend their lives together.