Red Alert Squad - Like A Fallen Constellation (035. Breakdown.)
Title: Like A Fallen Constellation
Fandom: House/24
Claim: Red Alert Squad
Prompt: 035. Breakdown.
Characters: Jake Hannigan, Brittany House
Pairing: Greg House/Brittany House, vaguely implied Jake/Brittany UST
Word Count: 3487
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Life after the end of the world.
Spoilers/Warnings: Major character death, angst, adult themes, spoilers for the 12/12 episode of House.
Author's Notes: Takes place in 2018, following the events of Eve, Answering The Bullet, Speaking In Ciphers, Glass Waltz and Sleeping Satellite, in that order. It goes without saying that while all those pieces are canon, this is not.
They buried her husband on October seventeenth, at the age of fifty-nine. Jackson was twelve, and his mother thirty-four, with a sick feeling in her stomach because Greg had been right all along: the drugs had caught up to him, and he wouldn't get to see their son graduate high school.
If it hadn't been for Jackson, Brittany would have eaten a gun on October eighteenth. But their son needed his mother then more than ever, so she knew she had no choice but to go on, as a widow and a woman who had very little will to live anymore. She didn't know what to do without the man who had promised her they'd grow old together and he'd take her away from all the suffering she'd endured.
But he'd kept that promise, she thought to herself, standing in front of an empty casket, holding onto her son's quivering hand. He provided you with a house, and a new career, and a son you thought you'd never have, and love you thought you never deserved. It's because of him that you're in Gainesville living out what you know is going to be your last job. He made that possible. He did this for you.
She knew that what she was saying to herself was right. It was because of Greg that she had been able to settle into her job as assistant head coach for the Florida Gators seven years earlier, because of him that they were able to afford to keep two houses. One in Gainesville, and the same one in Princeton, where they had raised their son. Princeton, where she was having a headstone set even though she was having him cremated, because to him it had always been home. She wanted Greg to have everything that he wanted, even if she could hear him just telling her it didn't matter.
She could hear him, and the more she listened to that little voice in her head, the more she thought about the last few moments they'd had together, when they both knew he wasn't going to make it through the night.
****
The doctors had given their diagnosis a few days earlier. She'd sobbed and pleaded and offered to let them cut her open to save his life, but Greg had been much more calm about it. He had taken those few days to do everything he'd wanted to do. Only when he'd gotten truly sick, five days later, did they check him back into the hospital, and only because he hadn't wanted her to have to think of him dying on the couch every time she walked into the house.
He'd said goodbye to their son a half hour or so earlier. He hadn't wanted Jackson to see the end of it, not when he was this young, so Brian had taken their son somewhere else in the hospital. Brittany had simply stayed by his bedside, her hand in his, her head on his chest, feeling like her heart was going to burst.
"I'm so sorry," he'd told her. "I should have...I should have taken better care of myself. Gotten off the drugs." A hard swallow. He'd survived rehab, once he'd finally gone, but the damage had already been done by the years of drug use and abuse. "They warned me," he said, and she knew he was thinking back to every time he'd taken a pill over the last decades.
She didn't want him going to the grave with that kind of guilt. "Shhh, honey," she'd said quietly, her voice breaking. "Don't blame yourself. You've been clean for...what, at least eight years now. We...we had no way of knowing it was going to happen like this." A swallow, feeling tears spring to her eyes. "No way of knowing. You did the right thing, when you could do it. Don't blame yourself."
The last thing he'd said was that he loved her, and he'd kissed her goodbye while she'd tried to think of something more to say than that she loved him too. She tried not to cry, but when she felt him go slack underneath her she sobbed and had to be pried off him by the nurses who heard the steady drone of the monitors that showed nothing but a flat line.
****
Everyone had come to the funeral. Not just her husband's colleagues at Princeton-Plainsboro, but some of Brittany's oldest friends and family. Jack spent much of his time consoling Blythe House over the loss of her son, while Kim tried to do the same for Brittany but her surrogate sister wasn't buying. She wasn't listening to anyone, be it her brother Nathan, or her former players like Danny and Steve, or even old friends like Kyle Porter or Jimmy McCarron.
Despite his best judgment, Michael had come down for the funeral. He knelt beside her, and took her hands in his. He looked into her eyes and he saw the space where her soul should have been, and a lump formed in his throat and no words would come. Nothing he could say would make her suffering any better. He ducked his head and felt the tremor in her hands, and kept his silence. He was one of only two people who seemed to know that the only one who could make her better was her husband.
The other was Jake Hannigan, standing in her kitchen, making coffee because she couldn't be bothered to eat. Waiting for the pot to finish, he leaned against the counter and watched the dozen-odd people who were milling about the living room offering condolences and trying to look as stricken as possible. Not many of them had been close to Greg, not since the family started living half the year in Gainesville, only returning to the New York-New Jersey area in the spring and summer months. Jake had moved to Orlando two years after they had gone to Gainesville, and he was the one that was closest to them. It seemed bizarre to say that, all things considered, but he knew it to be true.
He closed his eyes and took slow, deep breaths. While his best friend was in pieces, Jake had been the one to try and start thinking about the obvious facts. It was no secret that while Brittany had been moving up in the coaching world -- an assistant for a dozen years now -- Greg had made considerably more money, and he had been the family's major source of income. Though a good deal had been put away for Jackson's college education, there was still the question of them being a single-income family. Brittany had told him that it had been Greg's money that had allowed them to keep two houses and made it possible for her to take such a low-paying job. Without a doctor's salary, he saw the quality of life for the two of them going down considerably.
He didn't like that feeling.
Jake had never told her, never told anybody how much money he came from and where it had come from. His parents had been very wealthy people, and as far as he knew, so were their parents before them. They had managed it well, and he had managed it well, living on the money he made as a senior federal agent rather than the years of savings and investments that had been passed on to him. He had always been close-lipped about the money, not wanting to be a spoiled rich kid, not wanting to see it go to waste. But he knew now, it was the one thing he could give her that nobody else could. The one thing she might need. She wouldn't want affection, she didn't need anyone to lie and say everything would be fine. She needed someone to carry the weight.
He watched her, curled up on her couch, arms protectively around her son, and he began to think again.
****
She didn't stay in Princeton after the funeral. Publicly, she said it was because Jackson was in school and they were preparing for another basketball season, but privately it was because she didn't want to be there anymore. It wasn't her home, not without Greg there. If she could have picked up the family house and dropped it in the middle of Gainesville, she would have. She would keep the house in Princeton, but only because he'd loved it so much, and she did too. Otherwise, she never would go back. She was running scared, and she knew it, but she was too far gone to care.
She was doing the dishes in the luxury condo they'd bought seven years earlier. It took twice as long because Greg wasn't there to dry.
"You didn't have to do this," her boss said from behind her. "I meant what I said, you can take all the time you need."
"I'll need a lifetime, and I don't have that long," she replied, setting the dishes in the drainer before she turned to face him. She'd known Coach Donovan for eight years now, and been a fan of his for another four years before that. She hadn't stopped looking at him as a man who deserved total honestly from her. "Billy," she said, the first time she'd ever called him by his first name, "you and Christine have done more than enough for me."
Billy Donovan gave her an arched eyebrow; he'd caught the use of his first name. "There isn't enough, Brittany," he replied, shaking his head. "You've been on my bench for eight years, okay? You're family. We're behind you one hundred percent."
"I know." She swallowed. "I just don't know what I'm going to do, okay? I mean, I know...I'm gonna stay here at UF. I told you that I was gonna stay, and I mean that. But I don't know how the finances are going to shake out. I don't know what to do with the house in Princeton. And the most important thing is I don't know what to do with a bed that's half empty and a space where he should be." She felt her voice cracking. "Greg and I promised each other that if something happened, we wouldn't remarry. And I'm gonna keep that promise, but I don't believe for a minute that it's gonna be easy without him." The tears were sliding down her cheeks, and she wiped at her eyes hurriedly.
"No, it won't be," he said, handing her a Kleenex from the box on the counter. Once she took it, he settled his hand on her arm, looking her dead in the eyes. "But don't you think for a minute that you're gonna go through this alone."
She nodded. How much things had changed. When she had taken the job at UF, she had thought it a mere stepping stone to coaching in her dream job, somewhere in the ACC, and eventually at Duke University. But once arriving at the program, she and Greg had warmed to the people instantly. It had become a place she could see herself settling. Duke had its own people that it preferred to hire, anyway, former players mostly. She had gotten a job offer from another program a year earlier, and she could still remember the conversation between her and her husband, when she had told him that she honestly wanted to stay. How he had told her that he felt like this was the right place for her.
She'd trusted him, and he had been right. Greg was always right. That was probably why everything felt so wrong without him.
"I'm gonna come back and coach," she said after a moment. "He'd want me to coach."
There was the sound of a key turning in the front door lock, and Brittany closed her eyes, because she knew that who was on the other side of that door was not ever going to be who she really wanted it to be.
****
Jake knew that he'd never be who she wanted him to be. And it wasn't as if he was really trying.
He owned a condo of his own in Orlando, but he'd been driving the almost two hours north to Gainesville as long as he could remember. He had been to every UF home game since Brittany had begun coaching there, and the two of them had fumbled about to try and maintain a personal relationship as well, keeping the promise they'd made to one another years ago, when both were in a different place and time. Now he came for entirely different reasons. For a promise he had made to himself. He was fifty years old now, and this was the closest thing he had to someone to care about.
Someone who needed somebody to care about her or she'd go down in flames, and they both knew it.
He spoke briefly to her boss before the older man let himself out, and busied himself with hanging up his jacket on the coat rack by the door. Brittany was still standing at the kitchen counter, sniffling, when he found her there. Jake stood in the doorway for a long moment, just watching the slump of her shoulders, the way she didn't really care if she lived or died. She hadn't given a shit after what had happened in London, either. He'd had to beat the shit out of her for her to understand. Somehow, he knew that this would not be solved that way. Something inside her would not be coming back, no matter what he did.
He was reminded of a line from some musical: 'Nobody ever tells you how they really feel about you until you're dead.' It had been that way with him and House. He could still remember the other man looking at him from the hospital bed, telling him that he trusted him to take care of his wife. The same man who had beaten the hell out of him for touching his wife thirteen years earlier. But House had trusted him. And Jake had been just as angry and sickened by his needless demise. He had been the first one Brittany had told. The one standing by her side at the funeral.
"I'm not sure what we should do with him," she said, while they'd been making funeral arrangements. "Burial, or cremation? I don't know what he would want. He loves it here, but I think he'd want to be with Jackson..."
She'd looked up at him. Jake had thought on it, before the barest hint of a smirk appeared on his face. "Greg likes fire, doesn't he?" he said, and she had honestly laughed, for what had been the last time that he could remember.
"He meant a lot to you too, didn't he?" she'd said after a moment. He'd nodded, just a little. "I guess you could say that," he said. "He was important to me, because you're important to me." Not that he'd ever said that to Greg's face.
Not until the end, anyway. When he'd looked at the other man, and after House had asked him why he cared, snapped, "Because you matter, you son of a bitch."
Jake merely came up behind Brittany and wrapped his arms around her, holding her while she cried. It had used to be that he couldn't stand the sound of her being so emotional. But now, he was used to it, if only because it was all he ever heard from her anymore. A sign that at least she was still alive, even if she didn't want to be. He hadn't told her how much that meant to him. Even now, as the secure leader of his own field office five years on, he still needed her. He couldn't afford to lose somebody else, even though he understood her lack of will. He'd wanted to die, once. Except she hadn't let him go, and now he was just returning the favor.
"How was work?" she asked after a moment.
"I don't think that's important," he replied. "I think I'm just concerned with you."
"I miss the fuck out of him," she said, for what seemed like the eight billionth time.
"I know you do." He held her close, against his body, listening to the abnormality of her heartbeat. The difference in her breathing. "But look at it this way, the bastard is probably haunting you somewhere."
"Well, then you're fucked, because he never liked you," she said, and he heard her laugh for only the second time since her husband had died.
****
Long after he had finally managed to get her to go to bed, clinging to some giant stuffed tiger that Greg had won her at a carnival years ago, Jake found himself sitting at Brittany's kitchen table, thinking. This wasn't the first time he'd been in this position. He'd been custodian of his parents' estate for years; he still owned and maintained the house in Columbia, South Carolina where he had grown up. But that had been different, because there had been nobody else. This time, he'd gotten himself involved, and he knew that he wasn't getting out. Couldn't get out, because it would all go to hell without him.
Maybe in saving her, he was somehow saving himself. Again. He wasn't sure. He'd never been the kind of man to think that much on these things.
He was balancing her checkbook. Managing her finances. Paying her bills, for the most part, and he didn't care. Something inside of him said that he ought to just dump the condo in Orlando and move in with her, except for that she would probably think that it would look like something it wasn't. Which it wasn't, and would never be. Maybe years ago it could have been, but they had both agreed on it, the day he'd been confirmed at Langley. By the time they'd gotten to see each other for the truth, by the time they were willing to be proud of who and what they were, it was 'too little, too late.' They would never, could never be together.
Not even if she wasn't still hung on the man she had married, who wasn't that much older than Jake himself.
They would survive like this. What they had together, neither of them had any way of knowing that it was going to be the only thing keeping them both alive. But they would make this work, somehow. He had needed it, and she had given it. Now she needed it, and he was more than willing to give it.
He found himself looking at their wedding photos, looking at a side of Greg House he'd never seen or maybe not been willing to see. The man who had deeply loved his wife and his son. A man who had cared, and been cared for. The kind of thing that Jake himself would never have. There was some bitterness and jealousy there, but Jake could not find himself to hate the man. House had changed. They had both changed. The difference was that House had taken what he wanted, and Jake had held back. He had no one to blame for that but himself.
He went to check on Brittany again. She'd finally fallen asleep. He dragged the blankets that she'd thrown off up over her, and leaned down to press a soft kiss lightly to her cheek. Standing there, watching her sleep, able to feel the suffering radiating off her. The need to be loved. Where had he felt that before? He stood there, and he glanced at the urn sitting on her dresser. "I'm not going anywhere, you son of a bitch," he said quietly, just before he closed the bedroom door.
He couldn't.
Brittany needed him. He needed her.
Somehow, he didn't think Greg wanted him to, either.
Silently, Jake reopened the bedroom door. He crossed the room and settled on the end of the bed, just sitting there and watching her sleep. Simply staying near her, because that was as close as he was ever going to get to her. Reaching a hand over, he covered one of her hands with his own. Wanting to feel her, know that she was still there, somewhere, under all the pain and the torment she was going through. He couldn't make it stop, but he could make it easier, or so he hoped. He was actually hoping for once in his life. Things would never be the same, for either of them. They didn't have a choice, but to go on living.
"I'm not going anywhere," he said, even though he knew she'd never hear him. "I love you," he forced himself to say, even though he knew he'd never want her to hear.
Some things were better left buried.
Fandom: House/24
Claim: Red Alert Squad
Prompt: 035. Breakdown.
Characters: Jake Hannigan, Brittany House
Pairing: Greg House/Brittany House, vaguely implied Jake/Brittany UST
Word Count: 3487
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Life after the end of the world.
Spoilers/Warnings: Major character death, angst, adult themes, spoilers for the 12/12 episode of House.
Author's Notes: Takes place in 2018, following the events of Eve, Answering The Bullet, Speaking In Ciphers, Glass Waltz and Sleeping Satellite, in that order. It goes without saying that while all those pieces are canon, this is not.
They buried her husband on October seventeenth, at the age of fifty-nine. Jackson was twelve, and his mother thirty-four, with a sick feeling in her stomach because Greg had been right all along: the drugs had caught up to him, and he wouldn't get to see their son graduate high school.
If it hadn't been for Jackson, Brittany would have eaten a gun on October eighteenth. But their son needed his mother then more than ever, so she knew she had no choice but to go on, as a widow and a woman who had very little will to live anymore. She didn't know what to do without the man who had promised her they'd grow old together and he'd take her away from all the suffering she'd endured.
But he'd kept that promise, she thought to herself, standing in front of an empty casket, holding onto her son's quivering hand. He provided you with a house, and a new career, and a son you thought you'd never have, and love you thought you never deserved. It's because of him that you're in Gainesville living out what you know is going to be your last job. He made that possible. He did this for you.
She knew that what she was saying to herself was right. It was because of Greg that she had been able to settle into her job as assistant head coach for the Florida Gators seven years earlier, because of him that they were able to afford to keep two houses. One in Gainesville, and the same one in Princeton, where they had raised their son. Princeton, where she was having a headstone set even though she was having him cremated, because to him it had always been home. She wanted Greg to have everything that he wanted, even if she could hear him just telling her it didn't matter.
She could hear him, and the more she listened to that little voice in her head, the more she thought about the last few moments they'd had together, when they both knew he wasn't going to make it through the night.
****
The doctors had given their diagnosis a few days earlier. She'd sobbed and pleaded and offered to let them cut her open to save his life, but Greg had been much more calm about it. He had taken those few days to do everything he'd wanted to do. Only when he'd gotten truly sick, five days later, did they check him back into the hospital, and only because he hadn't wanted her to have to think of him dying on the couch every time she walked into the house.
He'd said goodbye to their son a half hour or so earlier. He hadn't wanted Jackson to see the end of it, not when he was this young, so Brian had taken their son somewhere else in the hospital. Brittany had simply stayed by his bedside, her hand in his, her head on his chest, feeling like her heart was going to burst.
"I'm so sorry," he'd told her. "I should have...I should have taken better care of myself. Gotten off the drugs." A hard swallow. He'd survived rehab, once he'd finally gone, but the damage had already been done by the years of drug use and abuse. "They warned me," he said, and she knew he was thinking back to every time he'd taken a pill over the last decades.
She didn't want him going to the grave with that kind of guilt. "Shhh, honey," she'd said quietly, her voice breaking. "Don't blame yourself. You've been clean for...what, at least eight years now. We...we had no way of knowing it was going to happen like this." A swallow, feeling tears spring to her eyes. "No way of knowing. You did the right thing, when you could do it. Don't blame yourself."
The last thing he'd said was that he loved her, and he'd kissed her goodbye while she'd tried to think of something more to say than that she loved him too. She tried not to cry, but when she felt him go slack underneath her she sobbed and had to be pried off him by the nurses who heard the steady drone of the monitors that showed nothing but a flat line.
****
Everyone had come to the funeral. Not just her husband's colleagues at Princeton-Plainsboro, but some of Brittany's oldest friends and family. Jack spent much of his time consoling Blythe House over the loss of her son, while Kim tried to do the same for Brittany but her surrogate sister wasn't buying. She wasn't listening to anyone, be it her brother Nathan, or her former players like Danny and Steve, or even old friends like Kyle Porter or Jimmy McCarron.
Despite his best judgment, Michael had come down for the funeral. He knelt beside her, and took her hands in his. He looked into her eyes and he saw the space where her soul should have been, and a lump formed in his throat and no words would come. Nothing he could say would make her suffering any better. He ducked his head and felt the tremor in her hands, and kept his silence. He was one of only two people who seemed to know that the only one who could make her better was her husband.
The other was Jake Hannigan, standing in her kitchen, making coffee because she couldn't be bothered to eat. Waiting for the pot to finish, he leaned against the counter and watched the dozen-odd people who were milling about the living room offering condolences and trying to look as stricken as possible. Not many of them had been close to Greg, not since the family started living half the year in Gainesville, only returning to the New York-New Jersey area in the spring and summer months. Jake had moved to Orlando two years after they had gone to Gainesville, and he was the one that was closest to them. It seemed bizarre to say that, all things considered, but he knew it to be true.
He closed his eyes and took slow, deep breaths. While his best friend was in pieces, Jake had been the one to try and start thinking about the obvious facts. It was no secret that while Brittany had been moving up in the coaching world -- an assistant for a dozen years now -- Greg had made considerably more money, and he had been the family's major source of income. Though a good deal had been put away for Jackson's college education, there was still the question of them being a single-income family. Brittany had told him that it had been Greg's money that had allowed them to keep two houses and made it possible for her to take such a low-paying job. Without a doctor's salary, he saw the quality of life for the two of them going down considerably.
He didn't like that feeling.
Jake had never told her, never told anybody how much money he came from and where it had come from. His parents had been very wealthy people, and as far as he knew, so were their parents before them. They had managed it well, and he had managed it well, living on the money he made as a senior federal agent rather than the years of savings and investments that had been passed on to him. He had always been close-lipped about the money, not wanting to be a spoiled rich kid, not wanting to see it go to waste. But he knew now, it was the one thing he could give her that nobody else could. The one thing she might need. She wouldn't want affection, she didn't need anyone to lie and say everything would be fine. She needed someone to carry the weight.
He watched her, curled up on her couch, arms protectively around her son, and he began to think again.
****
She didn't stay in Princeton after the funeral. Publicly, she said it was because Jackson was in school and they were preparing for another basketball season, but privately it was because she didn't want to be there anymore. It wasn't her home, not without Greg there. If she could have picked up the family house and dropped it in the middle of Gainesville, she would have. She would keep the house in Princeton, but only because he'd loved it so much, and she did too. Otherwise, she never would go back. She was running scared, and she knew it, but she was too far gone to care.
She was doing the dishes in the luxury condo they'd bought seven years earlier. It took twice as long because Greg wasn't there to dry.
"You didn't have to do this," her boss said from behind her. "I meant what I said, you can take all the time you need."
"I'll need a lifetime, and I don't have that long," she replied, setting the dishes in the drainer before she turned to face him. She'd known Coach Donovan for eight years now, and been a fan of his for another four years before that. She hadn't stopped looking at him as a man who deserved total honestly from her. "Billy," she said, the first time she'd ever called him by his first name, "you and Christine have done more than enough for me."
Billy Donovan gave her an arched eyebrow; he'd caught the use of his first name. "There isn't enough, Brittany," he replied, shaking his head. "You've been on my bench for eight years, okay? You're family. We're behind you one hundred percent."
"I know." She swallowed. "I just don't know what I'm going to do, okay? I mean, I know...I'm gonna stay here at UF. I told you that I was gonna stay, and I mean that. But I don't know how the finances are going to shake out. I don't know what to do with the house in Princeton. And the most important thing is I don't know what to do with a bed that's half empty and a space where he should be." She felt her voice cracking. "Greg and I promised each other that if something happened, we wouldn't remarry. And I'm gonna keep that promise, but I don't believe for a minute that it's gonna be easy without him." The tears were sliding down her cheeks, and she wiped at her eyes hurriedly.
"No, it won't be," he said, handing her a Kleenex from the box on the counter. Once she took it, he settled his hand on her arm, looking her dead in the eyes. "But don't you think for a minute that you're gonna go through this alone."
She nodded. How much things had changed. When she had taken the job at UF, she had thought it a mere stepping stone to coaching in her dream job, somewhere in the ACC, and eventually at Duke University. But once arriving at the program, she and Greg had warmed to the people instantly. It had become a place she could see herself settling. Duke had its own people that it preferred to hire, anyway, former players mostly. She had gotten a job offer from another program a year earlier, and she could still remember the conversation between her and her husband, when she had told him that she honestly wanted to stay. How he had told her that he felt like this was the right place for her.
She'd trusted him, and he had been right. Greg was always right. That was probably why everything felt so wrong without him.
"I'm gonna come back and coach," she said after a moment. "He'd want me to coach."
There was the sound of a key turning in the front door lock, and Brittany closed her eyes, because she knew that who was on the other side of that door was not ever going to be who she really wanted it to be.
****
Jake knew that he'd never be who she wanted him to be. And it wasn't as if he was really trying.
He owned a condo of his own in Orlando, but he'd been driving the almost two hours north to Gainesville as long as he could remember. He had been to every UF home game since Brittany had begun coaching there, and the two of them had fumbled about to try and maintain a personal relationship as well, keeping the promise they'd made to one another years ago, when both were in a different place and time. Now he came for entirely different reasons. For a promise he had made to himself. He was fifty years old now, and this was the closest thing he had to someone to care about.
Someone who needed somebody to care about her or she'd go down in flames, and they both knew it.
He spoke briefly to her boss before the older man let himself out, and busied himself with hanging up his jacket on the coat rack by the door. Brittany was still standing at the kitchen counter, sniffling, when he found her there. Jake stood in the doorway for a long moment, just watching the slump of her shoulders, the way she didn't really care if she lived or died. She hadn't given a shit after what had happened in London, either. He'd had to beat the shit out of her for her to understand. Somehow, he knew that this would not be solved that way. Something inside her would not be coming back, no matter what he did.
He was reminded of a line from some musical: 'Nobody ever tells you how they really feel about you until you're dead.' It had been that way with him and House. He could still remember the other man looking at him from the hospital bed, telling him that he trusted him to take care of his wife. The same man who had beaten the hell out of him for touching his wife thirteen years earlier. But House had trusted him. And Jake had been just as angry and sickened by his needless demise. He had been the first one Brittany had told. The one standing by her side at the funeral.
"I'm not sure what we should do with him," she said, while they'd been making funeral arrangements. "Burial, or cremation? I don't know what he would want. He loves it here, but I think he'd want to be with Jackson..."
She'd looked up at him. Jake had thought on it, before the barest hint of a smirk appeared on his face. "Greg likes fire, doesn't he?" he said, and she had honestly laughed, for what had been the last time that he could remember.
"He meant a lot to you too, didn't he?" she'd said after a moment. He'd nodded, just a little. "I guess you could say that," he said. "He was important to me, because you're important to me." Not that he'd ever said that to Greg's face.
Not until the end, anyway. When he'd looked at the other man, and after House had asked him why he cared, snapped, "Because you matter, you son of a bitch."
Jake merely came up behind Brittany and wrapped his arms around her, holding her while she cried. It had used to be that he couldn't stand the sound of her being so emotional. But now, he was used to it, if only because it was all he ever heard from her anymore. A sign that at least she was still alive, even if she didn't want to be. He hadn't told her how much that meant to him. Even now, as the secure leader of his own field office five years on, he still needed her. He couldn't afford to lose somebody else, even though he understood her lack of will. He'd wanted to die, once. Except she hadn't let him go, and now he was just returning the favor.
"How was work?" she asked after a moment.
"I don't think that's important," he replied. "I think I'm just concerned with you."
"I miss the fuck out of him," she said, for what seemed like the eight billionth time.
"I know you do." He held her close, against his body, listening to the abnormality of her heartbeat. The difference in her breathing. "But look at it this way, the bastard is probably haunting you somewhere."
"Well, then you're fucked, because he never liked you," she said, and he heard her laugh for only the second time since her husband had died.
****
Long after he had finally managed to get her to go to bed, clinging to some giant stuffed tiger that Greg had won her at a carnival years ago, Jake found himself sitting at Brittany's kitchen table, thinking. This wasn't the first time he'd been in this position. He'd been custodian of his parents' estate for years; he still owned and maintained the house in Columbia, South Carolina where he had grown up. But that had been different, because there had been nobody else. This time, he'd gotten himself involved, and he knew that he wasn't getting out. Couldn't get out, because it would all go to hell without him.
Maybe in saving her, he was somehow saving himself. Again. He wasn't sure. He'd never been the kind of man to think that much on these things.
He was balancing her checkbook. Managing her finances. Paying her bills, for the most part, and he didn't care. Something inside of him said that he ought to just dump the condo in Orlando and move in with her, except for that she would probably think that it would look like something it wasn't. Which it wasn't, and would never be. Maybe years ago it could have been, but they had both agreed on it, the day he'd been confirmed at Langley. By the time they'd gotten to see each other for the truth, by the time they were willing to be proud of who and what they were, it was 'too little, too late.' They would never, could never be together.
Not even if she wasn't still hung on the man she had married, who wasn't that much older than Jake himself.
They would survive like this. What they had together, neither of them had any way of knowing that it was going to be the only thing keeping them both alive. But they would make this work, somehow. He had needed it, and she had given it. Now she needed it, and he was more than willing to give it.
He found himself looking at their wedding photos, looking at a side of Greg House he'd never seen or maybe not been willing to see. The man who had deeply loved his wife and his son. A man who had cared, and been cared for. The kind of thing that Jake himself would never have. There was some bitterness and jealousy there, but Jake could not find himself to hate the man. House had changed. They had both changed. The difference was that House had taken what he wanted, and Jake had held back. He had no one to blame for that but himself.
He went to check on Brittany again. She'd finally fallen asleep. He dragged the blankets that she'd thrown off up over her, and leaned down to press a soft kiss lightly to her cheek. Standing there, watching her sleep, able to feel the suffering radiating off her. The need to be loved. Where had he felt that before? He stood there, and he glanced at the urn sitting on her dresser. "I'm not going anywhere, you son of a bitch," he said quietly, just before he closed the bedroom door.
He couldn't.
Brittany needed him. He needed her.
Somehow, he didn't think Greg wanted him to, either.
Silently, Jake reopened the bedroom door. He crossed the room and settled on the end of the bed, just sitting there and watching her sleep. Simply staying near her, because that was as close as he was ever going to get to her. Reaching a hand over, he covered one of her hands with his own. Wanting to feel her, know that she was still there, somewhere, under all the pain and the torment she was going through. He couldn't make it stop, but he could make it easier, or so he hoped. He was actually hoping for once in his life. Things would never be the same, for either of them. They didn't have a choice, but to go on living.
"I'm not going anywhere," he said, even though he knew she'd never hear him. "I love you," he forced himself to say, even though he knew he'd never want her to hear.
Some things were better left buried.