Knots: Silent Night (6/12)
Part One (By Pitza)
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four
Part Five
Being in Wilson’s office makes House a little queasy. He’s not afraid, he’s not thinking about anything other than the patient, but Wilson is. It’s that obvious. His eyes are glassy, as if he’s getting plenty of sleep, but no rest. He needs a haircut. His bangs reach almost to his eyebrows, which is unusual for Wilson. He always looks so tidy.
House doesn’t sit down. He doesn’t want to be tempted to stay, to let this back and forth drift into one of those rambling conversations that they’ll carry on for days in three-minute snippets. It’s way too soon for that.
Wilson is right there, seated behind his desk. For half a second, House misses him with such power that it ought to knock him down, but it doesn’t. He stands near the couch as they talk about anti-virals and the patient’s prognosis. House grips the head of his cane so tightly that his knuckles ache.
His eyes survey the junk that clutters Wilson’s shelves: books, trophies, a few photographs. He focuses on a picture of Wilson and his father, taken on a sunny day, maybe ten years ago. It must have been about the time he got out of med school. They stand arm in arm, both holding golf clubs. Both men are smiling.
Wilson looks like his dad. House remembers the elder Wilson as a great guy, hell of a golfer. That’s why his son plays golf to win.
“I’m not wrong,” he says. He has to concentrate on the present, that’s important.
“I know.” Wilson sounds pleased, but sad. He’s about to say something else, House can feel it. He asks about dinner. House can’t say yes, but he won’t say no. He’s stuck in a spot where he knows what he ought to want, to get far away from Wilson as fast as he can. But what he does want is something else, a middle ground.
Scar tissue. House is waiting for scar tissue.
“Maybe some other time,” he says. Compromise sucks. Compromise means that everybody loses, but that’s all he can offer at this point. He hopes Wilson understands.
For House, Christmas Eve is about standing by, watching the surrounding chaos of all the things that other people want to get done so they can run off to their real lives. What they have, what they want, whatever: it’s all a bunch of noise.
House’s answering machine is flashing. He does not care who called. He’s not in the mood to talk right now. No one who would call him has anything to say that he wants to hear, just clutter that people feel like sharing in December. He has no desire to be a part of it.
He’s thinking about Wilson’s wife. He liked Ellen well enough, though he had no particular need to like her. He doesn’t need to like anybody, and he doesn’t want anybody to like him. Friends just complicate your life.
Ellen was a terrible cook, he remembers; she and Wilson ate out a lot, and House liked that about her. After the first year or so, she worked in the city. He wonders how the sex was, between them. Wilson rarely spoke of it; House supposes that means they had plain, ordinary, married people sex with lights off.
He decides to start a fire, as some kind of twisted nod to the holiday. Christmas is a pagan festival. They were all about fire. Maybe it’s just something to do.
He wads up a bunch of newspaper because he has no kindling. He kicks an ottoman toward the fireplace and sits down to get a couple of logs. They’re light and dry from sitting there the way Stacy stacked them more than a year ago, a half-assed effort to make the place look cheery. A fine layer of dust comes up from the pile as House disturbs it.
He brushes the dull powder from his hands. It leaves pale streaks on his knees in the shape of his fingers.
He finds the fireplace lighter behind the pile of wood and touches the flame to the paper, then he wonders if the flue is open. He’ll find out soon enough.
The wood begins to catch after a little while, and the room does not fill with smoke. Lucky break. He likes this fire. He should have fires more often.
He gets up and grabs a couple of catalogs from the coffee table. He rips pages and moves them over the logs, holding each one as it burns. He feels the flames lift each page and watches the glossy colors and the pretty words light up, then crumble, as they turn black. He thinks about chemistry until his face and hands are too warm too stay there.
He moves on to the couch. The chill in the air settles on his bare arms; he’s surprised at the gooseflesh. He rubs his arms with his hands in an attempt to feel warm again. It’s not working.
He pulls himself up and goes to the kitchen for a glass of water to take his evening pills. House wants to be tired enough to sleep. He’s sick of thinking. He takes two Vicodin, even though his leg isn’t bothering him that much. He hears the wood crackling in the fireplace as he opens the refrigerator. His apartment is too quiet. There’s nothing but church on TV, nothing but cheesy holiday songs on the radio, and he does not feel like making his own music. He hasn’t touched the piano in almost two weeks.
Cuddy’s note from the other night falls to the floor. The muscles in his back protest and he feels a tug in his hamstrings as he bends at the waist. The funny thing is, if she had given him her number, he might call her, just to have somebody to talk to. He is morbidly curious about the number she did give him. She seemed to have no trouble placing what happens between him and Wilson in a clearly defined box. He’s not so sure.
It’s possible that Cuddy made a valid point, talking to somebody more familiar with the basics of sexual assault might help him make up his mind. House has never been a fan of stasis.
“Hotline.” The voice belongs to a woman, young, but not girlish. She sounds somber and professionally concerned. She’s here to help. House almost loses his nerve. He was so sure as he was dialing, speaking is a little more difficult.
“Hi. This is anonymous, right?” he says. “I mean, I don’t have to give you my name and social security number.”
“No sir,” the woman says. Now, she sounds a little nervous, as if she’s talking to her father. He’s not that old. “The hotline is completely confidential, you don’t have to tell me your name unless you want to, and I can’t report anything you say. ”
“OK, good.” House exhales, and nods, as if he is sitting across from this young woman. “So, can you tell me something about how you know that you’ve been sexually assaulted?”
“The law in New Jersey says--”
“I don’t care what the law says, I want to know what you think. Do you people have some kind of checklist?”
“Sir, do you think you were sexually assaulted?”
“Are you working from a script?” he asks.
“I’ve been trained to answer calls from people who are concerned about sexual assault, sir.” The woman sounds annoyed and defensive.
“Great, that’s why I called. My boss thinks that I was sexually assaulted, but I have my doubts.” House is proud of himself for having summed up the whole thing so neatly.
The woman sighs. House wants to know what her name is, but he isn’t about to ask. She probably wouldn’t tell him, even if he did.
“The way we handle calls is that if a person claims to have been raped, we believe them,” she says. “As I was about to say, New Jersey law defines sexual assault as forcible sexual contact.”
“See, that’s where I get confused. He didn’t exactly force me. I decided to get into bed with him of my own free will,” he says. “My choice. I could have just left him there.”
“If you said ‘no’ at any time, that’s rape.”
“I didn’t,” House says. “I didn’t say anything.”
“That’s the same thing as saying no,” the woman tells him.
“Do you really believe that?” he says. “If you think about it, silence is the same thing as saying yes.”
“No, it’s not.” The woman pauses. House can almost hear her attempt to form an argument. “I’m assuming that you had a relationship with this person prior to the assault?”
He wonders how much it matters. “Not that kind of relationship, he’s my friend. I--” He was about to explain to a random stranger exactly how he feels about Wilson, and the thing is, if somebody asked that question directly, House wouldn’t know how to answer. “I don’t know if I could have got away from him, after things started to get weird.”
The issue is that he does not know if he wanted to get away. He knew that Wilson wanted to fuck him, he said as much on the drive home, but House figured he wouldn’t be in any kind of shape to follow through.
“What do you mean by ‘weird’?” she asks. “Do you want to tell me what happened?”
House doesn’t, but he tries. He’s fine until he gets to the part about Wilson pressing a knee against his bad leg, pressing down on his shoulders, smashing his face against a pillow. Wilson didn’t mean to do any of this. He was too drunk to know what he was doing. House thought he was going to suffocate.
He gulps for air.
“I’m sorry,” he pants. “I shouldn’t have called you.”
“Sir, please don’t hang up.” She sounds desperate to keep him on the line.
“Greg,” he says. “My name is Greg.”
“Greg,” she repeats. “Look, if you were physically distressed, that’s aggravated sexual assault. It’s a first degree felony,” the girl tells him. She has recovered her confidence, and she’s back on book. “I really think you should report this assault. I know that’s not an easy thing to do, but this sounds like a good case. You could make a difference.”
He looks at the stacks of mail on the table in front of him. He’s let it go too long. Maybe he should burn it. “You’re a law student, aren’t you?”
“First year, at Rutgers. How did you know that?” she says.
House smiles to keep himself from laughing. That figures. “My ex is a lawyer. You’ve got the self-righteous patter down. Congratulations.” He pauses for a second. “You think this is a case, but I think that what happened to me is nothing more than sex that shouldn’t have happened.
“Rape is not about sex!” She is emphatic about this, which makes sense. “The actor uses sex as a weapon against the victim. It didn’t happen because your friend wanted to have sex with you, it happened because he wanted to hurt you.”
“Yeah, he hurt me, but there’s a lot more to it than that,” House says. “Don’t worry, you’ll figure out that lousy sex isn’t actionable some time before you get to be a junior assistant district attorney.”
House studies the dark wood around his fireplace. His eyes move over the carvings and the screen, to the pokers and brooms in their brass stand, and he focuses on the flame. He grabs a pad of paper and a pen. At the top of the page he writes Wilson’s name in big letters, draws a thick line underneath, and writes words as they come to him.
Symptoms. He has to know the symptoms before he can identify the disease.
The last year was hard on him, and it seems like Wilson was with him every minute, going through the big setbacks and the small victories as if they were his own. That can’t have been easy. A twinge runs through his leg; it registers as guilt. He never asked for devotion, not from anybody. He never asked Wilson to stay, never expected that he would, but at the same time, he has to admit that he wouldn’t have made it without somebody.
Stacy was the one who forced him to live, but Wilson saved his life. House knows that, even if he never said so.
The effort cost Wilson, too much. House didn’t know much about his first marriage, except that it might as well have been over before it started. What he does know is that the second marriage was for love. James and Ellen were well suited, and he thought nobody would be good enough to marry his best friend. Ellen was independent, she was smart, and she was a realist. That’s why House thought she was all right.
Why did she move out in July? Suddenly, House needs to know. Was there something, some night she wasn’t in the mood and Wilson pressed the point a little too hard, and ordinary sex with the lights off turned into something savage?
Her departure came without warning: one day, about a week after House returned to work, Wilson came into his office, clearly upset. They spent an hour getting a few pieces of the story out in the open, then came back here and drank themselves blind.
Wilson passed out on the floor between the couch and the coffee table. House tossed a blanket over him; even in the middle of the summer, his apartment gets cold at night.
All Wilson would say when House asked what happened was that he did something incredibly stupid. That something, it could have been anything. It could have been a pattern that House missed.
He doesn’t know if being the only one to suffer at Wilson’s hands would be better or worse. It’s a singular moment of clarity, but it fades, leaving only trouble in its wake.
He could have looked harder, or more closely. That’s what he does: he peels away the lies until the truth comes to light. That’s how he solves his puzzles. Every word Wilson has ever said to him must be called into question.
Everybody, everybody lies. They lie to each other, and they lie to themselves. They’re human, he and Wilson both. They can’t help themselves. Maybe all of this was inevitable. House gets off the couch, he doesn’t want to sit any more. He limps back and forth around the living room. It’s not pacing, but it has the same effect.
The lingering chemicals in his bloodstream fight with the oncoming Vicodin. He needs to focus. He catches himself pinching the bridge of his nose. It’s one of Wilson’s gestures.
He curses bitterly as he lights a cigarette, and the nicotine distracts him. He’ll know it’s time to lay off the smokes when he stops feeling. His head circles rather than spins, and he knows he’s cutting it close.
He wants another hypothesis, so what if Wilson’s wife got tired of waiting for an absentee husband who spent every minute, spare or not, prodding his gimpy friend to walk with a half-dead leg. What if she decided her man wasn’t coming home and just gave up? That’s so much more likely that House wants to slap himself because he didn’t consider it first.
What if those days and hours added up to be the incredibly stupid thing? Wilson would be justified in placing blame for the breakdown of his marriage in what’s left of House’s lap.
‘If’ is the hardest word, not ‘sorry.’ If House is correct, he is sorry. He never meant for any of this to happen, but intent can’t absolve him, any more than it absolves Wilson.
House takes a deep breath and lets it out. His head feels right on his neck and shoulders. He’s right. He knows he’s right.
He’s always right. This is good. He knows what happened. Anger met guilt. Obsession met obligation. Add sexual frustration, a liberal amount of booze and a few barbs? Spontaneous combustion.
It all makes sense now. It was nobody’s fault. He wants to tell Wilson, let him know that they’re going to be OK. He’s not nervous as he makes this call. He’s fine, or at least he’s getting there.
Wilson does not respond, not even to a page. House is surprised and disappointed. This is probably better, he thinks. It’s Christmas, and even though the day signifies nothing to them…
Thinking of himself and Wilson as plural, as a one made of two, is so automatic to House that he never stops to wonder why he does it. Before now, he never had to. One is less than two. It was always easier. Two wasn’t any harder to deal with than one, really. House doesn’t need friends, but he needs somebody he doesn’t have to think about so much.
Besides, blowing off busybodies that want to help, telling them that being alone doesn’t bother him is much easier when they’re wrong, when solitary is a choice.
He turns on the TV. There’s a choir singing on PBS. A woman’s voice stands out, rich and dark. He recognizes music of Handel immediately. Fucking great. He won’t be able to do much better than that.
He wonders whether wishing or praying is more pathetic. At least when you wish, you know nothing will come of it. He’s heard about people who truly believe that their prayers will be answered.
House doesn’t know how to pray, so he wishes.
He watches the fire as it subsides. As the televised concert ends, he covers the glowing coals with a last sheet of paper.
It rests there for a minute, maybe more; crinkles from the intense heat.
The page and the words he wrote catch, flame, and die.
Part Seven
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four
Part Five
Being in Wilson’s office makes House a little queasy. He’s not afraid, he’s not thinking about anything other than the patient, but Wilson is. It’s that obvious. His eyes are glassy, as if he’s getting plenty of sleep, but no rest. He needs a haircut. His bangs reach almost to his eyebrows, which is unusual for Wilson. He always looks so tidy.
House doesn’t sit down. He doesn’t want to be tempted to stay, to let this back and forth drift into one of those rambling conversations that they’ll carry on for days in three-minute snippets. It’s way too soon for that.
Wilson is right there, seated behind his desk. For half a second, House misses him with such power that it ought to knock him down, but it doesn’t. He stands near the couch as they talk about anti-virals and the patient’s prognosis. House grips the head of his cane so tightly that his knuckles ache.
His eyes survey the junk that clutters Wilson’s shelves: books, trophies, a few photographs. He focuses on a picture of Wilson and his father, taken on a sunny day, maybe ten years ago. It must have been about the time he got out of med school. They stand arm in arm, both holding golf clubs. Both men are smiling.
Wilson looks like his dad. House remembers the elder Wilson as a great guy, hell of a golfer. That’s why his son plays golf to win.
“I’m not wrong,” he says. He has to concentrate on the present, that’s important.
“I know.” Wilson sounds pleased, but sad. He’s about to say something else, House can feel it. He asks about dinner. House can’t say yes, but he won’t say no. He’s stuck in a spot where he knows what he ought to want, to get far away from Wilson as fast as he can. But what he does want is something else, a middle ground.
Scar tissue. House is waiting for scar tissue.
“Maybe some other time,” he says. Compromise sucks. Compromise means that everybody loses, but that’s all he can offer at this point. He hopes Wilson understands.
For House, Christmas Eve is about standing by, watching the surrounding chaos of all the things that other people want to get done so they can run off to their real lives. What they have, what they want, whatever: it’s all a bunch of noise.
House’s answering machine is flashing. He does not care who called. He’s not in the mood to talk right now. No one who would call him has anything to say that he wants to hear, just clutter that people feel like sharing in December. He has no desire to be a part of it.
He’s thinking about Wilson’s wife. He liked Ellen well enough, though he had no particular need to like her. He doesn’t need to like anybody, and he doesn’t want anybody to like him. Friends just complicate your life.
Ellen was a terrible cook, he remembers; she and Wilson ate out a lot, and House liked that about her. After the first year or so, she worked in the city. He wonders how the sex was, between them. Wilson rarely spoke of it; House supposes that means they had plain, ordinary, married people sex with lights off.
He decides to start a fire, as some kind of twisted nod to the holiday. Christmas is a pagan festival. They were all about fire. Maybe it’s just something to do.
He wads up a bunch of newspaper because he has no kindling. He kicks an ottoman toward the fireplace and sits down to get a couple of logs. They’re light and dry from sitting there the way Stacy stacked them more than a year ago, a half-assed effort to make the place look cheery. A fine layer of dust comes up from the pile as House disturbs it.
He brushes the dull powder from his hands. It leaves pale streaks on his knees in the shape of his fingers.
He finds the fireplace lighter behind the pile of wood and touches the flame to the paper, then he wonders if the flue is open. He’ll find out soon enough.
The wood begins to catch after a little while, and the room does not fill with smoke. Lucky break. He likes this fire. He should have fires more often.
He gets up and grabs a couple of catalogs from the coffee table. He rips pages and moves them over the logs, holding each one as it burns. He feels the flames lift each page and watches the glossy colors and the pretty words light up, then crumble, as they turn black. He thinks about chemistry until his face and hands are too warm too stay there.
He moves on to the couch. The chill in the air settles on his bare arms; he’s surprised at the gooseflesh. He rubs his arms with his hands in an attempt to feel warm again. It’s not working.
He pulls himself up and goes to the kitchen for a glass of water to take his evening pills. House wants to be tired enough to sleep. He’s sick of thinking. He takes two Vicodin, even though his leg isn’t bothering him that much. He hears the wood crackling in the fireplace as he opens the refrigerator. His apartment is too quiet. There’s nothing but church on TV, nothing but cheesy holiday songs on the radio, and he does not feel like making his own music. He hasn’t touched the piano in almost two weeks.
Cuddy’s note from the other night falls to the floor. The muscles in his back protest and he feels a tug in his hamstrings as he bends at the waist. The funny thing is, if she had given him her number, he might call her, just to have somebody to talk to. He is morbidly curious about the number she did give him. She seemed to have no trouble placing what happens between him and Wilson in a clearly defined box. He’s not so sure.
It’s possible that Cuddy made a valid point, talking to somebody more familiar with the basics of sexual assault might help him make up his mind. House has never been a fan of stasis.
“Hotline.” The voice belongs to a woman, young, but not girlish. She sounds somber and professionally concerned. She’s here to help. House almost loses his nerve. He was so sure as he was dialing, speaking is a little more difficult.
“Hi. This is anonymous, right?” he says. “I mean, I don’t have to give you my name and social security number.”
“No sir,” the woman says. Now, she sounds a little nervous, as if she’s talking to her father. He’s not that old. “The hotline is completely confidential, you don’t have to tell me your name unless you want to, and I can’t report anything you say. ”
“OK, good.” House exhales, and nods, as if he is sitting across from this young woman. “So, can you tell me something about how you know that you’ve been sexually assaulted?”
“The law in New Jersey says--”
“I don’t care what the law says, I want to know what you think. Do you people have some kind of checklist?”
“Sir, do you think you were sexually assaulted?”
“Are you working from a script?” he asks.
“I’ve been trained to answer calls from people who are concerned about sexual assault, sir.” The woman sounds annoyed and defensive.
“Great, that’s why I called. My boss thinks that I was sexually assaulted, but I have my doubts.” House is proud of himself for having summed up the whole thing so neatly.
The woman sighs. House wants to know what her name is, but he isn’t about to ask. She probably wouldn’t tell him, even if he did.
“The way we handle calls is that if a person claims to have been raped, we believe them,” she says. “As I was about to say, New Jersey law defines sexual assault as forcible sexual contact.”
“See, that’s where I get confused. He didn’t exactly force me. I decided to get into bed with him of my own free will,” he says. “My choice. I could have just left him there.”
“If you said ‘no’ at any time, that’s rape.”
“I didn’t,” House says. “I didn’t say anything.”
“That’s the same thing as saying no,” the woman tells him.
“Do you really believe that?” he says. “If you think about it, silence is the same thing as saying yes.”
“No, it’s not.” The woman pauses. House can almost hear her attempt to form an argument. “I’m assuming that you had a relationship with this person prior to the assault?”
He wonders how much it matters. “Not that kind of relationship, he’s my friend. I--” He was about to explain to a random stranger exactly how he feels about Wilson, and the thing is, if somebody asked that question directly, House wouldn’t know how to answer. “I don’t know if I could have got away from him, after things started to get weird.”
The issue is that he does not know if he wanted to get away. He knew that Wilson wanted to fuck him, he said as much on the drive home, but House figured he wouldn’t be in any kind of shape to follow through.
“What do you mean by ‘weird’?” she asks. “Do you want to tell me what happened?”
House doesn’t, but he tries. He’s fine until he gets to the part about Wilson pressing a knee against his bad leg, pressing down on his shoulders, smashing his face against a pillow. Wilson didn’t mean to do any of this. He was too drunk to know what he was doing. House thought he was going to suffocate.
He gulps for air.
“I’m sorry,” he pants. “I shouldn’t have called you.”
“Sir, please don’t hang up.” She sounds desperate to keep him on the line.
“Greg,” he says. “My name is Greg.”
“Greg,” she repeats. “Look, if you were physically distressed, that’s aggravated sexual assault. It’s a first degree felony,” the girl tells him. She has recovered her confidence, and she’s back on book. “I really think you should report this assault. I know that’s not an easy thing to do, but this sounds like a good case. You could make a difference.”
He looks at the stacks of mail on the table in front of him. He’s let it go too long. Maybe he should burn it. “You’re a law student, aren’t you?”
“First year, at Rutgers. How did you know that?” she says.
House smiles to keep himself from laughing. That figures. “My ex is a lawyer. You’ve got the self-righteous patter down. Congratulations.” He pauses for a second. “You think this is a case, but I think that what happened to me is nothing more than sex that shouldn’t have happened.
“Rape is not about sex!” She is emphatic about this, which makes sense. “The actor uses sex as a weapon against the victim. It didn’t happen because your friend wanted to have sex with you, it happened because he wanted to hurt you.”
“Yeah, he hurt me, but there’s a lot more to it than that,” House says. “Don’t worry, you’ll figure out that lousy sex isn’t actionable some time before you get to be a junior assistant district attorney.”
House studies the dark wood around his fireplace. His eyes move over the carvings and the screen, to the pokers and brooms in their brass stand, and he focuses on the flame. He grabs a pad of paper and a pen. At the top of the page he writes Wilson’s name in big letters, draws a thick line underneath, and writes words as they come to him.
Symptoms. He has to know the symptoms before he can identify the disease.
The last year was hard on him, and it seems like Wilson was with him every minute, going through the big setbacks and the small victories as if they were his own. That can’t have been easy. A twinge runs through his leg; it registers as guilt. He never asked for devotion, not from anybody. He never asked Wilson to stay, never expected that he would, but at the same time, he has to admit that he wouldn’t have made it without somebody.
Stacy was the one who forced him to live, but Wilson saved his life. House knows that, even if he never said so.
The effort cost Wilson, too much. House didn’t know much about his first marriage, except that it might as well have been over before it started. What he does know is that the second marriage was for love. James and Ellen were well suited, and he thought nobody would be good enough to marry his best friend. Ellen was independent, she was smart, and she was a realist. That’s why House thought she was all right.
Why did she move out in July? Suddenly, House needs to know. Was there something, some night she wasn’t in the mood and Wilson pressed the point a little too hard, and ordinary sex with the lights off turned into something savage?
Her departure came without warning: one day, about a week after House returned to work, Wilson came into his office, clearly upset. They spent an hour getting a few pieces of the story out in the open, then came back here and drank themselves blind.
Wilson passed out on the floor between the couch and the coffee table. House tossed a blanket over him; even in the middle of the summer, his apartment gets cold at night.
All Wilson would say when House asked what happened was that he did something incredibly stupid. That something, it could have been anything. It could have been a pattern that House missed.
He doesn’t know if being the only one to suffer at Wilson’s hands would be better or worse. It’s a singular moment of clarity, but it fades, leaving only trouble in its wake.
He could have looked harder, or more closely. That’s what he does: he peels away the lies until the truth comes to light. That’s how he solves his puzzles. Every word Wilson has ever said to him must be called into question.
Everybody, everybody lies. They lie to each other, and they lie to themselves. They’re human, he and Wilson both. They can’t help themselves. Maybe all of this was inevitable. House gets off the couch, he doesn’t want to sit any more. He limps back and forth around the living room. It’s not pacing, but it has the same effect.
The lingering chemicals in his bloodstream fight with the oncoming Vicodin. He needs to focus. He catches himself pinching the bridge of his nose. It’s one of Wilson’s gestures.
He curses bitterly as he lights a cigarette, and the nicotine distracts him. He’ll know it’s time to lay off the smokes when he stops feeling. His head circles rather than spins, and he knows he’s cutting it close.
He wants another hypothesis, so what if Wilson’s wife got tired of waiting for an absentee husband who spent every minute, spare or not, prodding his gimpy friend to walk with a half-dead leg. What if she decided her man wasn’t coming home and just gave up? That’s so much more likely that House wants to slap himself because he didn’t consider it first.
What if those days and hours added up to be the incredibly stupid thing? Wilson would be justified in placing blame for the breakdown of his marriage in what’s left of House’s lap.
‘If’ is the hardest word, not ‘sorry.’ If House is correct, he is sorry. He never meant for any of this to happen, but intent can’t absolve him, any more than it absolves Wilson.
House takes a deep breath and lets it out. His head feels right on his neck and shoulders. He’s right. He knows he’s right.
He’s always right. This is good. He knows what happened. Anger met guilt. Obsession met obligation. Add sexual frustration, a liberal amount of booze and a few barbs? Spontaneous combustion.
It all makes sense now. It was nobody’s fault. He wants to tell Wilson, let him know that they’re going to be OK. He’s not nervous as he makes this call. He’s fine, or at least he’s getting there.
Wilson does not respond, not even to a page. House is surprised and disappointed. This is probably better, he thinks. It’s Christmas, and even though the day signifies nothing to them…
Thinking of himself and Wilson as plural, as a one made of two, is so automatic to House that he never stops to wonder why he does it. Before now, he never had to. One is less than two. It was always easier. Two wasn’t any harder to deal with than one, really. House doesn’t need friends, but he needs somebody he doesn’t have to think about so much.
Besides, blowing off busybodies that want to help, telling them that being alone doesn’t bother him is much easier when they’re wrong, when solitary is a choice.
He turns on the TV. There’s a choir singing on PBS. A woman’s voice stands out, rich and dark. He recognizes music of Handel immediately. Fucking great. He won’t be able to do much better than that.
He wonders whether wishing or praying is more pathetic. At least when you wish, you know nothing will come of it. He’s heard about people who truly believe that their prayers will be answered.
House doesn’t know how to pray, so he wishes.
He watches the fire as it subsides. As the televised concert ends, he covers the glowing coals with a last sheet of paper.
It rests there for a minute, maybe more; crinkles from the intense heat.
The page and the words he wrote catch, flame, and die.
Part Seven