Father son
Title: Father son
Author:
snark_b8itRating: PG - 13
Character/Paring: Gen
Summary: John House reflects on his son's life, when unfortunate circumstances force them together.
“Where are you going?” John asked as Greg passed him. He was sitting on a bench outside the hospice. His son turned to him, seemingly surprised to see him sitting there.
“What are you doing? You’ll freeze your ass off out here.”
John watched the steam rise up from his coffee cup, the snow had stopped falling but it was still chilly. “I needed some fresh air.”
Greg stared at him for a few moments, it seemed like he was about to say something, but then lost the nerve. He dropped his gaze to the floor.
“I have a friend who lives in New York, I need to go and see him about something, I’ll be back soon.”
John bristled at his son’s words as he watched him go, he couldn’t believe it. Greg had only just got here, and he was leaving so soon.
“Your mother is desperately sick and you’re running off to go see a friend,” John said accusingly, not bothering to hide the disgust in his voice.
Greg stopped again and turned to face him, irritation rippled through his expression. “Yeah, I came here to party really, figured I should at least show my face,” he quipped bitterly, letting his eyebrows rise up with his punch line.
John stood angrily and placed a hand on his hip, “Don’t make a joke of this, can’t you leave the sarcasm in New Jersey for one night? It’s entirely inappropriate and you know it.”
“No, what’s inappropriate is your assumption that I’m cutting out on Mom, figures you’d think that,” his words tailed off quietly and he dropped his gaze again; he never could hold eye contact with him for long.
John knew he should stop, but Greg was missing the point, and John hadn’t had a decent night’s sleep in a week, his emotions were fraught. None of this was about him, or them, it was about Blythe. But whatever was going on, it always seemed to come back to Greg’s resentment of him and he couldn’t understand why his son couldn’t leave the past in the past.
“What is it with you and this attitude? Whenever we see you, you act like you had the worst childhood a kid could have had. Get over it, your mother is dying; can’t you just leave your crap at the door for one night?”
“I don’t want to do this now, go inside and just leave it,” Greg said, voice shaky and low; it seemed like he was desperately trying to swallow something down. But John wasn’t backing off.
“You should be thankful you had a roof over your head, and two loving parents, there are kids out there who get abused…”
Greg’s head snapped up and he cut John off. “Abused? Look up abuse, look it up,” he shouted. “Not all abuse is physical; you know what else is considered abuse these days? Unjustified blame, continuous criticism, refusal to value, inconsistent boundaries, refusal to acknowledge achievements…”
John shot a nervous look toward the entrance; his son’s voice seemed to be getting louder with each word.
“…What do you call making a thirteen year old sleep in the yard because he was ten minutes late home from a party, if that’s not abuse, then what is that?”
“Discipline,” John said strongly, eyes whipping back from the door to his son.
Greg laughed and shook his head, like it was the funniest thing he’d heard all week.
“You’re unbelievable,” he said shaking his head. “I’m going, and I don’t have to explain myself to you,” he said resentfully. He then turned and headed for the hire car parked at the front of the lot.
John watched him go, almost frozen to the spot. He felt winded. He couldn’t believe the things that had come out of his son’s mouth, that he thought those things about him.
He rubbed his eyes, they were sore with tiredness. Weirdly, the tight tension that had been in-between his shoulder blades since his son had arrived, was gone in an instant: the inevitable argument had happened. He dumped his coffee cup in the trash can by the entrance and went back inside. Allowing himself one thing at least, two hours before a cross word was exchanged, was pretty good for them, he supposed.
He went back to his wife’s room, wondering if Greg had ever given any thought to how hard it had been to raise him, when he’d been flinging his accusations. If he realized how hard it was to impress anything onto someone too stubborn to listen to a word another human being said to him.
His wife was asleep again when he returned; she’d been sleeping so much since she’d been admitted. He wasn’t sure if it was because of the new medication she was on or not. It was something he could have asked Greg, had he still been here.
He sat beside Blythe’s bed and found himself picking apart the past again; it seemed to be all he could do tonight.
~
The first thing John had been taught in the marines was not to lie, cheat or steal, and equally, not to tolerate those actions from others.
He was staring at the framed Marine Corps emblem that hung above his fireplace, a silver eagle sitting on top of the globe.
The words ‘Semper Fidelis’ sat above the eagle. ‘Always faithful’: just looking at it calmed him. And he needed to calm down because he was having a hard time dealing with his son right now.
Greg had been caught cheating. He was the smartest damn kid in his class and he’d cheated in a vital examination. John could not for the life of him understand why.
The shame burned his cheeks and he thanked God for the distance between Greg’s campus and his home. He’d never laid a finger on his son, but if he’d been close enough when the phone call had come in from the Dean, he’d have gone there, and he’d have broken a promise to his wife he’d made the day his son was born.
He was gripping the handle of the telephone tightly in his hand. He was very surprised Greg had bothered to call home, considering he must have known the Dean had already called here.
“I’ve never felt so ashamed of you, as I do right now,” John said; he wasn’t sure if his voice was quivering with upset or pure anger, probably a little of both.
“I’ll get over it,” was the bold reply.
“Who do you think you’re talking to?” John snapped, utterly surprised at his son’s brazen candor. He couldn’t believe the change in him since he’d been at college.
“I don’t know why you care; you never wanted me here anyway,” Greg replied calmly.
“You’ve got a nerve, giving me this attitude after what you’ve done. You’ve broken your mother’s heart,” John said, barely keeping the anger in his voice at controlled levels. Finally, his son seemed to find the good grace to acknowledge his actions. The mention of his mother had rendered him mute.
“You’re smart Greg, you’ve always been smart. You don’t need to cheat. You know that’s the worst thing about this.”
“Whatever I do you’ll be disappointed, so what does it matter?”
“Are you trying to say this is my fault?” John asked.
“No,” his son said, dragging the word out. “I’m saying you’re never satisfied, so why are you so pissed?”
John exhaled an angry breath and closed his eyes tight. “If you cuss at me one more time Gregory, I don’t care how many miles are between us, I will come down to that college and do something I probably should have done a long time ago. Knock some sense into you.”
There was silence on the other end of the phone again. But there was no apology.
Eventually Greg spoke again. “What’s happening next week, with Christmas and everything?” he asked, the audacity finally disappearing from his tone.
“We’ve decided you should stay there; stay and think about what you’ve done,” John said, hoping the rejection would make his son really think about the shame he’d brought on his family.
“We? Don’t you mean you?” Greg said quietly.
“If you come home next week, I don’t know what I’ll do. I’m so mad at you right now,” John stopped and took a deep breath. “I think it’s best for us all if you stay there this year.”
There was a brief pause, and then his son offered a quiet, “Fine,” before hanging up the phone.
~ ~ ~
True to his word, Greg was back within the hour. He’d re-appeared in Blythe’s room, when John returned back from a visit to the restroom.
John didn’t notice it at first: it wasn’t until he heard the sound that he realized why Greg had left earlier in the evening. He’d got a guitar from somewhere; it was an old battered thing. It looked a lot like the one Greg had owned when he’d been a teenager.
He was strumming it quietly. John didn’t know what the song was, it sounded like blues maybe, but he wasn’t sure. He also couldn’t tell if Blythe was awake or not, but the gesture on his son’s part was a nice one, all the same.
He was barely hitting the strings, tickling them quietly, because she probably was asleep.
There was something so tender and innocent in doing that for his mother. John suddenly felt awful for berating his son in the parking lot. He despised that he still felt this way sometimes; feelings of guilt when he’d jumped to the wrong conclusions.
He sat down outside the room again, letting them have their private moment, and the truth was he needed a few moments to regenerate. He could feel himself nodding off, his body trying to steal some precious moments of sleep. Greg was here now, so if anything happened… he shut his eyes, and decided a ten minute nap wouldn’t hurt. The surroundings, and the smell and the atmosphere were probably what set it off; he started dreaming about the last time he’d been in a hospital before Blythe had got sick.
~
There were only two people in the waiting room including himself, and John found a slight comfort in the fact that it seemed he wasn’t the only one in the dog house for having an opinion. Stacy, Greg’s girlfriend, with black squibs of eyeliner smudged around her eyes, was also in here, and had probably been sitting here longer than he had.
Only Greg’s mother and his friend James could manage to stay in the room longer than ten minutes.
John had managed about five minutes, before the conversation had disintegrated into a blazing argument.
He’d only tried to get his son to see that things could be worse, he could be dead; what Stacy had done, was save his life and he was acting like she’d torn his life apart. This approach had not gone down well.
The whole drive from New York, he’d had a sick feeling in his stomach. He’d been told his son was very ill and that they might not make it in time.
So, to see him awake and conscious when they’d arrived: he’d forgotten what relief like that felt like. Real, washing relief, like dodging a bullet, having something almost lost forever then snatching it back.
“You did the right thing,” John said to the only other occupant of the room.
Her head juddered up, like he’d dragged her from her deepest darkest thoughts.
“He doesn’t see it that way,” she said, wiping some of the tears from underneath her eyes; her voice sounded raw.
“So what’s new? Since when has Greg seen anything the way everyone else does?”
She forced out a weak smile and nodded.
“He’ll come around in time, he’s alive because of you, and he’s got to realize that eventually.”
He didn’t believe his own words really, and he could tell she didn’t believe them either, but he felt sorry for her, and didn’t know what else to say.
James entered the room and stood by the door.
“They’ve just given him some stronger medication; he’s a lot calmer now. Maybe you should go in again?”
John looked up at his son’s friend, he seemed like a nice enough guy, couldn’t do enough for him and his wife since they’d arrived.
“He said he doesn’t want to see me, I don’t want to upset him again, James,” John said unsurely.
“Don’t take anything he says to heart. He’s had a rough few days and he’s in a lot of pain, he’s not thinking clearly,” James offered, his words straining to explain away his friend’s behavior.
Blythe appeared by his side and smiled at him. John supposed he could try one more time; he went back into the room. Greg looked completely out of it, his face was pale and eyes were half closed and ringed with red.
For the first time since Greg had been a small boy, John desperately wanted to hug his son, take him in his arms and tell him how much he loved him.
But he couldn’t do it, the nerves in his body pulled taut at the very idea and the uncertainty about what would happen, and surely no-one would be more surprised at such a thing than his son.
But seeing him lying in the hospital bed, hooked up to a bunch of monitors, desperately ill, John wanted to tell him it would be all right, that he was his son and that he loved him very much. Why was it such a hard thing to do?
They’d never really had that sort of a relationship, they didn’t hug, they’d never said the word love, and they barely shared the same air space these days before Greg clammed up or left the room. They didn’t know how to talk to each other, they’d never known how to.
He took the chair by the side of the bed and stared at the floor, trying to find some words that wouldn’t make his son angry again.
“I haven’t got the energy for round two, so why don’t you go back out there and congratulate Stacy some more for screwing up my entire life,” Greg muttered groggily, his words slurring together. He seemed to be fighting a battle to keep his eyes open.
“She saved your life,” John said, quietly. “And I’m glad she did.”
Greg opened his eyes a little more, and observed him, with such a look of contempt he had to look away.
“I hate you,” Greg said in a whisper, it was so quiet and fragile John was surprised the words didn’t fall to the floor before reaching him.
But he’d heard: John felt them and they stung. He found it strange that it had taken Greg forty years to utter the words. He’d been expecting it much sooner
It wasn’t a revelation, he’d known it for a long time, but the words still impacted hard, now they were out in the air. He let the comment sit between them for a few moments. He was still going to say what he’d come in here to say, whether his son believed him or not.
“Well, that’s a shame Greg,” John said softly. “Because I only ever truly loved two things on this earth, one of them is your mother and the other is you. If I could swap places with you right now and give you your leg back I’d do it in a heart beat.”
Greg seemed slightly surprised, in his medicated haze, like he hadn’t quite heard right. Then he diverted his gaze and swallowed down whatever words he’d had left.
John got up and left the room then. If his son didn’t want him there he wasn’t going to force his presence on him. Not in his condition. He’d said what he’d wanted to say. He doubted Greg would believe or even remember the conversation anyway, considering the amount of pain medication in his system.
~
“Dad?” John jerked awake, blinking. Greg was standing over him shaking his arm lightly; he must have dozed off. He sat up in his seat and rubbed his eyes.
And then he noticed the gravity of the stare his son was giving him, and that his eyes were slightly red. John looked past him into Blythe’s room.
“What happened?”
“You were asleep,” was all his son could say, he stared unsurely at him. He didn’t need to say anything else.
John got to his feet and went quickly into his wife’s room; he took hold of her hand and sat beside her on the bed. Her eyes were closed, she looked peaceful. But her chest was no longer rising and falling slowly. When he squeezed her hand, she no longer squeezed back.
John could sense Greg was standing in the doorway behind him. There were a few minutes of silence before anyone spoke again.
“She’s gone to a better place,” Greg forced out eventually; he sounded awkward, like he didn’t accept his own words.
“You don’t believe that,” John said sorrowfully, as he brushed a finger lightly down the side of her cheek.
“Doesn’t matter what I believe, does it?”
He’d been prepared, he’d known this was coming, but he still was taken back at how much it hurt, and he felt like he couldn’t breathe. He could feel tears welling up in his eyes, he really didn’t want his son to see him cry, but then, he didn’t want him to feel like he had to leave the room either, he’d lost someone important too. And he wanted him to be there.
“I’ll leave you alone,” Greg said quietly, clearly sensing what was about to happen.
“No,” John said, shooting him a quick look, he swallowed hard and looked back at his wife, “Stay, please?”
Greg nodded, he then came over and stood beside his father.
They didn’t say anything else, grief was a personal thing, and people expressed it in different ways.
But when the tears did come John was surprised to feel his son’s hand on his shoulder, squeezing it softly, as he quickly wiped the moisture away from his eyes.
Sometimes it wasn’t what you said, if you weren’t very good with words, it was what you did. And for that moment, it was enough.