House MD Fanfiction

Close, but no cigar

Hilson, death!, 1499 words
By: DarlingHilson (Mycroffed)

House was sitting on a chair, next to a bed. Why? He had always known that this would be coming, it was basically what he had lived towards for the last few months. There was nothing that could've stopped this, they had tried. Oh yes, they had tried. Through radiation and chemo they had gone together, through road trips - yes, plural - and even death. Because House's name was no longer his own, his body no longer House's. For all everyone knew, he really was dead. And dead men tell no tales. Neither do they think, or feel. Yet here he was, thinking and feeling. He squeezed the hand he was holding, trying not to show how distraught he was, because yes, he was. If the owner of this hand died, there was nothing left for him to live for.

This was something else he had been thinking about. He knew the hand owner was going to die one day, rather sooner than later and yet, yet he had still killed himself for the man. He had given up everything and that - especially for House - was not something to be taken lightly. He had had fun those last few months. He had made some wonderful memories. Nobody bothered him, called him with cases that were barely a six - and by that definition not worthy of his attention, it had been just the two of them. Just the two of them on one last crazy road trip, only, simply because they could, because there was nothing else they wanted to do.

The owner of the hand had trouble breathing. The hand slipped out of his and tried to claw at his chest. It didn't work. He was too weak, he barely made it to his stomach. House stepped in and gave the man some more oxygen, to make his passing more bearable. And that was when that first question came up again. Why? It was the base of so many other questions. Why was he here, sitting in an uncomfortable chair, waiting for a man to die? Why did he even care at all? Why did he care enough that he desperately wanted to spend the last five months this man had to live with him? Then he realized that it didn't matter, not really. This was just proof of what people had been trying to tell him all his life. He could love. He was capable of it and this sitting by a dead man's death bed was the ultimate proof.

This wasn't love in the usual concept, like displayed in movies. Boy meets girl, they fall in love and they get married and live happily ever after. No, this was the kind of love that was denied. It was denied its existence even though every action of those two men was overflown with it. It was denied even though everyone with a decent set of brains could figure out what held those two people together. But now, in those last moments, House couldn't help but acknowledge it, because it was there and it was what had kept him on his two legs and out of jail - for most of the time - for almost more than twenty years. It was this love, this unusual connection between two men, who weren't even gay or bi, that brought them here, in this small hospital, in a town nobody knew who they were. And it was now that House needed to say it. He needed to say it one first and last time before the time had run out.

He squeezed the dying man's hand again and made sure he actually looked at the former doctor when he told him he loved him. The man's face grimaced in pain before he completely relaxed and looked almost serene. He smiled a last time before he muttered "took you bloody long enough." The serene expression disappeared again, along with the smile, but House kept seeing it, the last smile of the almost dead man. There were a couple more coughs and wheezing breaths before the man's body went completely silent. A heavy silence fell in the room, only disturbed by the monotone beep of the heart monitor. The doctor who was present didn't dare to move to turn it off, because it felt like actually saying to the universe that this man was dead and House didn't want that, not yet. He grabbed hold of the now completely dead man's hand again and held it tight to his chest, to his heart, because that was what the man had always been for him and House didn't know if he wanted to continue to live with his heart ripped out and not beating in this bed.

After five long minutes, he got up and turned the heart monitor off. He glanced at his watch, cleared his throat and said with a steady voice to everyone who wanted to hear it: "Dr. James Wilson. Time of death: 3.13 am." He had fought bravely, this man, even though it wasn't fighting in the way that House had initially intended when he had refused to tell Wilson that he loved him in that car, now more than five months ago. This man had fought bravely because he had fought for the dignity he wanted - the dignity he deserved! - in his death. He had convinced House in his last dying moments that dying in dignity was possible after all.

House popped a few Vicodin, halfheartedly hoping that he'd start to hallucinate again and that this time the hallucination would be his dead best friend Wilson. The doctors tried to pull the Vicodin out of his hands, but he had lost control, even though that now all seemed so distant. He had started to scream and shout and yell that this wasn't fair, that his heart should be there lying in that bed, all naked and exposed and bleeding. The doctors didn't dare to sedate him, with all the pills he'd been taking, it could very well be lethal. So security - the one security agent the hospital could afford to hire - barged into the room and pulled House away from the dead body of his best friend, the only relationship he hadn't given up on yet. And he was not ready to. The security agent let him go, leaving him to stare up to the front of the hospital and wonder if this was all worth it. He took another three Vicodin and then three more, because they needed to numb this pain in his chest, they needed to numb the pain he was feeling, but they couldn't, but it wasn't physical.

The ex-diagnostician limped towards the closest bench to the hospital, still taking more and more Vicodin. The pain, he thought, it should've been gone by now. He had been taking so many of them that surely, he either should have died already or the feeling that was killing him should have left. Those were a lot of 'should have's, even House realized this. It was then that he realized. He kept taking them, not only because he wanted to stop feeling but also because he wanted to stop being alive in a world without his best friend. Wilson had always been the one to be there for him, no matter what. In sickness and in health. They had gone through sickness and they had gone through pain. Till death do us part.

But House wasn't giving death a chance to separate them. He kept popping his pills, skipping the hope of hallucinations and going straight to the hope to die. He closed his eyes and remembered every happy moment with Wilson, every bad prank, every moment he regretted the words that had come out of his bloody mouth. He laughed and almost reached that same serene expression his friend had had earlier, but not quite. There was a touch of bitterness in his version of it. He had always known that he would come to outlive the oncologist, but that it would only take a few minutes, he had never expected that. After the expression disappeared, there were no coughs, no wheezing breaths, just the body becoming very, very quiet until every muscle just stopped moving. By then the paramedics, who had spotted the man on his bench came rushing towards him, but it was too late. The voice of an unknown man was the one to declare the world that Dr. Gregory House's time of death was 3.23 am, barely ten minutes after his friend.

The two corpses were lead to the morgue of that unknown hospital and the man who was supposed to do the post mortem just couldn't bring himself to cut the two bodied open, so he just left them on those tables for the rest of the night, their hands reaching out towards each other, but not quite touching. Because that had been the story of their relationship: close, but no cigar.