Chapter Text
~NOW~
She was only thirty.
Thirty.
And pregnant.
And she had coffee with him this morning.
Wilson sat slouched on the plastic chair, elbows on his knees, hands laced together so tight his knuckles looked like bleached pebbles. His lab coat was wrinkled, smeared with some stranger’s blood, though he didn’t know when that happened. His pager had long stopped buzzing. Nothing existed beyond the heavy silence in his chest and the faint beeping of some monitor behind the trauma curtains.
Violet’s curtain was still drawn. Trauma 3.
They always draw the curtain when there’s nothing left to see. Nothing you can fix. When what lies beneath it becomes evidence, not a person.
Wilson stared at it. Stared so hard it almost wavered like heat on pavement. His ears rang. He couldn’t remember the last time he blinked.
“She was fine this morning.”
That’s what he’d said. Repeated. Clung to.
“She was fine.”
She laughed. She called House an emotionally constipated Neanderthal. She dunked a biscotti in her coffee, tapped it against the mug with an air of ceremony like she was at a royal tea party, then grinned at him when it fell apart and sank.
She said she was going to talk to House tonight. “No more avoidance,” she’d said, rolling her eyes but hopeful. “I’m not afraid of him. I want answers.”
Wilson told her, gently, to go easy. That House had been… strange, recently. Off his axis.
She had smiled and said, “So am I.”
Now she was gone.
Just like that.
Something in Wilson had gone with her. A fault line had opened wide beneath his feet and swallowed all the meaning in the world.
Violet Rowan. House’s wife. Wilson’s best friend. His secret safe, his emotional lighthouse, his co-conspirator in surviving House.
Violet, who always understood too much and said too little. Who never let her sadness stain her strength. Who’d bled through her fingertips for the people she loved and never asked for anything in return.
And now—now she was nothing but memory.
He didn’t know how to breathe without her.
He felt it before he saw it, movement in the corner of his eye. A shuffling.
Wilson looked over.
House was turned around.
Leaning against the wall like he didn’t need the cane, like gravity no longer applied to him. His face was expressionless. His eyes, however, were glass.
Wilson followed his gaze.
There was no one there.
But House was staring at something—someone, with fierce intensity, his pupils dilating like he’d seen the sun itself.
Wilson’s heart cracked wide open.
Because he knew.
He knew what House was seeing.
Violet.
House was hallucinating her.
And the worst part, the part that gutted Wilson down to his marrow, was that he could almost see her too. If he closed his eyes. If he tried hard enough. If he let himself believe.
“House,” Wilson said softly.
But House didn’t respond. His eyes were wet now. Red-rimmed. Wide.
His lips moved like he was trying to speak to her.
To Violet.
To the version of her that still existed in his mind, just a few feet in front of him. Maybe smiling. Maybe touching her stomach. Maybe telling him it was all a mistake, that she was still here, still breathing, still his.
Wilson stood slowly. He didn’t dare approach.
He felt paralyzed by his own helplessness.
This was House. Brilliant. Impossible. Cruel. Unshakable. He was the one who broke people, not the one who broke.
But now, watching him reach out into empty air, just a small, trembling twitch of fingers, Wilson felt something unravel inside him. A sob that didn’t rise to the surface. A scream that got stuck in his throat.
There was nothing he could say.
No words. No comfort. No damn anything.
He’d spent his entire life trying to help people.
And now, when it mattered most, when the man he loved as a brother was hallucinating his dead wife just feet away from her cooling body, Wilson had nothing.
Just silence.
*
He remembered when Violet first came to Princeton-Plainsboro.
House was instantly suspicious. Then intrigued. Then terrified.
He fought it every step of the way. But she didn’t.
She matched him. Temper for temper. Wit for wit. She exposed his humanity like a surgeon peeling away dead tissue to find something vital underneath.
They got married in a courthouse on a Tuesday.
No flowers. No witnesses.
Just House, Violet, and a very annoyed clerk.
Wilson signed the license.
And when House limped away afterward, mumbling about taxes and legal benefits, Violet had grabbed Wilson’s hand and whispered, “He’s happier than he’ll ever admit.”
And she was right.
God, she was always right.
He thought of the babies. The one she loved like her lifeline and the other she never got to hold.
“Her babies,” Wilson whispered aloud, voice cracking.
Now, her son will grow up without a mother.
House sank to his knees.
Not collapsed. Not dramatic. Just… gave up.
His head tilted slightly. His hand hovered in the air like he wanted to catch a wisp of something before it disappeared.
Wilson couldn’t bear it.
Couldn’t look at him like that.
Like a man made of glass, cracking silently under the weight of the invisible.
Still, he didn’t move.
Didn’t interrupt.
Because what do you say to a man who sees the ghost of the only person who ever loved him and knows, knows deep in his bones that she is gone?
What do you say to yourself, when you’ve lost your best friend, your person, and the world keeps spinning like it’s just another Thursday?
He wiped his face, found tears there.
Wilson sat back down. Rested his hands on his knees. Looked up at the fluorescent lights until his vision blurred.
Let House have his ghost.
Let himself have his grief.
There was nothing else to give.
_________________________________
There was a curtain still drawn across Trauma 3.
Wilson stood facing it like it might rear up and attack him. His shoes felt glued to the floor, but the sterile scent of antiseptic and iron pulled him forward. His legs moved before his brain agreed to it. Just a step. He'd already seen her. He pulled the cover over her. But he needed to see her again.
Then,
“Don’t.”
The voice was raw. Cracked like something dying.
Wilson froze mid-step.
Behind him, House stirred for the first time in what felt like hours. He hadn’t stood, hadn’t moved much at all since Cameron had come out of Trauma and said the words, flat, quiet, final.
“I am sorry, House.”
Wilson, when he learned of what happened, didn’t remember sitting down. Didn’t remember the part where the world tilted and never righted itself. He hadn’t cried. Not really. Not yet. Because Violet Rowan had coffee with him just this morning. Because she was only thirty.
Because this wasn’t real.
“I said don’t,” House repeated, louder now, though not shouting. The edge in his voice wasn’t anger. It was pain. Panic. His fingers clenched the armrest of the chair like it was the only thing tethering him to gravity. “Don’t go in there. That’s not her. That’s just… leftovers.”
Chase and Foreman stood a few feet away, fresh from the trauma room. They looked pale, shaken, eyes hollow. They weren’t doctors right now. Just people. Just men who’d seen something they couldn’t unsee.
Neither spoke.
They didn’t need to.
Wilson turned his head slowly, just enough to see House still hunched in the waiting room chair, back bowed like something had caved in. Like grief had carved a canyon in his chest and left him unable to breathe.
House’s eyes weren’t on him. They weren’t on anything in the room. They were fixed somewhere invisible. Somewhere inside.
“You have to see her,” Wilson said, gently now. Like a person trying to lead a dog out of traffic. “We both do.”
“No,” House replied again, this time quieter. Firmer. “You can. I can’t.”
Wilson stepped toward him. Dropped to a crouch to bring himself eye-level.
“House…”
House blinked at the sound of his name.
“I was going to talk to her today,” House murmured, almost as if the thought had just remembered itself. “I was going to apologize. I was going to—” His mouth twisted, pain contorting the words before they escaped. “I was going to try.”
Wilson sat beside him, slowly, not touching him. Just near enough to remind him he wasn’t alone. The silence that followed was thick and oxygenless.
Finally, House spoke again.
“She said I made her feel like a ghost.”
Wilson didn’t move. The words hung in the air like smoke.
“She said that two days ago. In the kitchen,” House continued, voice barely more than breath. “She said she was already dead and I just hadn’t noticed.”
Wilson’s throat tightened, sharp and raw.
Because of course she said that.
Of course Violet, brave and too-young and fiercely alive, had fought to be seen while the man she loved buried himself in self-defense mechanisms and barbed sarcasm. Of course she was fading in front of them and no one realized just how much.
“She wanted you to see her,” Wilson whispered. “She wanted to be visible again.”
House gave a stiff nod. “I know.”
They sat there, two aging men surrounded by the echo of something beautiful and gone. Not doctors now. Just grief-stricken boys who’d loved the same woman in different, broken ways.
“You want me to go in? And do you want to, with me?” Wilson asked finally.
House didn’t look at him.
“No,” he whispered. “I want to stay right here and pretend I said the right things when I had the chance.”
Wilson reached out. Placed a hand on House’s shoulder, tentative and feather-light. There was no reaction. Just the faint rise and fall of breath, irregular like everything else in the world now.
Then, slowly, Wilson stood.
One foot in front of the other.
He walked the long corridor toward the curtain, each step a defiance of what lay behind it. Chase and Foreman flanked the wall near House, silent as sentinels. They didn’t ask questions. They didn’t offer comfort. They simply existed in the space, witnesses to the unraveling.
Wilson’s fingers closed around the edge of the curtain.
And he hesitated.
He remembered every single moment he’d shared with her. Not just the big ones—her wedding day, her pregnancy announcement, the night she sobbed in his car for three straight hours—but the small ones. The inside jokes. The dumb movies. The way she’d texted him whenever House made her want to throw a chair through a window.
He braced himself.
And pulled the curtain back.
The room was dim and quiet. Too quiet.
She lay on the stretcher, a white sheet pulled up to over her face. He had done that. The monitors had long since gone dark. He lowered the sheet. Her hair was damp. Her lips slightly parted. Her skin had the pallor of something no longer inhabited.
Wilson moved closer, barely aware of his feet carrying him.
Violet.
She looked like she might wake up at any moment and tell him this was a mistake. That she’d been asleep. That she just needed five more minutes.
She looked younger.
More peaceful than he’d ever seen her.
But her hands were cold.
Wilson took them anyway. Held them between his palms.
“Hi,” he whispered.
There was a lump in his throat, too large to speak through. Still, he tried.
“You scared the shit out of us,” he said, smiling through tears. “You always had to be dramatic. Even in death.”
He exhaled shakily. Blinked rapidly.
“I miss you already,” he murmured. “He does too. He just doesn’t know how to say it.”
He bent slightly. Pressed a kiss to her knuckles.
Then let go.
She was gone. Not in theory. Not in metaphor. But gone.
Wilson pulled the sheet up over her shoulders, pausing one last moment.
Then stepped back out into the hall.
*
House hadn’t moved.
But his eyes snapped up the moment Wilson returned.
They searched his face.
And Wilson didn’t say a word.
He sat again.
This time closer.
And waited.
It was House who broke the silence.
“I think I thought she’d never really leave,” he said. “Like she’d always be there. Like no matter how much I pushed her, she’d just… stay.”
Wilson didn’t respond.
“I knew she was pregnant,” House said suddenly, eyes red. “Back when it happened. I knew. I overheard her telling Cuddy. She thought I hadn’t, but, I knew. And I didn’t say anything. Didn’t ask. Didn’t even bring it up until she said it herself.”
Wilson turned slowly to look at him.
House was breathing heavily now, like each confession stripped skin off his chest.
“I didn’t ask,” he repeated. “Because I didn’t want to deal with the part where she might actually leave me one day. But it flowed out in the wrong way.”
Wilson didn’t know what surprised him more—that House had known, or that he’d been so afraid to lose her to the point he had refused to acknowledge the events happening in his life.
“She did what she had to do. She acted as a mother to Eli more than your wife that day, House,” Wilson said, voice low.
House gave a bitter half-laugh. “Yeah. Maybe. Maternal Instinct. She was right but I made it hard.”
Silence stretched.
Finally, Wilson reached into his coat and pulled out a folded paper. Violet’s bracelet. The one she always wore.
“She had this on,” he said. “I thought you’d want it.”
House took it.
He stared at it for a long time. Then curled it in his fist and brought it to his chest.
“I wasn’t good to her,” he whispered.
“You tried,” Wilson said.
House shook his head. “No. I was going to try. I just… waited too long.”
Wilson said nothing. Because sometimes silence was the only language grief understood.
They sat like that for a long time.
Two men surrounded by friends and ghosts.
Waiting for the world to make sense again.
"Maybe she breathed her last thinking I didn't love her".
_________________________________
~THEN~
“You need to control your emotionally stunted hellbeast,” Violet snapped, slamming her coffee down on Wilson’s desk so hard that half of it sloshed onto a patient chart.
Wilson didn’t even flinch. He reached for a tissue, dabbed at the corner of the file, and looked up at her calmly. “I assume we’re talking about House.”
“No, I’m talking about the other six-foot misanthrope who fake-limped into Le Bernardin last night dressed like a biker-chic mortician.”
Wilson raised an eyebrow. “He showed up at your date?”
Violet folded her arms and paced in tight, agitated circles, her heels clicking like punctuation marks to her fury. “Not just showed up. Oh no. That would’ve been too civil. He commandeered the table. Pretended he was my protective brother and spent the entire evening describing in elaborate detail how I had once stitched a human ear to a cantaloupe in med school as part of an ‘experimental sculpture phase.’”
Wilson’s hand went to his mouth, trying to smother a laugh. It failed. Miserably.
“It’s not funny!” she barked.
“It’s a little funny.”
Violet threw herself onto his couch like a starlet in a silent film. “He introduced himself as Bartholomew Splicington. And when my date—who, by the way, was a very sweet neurosurgeon with actual conversational skills—asked what he did for a living, House told him he was a professional nipple curator for the MoMA.”
Wilson wheezed.
“Professional nipple curator, Wilson.”
“Okay, that part is funny.”
“I hate him.”
“No, you don’t.”
“I do! I want to strangle him with a catheter. I want to tape bubble wrap to the underside of all his chairs so every time he sits down, it sounds like he’s farting in Morse code. I want to inject all his Vicodin with glitter glue.”
Wilson laughed until he had to wipe his eyes. “He’s obviously doing it on purpose.”
“Of course he’s doing it on purpose!” Violet snapped. “He does this every time I so much as look at someone with a working prefrontal cortex. The last guy? He hacked into the hospital paging system and made it sound like I was urgently needed in the urology department during our dessert. The guy ghosted me before the tiramisu even landed.”
Wilson leaned back in his chair, still grinning. “I think you might be the only person alive who House messes with because he likes you.”
Violet snorted. “He doesn’t like me. He likes chaos. I’m just the poor idiot orbiting the epicenter.”
Wilson gave her a look. “He knows your schedule by heart. He somehow knows exactly when you leave the OR. He even memorized the name of your cat.”
“He told me my cat sounded like a venereal disease.”
“Which means he Googled your cat.”
Violet opened her mouth, paused, then slowly closed it again. Her brows furrowed.
Violet wasn't finished, resumed pacing again like a cat in a cage while Wilson watched her from behind his desk, his lips twitching with barely concealed amusement.
“He told my date—my date, God help me cause I don't even know which one it was, Wilson—that I once performed brain surgery while reciting Hamilton. And when I tried to correct him, he rapped the entire second verse of ‘My Shot’ while miming a craniotomy with a butter knife! In the middle of a Michelin-starred restaurant!”
“I mean, points for commitment—”
“Don’t defend him!” Violet flung a hand toward the ceiling in exasperation. “Do you know what it’s like to try and flirt with someone while House is describing cerebrospinal fluid leakage like it’s part of a romantic charcuterie board?!”
Wilson opened his mouth, whether to apologize, deflect, or simply laugh again was anyone’s guess, when a knock came at the office door.
The door opened before either of them could answer.
Chase and Foreman stepped in, each holding a chart, looking vaguely apologetic. Chase spoke first.
“Sorry to interrupt, but we were wondering if you had a minute to consult on—”
“Absolutely not,” Violet snapped, spinning around and pointing at them like a prosecuting attorney. “Does this look like a good time to you?”
Chase blinked. “Uh…”
“Does the wild gesturing, raised voice, or the visible murder aura not suggest to you that I’m in the middle of something?!”
Foreman raised an eyebrow. “We just need five minutes.”
Violet advanced a step. “You can have five years when I’m finished dismantling the psychological profile of a certain narcissistic limping gremlin who thinks sabotaging my social life is some sort of love language!”
Wilson winced behind his mug of coffee. “She’s not exaggerating.”
Chase looked confused. “You mean… House?”
“Ding ding ding! Gold star for the Aussie!” Violet clapped sarcastically. “Next week we’ll cover basic pattern recognition.”
Chase gave a half-laugh, then realized too late that it wasn’t safe. “Sorry. I just—he showed up at your date again?”
“In leather. And a fake accent. Told the hostess we were half-siblings from Transylvania. Called me ‘Violate Rowanovich.’”
Foreman blinked. “…He really doesn’t want you dating, huh?”
“Wow, Dr. Foreman, thank you for that keen analysis,” Violet snapped. “Truly, we are blessed by your gift for the obvious.”
Wilson sighed and leaned back, raising a hand to the two men. “Guys, come back later. Preferably when the emotional storm system has passed.”
Chase glanced at Violet, then wisely took a step back. “Right. We’ll just… circle back in an hour.”
“Circle back with snacks,” Violet added. “For my suffering.”
Foreman muttered, “Man, you really are the only person on Earth who could survive both a date and a workplace relationship with House.”
Violet crossed her arms. “I am a modern medical martyr. History will remember me.”
“Or canonize you,” Wilson muttered.
The door shut behind them.
Wilson turned back to Violet, who resumed pacing.
“Sorry,” she muttered. “They walked into the storm.”
Wilson smiled. “I’m just surprised they walked out.”
“…Do you think he’s actually—”
“Falling for you? Yes.”
“—plotting my death? Because I do think I saw chloroform in his coat pocket yesterday.”
Wilson rolled his eyes. “You’re in denial.”
“I’m in hell.”
“You like it.”
Violet gave him a long, withering glare. “I like a lot of things, Wilson. Functional air conditioning. Orthopedic insoles. Post-call sleep. Nowhere on that list is ‘Gregory House in a leather jacket telling my date that I collect colon polyps as a hobby.’”
Wilson couldn’t help but grin again.
“She stormed out,” Violet muttered. “The hostess. Not me. She thought House was about to mug the wine steward. I had to bribe her with three Yelp reviews and a tray of petit fours.”
“You stayed?”
“I had to. I was afraid he’d burn the place down out of spite.”
Wilson leaned forward. “But did you actually talk to him?”
Violet stared at her lap for a long beat.
“We argued about Kantian ethics. Then we argued about cats. Then we ordered mussels and fought over the last one like savages.”
Wilson blinked. “…That sounds suspiciously like a date.”
“It was not a date,” Violet said firmly.
“You shared seafood. There was fighting. At some point, I assume he insulted your intelligence and you insulted his soul?”
“…and his sock choices.”
Wilson pointed. “Textbook House-romance.”
Violet groaned and let her head fall back against the cushions. “He’s impossible. He’s childish and condescending and drives me insane. I swear to God, Wilson, if he ruins one more potential relationship, I’m going to steal his cane and beat him with it until he begs for mercy in medical Latin.”
Wilson chuckled, then said gently, “Have you ever asked him why he does it?”
“He’ll deny everything.”
“Still. Try.”
Violet sighed. “The problem is… sometimes I think he actually listens. Like, genuinely listens. I’ll be halfway through a rant about NIH funding and he’ll just say something that proves he caught every word. And other times, he treats me like I’m a mildly amusing traffic cone.”
“He does that when he’s scared.”
“Scared of what? Me? I weigh like a hundred and ten pounds and most of it’s sarcasm.”
Wilson leaned back with a smile. “Exactly.”
There was a long silence.
Violet sat upright again, brushing hair out of her face. “He’s a menace, Wilson.”
“Sure.”
“A deviant.”
“Absolutely.”
“And if he shows up on my next date, I will drag him into couples therapy myself.”
Wilson raised an eyebrow. “So there’s going to be a next date?”
Violet paused.
Then, begrudgingly: “…Possibly.”
“I’ll make sure House is busy with clinic duty that night.”
She grinned. “You’re a good friend.”
“Just trying to keep the nipple curator off the streets.”
*
Later that night, House stood outside Violet’s apartment with a smug little smirk on his face and a takeout bag from that same seafood place.
“I brought mussels. And a laminated chart of famous nipple curators. For science.”
Violet didn’t even hesitate.
She grabbed the bag, stepped aside, and muttered, “If you sabotage my love life again, I’m supergluing your Vicodin bottle shut.”
House smirked.
But he didn’t try to deny it.
Because somewhere beneath the sarcasm, beneath the games and jabs and elaborate schemes, he had fallen for her.
He just hadn’t admitted it yet.
And Violet, God help her, maybe hadn’t admitted it either.
But she let him in anyway.
__________________________________
~NOW~
Thirty minutes passed before House finally stood.
No declaration. No drama. Just the sound of the cane scraping lightly against the linoleum, and the quiet groan of weight being shifted onto reluctant joints. He didn’t look at Wilson, or Foreman, or Chase. His gaze stayed fixed ahead, on the space beyond the trauma room door. The curtain still drawn.
He didn’t ask who was waiting.
Didn’t say he was ready.
He just rose like a man who had no choice but to walk.
Each movement was careful. Mechanical. Not the defiant limp of routine, but the slow choreography of someone doing something they’d rehearsed only in nightmares.
Cameron was standing at the threshold. Her hands were clasped together in front of her, gloves long since discarded, her scrubs stained with a streak of something dark and dried at the shoulder. She had aged in the past hour, eyes red, expression pinched at the corners like she was holding something in that threatened to burst out.
“I cleaned her face,” she said gently, as if speaking too loudly might wake the dead. “Closed her eyes. And the fetus — the baby has been taken to the morgue. You don’t have to look if—”
“I’ll look.”
That was all he said. Flat. Final. Clinical. Not brave. Not broken. Just inevitable.
She nodded and stepped aside. Her face didn’t follow him in. She couldn’t.
The curtain slid open with the softest whisper of rings on metal.
The lights in the trauma room had been dimmed. The buzzing fluorescent harshness replaced with a more forgiving wash of gold, but it made everything look more unreal. Like a painting of death instead of the real thing. The gurney was still in the center of the room. Still. Silent. The machines unplugged, the monitors blank, cables neatly coiled like they were trying to be respectful.
Violet lay there.
Pale.
Still.
The white sheet covered her body from the chest down. Her face was framed by dark hair someone had gently combed back behind her ears. Her lips were closed. Her eyelids, too. Hands by her sides.
She looked peaceful.
Too peaceful.
Wrong.
House didn’t rush. He walked in like he was entering a museum exhibit. His cane tapped gently across the tile. No one followed him inside.
He didn’t speak.
Not at first.
He simply looked.
Violet.
There was a time he couldn’t go ten minutes without hearing her voice. That sharp, dry wit. That low murmur when she was angry but trying not to cry. The occasional half-laugh that caught in her throat, usually when he’d said something too inappropriate in the wrong moment and she couldn’t help but find it funny.
Now she was quiet.
Unmoving.
Unreachable.
He stood at her side, hovering just beyond the boundary of the sheet, as if touching it might confirm the finality of what lay beneath. His eyes didn’t blink much. They just roamed her face, slowly, as if searching for the part of her that might still be real. Still present.
He didn’t find it.
“I yelled at you,” he said. The words barely reached the air.
They hung there, invisible and heavy.
He didn’t elaborate. Didn’t apologize. It wasn’t a confession, just a statement. A point of data. Something he couldn’t erase from the timeline.
He didn’t cry.
Not yet.
House studied her forehead. The faint crease between her brows was gone. He used to mock her for it. Told her she’d overdeveloped the “serious face” muscle. She used to reply by flicking him in the middle of his own forehead, right between the eyes.
Now, smooth. Blank. Clean.
Her hands, he saw, were cold. He didn’t touch them. Didn’t have to. He’d held cold hands before. He knew what they felt like. But these were her hands. The ones that used to cup his jaw when she was trying to get through to him. The ones that used to drum along his back lazily when she couldn’t sleep. The ones that trembled, slightly, when she first told him she was pregnant.
He hadn’t answered her then.
She’d gone quiet for a long time after that.
He took a breath. Shaky. Shallow.
“I touched you like you were an obligation,” he murmured. Another line. As much for himself as for the room.
It was a truth. Not dramatic. Not performative. He didn’t try to redeem himself with it. He just laid it down like a card on a table.
He didn’t cry.
But he did lean closer.
Not touching.
Just closer.
His gaze hovered over her face.
Her nose was the same. Small. Slightly upturned. She used to complain about it, but he always liked it—it crinkled when she smiled. He couldn’t remember the last time she smiled.
The bruises around her temples were faint, now yellowing. Cleaned. Cameron’s work. But he noticed. He catalogued them. Every detail.
That mouth. Once so full of fight. That voice—sarcastic, low, unafraid—now silenced.
Her body beneath the sheet, he didn’t let himself think of what had been lost there. The pregnancy. The almost-child. The parts of Violet he’d never get to know.
He felt like someone had taken a scalpel to his chest, opened him up, and removed the one part of himself that still made him human.
He didn’t cry.
He just stood.
“I was so angry at how you disappeared into yourself,” he said, very quietly. “I didn’t see how far gone you were.”
No one answered. There was no one to answer. Only the empty chair in the corner. The faint tick of the wall clock. The ghost of a life never fully lived.
He stepped back slightly. His hands clenched around the cane, knuckles white.
It had been easier to make her the villain. To paint her withdrawal as petulant, her depression as deliberate. Easier to accuse than to ask. He told himself she was distant because she didn’t love him. That she’d changed. That pregnancy made her clingy, unpredictable, inconvenient.
What a joke.
She had been vanishing before his eyes, and he was too obsessed with preserving his fortress to notice. He thought if he ignored the cracks, they wouldn’t widen.
Now the house had collapsed.
He closed his eyes. Just for a moment. The inside of his eyelids burned.
When he opened them again, she was still dead.
Still. Cold. Gone.
He reached out, very slowly, and adjusted a strand of hair near her temple. Just a nudge. Like she might care. Like it mattered.
Then his hand fell back.
He didn’t speak again.
There was nothing else worth saying.
Minutes passed.
Outside, the hallway was silent. Wilson hadn’t left. Chase and Foreman were still posted like statues. Waiting. Not rushing.
When House finally turned, he didn’t look back.
He left the room like a man walking away from the only battlefield that ever mattered.
He stepped through the curtain, past Cameron’s careful silence, past Wilson’s tight-lipped waiting. His face was blank, but not unreadable. It was the face of someone who had seen something unspeakable and survived it.
Just barely.
He didn’t say goodbye to the room. Or the people in it.
He didn’t have to.
He stood there.
Out of Trauma 3.
" Now what?"