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He wasn’t meant to do this.
He wasn’t meant to shift uncomfortably in the squeaky visitor chair. Wasn’t meant for his nose to burn from the smell of antiseptic and sure wasn’t meant to feel an ache so deep Vicodin couldn’t touch it with a twenty-foot pole.
The room was dark. A nightlight over her bed was the only light—not that he needed it to stare at her heart monitor. The steady rise and fall across its dull screen was as red and damning as hellfire. The little beeps ticked away over the chugging of dialysis. He was determined to stare at the monitor long enough to erase the feeling of her carotid under his forefinger, weak and thready—his heart jumping when he realized she was going to die.
She almost died today. Yesterday. Whatever you call it when it was two in the morning and you had a gun pointed at your face less than twenty-four hours ago.
He was the last person here. Kutner and Taub were long gone. Foreman shuffled out with a self-satisfied look on his face that under normal circumstances would prompt further investigation.
Cuddy had barely spared him a second glance after the dust had cleared. He had got Wilson off his ass by shoving a peanut butter jelly sandwich down his throat telling Wilson he’d go home as soon as the Viocodin kicked in. Wilson had been tired enough to either not see through the lie or have the energy to correct it. He found the lack of protest disappointing but wasn’t sure why.
It was him, the nurses, and whatever dead things haunt a hospital on the midnight watch.
Any delusion of going home was gone from his mind. He still had drywall dust on his arms and caked into the sweat in his hair and his mouth tasted like blood from when he bit his cheek too hard. Whenever he found the willpower to tear his eyes away from the heart monitor he would go back to his office and collapse into the first chair he found. He would fall asleep thinking of ways to deflect tomorrow’s interrogations from his fellows and Wilson alike. Perhaps Cuddy if word got back to her. Though without Cameron around it rarely does.
There was something… heady about this guilt. Heavy and hot in his stomach like liquor. Like the one a.m. TV glow making the bourbon on his coffee table shine amber. Like Amber, but if killing her wasn’t so close to killing himself.
Oh, there was guilt about Amber’s death. From the second he knew she was on that bus with him, he was guilty, but it was a slow-acting self-serving guilt. It was the knowledge that if his night had gone to plan, if his call had found the right person at the end of the line, there was a good chance Wilson would have been lying dead in that hospital bed. It was having to look Wilson in the face and see that self-destruction always had a blast radius. It was knowing he could never change. He would get drunk. He would call. Someone would leave him one way or another and it would be his fault. He would be alone. Just like he always has and always will be.
This was a guilt that stared back at him when he looked at it.
He was sure he’d never heard anything louder in his life than that gunshot until the blast in radiology. Dust choking his lungs and vision. Pain burning through his thigh and creeping up to his stomach and down to his knee when he collapsed on the ground next to her. Thirteen’s head in his hands and her eyes fluttering open, clear and present and knowing and piercing. She had a way of looking through him that he could never really pinpoint. Even Wilson’s best psychoanalysis and Cameron’s pitying looks couldn’t penetrate as fast as this bullet through muscle.
Like recognized like perhaps?
It was more than placing the gun back in his hands. He didn’t solve the case fast enough. He should have taken the meds himself. He shouldn’t have left her alone in a room to die.
He shouldn’t have been made this way—egotistical and narcissistic and self-serving and haunted by this need to know he was right.
He didn’t do the right thing.
It was one thing to do nothing while Thirteen self-destructed. It was another entirely to push her head-first off a cliff to an untimely end.
Untimely.
Without time. Out of time. The vision of Thirteen on the CT table scared and curled up and in pain and so unbelievably young burned into his mind. He remembered his own fellowship—young and naive and ready to devour the world whole.
Thirteen would never see thirty from this angle. She only had one chance. One moment to live. The past would never exist for her the way it did for him. The future would never be real for her the way it was for him. The present would keep happening and happening until it fails to hold its own weight and collapses onto itself. Like cancer– like an infection– like a body hurdling towards entropy– like a bullet to the head– like a bus t-boned by a semitruck–
He knew of no other way to conceive of endings than through the body.
He watched the heart monitor speed up, a distress call. Breathing elevated. He reached out instinctively, taking her hand in his. Skin clammy to the touch.
He shouldn’t be here. There was no universe where he was the right person to be here. He was unqualified. He did his part, diagnosed the problem. He knew what was about to come. He was not meant to stay and treat. He was not meant to care.
It only took a few more minutes for whimpers to permeate the small room. At the first sound, his gaze was immediately torn from the heart monitor, forced to confront her expression in the dim light. Her face pinched in pain, exhaustion carved deep holes under her eyes, and her cheeks were sallow and pale.
He sucked in a harsh breath. His hand seemed to shake where it clutched hers but that was impossible. He was fine. She was fine. She was just having a nightmare. She was not in real pain. Her pulse was strong and steady and the dialysis was humming in the corner of the room.
Another whimper, louder this time. She pulled her hand out of his, crossed her arms over her body, protective, scared . Her eyes pulsed under closed lids, rapid eye movement .
He decided to do nothing. Let the nightmare pass or let her wake herself up. Then maybe leave the room while she composed herself.
She cried out, a little louder, face contorted in pain, in fear, and all of the sudden he couldn't stand to watch it go on any longer. He needed her awake. He needed to stop the pain.
“Thirteen,” his voice was forced, rough and unused. “Thirteen, wake up. You need to wake up.” Another cry and he’d rather claw his ears off then hear it again. “Remy!”
She jolted and her eyes found him and it was exactly the same as radiology.
As she came to her senses, fear crawled into his throat and made a home there. He was wholly unprepared for this. He had never done this in his entire life. She probably wanted to see anyone but him. Anyone else on this planet would be better-suited to the job. He was rude and sarcastic and caustic and just plain mean. Whatever thing made people care for each other he had abandoned with such vigor to make himself unrecognizable to human kindness and now he was faced with the reality that he did not know how to be kind.
He was sure he has never felt this inadequate in his entire life. Oh, he has felt inferior and unworthy and despised. He had his father to thank first and foremost for that. Most recently, he had James-fucking-Wilson asking him to risk his life for his girlfriend to thank. But inadequate? Ignorant and lost and searching blind in the dark? That was something only Thirteen could do to him apparently.
“House.” Her voice was weak. Her eyes on him. He wanted to flee but instead stood up, grabbed the pitcher of water and ignored the pain shooting through his leg. He handed the stupid cheap hospital plastic cup to her because nightmares caused sweat which depleted fluids. You were supposed to give people water when they had depleted fluids.
She drank it. He sat down and suppressed the urge to sigh in relief.
“Thank you,” she said, her voice less raspy. He nodded.
“Have you slept?” She asked.
“No. I’m fine.”
“You look like shit.”
He smiled. She grinned. He rubbed a hand through his face, trying to find a way to fill silence without any of the words to make this right.
“Why are you here?”
“Making sure these nurses do their job correctly.”
She hummed. “No one is better at patient care and satisfaction than the great Dr. House?”
“Well, they’ve never diagnosed a patient with a gun to their head. I figured my expertise was needed.”
“I think they’ve got the nursing covered. Your expertise on deflection however, always comes in handy.”
She reminded him, unbidden, of the worst night of his life. He blinked, and instead of Thirteen in the hospital bed he saw himself. Post-infarction, he stared at the ceiling while Stacy snored quietly in the cot on the other side of the room, contemplating the quickest way to end his life in a hospital bed. The quietest way to end his life in a hospital bed. The way he was least likely to be caught before dying. It was a game he had played in the months after the surgery. Once he had realized he was too much of a coward to go through with any of it, it was a constant preoccupation. At home, the grocery store, physical therapy, in the car, in the park. The plans became more and more elaborate, more extraordinary, more real, as time went on.
He had wanted to die.
She was still looking at him though, demanding he give her an answer with those eyes that manage to pin him for exactly what he was. Not Foreman catastrophizing, not Wilson enabling, not Chase looking for something to put on a pedestal. Thirteen managed to ask him to be exactly what he was.
There was no script for this. Not a single false-platitude he could provide even if he wanted to.
“I don’t want you to die.”
“You don’t get to say that,” she snapped.
He wasn’t expecting anger. At least anger was more familiar to him than despair. “Do you want to die?”
“No!” Her hands clenched the bedsheets. “Not- not anymore. Not after- radiology.”
“I almost killed you today.”
“ I almost killed myself today.”
“And I nearly let you.”
“You can’t save everyone!” She yelled. He flinched.
She was angry. She was willing to accept the fact that she didn’t want to die. She was even willing to admit that she had been attempting to kill herself in a lazy, negligent sort of way. He was missing something. Misdirected anger? But angry at who? Herself? The gunman?
“You’re right. There was no reason to hand him the gun. There was no reason to leave you alone in there to deal with the consequences of my mistakes.” He said carefully, so carefully, watching the groves of her face twitch, her eyes darken.
She scoffed. “Don’t kid yourself. I’m not worth dying over.”
Of course. Not misplaced anger. Not quite.
“You can’t have it both ways, you know.” She raised an eyebrow, flashed him a knowing look. “Well, you can have one thing both ways. But you don’t get to decide you want to live and then deny your death would be untimely.”
“My life isn’t a tragedy.”
“Neither is mine,” he shot back. Her eyes dipped to the cane between his hands. He couldn’t tell whether she agreed with his assessment.
“You don’t get to decide what my life means.”
“Why are you so determined to argue your life is meaningless?”
“I’m not-”
“But you are,” he said more forcefully. “I say your death would be sad and you say there’s nothing sad about your life ending. I say your life has worth and you say I must be wrong.”
“You don’t get to say that!”
“No, I don’t. But I don’t see anyone else sitting here so we are both going to have to deal with it.”
Tears began to form in her eyes. Her eyes unfocused as her vision must be blurring. “You don’t get to– you don’t get to do this .”
“You can only handle living so long as no one interferes with it. You need your death to be negligible, unnoteworthy, but you don’t get to decide that. You are not God.”
He was just able to make out the glint of tears running down her cheeks in the low-light.
The tears steadily increased. The only noise she made was the occasional gasp for air. He was compelled to place his hand against hers because that was what people did. He tried not to act surprised when she grasped him like a clamp to a hemorrhaged artery—keeping all his insides together.
This didn’t happen to him in the same way. He didn’t realize he wanted to live all at once. Instead he spent every day for months just trying to get through the next case. And then the next one. And the next one. He did that over and over again until he spent more of his days thinking of ways to save lives than end his own.
By then, Stacy had left. By then, Wilson had a soon-to-be-Mrs.Wilson-number-three.
He didn’t spend too much time thinking about his death if he could help it now. If there was nothing after, then there was no need to contemplate it. He had to get out of bed. He had work to do. He had Wilson for as long as he didn't ruin their friendship.
Her fingers dug into his hand. He squeezed back because he didn’t know what normal people did, but hoped it was right.
“I’m going to die.”
“I know.”
“You care anyway?” He could barely hear the question over his own breath.
He could handle Wilson accusing him of caring. He didn’t exactly know why or how but Wilson believed that through whatever thick exterior he had that he actually cared for patients, for his fellows, for him . This was easy to deny and even easier to deflect. If he cared– if Wilson knew he gave a damn–
He couldn’t bear the thought of Wilson leaving anyway.
Thirteen seemed determined to be his undoing. Having to watch her, desperate and vulnerable, came with the same adrenaline rush as standing in a fluorescent haze, patient unresponsive on the table, paddles ready, and heart pounding. The entire world condensed down to a single electric pulse under his hands. No room for mistakes. No time to think. Nobody to tell him what to do. He needed– she needed him to do the right thing right now.
He’s never been needed so viscerally in his life.
“I care.”
The words sounded foreign to him—rough but somehow softer. As though someone had smoothed out the very worst of his sharp edges when he wasn’t looking.
Her breathing evened out and her hand loosened its death grip around his. He watched the tension release from her shoulders, neck, and then face.
“Okay,” she said.
It was so late. She must be tired.
“Go to sleep,” he murmured.
She closed her eyes. He watched her face relax to something less anguished, more peaceful.
It was easier for him to fall asleep when he could feel the warmth of her hand in his.