Prologue

The light in the hotel room is dim, stained red by the closed curtains. It's the middle of the day, and it's scorching outside. In here, the air conditioner is on full blast, pumping out cool, dry breath that smells like clean linen and leaves a strange taste in your mouth.

'Wilson,' says House, unzipping a carryall and rummaging inside, 'I left your toothbrush at the last place, so you'll have to borrow mine tonight.'

On the bed, Wilson shifts and makes a pained noise.

'Yeah,' says House. 'I know. It's hard cheese. You'll have to catch my germs. I'll get you a new one tomorrow.'

House contemplates the bags, and then decides against unpacking. He simply takes out Wilson's vials of morphine and syringe and throws them into the bedside table drawer. Then he collapses on his own musty single bed, toeing off his sneakers. He finds the TV remote on the bedside table.

There's nothing on. He looks for Pay Per View Porn, and finds something not-quite-vanilla but not-quite-kinky.

'Wilson,' he says, softly. 'You're missing porn.'

Wilson makes another pained noise.

House looks over at him, and realises that he won't need to buy that new toothbrush, after all.

It's very quiet, the last hour or so. Almost silent, in fact, apart from Wilson's death rattle. Which sounds like a door creaking closed, ever so slowly.

After this - after he's checked for vital signs once, twice, three times, his fingers against Wilson's cold wrist, carotid, nostrils - House sits on the edge of the bed and looks at Wilson for twenty minutes.

First, he looks into Wilson's open eyes. Long and hard. Searching for the dead husk of any great revelation or answer. There's nothing. He closes Wilson's left eyelid, and leaves it like that for a moment, posed in a frozen wink. He laughs, softly, but a little hysterically. Then he closes the other eyelid.

He looks at the rest of Wilson. His sunken cheeks, the hair follicles large and dark against the translucent pale, the lank strands of stubble dark, and artificial-looking, like they've been poked in with a crochet hook. Wilson's nose doesn't look like Wilson's nose any more. The flesh has collapsed a little around the bone structure - it's lost its proper shape. The skin on his bare arms, too, visible where his pyjama sleeves are rolled up, seems to have sagged - fallen away from the skeleton to pool against the mattress. It's as though his entire body has deflated with that last croaking breath.

Something has gone. Something intangible. Something unnameable has slipped out of Wilson, in that very last moment.

House has seen countless people die before, in countless different circumstances. Though he's never noticed this subtle change.

No. House doesn't believe in a soul.

But the closest he's come, is with Wilson. There was something - that unnameable thing that was in Wilson, and now isn't - that resonated with the same thing inside House. It was like... It was like walkie talkies. One inside Wilson, one inside him. Tuned only to the frequency of each other. And he could hear Wilson through his walkie talkie, all the time – his soft voice, whispering the fact of his presence in the world. Wherever he went. Wherever Wilson went. Even with hundreds of miles between them. And now it's gone. House knows, because he's flicking through the channels and the frequencies, and he can't find Wilson's. All he gets is static.

After a minute of contemplation, he undoes the buttons of Wilson's pyjama top and spreads it to bare his chest. The dusting of hairs between Wilson's nipples look wilted. His happy trail looks sad.

House pulls down Wilson's pyjama pants. He's mildly surprised to see that Wilson's prick is half-hard. With the rest of him so limp, it looks almost comical. He's heard of this happening, at the moment of death, though he's never actually seen it. Not on one of the seventy-two corpses he's autopsied in his time.

He knows it's a perfectly natural, explicable phenomenon. Still, it creeps him out a little.

House gets up from the bed, sits down at the desk and opens up his laptop. He powers it up and opens a page in the Word Processor. Then he types the following:

Dear Miscellaneous People Of My Past And Present Acquaintance,

If you care enough to read this, it's likely you fall into one of three categories:

I've hideously offended you at some point in the past, and you've sought out the details of my demise in order to gain some small satisfaction from the fact of my death and some insight into the psychology of a man who could be so needlessly cruel. To this demographic I would like to apologise. Not for offending you, but for the fact that this letter will sorely disappoint you.

You believed you knew me in life, and disliked me intensely. However, deep down, you sensed in me some glimmer of Goodness, Hope and Love for Mankind. You either made some futile attempt to help me realise this, or harboured fantasies of doing so at some indeterminate future date. To these people I would like to say: you are morons.

You are the DI investigating my apparent suicide. To you I would like to say - I was murdered, murdered, I tell you. You want to look for a small, bald man, with unpleasant, beady eyes and egotistical delusions about migraine medication. Goes by the name of Von Lieberman.

Life's been a pain. I've been a pain. It's all been one big pain.

Bye now.

Gregory House.

P.S. Please bury me in my Howlin' Wolf t-shirt.

House leaves this window open on his laptop, and then crosses to the bedside table to pick up the phone. He dials 911, and says to the operator, quite calmly,

'Hurry, please. The blood. There's so much blood.' He gives the address of their hotel room. It's a risk. It gives him very little time to get things done. Then again, he doesn't want Wilson to lie rotting in a motel room for days, even if it is well air-conditioned. He, himself, couldn't really care less. He hangs up, opens the bedside table drawer and takes out the remaining three vials of Wilson's morphine.

He carefully fills a syringe with seven times the lethal dose and sits on the edge of the bed. He tugs off one of Wilson's long grey socks and ties it around his own lower bicep as a tourniquet. Smacks the crook of his arm until a fat blue vein raises on the surface. Then he injects himself with the entire contents of the syringe, undoes the sock, and replaces it carefully on Wilson's foot.

He lies down beside Wilson. Takes him by the shoulders and drags him a little closer. He doesn't embrace him, but he does roll him onto his side, so that they are face-to-face, very close. Wilson's chest is still bare, and his pants are still around his knees. The tip of his naked prick is just touching House's knee. House watches as his own shallow breaths stir Wilson's nose hair.

'Let me tell you what I did today,' he says to Wilson. 'I had a good day. I've been having more and more good days, lately. I finalised some plans for the future. I spent a lot of time deep in thought. Reassessed things. I think I came to a reasonable decision.'

A giddy, sick, euphoric feeling rises in House. He remembers it - it's the feeling you get when you're about to orgasm, and you don't want to orgasm, because the moment afterwards, when the sensation slips away from you, is so sad.

'Wilson,' he says, and waits for a second, as though to make sure he has Wilson's attention. 'This is stupid.'

He thinks he hears Wilson's reply, creeping sibilant through the air vent above the bed. Though he can't make out the words.