Title: Wave your Flag.
Summary: When it happens the weather is not dark, stormy, or pouring with rain. No clichés permeate the event, no stages of grief ever surface. An angsty one-shot about House and Wilson, death and grief. Please read and review.
Warnings: Mentions major character death, child abuse and is extremely sad in tone.
Spoilers: None, as this only takes place in my twisted brain.
Pairings: None.
Disclaimer: I'm pretty sure that I don't own any of the shows that I've written about (or any other shows come to think of it), but I have trouble keeping track of what day it is, so who knows?
A/N: Hell yes people! This week I started 5 fics, and finished 3. That is a winning scoreboard against my crippling procrastination. Anyway, I hope you enjoy this piece, bearing in mind that it is very depressing.
When it happens the weather is not dark, stormy, or pouring with rain.
There is no dramatic music leading up to it. There is no warning at all, really.
You do not fall into a dream state where all you can see is the body and all you can hear is the shrill beep of the heart monitor.
There is no roaring in your ears, nor stinging at the edges of your eyes.
You do not spontaneously fall into a state of catatonia, or of shock.
You do not weep desperately, fall to the floor or curl in upon yourself.
You still inhale oxygen and expel carbon dioxide at a fairly regular rate.
So really, despite previous beliefs, the world does not end with the death of Gregory House. Birds still sing at unreasonable hours of the morning; flowers still rot in decorative vases in temperate living rooms; the world keeps turning. And you keep functioning.
Day after day. Week after week. Despite the fact that the glass door of the diagnostic office now spells Robert Chase, M.D. and the clinic duty roster is missing a name, things remain constantly, absurdly, the same.
Only at night is something about you fundamentally different about you: the way you dream. Despite, or perhaps because of, the large doses of sleeping pills they have you on, your dreams are now more vivid than ever.
In one you are reclining in a comfortable office chair, letting your lips curl into a smirk and speaking an obligatory jibe, the cue for the man across from you to begin. The man across from you with bushy, brown, eyebrows climbing his forehead and hands resting on his hips and his well-ironed dress shirt. The man is you, although you are not him. He is sighing, and you recognise it as the beginning chords of a familiar melody. Reprimands, admonishments and reprehensions flow from his lips the way music flows from your hands when you're in the still place of amber-coloured scotch and mahogany scented wood. The song of his lecture is a nice background hum for the symphony of your thoughts.
In another, the voice addressing you is cold, disappointed, and militant in such a way that it seems laced with steel. Or perhaps its ice. This tower of a man grips your wrist like a vice as he talks. It would be enough to make you cry, if you were the sort of child who cried. It is enough to make you beg in your mind, the words tripping over each other in their urgent haste. Please – please – back off – let me go – I'm sorry I'm sorryI'msorry. All of a sudden the words are tumbling from your lips as the man drags you towards a sinister metal bathtub. Your humiliation intensifies as your clothes are ripped from you and you are thrown with abandon into the depths of the tub.
In another you are lying on a thin mattress surrounded by clinical, lime-green sheets that reek of hospital and pain. The scent of pain is thick around you. Perspiration and fast-exhaled air and vain hopes of release. A cloudy blanket of morphine encompasses your consciousness, but it is little use against the churning sea of agony that stabs, spikes, throbs and drags screams from your raw throat. What is even more present than this writhing mass is the realisation that you can take little more. Another day, or maybe two, but a lifetime is beyond you. You have never prided yourself on knowing your limits, but this one is clear to you. You can take no more.
These dreams always end with the high chirping of your alarm clock, and the disorienting sense of returning to your own body.
On another sickly-normal day after one of these dreams, you decide to visit the grave in the hopes that it might make phrases like 'In Denial' and 'Ignoring Reality' stop following you around. You are not ignoring reality; you are up your neck in reality. Reality has pushed its way into the forefront of your vision and is waving flags so brightly coloured that they make you want to vomit. You are in no way ignoring reality.
You lay flowers in front of the small gravestone even though you are sure House would have scoffed at you for defiling his place of rest with something so sappy. You are sure of it, but you do not hear him say it because House is dead, and you do not hear dead people. You are a rational human being.
Staring at the three simple words on the gravestone you reflect that they do an excellent job of saying all that needs to be said and saying nothing of significance whatsoever. Dr. Gregory House. You remember thinking this at the funeral too, and several times since then, so why on earth are you re-thinking it now? The statement has not changed. It is still contradictory, slightly irritating and all you could think to think about the cold, grey slab of stone. Why must you re-think this thought? Why do you have the space in your mind to have that trivial thing circle through it again? Why are you standing in front of your best friend's grave asking a bunch of rhetorical questions to no one? Reality waves its flag in a slow, mocking arc.
You get into your car to go to work, because that it what rational, ordinary people do. Yet, as you trudge through the typically awful traffic, a thought strikes you. It is not one you've had recently, so you latch hold of it and obey. You park your sensible, affordable car by the building, and enter apartment 221B. You keep your eyes fixed on where you know the object you seek will be. Nothing has been disturbed in the apartment, which strikes you as rather pointless. No one is using these items of furniture and personal memorabilia. No one except you, as you grab what you seek off of the shelf and leave the apartment to its silence.
You take your messages from the reception desk as you enter the hospital, then head up to your office at a slow, measured pace. When you enter you stare at the book you retrieved from your dead friend's apartment. The book you gave to him all those years ago, wrapped in green with an un-characteristic note. The book he never opened, until after using it to prank his fellows with. You never really understood why he did that. It baffled you for a long time, the truth flying high above your comprehension. You simply did not understand. You understand everything in this new House-free life both completely and not at all. Oh joy, another contradictory statement. You hope this one doesn't start circling your mind like a hawk too.
You walk out onto the balcony and place the book on the edge of the wall. You remove your tie, which House would have called hideous, although you cannot hear with what inflection, because you do not hear dead people. You wrap the tie around the book and place it back on the wall. You give it a small push and let it fall over the edge. The non-rationality of this action pleases you. The fact that when people see it on the ground below, they will have no idea of its meaning and thus it will not simply be a normal, everyday thing pleases you more. It pleases you so much that you laugh, except it turns into a choked sob on the inhale.
You let more laugh-sobs leave you until you are curled on the ground with your quivering back resting against the balcony wall and your chin resting on your knees. You sink your teeth into one knee in an attempt to quiet the desperate sounds escaping you, and wonder if your smart suit pants taste better or worse than the faded jeans that House used to wear so religiously. The madness of this thought is unendingly refreshing.
You shift positions so that you are lying on your back. A plane crosses the sky in your field of vision. When it reaches the centre, you see that a banner is waving behind it, not unlike the motion of a flag. It is out of your view before you can read what it says though.
"I'm sorry." You whisper.
No one answers.
A/N: Please review? If you do I'll dance around a little, give you a cookie then be happy forever. And isn't that just a win-win situation?