Purgatory
A/N: It's been one year. I honestly cannot believe it's been one entire year since we said goodbye to House and the gang. This fic is a tribute to the fandom that got me writing fanfiction and the show that taught me everything about life that my parents didn't. This will probably be the last thing I write for House, other than updating my multi-chapter fics. So... here we go.
Update 4/2/2015: Edited to reduce crap factor.
Robert Chase doesn't think that he'll ever get sick of this feeling. The stirring in his chest that he gets, the warmth that spreads through him when he sees her sleeping peacefully next to him, her hair spread out around her head like a blonde halo. He liked her hair when it was light brown, but he doesn't mind it blonde. If he wakes up before her, on the days that she doesn't do yoga before work, he's content to just lay there, propped up on his arm. Just watching her. Breathing her in.
He tries to treasure every moment that he has with her, because he knows that it can't last forever. He's known that from the start with her. She'd been born with an expiration date stamped on her foot, and it was thirty years earlier than the usual person's. He is going to lose her. He is going to watch her die, and somewhere along the lines he'd promised to kill her himself, now that House is gone.
Someday, her illness will put both of them through the kind of pain neither of them have ever felt before. But for now, they're fairly young. If they're lucky, they'll have a year or two, maybe even three before the symptoms start. Another year before they become so bad that she can no longer live her life. They still have time, short thought it may be.
He never thought that she would come back. He thought that she would live with her girlfriend, away from the medical world, happy as she could be until the end of her days. Yet, after Wilson's funeral, she approached him. She wanted her old job back, and apparently her and her partner had split. Taub had resigned, intent on taking a job at New York Mercy that required less hours from him and allowed him more time with his children, so it had just been himself, Park, and Adams in diagnostics.
He'd accepted her back with open arms. They'd formed a habit of getting dinner together after work, discussing the case, and sometimes even talking about themselves, though it took him a long time to get her to open up. Eventually, though, he finally managed to get past the wall that was Thirteen, the woman who preferred to be called by a number, and was able to see the person underneath: Remy Hadley.
He doesn't know when he fell in love with her, but he guesses that it was sometime after their dinners stopped ending at the restaurant and started ending the next morning. Hell, he doesn't even know specifically why he fell in love with her. But he did, and for the first time since Cameron had left him, he felt love. After two months of the trysts that Thirteen never seemed inclined to talk about after they occurred, Chase told her in no uncertain terms that he wanted more.
This time, it was she who accepted the offer with open arms. He can honestly say he's never been happier. He has the job he's always aspired to, his friends, a woman whom he loves... things are good. Functional, almost. He never thought anything at Princeton Plainsboro could be anything but chaos.
He supposes that when House died and Wilson followed soon after, they took all of the chaos with them. Sometimes he misses it. He misses House a lot. A lot more than he ever thought he would, anyway. He keeps the diagnostician's red coffee cup and overlarge tennis ball as keep sakes. He can't help but think every time he sits in the Eames chair that House would kill him for sitting in his favorite spot. Even now, one year after House's death, Chase still expects him to walk through the door and ask him why the hell he isn't blowing up the patient's heart or some other kind of insanity.
Looking back, he had a mentor in House. The man didn't really teach him, Chase simply learned. He learned how to be a doctor, how to make the decisions that defined who you were as a man and as a medical practitioner. He owes Gregory House, that much is undeniable.
He visits House's grave when he can. He visits Wilson's as well. He talks to them, tells them what's happening at the hospital, and in his life. He misses House, because he realizes now that the grizzled older doctor was the closest thing he'd ever had to a father, ridiculous as it may seem. His only regret is that he didn't tell him that before he died.
House would've just laughed in his face, but still. It would've been a nice sentiment.
Lisa Cuddy is the first to admit that she's never really known what she wants out of life. Warring desires have always been at her core. What does she really want, what does she need? A family? A career? Love? She's tried desperately to find and hold onto all three, and now, at age forty-four, she thinks she's gotten fairly close.
She is Dean of Medicine at UPMC. It's a smaller hospital than PPTH, and it allows her a little more time at home with Rachel, who is now five. She has a steady boyfriend of nine months, Dr. Lyle Warner, an ophthalmologist that had been hired on shortly after she became Dean.
Things are... good. Or at least they should be. Things are simple. She has never realized how overly complex her life had been until she was on the other side of the fence. Lyle doesn't play mind games with her. Lyle doesn't make her wonder what he's truly capable of, she doesn't have to constantly worry about where he is, what he's doing, when he'll snap. He is pleasant, predictable, and safe.
She is bored to tears. She hates to admit it, but she finds herself missing the insane bastard that had nearly killed her and plowed his car into the side of her house. Because there is never a dull moment with House. Because he had kept her on her toes, had made her life exciting. Now, she is stagnant, and she has every right to be happy - she should be happy, damn it.
But she isn't, and that drives her fucking mad.
Eric Foreman isn't the kind of man who ignores his instincts. He'd learned a long time ago from a certain grouchy cripple that your gut is one of the few things in the world that you actually can trust. When he finds House's ID propping up the table in his office, he knows. He simply knows.
There are other clues, too. When he goes over the autopsy report, he can see that the dimensions of the corpse don't quite match up with House's. The burnt body is paunchier, shorter. Yes, the fire could have warped the skeletal structure, but it still doesn't resemble House's lanky physique at all. Secondly, Wilson looks way too happy when he comes by to finish cleaning out his office to have just legitimately lost his best friend. That, along with the ID and the fact that House's last patient, a heroin addict, has been reported missing...
Foreman knows he's still alive.
When he double-checks the dental records, it's the final piece of the puzzle. House is not dead, and without a shadow of the doubt, he's somewhere with Wilson. That fact, strangely, makes him very happy. House managed to escape the law so he could spend the last five months with his best friend. What he does after that... who knows?
He gave up everything for his best friend. It's just so... un-House. Foreman decides that maybe he's misjudged the man he's so frequently accused of being exactly like. Upon seeing what he did for Wilson, he decides that being like House isn't all that bad.
Nowadays, Foreman's life is where he wants it to be, and that's about all he can say for it. He runs the hospital, and in his opinion and in the opinion of his superiors, he does a damn good job of it. However, no matter how successful he is professionally, no matter how nice the house he recently bought is, and no matter how much money he has in his bank account, he is alone. He sleeps alone, he returns to an empty home every night, and he has no one. He grabs a beer with Chase a couple nights a week when he isn't with Thirteen, and that's it.
It's almost hard, being friends with Chase. Chase, who is madly in love with the only woman he ever could have seen himself marrying, of being with forever.
Foreman has become much more like House than he ever thought he would be. Bitter and alone, gifted with hyper intelligence, an illustrious career, only one friend to his name and completely miserable. He thinks he might always be miserable, but he might as well try to do something right instead of just wallowing in his own self-pity.
He'll do his job. He'll see to it that the people who come into his hospital seeking treatment leave better than they were when they arrived. He may be House-light, as Cuddy had deemed him, but he can do things that the older doctor could not. He'll make a difference, and that, at the very least, is a comfort to him.
Allison Cameron has never depended on happy endings. She never expected one, either. Had she hoped for one? Sure, but who doesn't? Everyone hopes for a light at the end of the tunnel, everyone wants the wedding, the baby in a baby carriage, the perfect man, perfect job, and nice little suburban house with a dog and a white picket fence to top it all of. People want contentment.
Somewhere along the lines, she'd found happiness.
Chicago held for her something that she had searched for her entire life - fulfillment. She doesn't want a facade of happiness, she wants to feel that lightness in her chest, to wake up every morning and not have to weigh the pros and cons of getting out of bed. When she first started in Chicago, with the support of her family, she is able to move on past what had happened in Princeton with Chase.
She meets Oliver Harrow, a surgeon at Chicago General who charmed her almost instantly. He has thick dark hair that hangs in his eyes, an easy smile, and two bright green eyes that never fail to captivate her attention. He is kind, compassionate, and he has an identical sense of humor to her own. She falls for him fast and hard. A year after moving away from Princeton, they marry. Nine months later, she gives birth to their son, Aaron David Harrow.
When she holds the small bundle wrapped in a blue blanket in her arms, she finally finds it. Fulfillment. She is happy, happier than she has ever been.
Somehow, she's escaped Princeton Plainsboro Teaching Hospital. Not unscathed, but at least alive, which is more than she can say for Amber... or Kutner... or House and Wilson.
House has not permanently tainted her. She is not doomed to misery. No, she has everything she wants.
Sometimes, though, she still misses the insanity of working under House. She misses the brilliant and infuriating man she had been in love with, and the one she had thought she had been in love with. She misses Foreman, she misses Wilson, even Cuddy... but that is a part of her life that's passed. It held her worst days and her best days, but it is done.
She's finally learned one of the only lessons that House hadn't taught her: if you want a happy ending bad enough... sometimes, you actually get it.
Gregory House has been dead for one year, officially. To himself, he's been dead for seven months, at least in all of the ways that matter. In reality, he is still breathing, and that fact never ceases to frustrate and amaze him. Because he's used up his nine lives. Because he should be buried six feet under.
But he made a promise, and he was a lot of things. Narcissistic, misanthropic, self-destructive... he's long forgotten how far his laundry list of flaws extends. Is there any point in keeping track anymore? No one is there to psychoanalyze him, to remind him of those things.
Gregory House is a lot of things, but he's still a man of his word.
He promised Wilson he would live on. And here he is... living on.
House has been living in purgatory for six months, two weeks, three days, thirteen hours, and forty-three minutes. He doesn't really know why he was keeping track. Maybe somewhere, in the part of his mind that is still sane, he finds it comforting, comforting to know that time is still moving along without him, that the Earth is still spinning.
In Mayfield, it feels quite a bit like it did when he was in prison. Like his life has been put on repeat, like he is living the same day over and over again. Only here, instead of gang members and murderers, he is surrounded by people who's level of damage almost rival his own.
Almost.
Here, they offer him platitudes. They offer him hope. They offer him all the help he can get, in the form of therapy, in the form of many multicolored pills that he has no intention of ever taking. He had stopped taking drugs a long time ago, and he won't start again, even if they'll supposedly help him.
It's not like the last time he was in the mental ward. He isn't reprimanded for missing the group therapy sessions. He isn't scolded for refusing to take his medicine. He doesn't know if it's because maybe they're a little bit afraid of him, or maybe it's because Nolan just orders them to leave him the hell alone. If the second is true, he's grateful. He avoids social situations like the plague. In Mayfield, you receive only one look from the staff. Pity.
He's changed a lot, but he still hates being pitied. He doesn't need their pity, and he doesn't deserve it. That's why he stays in his room most of the day, talking to the hallucination of Wilson that he knows isn't real. The hallucination that causes him to be in the mental facility in the first place.
He leaves for meals, sometimes. Sometimes he doesn't feel like he can eat at all. If he tries to swallow something, it immediately comes back up. He hates those days.
At three o'clock, every single day like clockwork, he goes to Nolan's office. A lot of the time, he just sits there. The psychologist doesn't press him. Nolan's learned over the months that luring him out of his catatonic state is nearly impossible. So, he stops trying.
On occasion, he talks. On those days, Nolan takes the advantage and tries to pry as much out of him as humanly possible. Sometimes it just causes him to shut back down. Other days, he finds himself actually being expressive about how he feels. Maybe it's because keeping everything inside of himself for so long has begun to wear on him. Maybe he just likes the sound of his own voice.
He doesn't know. He doesn't know much of anything, anymore.
Once in awhile, Nolan will bring him an interesting case file that lands on one of his friend's desks. The patient is already cured, but the diagnosis isn't included. House will sit there for a few hours, brainstorming theories, asking questions about the patient, probing into their personal life as much as he can with the thin amount of information he's provided.
Those are his best days, now.
He always gets the diagnosis right.
No one knows that he's in Mayfield. Nolan, as a favor to him, admits him under a false name. As far as the world is concerned, Gregory House is just as dead as his best friend. He's okay with it that way. Sometimes, he wishes that on visiting day someone would be waiting there for him, but he knows it's better for him to be alone.
After all, if he's alone, he can't lose anyone else.
House looks out the window onto the grounds. Spring has visited New Jersey, and he likes the sound of the new green leaves brushing against each other, the lush look of the grass surrounding the psychiatric hospital. He hasn't left Mayfield since he'd been admitted. He's only been outside once or twice in his stay here. He just doesn't have the energy anymore. He doesn't know if he's getting old, or if he's just lost his will to do much of anything other than continue existing.
He is in purgatory. He is existing, and he is breathing, but he is not living. He's been empty for so long he can't really feel at all anymore. He isn't happy. He isn't miserable. He isn't anything, except for maybe lost.
House will survive, though. He will carry on. Because he made a promise to his best friend, and he isn't going to break it. He's still a man of a word.