A/N another one of those "inspiried by" sorts of fics, in that this is what you get for listening to one of the most depressing albums of the past three decades, The Eels: With Strings. This is sort of inspired by Suicide Life, thought not entirely. And House is the only man I can see contemplating suicide not because he's desperate, or depressed, but simply because he's bored, because he's already gotten everything he's wanted out of life, and without the challenge of being better, he's miserable.
Gregory House was bored with life. There wasn't any challenge left in it. Somehow, now that his father was dead, it left a bigger void in his life than he ever could have possibly imagined. For a man that he hated so badly, he found himself rather...empty following the passing of his main antagonist. It took a while for the feeling to settle, but it had. For the first few months, he had felt as though a giant weight had been lifted off of his shoulders, but now he knew that that weight was what had kept him going. It was enough inertial mass to keep him moving forward against all forces of friction. And without that weight, he found himself left drifting on the wind like a balloon.
He had nothing left to accomplish. There hadn't even been a case in two weeks, and he was getting restless. The team could solve his cases as well as he could, they didn't need him, certainly not with Cuddy's constant presence there to serve as another sounding board for their theories. For a woman who had very limited experiences actually practicing medicine in the past few years, Cuddy had been surprisingly good at coming up with theories that the rest of them could figure out. Throw in the former ducklings as resources, and the team really didn't have any need for him. Hell, they could put Foreman's name on the door, and be done with it. The only reason he was still there was because they couldn't fire him. Well, they could, but he had a reputation, and the board wasn't going to risk getting rid of one of the few doctors that had a name for himself-however badly it was marred-in favor of a more peaceful, uniting hospital. After all, big name doctors were the ones that kids picked to follow, and kids choosing to follow him meant more students throwing their money at the hospital.
And even Cuddy wasn't really an option to antagonize anymore. It wasn't fun when she didn't respond to his antics. She was too busy being run ragged by an infant, and she just ignored all attacks, rather than fighting back as she so often did. Rather than think up elaborate forms of revenge, like stealing all the furniture out of his office, she was too busy changing diapers and trying to remember how to think. She was still spending much of her time on the fourth floor, but the flirtatious air had been extinguished once she was named the sole caretaker of someone else's crotchspawn. She just didn't have the energy to keep up whatever unresolved sexual tension that existed between them. He had clearly just come in second to something that couldn't even feed itself.
Wilson, while returning to being Wilson, and his best friend, confidant, and watchman, was still distanced from him. Playful jokes didn't have the same effect they'd always had. And Wilson seemed to be playing Pygmalion, attempting to mold House into something he wasn't, making a better man out of him. And House resented that-there was nothing wrong with being a miserable bastard. He was able to make his own decisions about his life, and he chose to be a miserable bastard. He didn't need Wilson playing nanny to him, attempting to make him self-sufficient. He was plenty self-sufficient. Just because he hadn't changed his diet at all since his college days of booze, drugs, and takeout didn't mean anything. Just because he still looked like a rumpled mess like he did in college didn't mean anything. He'd managed to make something of himself.
But he had nowhere left to go. He knew he was one of, if not the best diagnosticians in the country, if not the world. It wasn't hubris, it was fact. There were few that compared to him. He was head of the department, with an entire collection of underlings ready to do his bidding. The only other job improvement he could make, the next step up the career hospital would be running one, and that was not a job option for him. He just didn't want to do it. So he had reached the top, and had nowhere left to go. And it left him feeling slightly lost and disoriented-and he'd felt that way since he'd gotten the job. But he'd always managed to ignore it. Now it was a symptom of a bigger problem.
He had done everything he had in life because of his father. Not to make him proud. Not to make him happy-no that was the reason why good sons did things, and he was not a good son. He was not a very good man at all. He was happy being a horrible man. It was the one thing that gave his life some sort of meaning-that was one sameness that would always exist in his life. He would always be miserable, and he would always be mean. He had moments where he showed that there was some emotion that made him a human, but it was always a little poke, one man coming out of the trenches, while the rest held the defensive front.
He had done everything he had to spite his father. He did well in school because he wanted to prove to his father that no amount of abuse could possibly hold him back. Not that he ever went to classes-from his freshman year of high school on he was always the one that had been "too cool" to be the braniac of the class-but he always managed good grades much to the frustration and anger of his teachers who felt that anyone who missed more classes than attended them should fail the class regardless of test scores. But there was no way to argue that he knew the material, and that he knew it well.
He became a doctor, because it was something that his father could never-and would never-do. He did it to gain respect that his father had never earned. His father had been respected, but only because John House had been in an institution that forced respect upon people rather than requiring them to earn it. He rose to the top because he wanted to outdo his father, so that his father could not mock him for it, even though it always happened anyway. There was always some way that he had been not good enough and he strove to improve it.
He drank too much, he took too many pills, because his life didn't matter. It was just another life, just another person who would eventually die, and what did it matter when or how? It was self-destructive, but it was what made him thrive and it was what infuriated him most about Wilson. That the man couldn't see that without his self destruction House would be nothing. House needed to be constantly walking the edge of life and death, because without the constant threat of falling off, he'd have ended things much, much sooner.
It was something that had always played in the back of his head. If it ended now, what would happen? The world would continue turning. The earth would continue to revolve around the sun and it's own axis. Day would come, and night would fall. Just like the world continued after every other person died. It would rain, and the leaves would change, and the snow would fall, and the world would continue going on without him. Patients could be handled by his team, they didn't need him. Wilson would move on with some other blonde girl who needed to be loved, and waste his life away with yet another marriage and yet another divorce. Cuddy had her child, and would channel whatever sadness she felt into becoming a better mother. The team would perhaps be the ones to be most upset. Cameron would cry into Chase's shoulder, and Chase would think in the back of his mind It was only a matter of time.
Foreman would resolve that he would never become House, and Thirteen would just be faced with another reminder of her own mortality and the choice she had made long before her mother had died-that she would end things before the disease ended her. Taub would sigh, and Kutner would feel guilty, but they'd all eventually move on with their lives, looking back occasionally at the man who had taught them how to be better doctors.
Babies would be born, and old people would die, and nothing would be any different in a world without him in it. It was a thought that was both comforting and dismaying. That a life meant so little. That if he died, it would make no impact in the world around him. Millions of people died every day, and it made no difference to the rest of the human race. But at the same time, it assured him that his death would not mean the end of a species so hell-bent on destroying itself that it could continue to burn itself out over the next few hundred years.
The human race was the race to the end. All of life was a suicide life, destined to end in death of some sort. It was a vain pursuit to attempt to live forever. There was no reason to live, as no matter what you did, you died anyway. It was the great paradox of being alive.
But he'd never actually followed through with it, as he wasn't a very brave man. Then again, they always said that ending one's life was the most cowardly thing that one could do. So did he keep on living because he was a coward, or because he wasn't? He knew that when the time came that it wouldn't be a brave, glorious death. If he had to pick what was the most likely scenario, it would be his liver giving in from the steady stream of paracetamol and alcohol that made it's way through his system every day. There was a reason why it said on the bottles of Tylenol that you shouldn't take it if you have more than two alcoholic drinks a day.
He was honestly surprised that it was still in rather good shape for all the hell he put it through.
There were hundreds of ways that he could kill himself. How he would do it, if it came down to it, he didn't know. Guns were too messy-they left all those nasty blood stains around, and if he did it at home, no one would want to move in with a giant blood stain that was the last bits of the former tenant left behind. Hanging was too...undignified. Someone would find him tongue lolling out, because he didn't think he had any place to dangle a rope high enough from to properly snap his neck.
Carbon monoxide was painless, and easy, but too easy. Besides, if he was going to go, he was going to go. He wasn't just going to stick his head in the oven and call himself Plath. No, if he was going to go, it was going to be something grand and extravagant. Like the super glue and piano wire method he'd always heard about. Tie a noose of piano wire-of which he had plenty-and super glue your hands to your head, and a rope around your feet, and jump off a building. The piano wire severs the head, and since it's super glued to your hands, you're left holding your own head, dangling from a building. He had to admit, it had promise if he did it off the hospital. He'd certainly get plenty of attention, what with all those windows and everything.
He sighed and took another swig of his whiskey. He hadn't actually planning on living this long. He'd somehow made it to the verge of his fiftieth birthday-coming up in only a few scant months, and when he was younger he thought that fifty was something that had been completely unattainable. He drank too much, he was a smoker (although he'd quit when Stacy had in a "show of support"), he took enough vicodin in a day to make most heroin addicts balk at the amount of opiates he had in his system, and he took silly risks. By all means, he should have been dead thirty years ago.
He'd come close-and always at the times he hadn't actually wanted to die. He'd nearly died because of his leg, he'd been shot, he'd stuck a knife in an electrical outlet, he'd overdosed more than once, he'd been dropped off at the hospital by his roommate at the time with a BAC high enough to kill all but the most hardened alcoholics. But whenever he considered actually going and offing himself, well, that was a bit more difficult. He didn't quite know how he'd go about it. It wasn't an impulsive thing to do, a proper death took planning to execute properly, pun entirely intended.
There were calls to be made-he didn't think he could die without actually saying goodbye. Even when it had only been an "if it happens, it happens" thing, he had called his mother. He hadn't actually been planning on dying that Christmas eve-but he had known by the fifth oxy and the sixth scotch that it was not going to end well, no matter how it ended. And he hadn't wanted to die without letting his mother know he cared. Because he did. Perhaps that was why he was still around-and he knew that it was a part of it. He could just off himself so close to his father dying, it would break his mother, and he wasn't going to be directly responsible for another death.
He wasn't going to leave Wilson in the lurch either-if he was fully intending on ending things, he'd make sure that it was clear to Wilson what his intentions were. Preferably in a way when he wouldn't find out until after the fact, and in a way where his friend wouldn't feel guilty about not stopping things. That was the biggest dilemma facing him. If he let Wilson know what his intentions were, then no doubt the man would try to stop him, and if Wilson failed in stopping him, then he knew Wilson would be burdened with a huge amount of guilt.
But he couldn't just go without saying goodbye to his best friend. It was a puzzling dilemma, and one that had kept him up before.
Cuddy, well, she'd find out after the fact, feel a bit guilty that she hadn't noticed any warning signs, remind herself that every single thing he did was a warning sign, and move on with her life. Although turning her over on her desk and fucking her brains out was something that was relatively high on his list of "things to do before he died." Most of the rest had either been crossed off by actually doing them, or crossed off because he was no longer able to do them.
He couldn't exactly sneak across the iron curtain anymore-that had been on the list, but crossed off once the nineties and the fall of communism came. He couldn't exactly hike the Appalachian trail now that he had a bad leg. He'd already been skydiving, danced naked in front of an audience, been all the way around the world, seen the pyramids and the Eiffel Tower, and the Great Wall, and he'd accomplished all of that before college. One of the very few benefits of a military family.
In fact, there was nothing left on his list of things he'd never done. Sure, he'd never banged Cuddy in her office, but he had slept with her, no matter how many years ago it had been. So it wasn't quite screwing the boss, as she hadn't been his boss at the time, and in fact he'd been the one with the power, what with being the graduate assistant to her class and all. Even if that wasn't at all the reason, he'd still slept with her, and there was nothing left in life for him to accomplish.
And then there was the issue of what to do with himself once he was gone. He had a will, he'd had one since he graduated med school, and as such, actually began to have his own possessions to dole out to other people once he shuffled off the mortal coil. But there was the bigger problem of the remains. If it was up to him, he'd be perfectly content with being dumped into a potter's field and ignored for the rest of his life, but he knew that other people wouldn't let that happen. Other people being Wilson, his mother, Cuddy and Cameron.
He wasn't fond of the idea of a funeral-it was already laid out in his will that any grieving would be done Irish-wake style, with much boozing and fun. Then again, if the rest of the hospital staff showed up, it would be celebrating. Only it would be celebrating his death, rather than the life he had lived. He didn't really want to be buried and rot away into the lining of his coffin. No, cremation was much neater, and he could be stacked with his father, grandparents, Aunt Janice and Great Aunt Karen on a shelf in his mother's garage, all in square urns, all matching neatly as though they were supposed to be there and that they were all coordinated for a reason.
He lay awake at night, and considered these things. It was something to do with himself when he couldn't sleep and he was starting to realize just how old he was. Of all the things he had done in his life, but not of how much there was left to do. And he wondered, every now and then, if Cuddy felt the same way. No, of course she didn't. She had a child now-and when she hadn't had a child, but she was at the top of the career ladder, she had wanted one. So she always had had something to live for, no matter what she achieved. And now she had a child to continue living for.
He looked at the bottles of pills in front of him, and the thought passed through his head briefly, one hand reaching forward, only to be paused mid-air. He paged through an issue of Rolling Stone that was older than he thought the coffee table was, surprised to land on an article about Hunter S. Thompson. Engrossed, he smirked to himself, making a mental note to add one more thing to his last wishes:To not have his ashes stuck in an urn to put on a shelf in the garage, but rather to get them blasted out of a canon. Certainly a way to make his statement. He was sure he could come up with a decent variation on it, so that it wasn't blatantly ripping off the man.
He was bored. He was lonely. He had nothing to do. No cases-those were the only things that drove him to do much of anything anymore-nowhere to advance up the career ladder, no more sick bastard telling him how he could improve his life. No, there was nothing left for him, but yet he wasn't sure if this was it. If this was all there was to life, or if there was something more. If he really did have the best way to kill himself, or if there was one better. If his affairs were really in order, or if they weren't.
The phone rang, and he reached for it, checking the caller ID for a moment before answering. "If you had to kill yourself, how would you do it?" No hellos, or how are yous, nope, launching into the bluntest question he could.
"What?"
"If you were told you had to kill yourself, that there was no other option, how would you do it?"
"I wouldn't."
"What if the option was yourself, or a million other people, and you could chose your way to go, any way at all, what would you do?"
"House-"
"Answer the question, Jimmy."
"If I had to pick some way to go, it'd probably be-" There was a pause. "Why are you asking me this?"
"Morbid curiosity. Answer."
"Something quiet. Like leaving the car running in the garage." House rolled his eyes.
"Of course you would. You're not the type to slit your wrists and write your note in your own blood after all." Which was a rather intriguing idea, if he had to think about it.
"Are you all right?" It was a reasonable question, he supposed, since he started a conversation about suicide without any prompting.
"Just dandy." He could almost hear Wilson roll his eyes.
"No really. I'm not going to have to put you in the psych ward for the next seventy-two hours am I?"
"I'm fine. Really." It was a lie, but everybody lied.
"Are you high?"
"No less sober than usual." It was true. It was when he was sober that he'd think about the way he was going to die-he wanted it to be on his own choosing. He didn't believe in fate, or that things happened for a reason. No, things happened because things happened, and one door closing was a door closing and leaving a part of him behind. There were no more open doors in front of him.
"I wanted to see if you wanted to go see the new Underworld movie. Vampires, werewolves, and big boobs in very little latex." House pondered the proposition for a moment, "But if you'd rather wallow in your own misery, go right ahead." House shook his head.
"When's it start?"
"Seven. AMC over on Sloan-" House rolled his eyes.
"Because you're such a high school kid that you go to the one they all go to."
"Montgomery's not showing it. Already checked." And of course the theater on Nassau street wouldn't be showing it, which left them with AMC, the only decently sized movie theater in Mercer County.
"Yeah. I'll meet you there." He gave one more look towards the pill bottle. This was a suicide life, he had no reason to live, but he couldn't come up with a very good reason to die either. He'd go none to bravely into the night one fateful day, but it wouldn't be any time in the future. Not because he didn't want it to happen, not because he wasn't ready for it, but simply because there were still more plans to be made, more kinks to be worked out. It would happen, and it would happen someday soon, but it wouldn't be tonight.