Its loveliness increases; it will never Pass into nothingness;
but still will keep A bower quiet for us, and a sleep
Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing
When House entered Dr. Malaki's office, he didn't bother with 'hello' or 'go to hell'; he just plunked himself into the nearest black leather chair and started in on this month's edition of Top Engine.
"Dr. House," she said, and maybe House was letting circumstance cloud his judgment, but she sounded so confident and assured of herself that it felt like one big slice of smarminess. He kept his nose buried in the magazine. "I know you don't want to be here."
"What gave it away?" He flipped through the pages, not actually reading anything. The magazine could've been filled with articles about car mechanics who resembled Zeus, for all he knew, but he had to stick it to her one way or another.
"But Dr. Cuddy's told me that either you come here once a week or you go back to working at the clinic. And I've heard how much you dislike working there."
"Thanks for telling me how I feel."
He'd been half-hoping to goad her into snatching his magazine away or bursting into a tantrum, but he supposed that they trained her kind better. She wouldn't be one to lose her cool so easily.
"So you'll probably be passing a lot hours here. You could spend that time doing nothing, or we could talk. It's up to you."
His hand shot up into the air, letting his non-reading fall into his lap. Mocking Malaki promised to be more fun and than the magazine. "Ooh, ooh, I vote we do nothing," he said, as earnestly as possible, like a Boy Scout swearing on his mentor's grave. "Or we could do the ink blot tests. I've got a real talent for freaking out quacks with my readings, just you wait and see. One time I saw Sleeping Beauty crashing into a Ferris Wheel. There was blood everywhere. And by 'blood' I mean 'ink.'"
"Cute." She appeared to be, now that he'd actually given her a good look, truly of Filipino descent, as her name had suggested but her New York accent denied. Her black hair was cut sensibly and razor-sharp to chin-length, and her glasses had a thin, copper frame. Her expression was as calm as the landscape paintings that adorned her office.
He'd call her plain and probably would during a future session, but she was that sort of plain that implied that she didn't bother with the extras because she did not deal with bullshit.
Bullshit of the sort he was flinging at her now.
"Some have expressed concern--"
"By 'some' you mean 'Cameron,' right? She wouldn't know how to stick to her own business even if she was handcuffed and dropped to the bottom of the ocean."
"Dr. Cameron was worried, yes." Malaki clasped her hands over the table--yep, there it was, a gold band on her wedding finger. So she allowed some measure of bullshit in her life, after all. She was a romantic, wearing a symbol of how a relationship could last forever and beyond.
What a load of crap. It pissed House off just to think of it.
"But she wasn't alone. All the reports I've received agree you've been acting unusually for the past month, ever since the accident," Malaki said.
"You can say it, you know," House said petulantly. "'Since Wilson died.' Or maybe you prefer a euphemism--since he kicked the bucket, since he went to rottenskull café, since he became worm food--"
His voice rose, but it was only because he was so annoyed at having to tell everyone to not tip-toe around him. That was all; there was no other reason. And he certainly wasn't yelling because the subject matter upset him.
House forced himself to put a lid on his anger. He didn't want to lose control in front of the professional whack-job interpreter; he might as well stamp 'loser' on his forehead if he did. "You can say 'since he died,'" House concluded.
"Fine. Since Dr. Wilson died, it seems that you've not displayed any signs of grief or even changes in behavior--aside from your fixation on Ms. McFinn."
House laced his fingers and looked away. "Should I be boo-hoo-ing my eyes out?"
"It's been said that you're still in denial."
"Denial? Who just told you to stop dancing about the bush? I get it. He's rotting in the ground." House kept trying to read Malaki for reactions, but maintained a stubborn poker-face, as if she'd overdosed on Botox. He switched tactics. "But enough about me. Tell me about your mom. She a bitch? Or maybe your marriage is so awful you prefer to wallow in other people's problems."
She didn't even bat an eye, the stubborn thing. "We're not here to talk about me, my mom, or my husband. We could talk about Wilson, though. I heard that the two of you were close."
"His office was right next to mine. Empty now, though maybe it's haunted. You think it's haunted, Dr. Mal?"
Using the wrong name didn't faze her. "What I think doesn't matter, right now. Why don't you tell me what you think?"
"He's probably around," House said, saying ridiculous things with the hopes of bugging her. "He was such a workaholic I don't think he'd even know how to leave. But, even if his ghost is hanging around, I'm harassing Cuddy 'til she gives me the room." He didn't want it for sentimental reasons; he needed the space to lock his employees up until they stopped looking at him like he was about to burst into a mushroom cloud of repressed grief.
"And you two were living together?"
House shrugged. "He slept on my couch. Peed in it too, the dog. No wonder his wife threw him out. He saved me the trouble of doing the same when he died."
Malaki's eyes flicked down, and for a second House thought he'd finally gotten to her. "I've also heard rumors that you were more than friends."
He'd heard them, too, and hearing it now irritated him just as much as it had before. But he hid his annoyance with a jest: "Yeah, we were more than friends. I owed him money. Couldn't pay it back, so, y'know, had to resort to sexual services. It wasn't a pretty sight, let me tell you."
"You're a funny man, Dr. House."
"And you're not."
He spent the rest of the hour pointedly ignoring Malaki and reading his car magazine. It ended up being entirely devoid of articles about car mechanics that looked like Zeus.
"How'd your day go?"
House glared at Wilson. "We really have to stop meeting like this."
The setting--a bland hospital room--was blurred and lacked detail. The background furniture bled into one another and all color was washed away, but this tended to be the case in House's dreams. Or at least in the dreams he'd been having lately. "Why? I think it's kind of nice, myself." Wilson, on the other hand, came in a HDTV level of quality. House could see everything about him, from the floppiness of his bangs (longer than they'd been a month ago; they'd been trimmed just before the accident. Bangs couldn't grow in dreams, could they?), to the creases in his white, ironed, button-down shirt.
"For one thing, how am I supposed to miss you if you won't go away?"
"Why miss me if you don't have to?" Wilson asked, propping his feet lazily against the patient's bed, his shoes scuffing dirt onto the pristine sheets. House glanced at the bed's occupant, a twenty-something girl with strawberry-blonde hair. As with the other non-Wilson details, House couldn't quite make her facial features.
Well, this being a dream, it didn't matter where Wilson put his feet. It nagged at House, though, Wilson being that irresponsible and inconsiderate. It didn't feel right. It didn't feel like Wilson.
"I should be missing you. You're dead."
Wilson sighed and shook his head, a sight House had witnessed many times in their years together, as well as in the month since Wilson's death. "How many times do I have to tell you? This is me. I'm real."
Wilson placed a hand on his upper arm, and sure enough, House could feel its pressure, light at first, then harder, as his grasp tightened. House pulled his arm away. "Yeah, that'll be very convincing when I wake up tomorrow and you're still dead." House grabbed the remote control from off the blurry bed stand and flicked through the channels. Since this was taking place in his own head, there'd better be something good on.
Wilson settled into his chair, his elbows sinking down to his sides and his back slouching against the curve. "You never did say how your day was."
"They sent me to a shrink."
"What for?"
"Because I didn't cry at your funeral," House said, gaze set on the TV.
"I thought the punishment for that was death row."
"That's in Algeria."
"Ah. Wise people, the Algerians. You should've cried at my funeral. I deserved it."
House snorted. Dream or not, this was actually not a bad Wilson substitute. He wasn't quite entirely Wilsonian, but he was just enough so to do the trick.
House plunked his own feet onto the girl's bed, relaxing. "If anything made me cry at your funeral, it was the sheer boredom."
"Not my fault," Wilson said. "If I'd gotten any warning, I'd have planned it at a strip-club."
"What, as a final act to make everyone like you?"
"Yup."
And though House resisted against accepting this Wilson, like he did every night, in the end he gave in. Something was better than nothing. And sometimes, when he let himself not think too hard about it, House could fool himself into believing that this was no dream and that this really was Wilson.
In the background, the TV's static droned.
House woke up and stared up at the ceiling, groggy and confused. Hadn't he just been talking to Wilson? They'd been mocking shrinks and other things and then suddenly he was waking up in bed--
Quacks. He rolled over and stuck his face into the pillow and let himself, like an ostrich sticking its head into the ground, take false security in that comfort. Of course. They'd been talking about quacks because Cuddy sent him one to get him "deal" with Wilson's death because Wilson was dead. The whole conversation had been in his head.
House had been right. The memory of Wilson grabbing his arm in a dream was not convincing at all, when he returned to reality.
He took in deep, stabilizing breaths, to calm himself down. He couldn't go through this every single damned morning. He simply couldn't. He had to kick Wilson out of his mind, once and for all. But how? What was keeping him there?