It's a cold, grey morning- the kind that has a way of tinting the world blue- and he wants to make a Twilight reference but there is nobody there to listen and even then none of his usual audience would get the pop culture throwback.
"Amateurs." House half grunts, half laughs to himself as he takes the second, deep drag of his morning cigarette.
He doesn't miss people outside of these moments, where he has wit and knowledge to bestow upon them, purely out of his own overwhelming generosity. He understands, conversely, that they do not miss him. At all.
"Fine by me…" He murmurs to himself, going cross-eyed to watch the cigarette cherry come to life with another pull, glowing a piercing orange against the muted backdrop of his surroundings- a tiny beacon in the maelstrom of emotions reminding him, reminding The Addict, that all he'll ever need are the vices that have kept him company for all these years.
He leans back against the steps of the stoop, keeping himself upright with his elbows while he extends his battered leg in unison with a slow exhale. The set of mimosas he brought out sit untouched beside him in the company of the telltale orange bottle that defines him. He gave up denying this fact ages ago, when his thumb trembled against the plunger of a syringe…
House shakes his head to knock his thoughts off their course, knowing that dwelling will only blaze a trail to sorrow and he's had enough of that icy knot in his stomach for a lifetime. Worried, he reaches for the bottle and shakes out two pills, reconsiders, and makes it three- he has to act quickly. The terror he keeps stifled and buried is never so strong as when he sits and lets his mind wander. It always brings him to the open wound still festering on his heart; ugly and hostile and growing. Like his leg, it won't heal and in acknowledging it he only admits his own vulnerability and the realization scares him.
He will never recover from this.
With the wound exposed he feels everything and he feels it amplified because for years on end all he's felt is nothingness, the cold bite of resentment, and the dull ache of dependency. Now, emotions he taught himself to hide and ignore are demanding their time in the forefront of his consciousness and he does not know how to put the lid back on this Pandora's box.
The grief is overwhelming and he is drowning in it, aware of the fact that he is but unable to do anything more than what he's best at: self-medicate. If that makes him a coward then he vows to himself to live with that because he doesn't care, can't care, anymore. The wound is just too big, too exposed, and there is no more room left on his back for demons, no more closet space to lend to skeletons. After years of chasing, of vying for it, he has what he only thought he wanted- the knowledge of his limits.
He's at his breaking point.
The war that he's been waging, against the world and everything in it, has been fought primarily and for so long in his head and now that there is nothing left but hindsight he sees it all in crystal-keen awareness. Something like despair stirs in him now that the armor built over so many bitter years has started to chip, now that the pieces are starting to erode and the decay is progressing too quickly to contain, making it impossible to salvage all he's worked so hard to build. There's no choice now but to wait for it all to crumble and bury him because that is destined to be the fruit of his labor.
He can't fight the instinct to beat fate to the finish line, to do it himself so he can deny someone, somewhere, the satisfaction. If he's already numb and empty when the hammer falls then he wins. It's cutting off his nose to spite his own face because it's his life and his choice and he is the only thing allowed to control it.
He's gritting his teeth to the point that he's bitten clean through the filter of his cigarette and the sharp, acrid taste of poison cotton numbs the tip of his tongue and sets his gums tingling. House turns and spits the ravaged cigarette into one of the mimosas and picks up the untouched one to partake in, mostly to get the taste of ashtray out of his mouth. The hint of champagne touches the back of his tongue as an afterthought, well after the first gulp is already past his teeth and down his throat, simmering in his nervous belly. He makes an abrupt, grating sound as he hocks up phlegm and spits it out for distance, intrigued momentarily as it catches in the morning wind and lands with a definitive 'squick' on the rear windshield of the car parked in front of his apartment.
"Charming."
He doesn't startle at the familiar voice, the husky little tease of syllables he's memorized and come to adore, and he makes no move to acknowledge that she's coming out to sit with him. Behind him, actually, slender legs framing his shoulders now. The hairs on his arms and on the back of his neck bristle with anticipation and he's sucking in a sharp breath before she even has a chance to touch him. He eases back against her as graceful fingers spill over his shoulders and he doesn't stop until he feels his head against her stomach, a sigh escaping past lips parted with private relief when she snakes her hand beneath the collar of his t-shirt to rub his chest and tease the thatch of hair there.
She is a pond of strength and comfort he has come to drink deeply from but even she cannot restore him and he feels the futility weighing on them both as he all but collapses into the rock she has had to become for him. His thigh protests the small display of need and he moves to rub the mangled area through his pajama bottoms, turning his body in an attempt to bury his face against her sleepshirt under the guise of alleviating pain. It's all smoke and mirrors, lost on her at this point- Remy's come to know him well.
"House…" She coos but the sound is muted by the white noise of a Vicodin high and so she clears her throat to try again, bolder this time.
"Greg."
He twists his head, an awkward pivot of his neck with earnest intent to listen to her, and now that she has an audience there is nothing to be said because it's hard to understand and soothe grief when you're the cause of it.
The look in his eyes is a withered one, muddy rain puddles replacing glaciers, and he lays there still and bewildered, waiting for her to say something, anything, to make everything all right. Yet that expectation is too tall an order to fill and distraction is the only true comfort she has for him. She strokes his hair, fingers diving into salt and pepper waves and she wonders to herself if he ever plans to get it cut again. He closes his eyes and turns to sigh against her stomach, his breath hitting in a hot burst of finality. She looks down at him and realizes what he's doing, watches as the strength and fight drain from his bones thanks to the emotional bloodletting in that brilliant mind of his. She was a kid, once. She had a dog and she saw it crawl under the porch and assume the position and she knows. Fucking hell, she knows.
He's getting ready to die.
"Hey…" She gives his hair a playful tug and his stubbled cheek a gentle pat, trying to tease him back to attention. She denies him when he shifts to try and hide his face in the crook of her arm, putting a hand on either side of his head so that he has no choice but to look up at her from her lap, even though she'll appear upside down. Remy leans forward to hover over him when he opens his eyes and can't help but notice the he looks exhausted for the trouble.
"Hey…" He grumbles back to her, past the lump in his throat but not louder than the sandpaper edge his words always have. All he can think is that she's beautiful and the thought is an obsessive one: from her adorable nose to the knick of a scar on her cheek, every last detail is vivid in his mind. His eyes meet hers and it holds him while his stomach turns on itself, their surroundings fading into white glare like inverted tunnel vision.
He's not prepared for her to kiss him from this position and his body tenses, his lips clumsy against hers and his hands unable to do more than twitch in bumbling confusion until they find her face. She holds the embrace until it emboldens her confidence, sighing into his return as she breaks it off.
"I love you, Greg. You did the right thing."
Remy hauls back without another word and slaps him hard across his face, her palm throbbing electricity to her fingertips afterwards, hand stinging as she balls fists into the material of his t-shirt to hoist him up.
"Now wake up."
It's a rush straight out of a science fiction movie, like some kind of warp drive, surroundings blurred into obscurity with the sense of forward propulsion bringing stomach contents to the frontline. It's all color and lights in no discernible pattern coupled with a feeling of weightless helplessness but there is a fixed point on the horizon and he's hurtling towards a widening chasm of pure white, about to breach.
He breaks the surface like a man seconds from drowning- with a gasp and wide, frantic eyes- to an explosion of sights and sounds he's not yet able to process. Shadows pass in front of him in a bustle, urgency detectable despite the shapelessness and it's the sounds that he's able to digest first: the beeps of machines and the wheeling of gurneys, the clack of metal instruments against surgical trays.
Coughing, no…choking, racks his body and sets his lungs on fire because he can't catch his breath and it's merciless. House tries to clutch his aching chest but a barrage of hands are there to subdue him, his panic breeding aggression in his movements of protest.
Cameron's is the first face he recognizes, her eyes filled with worry and default concern, the knowing glint even brighter in contrast with the dark circles. She turns to say something that sounds like 'forget it' to the Australian shouldering through the shadowy onlookers with defrib paddles in a white-knuckled grip but he can't make out the words with any certainty. He falls back unceremoniously against the stale hospital pillows and cringes because everything hurts and it feels like everything is closing in on him while Cameron speaks again, the sound a disorienting echo.
"He's back."