A/N: I'm a prolific little bugger today, and it feels good. Inspired by the song Both Sides Now by Joanie Mitchell, and if you squint real hard you can piece together where the lyrics would fit, if it was a songfic proper. One chapter to a verse, three chapters total.
There was a time when Gregory House had been optimistic once. It was a long, long time ago. When he was still at the age of not knowing any better, and just accepting that things were the way they were because. And because was a good enough answer for him. It would still be another year before "because why?" would become a constant part of his exasperating vocabulary, but for now, he was content.
And he thought that life couldn't get any better. He looked forward to warm summer days and popsicles, something that he damn near lived off of for most of his youth. He looked forward to being able to go outside, and play with the neighbor kids, or even just outside to his own playset that his father had built. He listened to his father's commands, and his mother's insistence that his father was acting the way he was because he wanted Greg to grow up big, strong, and perfect.
He didn't think there was anything wrong with the way his father raised him, but he wasn't yet old enough to know better. He didn't know that sleeping outside was a bad thing-even when it was cold out. He just took up refuge in his play house, and pretended he was camping somewhere, or on a ship in the middle of the sea, and that the storm would pass, and he'd get to go outside to a sunshining day.
And on warm summer nights, he'd lay out on the grass willingly, watching the sun dip down, and watch the clouds roll by, pointing out the shapes in them. Occasionally, his mother would join him. Angels, and ice cream cones, each shape shifting and metamorphing into another, as they gently blew by on the wind.
They'd given him hope as a child, they were something that were always there. Something that he could count on, that he knew he could always look up at. And he liked them, because they could be whatever he wanted them to be. If he wanted them to be a pirate, they'd be a pirate, if he wanted it to be a bunny, he just needed to squint and tilt his head, and he could make out the four legs and long floppy ears.
They were malleable constants, and he knew that wherever he went-no matter how many times he moved, every time he looked up, there the clouds would be, waiting for him to pick out some decoded message in them. And it was hilltops, and valleys, stations in Germany and Japan and the desert sands of Egypt, and his back yard back home wherever that was, where he'd stare up at the sky and make the clouds whatever he wanted them to be.
Sometime between the age of four-endlessly optimistic about the world-and the age for 14-endlessly cynical about it-the clouds had faded away. He'd occasionally look up, but not be able to see anything. He'd keep trying to see the castles made of ice cream and sweets, the angels, the bunnies, the smiling, happy people.
He'd keep trying to be optimistic, tell himself that the next day would get better, that this was just a passing phase. Or that he'd grow up and move out, and all this would be done, and he'd never have to see his father again. He'd keep searching vainly for shapes in the clouds, that had always been there to comfort him, some sort of decoded sign that thing were going to be all right.
And occasionally, he'd sit staring at the clouds, even now, hoping to pick up some sort of shape, some sort of something to give him the hope he had in his youth. Somewhere along the way, the clouds had turned from something constant to something constantly there. Things that meant nothing good-they meant rain and snow, and miserable weather.
They became an excuse, so that he didn't have to do anything. "it's raining", or "it's snowing out" became excuses to stop him from doing something spontaneous. They became things to blame, to hate, rather than to look up at in glee.
He didn't know when the clouds had shifted from something good to something bad, he didn't know when he had lost that optimistic hope that always accompanies youth. And part of him wished he still had it, that maybe life with hope was better. And then he reminds himself that hope is for those that don't' see the reality of the world. That Nietzsche was right, hope was the worst of all evils, for it prolonged the torture of man.
But still, for some reason, he stood on the balcony of his office, staring up at the sky-and the big, fluffy white clouds, like the ones from his youth. Not the thick ones that he was so used to seeing, not the ugly clouds that hung over New Jersey, as though to blanket it permanently in dourness, but the big white ones that every child draws onto their pictures in school.
The sort that adults don't even notice anymore.
When Wilson comes out to join him, and ask what he's doing, he gives a small snort of laughter. "Cloud watching." Maybe, just maybe, he could see what the younger side of him did, the other side of him, that had long since been turned off and ignored. Maybe he could find hope in the clouds again.