Anathema
By Wordsmith14
Disclaimer: I do not own House.
"All sins tend to be addictive, and the terminal point of addiction is damnation." – W. H. Auden
A "Jesus is the Way!" banner flaps in the breeze.
Passing by it – en route to the local bar –, he remembers the church of his youth, especially the stained-glass windows of St. Augustine, Mary Magdalene, and the Holy Family.
There was a time he believed there was a magic to the windows, a sort of pixie dust. Let the colored light bathe your hand and fly away.
From what and to where, he didn't know, and he still searches for answers because he didn't find them there.
The punching bag has the face of an old friend. . .or was he an enemy?
He doesn't remember now. It was a long time ago; time erases distinguishing marks, and he'll do for tonight.
His fists are furious, frenetic in their lack of regularity. The bag cannot repel the assault, does not even try to, and yields, splitting, revealing foam that serves as an off-white flag.
It's not an easy victory; his hands throb, and his knuckles are scraped scarlet and blue. Still, he pounds on, despite surrender, despite pain, despite reason.
She loves him. . .and she hates him. She loves him. . .and she hates him.
She plucks petals, one by one, off a rose. For a few seconds, she's a maiden garbed in white from a medieval ballad, fretting simply over matters of the heart.
But when are matters of the heart ever simple? The scene flickers, and she's a twenty-nine-year-old widow in a doctor's coat ripping petals off a blackened rose.
The rose is dead. It's Father's Day, not Valentine's Day. And she doesn't know who she's tearing shriveled roses for.
She stares adoringly, reverently at her baby. Isn't he beautiful?
She had guarded him, fretted over him, and prodded him out into the world, just like she had promised when he had been carefully delivered into her care.
She knew she had been a good mother. He is now respected, robust, and still growing and changing like any healthy child should.
Maybe too good, she reflects ruefully. She turns away from the mute building, ungrateful in its adulthood, and rubs her flat stomach with regret.
He smiles at his patient. She's an attractive young woman: gold, rose, porcelain, and sapphire. Someone precious.
Someone easily damaged.
He tells her, and she weeps a heroine's tears. It's beautiful the way droplets slide down her delicate nose, and it's also heartbreakingly sad.
She's different from other women he has known and the same, too. Vulnerable like Julie yet day to her night. She is Tiffany's twin without her steel and barbed wire. Warmth radiates from her, a star in the same galaxy as Melody, but she's too young to see the eternal comedy of the human experience playing out before her.
She also reminds him of someone else, the ghost of the skeleton in his closet, and he's drawn to her, almost unwillingly.
Almost, because she needs him, and he's the master of fulfilling need.
He counts the candy lined up neatly in front of him. One, two, three, four, five, six.
They're candy, because they're sweetly satisfying. Others call them drugs.
If that is true, then his job must also be a drug, because it's also sweetly satisfying.
They're his salvation, his drugs. Because he is one of the damned, isn't he? Damned to pain, damned to isolation, damned to lifelong misery, and maybe eternal suffering, too, if the religious had their stories right.
Maybe his forms of salvation are damning in themselves, he muses. But if that's true, then everyone in the world is damned.
Fin.