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The universe conspired against them, one by one. They were all House now – all less than whole, all missing some crucial part. Only together did the total of their pieces sum to an entire human being, and so they were able now only to function thusly as one, effectively soldered together by Fate, and House, its limping Igor, into a Frankenstein's monster with a stethoscope.
Cameron had been first. The second child Chase gave her swam happily in its amniotic sac until the day of its birth, when on his way out he tore something deep inside her, and the only way to stop the bleeding and save his mother's life had been a radical hysterectomy. Cameron had recovered well, the child had been unharmed, and with a healthy son to join his older sister, neither she nor Chase felt they could object too strongly to the lot life had dealt them. It could have been much worse. And yet, still a young woman, she looked sometimes at herself in the mirror and saw not her pretty face, not her slender waistline, not the womanly figure that still caught men's eyes, only the extra space in her belly where her womb had once been. Two children was enough – it wasn't the premature end to her fertility that upset her, but the idea, that, like a family pet, she had been neutered – the attractive package around her organs still intact and functioning well, but within, a hole where her gender used to be.
She didn't talk about it much to Chase – had ventured only once to talk to House about it, sort of, with a sideways kind of approach that emerged as the question do you feel incomplete without your thigh muscle? House, never a stupid man despite all impatience and misanthropy, had to his credit at least heard the hidden tremor of self-doubt in her voice. I am incomplete, he told her, blue eyes serious and face grave with the unspoken apology for that evil truth. It was the longest conversation either of them ever had with one another about it.
Chase, for his part, hated that he could not change what irked the woman he loved, and for that reason she seldom spoke of that sensation of incompleteness. There was little to be done to assuage doubt like that because it was irreversible, and, in the end, what choice had there been – to forfeit that small ball of elastic tissue in her abdomen in exchange for her survival, or to bleed her life out onto the delivery room bedsheets while their newborn howled in the corner? No, no choice at all.
Foreman was next. A few years later, a car accident on the way home from work; a few too many cars merging into that lane, and he had suddenly found the front end of his car crunched down around his legs. He suffered only minor injuries to rest of his body, despite the damage to his vehicle, but the steering column had so extensively lacerated his knee that the joint had to be replaced. A modern doctor, he always extolled the advancements of science, among them the marvelous things that could be done with faulty joints, limbs, even, sometimes, entire hearts. But the sight of the cane beside his bed the first morning of his physical therapy so terrified him it took an entire hour to convince himself to try to stand.
That would have been too much irony even for the universe, and with some pain and an appropriate PT regimen, Foreman recovered and refused even to take home the cane they had provided him in case of sudden pain or stiffness. He also had a prescription for Vicodin; he even filled it. It sat, unopened, on a windowsill in his kitchen. He had Cameron and Chase over for dinner occasionally; Chase probably saw it and Cameron almost certainly did, but neither ever commented on it. They knew why he kept it there as well as he did – right above the sink, right next to the coffee maker, where he saw it five, six, seven times a day, a reminder of the sick fear that cane had induced in him and a command to keep at bay the stray House-like inclinations that even now almost always threatened to become a major component of his personality.
Foreman walked with a limp; it was unavoidable, he held it well and usually took care to be at the hospital and seated in the office by the time House arrived each morning. Neither he nor either of his colleagues could ever decide whether it was for the older doctor or himself that he ensured House would not have to see the other man walk in every day, one leg stiffer and slower than the other, but under his own power and for the most part without pain.
It took a long time for the universe to get around to Chase. A doozy, though, when the blow landed. They were closer to "mid-forties" than "early" by then, Cameron's hair tinted, Chase's shorter and a little sandier at the temples, no trace of brown left at all in House's. Foreman wore little half-glasses, the other two with considerably stronger prescriptions in their contact lenses. Children nearly in high school now, plus a few other staples of early middle age.
Cameron had lost her ovaries and uterus some thirteen years before; Foreman had been without his knee for a decade. At forty-seven, Chase lost his hearing. It was a freak accident, like Cameron's, like Foreman's, like House's own. When a gas main running just outside the hospital ruptured, Chase was in the clinic with two other doctors and some thirty-five patients. Chase sustained the customary cuts and bruises from flying debris, a few broken fingers from who knew what, and happened to be standing just close enough to the window that the concussion from the blast drove the Aussie back into a wall and his stapes into his inner ear, causing irreversible sensorineural hearing loss. In layman's terms, the tiny stirrup bone, forced inward by air pressure, sheared his auditory nerve in half.
He could still hear in the other ear, of course, and knew his colleagues well enough that he could read their lips if he didn't quite catch their words. Only House seemed to delight in mumbling or tilting his head at just the right angle to make his mouth impossible to see clearly. Cameron grew used to the slight frown of concentration that accompanied her husband's attempts to follow conversation. Chase, just as stubborn in his own way as their boss, refused to allow the sudden and drastic reduction of his sensory world visibly affect him, but there were times when Foreman caught him slouched in an office chair, eyes closed and palms pressed to his forehead to try to rub away a screaming headache, and it was unavoidable someone often had to furtively repeat what House had told them. The Australian accent had mellowed a few more notes after another twenty years in the States, but began appearing with rare prominence as he listened more to his internal voice than the ones around him to keep track of what he was saying. And he spoke so softly. It was calming, really, wonderfully gentle, but Cameron knew, and House most likely guessed, that Chase was really afraid he would not know if he was speaking too loudly and therefore embarrassing himself.
They would be almost seventy-five by the time Cameron found him weeping into his hands because he had not heard their granddaughter's tiny two-year-old voice say she loved him.
For now, though, with Chase's injury, they were complete – complete in a way being whole had never made them. Now, their team had the fullness of that one, shared, devastating experience. Each and every one of them – no longer the brilliant but unreachable Dr House and the minions that tried desperately to lap enough knowledge from around his feet to attain the insight that only tragedy can bring. They had all reached it, in one way or another, perhaps in different degrees – were they better doctors for it? Was House?
They were who they were, the same excuse House had used for decades. They weren't bitter like him, or dark, but they were broken enough to bridge the gap between him and the patients that, if they did their job properly, would never have to understand. Cameron's loss gave her, the only one of them given to real introspection, the unsettling doubt about her own humanity. Foreman's pushed him one terrifying, tantalizing step closer to what he was alternately accused of and praised for. Chase's took a connection to others he clung to in lieu of family or homeland. They all wondered on some level, for the rest of their lives, how close they were to the person they would have been without that loss.
What happened to you if you weren't buried with all the parts and abilities you were born with? Were you still the same person you had always carried around a picture of in your head, if you weren't sure how loud you were talking, or if you couldn't tell if everyone else could see you limp, or if one of functioning systems in your body was simply and entirely gone?
Individually, lacking, all three – all four – of them. But taken as a group, someone could always walk, someone could always hear, someone could always, theoretically, reproduce. Oh yes, incomplete and for what – the personal amusement of the universe or whomsoever ran it. All broken down, one at a time, to the lowest common denominator that they had fought and admired and learned from and rebelled against since they were all much younger doctors.
And when they each died, as people so often do, no better or worse could be said of any of them but that, like that freak damage to each formerly full body, they had left indelible marks on one another's lives.