Title: "Faded Edges"
Word Count: 2128
Rating: PG-13 for language
Summary: Sometimes the secrets people keep aren't the ones that hurt us.
Author's Notes: Well, this appears to be that second attempt at a House!father-relationship story. This one is in the first person... like I should have written a lot of them all along, I think. Slightly-AU, but don't run away screaming; it's just because in "canon", last we knew John House was still alive, and this is set around the time of his death... although still in the recent time that we know. I owe Cincoflex my soul for semi-beta, support, and... well, support. Yeah.

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It was raining the day my dad died.

It always rains in Jersey. It's like a law, one of those ridiculous blue laws that no one remembers anymore: like "It is illegal to delay or detain a homing pigeon" or "It is against the law for a man to knit during the fishing season". And just like the rest of them, if you squint you can see the logic behind it: New Jersey needs the rain. James O'Barr once said that it rained 'in a last, desperate attempt to wash sin from the city', and even though the city he's referring to is Detroit, in the end they're all the same. All the dark ones.

And I'm getting off-track here, aren't I?

Anyway, it wasn't raining the day he actually died; I was being dramatic, I suppose. When you see death as an everyday occupational hazard you don't associate that moment with anything other than the ceasing of function, a scrawl on a form, sometimes the bitter taste of I fucked up real good here, didn't I? Not all that often for the latter, in my case at least, but what I'm trying to say is you don't think about the person's life ending, you don't remember foosball games or their taste in music and how that's gone now, how they'll never complain about their speeding ticket or put their shirt on inside-out again. They're just dead, and like everybody else you don't associate clinical 'dead' with 'gone'.

What you associate with 'gone', is the baggage that comes later. Like the funeral: a bunch of crying people in bad black dresses, stale flowers that always smell the same and piss-poor lighting that never seems to get any better.

So: it was raining the day that they buried him.

I don't own a black suit. Suits cost far too much money for what they are: which is, essentially, a monkey suit with buttons. Even the tux I wore to the charity poker night was rented. I loathe suit jackets. They're too damn confining. Not to mention what it'd do to my image if I were ever caught dead wearing that dog-ugly...

...okay, so yeah. I have one. And it took the dry cleaners two days to find my claim tag, and the vest itches like fuck, and I should have gone to the damn funeral in blue jeans if just because the son of a bitch would have rolled over in his grave, sat up, and we all could have gone home and had a beer.

And I probably would have.

Except for my mother.

Cuddy was there, too, all professional condolences and looking ever-so-natty in a charcoal jacket and a long black skirt... longer than I've ever seen her wear, actually. I didn't think she even knew that they made skirts that came down below the knee. People came in and out; I think Stacy even made an appearance at once point but I was too busy trying to ignore her to notice.

If she'd brought Mark, though, then I would have noticed.

Down-and-dirty, cripple mud-wrestling action.

I guess she knew better.

But my mother hugged me at the graveside, and if anyone there had anything witty to say about Greg House in his Mommy's arms they had the dubious wisdom to keep it to themselves, and she stood beside me after the service with red-rimmed eyes but composed all the same. Gotta hand it to my Mom.

She never was the passionate one.

"I thought..." and she laughed quietly, pulling her long coat around her a little more tightly. "We made it through Vietnam," she went on, a little more firmly. "That whole horrible decade was like one long nightmare, Greg. You-- you aren't old enough to remember that. But after all of that, all of the fear and the waiting and worrying, one letter every six months, I never expected that he'd go like-- like this. So suddenly."

She must have seen something in my face, then: goddamnit, mothers always know, someday I'm going to have some mother of nine autopsied to look for that aspect of brain function that acts like a fucking radar to their kids. There's probably an article in that somewhere, and generations of teenagers will laud my name and build me monuments on every high school campus.

Anyway.

Whatever it was that she saw, her mouth curled up into that smile. "I know what you remember. But he was hard on you because he loved you, Greg. He wanted you to be the best you could be," and I had to grind my teeth and fake the world's best long-suffering smile to keep from saying, Yeah, an army of one. I didn't expect him to go like this, either, Mom: he was such a bastard that I expected him to outlive all of us.

I've gotten good at knowing when not to say anything anymore, and I was cold and wet and just wanted to get the hell out of there and go home, and when she clasped my hand with both of her gloved ones to kiss my cheek I thought I'd gotten away clean. There were too many old memories here, too much unresolved bullshit and I had no desire whatsoever to stand there and ponder the meaning of life -- my life – while the graveyard workers stood tactfully just out of sight, leaning on their shovels and smoking cigarettes with their feet in the mud.

What adults call 'tact' is usually just a shorter way of saying chickenshit.

But before I could turn away, she'd reached down into her oversized purse and handed me something: some wirebound book about the size of some weepy teenage girl's hot pink journal.

Squeezed my hand, and I took it from her reflexively just to keep her from dropping the damn thing on my toes.

"He was proud of you, Gregory," she said to my back, and the whole way back from the cemetery I spent the bike ride with something frothing over inside my chest at the irony.
Yeah. Right. My dad, King Missile, his fellow jarheads called him "Jack" and there was a right and a wrong way for everything. My dad, whose middle name was 'Sir' and who expected that if I could skip a grade in school I should have been able to do everything else with equal ease: make quarterback on the football team, bring home a varsity letter in lacrosse. Beat everyone else out for the debate club. Ace the exams – I did that, no help from him. Defend myself from the fuckwits in every school they put me in who didn't like the new kid.

Get over the infarction.

Be grateful I was still alive.

Walk.

My dad, who never said a single word to me about my choices except when they were the wrong ones.

And I thought about it, thought about it while I parked the bike and snatched up the cane in my hurry to get out of the goddamn rain, thought about it enough so that when Cuddy called to me from the bathroom as I was peeling off my drenched jacket and pants by the sofa I barely even registered that she'd somehow beat me there. Probably thought I'd want to talk, or something equally asinine. I'd told her already, the morning I'd gotten the call: It's fine. Really. I'm not gonna get all weepy in the middle of the service and throw myself into the grave. I have my life. He had his. And at least one of us is still around to keep making the world more miserable, one person at a time.

And I thought about it enough to settle down on the sofa after a while, fresh dry jeans and an oversized sweatshirt, the low warm tug of Vicodin and a glass in my other hand, and tap my fingers on the cover of that little red book.

So simple.

So ugly.

And when I opened it, only half paying attention, what I'd expected is not in the least what I found.

That's the way the world works, isn't it? Always someone to crouch behind you while someone else pushes you down. I always thought that if there was a God, He created people for pretty much the same reason man created Slinkies: they're useless and stupid and ugly, but it's so much fun to watch them fall down the stairs.

Inside: a surprise.

PRINCETON-PLAINSBORO GAINS WORLD-RENOWNED DIAGNOSTICIAN, the headline screamed at me even from the blurry faded ink, and I had to rub my eyes for a second to make sure I hadn't, you know, simply blacked out in a booze-addled haze and was currently in the middle of a satisfyingly ego-stroking dream. But no, it was there, and I remembered that one: it'd earned me free drinks and a furtive drunken grope in a bar down the street from the hospital. Me? Yep. Greg House, that's me.

More pages, more carefully-recorded events, like ridiculous snapshots in black-and-white, those wedding photos in which the bride and groom look so happy to be frozen forever in the act of stuffing cake into each other's mouths... and what the photo doesn't show is that the bride's father hates his daughter's husband, or that the groom ripped his Jockeys in his hurry to get dressed, or the tearful screaming argument that they had not two hours after the guests were gone, the DJ packed up, and the false promise of their future recorded forever on film.

Like these, these clippings: no scrawled comments, no snapshots of shouting matches over hair and grades and friends and girls; no John, please, you don't have to be so harsh with him and Somebody has to be, or he won't live to be old enough to enlist. Every major event: there was the Hopkins admission letter, enthusiastic and dated July 1976, the mention of dean's lists and nothing at all about my having left there.

The day I got my medical license.

Back, through, and if all I really felt at that moment besides shock was disgust, maybe that makes me a bad person. But all of this, all of it was as painfully false as trying to convince me that everything had a right and a wrong way to do it.

There is no right and wrong. What is, is, and you just do what you have to do.

And until Cuddy settled down on the sofa beside me, her arm warm across my shoulders, I hadn't even realized she'd been watching.

"How long have you--"

"Long enough," brushing back her hair, her eyes serious and glittering in a way that either meant a rare moment of empathy or Danger, Will Robinson. "Long enough to see your face."

"I---"

"Don't know what to think, because your sense of not being good enough, your need to constantly punish yourself, is currently at war with your oversized ego?"

Damn her.

"We don't get to choose our families," she went on, and any other time I might have asked her what skeletons the esteemed Cuddy family had in its closet... a "B" in gym somewhere back down the line, maybe? "And like it or not, they don't get to choose us, either."

She stroked my arm, then, and I closed my eyes.

Damn her.

"But our choices reflect where we came from. And if you're as good as you are," nodding to the book in my hands, "Well, you had to have gotten it from somewhere."

Leaning in, she brushed her lips over mine in that way she knows makes me crazy... but somehow, tonight, it doesn't. Tonight it makes me relax, makes me able to look back down at the clippings in my lap and wonder what else might have been left unsaid, all these years.

When people fear weakness, they fear intimacy. Because it opens them up so completely to the other person that they lose control.

My dad was not a guy who liked to lose control.

You had to have gotten it from somewhere.

And for a moment – just a moment – I have to wonder if she's right.