One Room, No View.
Author: Storm
Characters: House, Wilson, Mrs. Wilson, Oma House.
Rating: PG
Summary: Wilson's hurt, but it's House who unexpectedly finds healing.
A/N: Written for the Literary Drabble Challenge. Kinda got away from me, so I'm hoping flash fiction will count ;) Prompt: "My grandmother's guilt lasted a lifetime" (Babyface, 77).
Clank-clank, clank-clank. Long grey needles flash, knitting and pearling. He's woken to this dozens of times: gnarled hands spooling wool, rheumy eyes intently peering, emotions buried in mounds of wrinkles. Oma used to rock herself in the old chair on the porch. If Greg slept at all, he'd wake at the thud of his father's heavy boots departing for the training barracks. The creak of her rockers on the planks would let him know it was time to crawl out, to brush off the spiders and the dirt and return to the house again, wash himself and dress in normality, go off to school. His mother, working night shifts as a nurse at the barracks hospital, was none the wiser.
Wilson's mother knits in the spare chair House himself had dragged into her son's room. A pair of socks has become a scarf, a sleeve, the beginnings of a sweater. Still the respirator rasps, the IV lines drip, the lines on the monitor steadily zig and zag.
They cornered him in an alley, hurrying back to the hospital from the bar, after the civil ceremony.
It wasn't even his. House thumps his book down on the bedside cabinet, punches the button on the monitor, glares at the unchanging readings on the printout. He pitches it into the bin to join the flowers sent by the two oncology nurses from their Caribbean honeymoon.
Wilson's mother watches him until he subsides into the pillows again, reclaims his grip on Wilson's limp hand. The momentary hope fades from her eyes and she holds up her project, stares over the collar that is taking shape at the bed. He says, before he can stop himself:
"Blue isn't his colour."
Withered lips soften into a reproving smile.
"It isn't for him, Greg," she says gently. "There aren't any magical healing powers in a sweater. You've strong-armed the best doctors in the world into taking care of him. You're here all night, every night, twice an hour every day. There isn't a wall in the room that hasn't got a differential scrawled all over it; if he's silly enough to wake up in a moment that you're not here, he'll know that you were."
If they were sat nearer, she'd pat his cheek, House realises. Instead, her smile grows fonder.
"You know what the first thing he's going to ask me is? Who was looking after you?'
House could do with the respirator for a moment himself. He can't breathe, can't think. He hopes his own new collection of wrinkles will hide the strange urges to smile and to cry. He finds he wants to believe in religion: to hope that, if those in heaven get to look down, those in hell have to look up. Wilson's mom might be wrong about there being no such thing as sartorial wizardry. Her needles resume again: clank-clank, clank-clank.
[End].