Disclaimer: See Chapter 1
A/N: This is dedicated to Tigger101 who criticises, supports and mocks in one go. Thanks Tigger. Also, something Tigger raised the last time - do you expect this to GO somewhere? Because it does, but now I'm not too sure if it goes where you think it should go? Anyway, this is the last planned part, but if a lot of you aren't satisfied with the way I've resolved it, please drop me a line, and I'll try to work something out? Oh, and EXAMS ARE OVER!!! Sorry it took so long to bring this chapter out.
Autumn
"When darkness turns to light,
It ends tonight,
It ends tonight."
- 'It Ends Tonight', All American Rejects
The winds awake and blow the surface of the warm, baked earth, and she can feel the ground emit a tiny audible sigh of relief. She feels that way herself sometimes, all the time, never, as she works late into the night, trying to feverishly ensure that the patient doesn't die on them. Sometimes the others are there, sometimes they're not, but it doesn't really matter, because to them it's just another case.
Shouldn't it just be another case?
There is nothing overly special about this patient, nothing overly tragic or dramatic – she's just another teenager trying to find her place in the world – a world that is changing without her. Her parents come into visit her daily after work, and her sister comes in after school and they're a perfect, little family- a perfect family that she never had. They just sit there patiently, watching her watch them, and it's so familiar, except so much more unnatural when the patient's fifteen.
"She's always liked that," the sister tells her one day when she comes in to draw some more blood. This is the longest a patient's lived without them forming a diagnosis, and if she admits it to herself, they're no closer to finding a solution to this puzzle.
"Liked what?" she asks, because it was the type of comment that meant that she wanted an answer.
"Watching human nature," the sister replies quietly. And the comment reminds her so much of him, that she has to blink and hurry to make her escape, trying desperately to ignore the blank helplessness that lines the room. As she walks briskly down to the lab, she glances in at him in his glass-walled office, bouncing a tennis ball idly, a look of intense frustration on his face.
She walks on quickly.
"Jessie's smart," one of the patient's teachers informs her when she bumps into her in the hospital cafeteria. "She should be out there changing the world, not lying here wasting away." She silently agrees, but murmurs platitudes instead. What can she say? She's seen this so many times before.
Sometimes she hates her job.
Late at night, when Jessie's coded blue for the third time that evening, she wonders why the girl hasn't died yet. Has she got some hold on life, some inner determination that makes her refuse to let go? Does she feel that she could give so much more back to the world? Drowning in her despair, she takes out the image of Beth's smile from her memory, and clings to it, waiting for the light to come. House comes into the lab, and they look at each other, lost in an eternity and she knows he doesn't understand. She doesn't understand either. He sits down beside her and they work silently, waiting the night out. Somewhere during the night, his hand brushes hers and House half-smiles.
She doesn't smile, but that's alright, because he knows she wants to. Wants to, but can't.
When morning finally breaks, she's in Jessie's room again, and he's right behind her for the first time, ready to break into his little diatribe about not lying to them anymore. Jessie opens her eyes, and stares at them both for a moment, before smiling softly.
"It's the two of you, isn't it?" Jessie says, with the bluntness of a girl who knows she's dying.
"Not very coherent, are you?" House remarks dryly, ignoring the implication. "Must be the whole tube down your throat thing." She glares at him, resenting – not for the first time – his insensitivity.
"Oh …" Jessie breathes, and a shutter falls behind her eyes. "Are my parents here?"
She shakes her head and House shrugs, plonking himself down in the chair that her father had once occupied. "They must have gone back to work – having you at the centre of their universe must get tiring."
Again, she lets out an exasperated breath of air, and the sound hangs in the air, the most fragile thing in the room. Jessie glances at her, the smile rapidly disappearing from her face.
"Do you know what's wrong with me?" she asks urgently. Desperation colours her voice – desperation and frustration, two emotions all of them understand perfectly well.
"Yeah, we're just waiting until you nearly die before we administer treatment. It's a test to see how long you last," House snaps, and she looks at her hands, ready for the tears that will come. But they don't, and instead Jessie shrugs, almost carelessly. He looks at her, and frowns. "In fact, you've lasted longer than expected. Why?"
She knows, instinctively that he's searching for a clue – a clue to her condition, and she looks expectantly at their patient.
"A secret …" the girl says quietly, her eyes fluttering shut, as though about to sleep. But of course he isn't going to let it go, and instead of leaving her be, he bangs the tray at the end of her bed loudly with his cane, and Jessie jerks awake.
"What secret?" House asks harshly, leaning forward. She inhales sharply, holding her breath, as though afraid that he'll break something. Her, most probably, though at this stage, Jessie is fair game too.
"It won't help," Jessie replies wearily.
"Everything's important," he says, taking hold of her limp, emaciated arm and shaking it. She doesn't say anything, watching Jessie's eyes instead, as they flicker frantically across the room and searching her face. She can read the indecision there, but what is the indecision caused by?
"Wait …" she begins, but it's too late.
"My father …" Jessie whispers.
"Abused you? What?" House urges brusquely, no sign of emotion showing whatsoever. She sits back in the chair, back straight and taut, one hand over her mouth, because somehow she knows that whatever Jessie is about to say will change everything.
For Jessie or her?
"My father's having an affair," the girl says, her face tight. "No one knows … no one knows I know either … but if I get better, he's going to leave us. I know."
The air is thick with regret, fear and disappointment, but as she watches Jessie's face, she sees the tightness of her face suddenly loosen and something fall away. Is it a burden she's lost or a part of herself? As she watches Jessie close her eyes, she feels his hand on her shoulder, like a faint memory of that moment in the chapel so very long ago. She allows him to guide her out of the room, and through the inertia, she feels the shape of the questions and admissions between them, but she knows they won't allow themselves to say it.
Not now.
She closes her eyes and that image of Beth floods her mind once again. Where did that come from?
Jessie passes away at midnight. The parents are distraught, of course and the sister stares blankly into space as the father leads the mother into the room. She looks at them silently, devoid of any words of comfort, and tries not to think of the other woman who's waiting for the father. As she stares down at Jessie's empty face before the nurse covers her with a sheet, she remembers the sudden looseness on Jessie's face after her confession. It had been keeping the secret that had held her here, and after she had released it to the world, she had nothing to cling onto anymore. Silently, she resents him for prising the secret from Jessie's weakened fingers.
The sister comes to stand beside her, her grief filling the space where Jessie had been.
"I think she knew," she says quietly. "That Dad was having an affair. She didn't want to stay here any longer."
The terrible irony of the sister's words strikes her, and she lets out a half-choked laugh.
"No," she says, looking away. "She wanted to stay here because of it."
She leaves the room – leaves the sister alone with the nurse, her sister's body and silences so long and heavy that they will follow her for the rest of time.
She gets in her car and drives to the indoor skating rink and sits in the car for a moment, her face numb and her body clenched. As she gets out, she lets the car door slam behind her, not bothering to lock it. The rink isn't crowded or full, and skaters skim over the ice gracefully. She watches as one falls to the ground and listens as the coach calls instructions after another.
None of them are Beth.
"Can I help you?" a voice breaks through her reverie and she turns to see Beth's coach standing by her. Phoebe, she remembers vaguely.
"What days does Beth train?" she asks, her voice hoarse from not crying. The coach looks at her solemnly, her cheerful demeanour melting away.
"She died, honey. She died just after summer."
Somewhere in the half-frozen corner of her brain that's still functioning, she can hear the coach talking – asking if she's that doctor lady who taught Beth the salchows, something about Beth asking for her, something about Beth having – is it cancer? She's not sure, and instead of smiling sadly with the part of her soul that she doesn't have, she backs away.
It's started snowing early in New Jersey, and she's skating feverishly on the half-frozen outdoor rink sometime later, doing cross-spins, backspins, one-foot spins – all the spins she can think of – all the spins Beth loved, and she's dizzy with something akin to loss, but it can't be loss, can it? Can it? Her hair's flying and whipping around her as her skates scrape the surface of the ice, and the temptation to do a salchow is there, but she can't do it – she won't do it, now that Beth can't. Her breath comes out in ragged intervals as she spins wildly out of control. Her skates catch on something, and she stumbles, unable to catch herself, sprawling onto the ice. Ignoring the pain, she gets up again and does a backward crossover, holding it and waiting for the right moment to launch into her spin. Just as she is pushing forward in a semicircle, ready to start spinning again, his voice cuts through the cold, cold air.
"Stop it."
She is startled and jerks around, just managing to stay upright – which is good, because she doesn't think he'll let her live it down if she falls now. House is standing there, on the edge of the rink, looking at her, and she finds herself slowly skating towards him, the numbness of her brain starting to thaw. He watches her as she clumps to the edge of the rink and sits in the snow, oblivious to the cold and the wet.
"Why?" she asks.
"Yes, why?" he agrees. "And who and what and when?"
"And how," she reminds him, because she always used to miss 'how' out when she was in primary school, and by the looks of things he probably did too. He lowers himself awkwardly to sit beside her, and they stay like that. Maybe sometime later, she'll lean against him, and maybe he'll let himself put an arm around her.
And maybe sometime later, she'll do a salchow again.
-end-
So tell me: are you satisfied with this ending? Or should I do a sequel/additional chapters/ epilogue? And also if you've been following this story, please do drop me a line, especially if you haven't reviewed before. I'd just like to hear what you all thought of this, and no, I won't torture you with a horrendous arrow again.
Thanks for reading,
s.a.r.d. ine