A/N: I randomnly wrote this little piece. I like it.
Brownie points to whoever can figure out what's funny about the title...
No slash intended. Please read and review, thanks.
Listen to "Liz on Top of the World" from the Pride & Prejudice OST.
Octets
Sometimes, when House is alone, he plays the piano and thinks of Wilson. The music is always soft, and quite often, it crescendos into a majestic stage, lifting him up and closing his eyes. Typically a classical piece.
He can never tell Wilson what he thinks of when he plays this way. He can never tell anyone. He's not an emotionally honest man, never one for sentimentality. There are enough gay jokes and rumors floating around as it is. Besides, no one would really understand him anyway. No one can understand what it is he has with Wilson, and sometimes, House doesn't think he knows either. He's spent many nights sitting in the dark, thinking, trying to piece together words in his head. It is one of his few failures within the last decade.
He has finally resigned to the music as his sole manner of expression and understanding. He has come to the silent conclusion that the reason for this is that his and Wilson's love is exactly like music – something words are completely inadequate for. And yes, he decides, it is love he shares with the oncologist, but not at all what people think of as love. He has no desire to add sex into their funny little friendship, no desire to change things at all. He has realized that what he has with Wilson is perfection, the only kind that imperfect human beings can ever hope to achieve.
Everything about their friendship flows from his piano pieces – the quiet elegance, the array of variations in beauty, the unsaid emotion, the playful and the light, the seriousness that never lasts or leaves, the sensation of overflowing and eternity. Not even poetry can describe the music he plays when he thinks of Wilson, nor can it explain their love. It is metaphysical, and for a man who could be no more comfortable with his atheism and lack of spirituality, that is a startling definition.
Sometimes, when he plays, all he can do is sway, pump the damper pedal, his eyes shut and his hands confiding every note of love in the keys that will never betray him. Sometimes, he smiles. He doesn't know how to explain or describe this friendship he doesn't deserve, and at last, he is at peace with that. The piano does it for him.
He wishes, on occasion, that Wilson could hear it. He wishes Wilson could hear the trills, the grace notes, the overlapping scales, the chords that cause the piano strings to vibrate like extensions of his heart. He wishes Wilson could hear the gentility, the pleasant dancing, the gliding and liberation that House can only ever have with his piano. He wishes Wilson could hear and understand, as if House were reading the terms to him: appassionato, con amor, delicatamente, dolce, gaudioso, grazioso, intimo. He wishes Wilson could know that it's his way of being honest, his way of writing poetry, with luminoso, piacevole, volante.
But perhaps, he decides, it is better kept secret. Perhaps it isn't meant to be understood. Perhaps that's why he was given this gift – the piano – so that he would not be confined to the limited spectrum of science. He loves his work, no question. But medicine is something requiring logic, comprehension, something that any human being can recognize.
And this love – is greater.