A/N: Another random ficlet that I suppose I wrote as a sequel to "Octets." I don't think it's as good, but it's okay.
Listen to "Angels in America (Main Title)" from the Angels in America OST.
No slash intended. Please read and review. Thanks.
By the way, She is perhaps one of my favorite places in all of NYC and the world, for that matter.
Angels
"Now there is at Jerusalem by the sheep market a pool, which is called… Bethesda…whoever then first after the troubling of the waters stepped in was made whole of whatsoever disease he had."
John 5:2-4
Wilson doesn't tell anyone when he decides to drive into Manhattan. It's a Sunday afternoon, the universe soft with gray. He stops in the Upper West Side and pushes his hands into his coat pockets, losing himself in the crowd. The sounds and the voices fail to invade his preoccupied mind, fading into the background like low rumbles of earth. He spent the driving hours sinking into these depths of thought, and he will not be relieved until he reaches her.
He feels himself sigh and his heart punch, when he finally turns a corner and sees the quiet glow of all that green. He trots across the street, and the wet grass crunches under his loafers, lightning shooting up into his chest. He's close. He slows down to an inconspicuous walk, figuring he may as well savor the uncommon amount of organic life that's been saved from all the steel and paper that's swallowed this city up, that's wiped out so much of the original world. He doesn't mind the strangers scattered all around him, reading and making out and napping. He follows the path, remembering exactly how to reach her.
It begins to pour, as he slows to a standstill, eyes ensnared. She introduces him to hypnosis – this brazen immortal. He pays no attention to the rain seeping into his skin, covering his face in all that unexpressed truth.
He remembers the first time he came to see her – a cold night in early '99, the night House had died. Wilson had left, trusting Stacy to take care of things, only because he felt suffocated.
"I don't give a damn what God you belong to," he had shouted at her then, his voice cracking. "I came here to demand, not pray."
She looks different now, in daylight. Her form is a frozen glimpse of the afterlife, the hopeful version. Her wings arch above her, proclaiming her divinity, reminding this city who she is and who she represents. Her face, he realizes as he draws near, is soft with that mercy God should have. She was cold and hard on that first night. Now, she is patient. She knew he would return.
"You're not going to take him away from me!" he had said. "You're not going to overlook him! You know who he is! You know!"
And she had known. Gregory House – the only one who had ever pushed James Wilson to seek out a face for the supernatural forces he had been raised to believe in. She had known, smiling privately to herself that night, that this was the man heaven had whispered an introduction for. He was one half of one more peculiar whole that only her Master understood. If only Wilson had seen her smile, perhaps the last five years would have passed easier for him.
Now, he was not as bold as he had first been. He approached with reverence and a new request.
"Bethesda," he called out. "The job isn't done. He's miserable. I won't believe that's how he was meant to be."
The rain is lost in her own waters, cleansing her and bringing him to a closer understanding.
"Point me in the right direction," he pleads. "Tell me how to finish it. Tell me how to heal him."
And she doesn't answer, looming far above him against the clouds. He closes in on her, his eyes never leaving that mysterious face that neither smiles nor frowns. He can feel the cold penetrating his body, but he makes no move to escape. Gently, as if trying not to be seen, he dips his hand into the pool, and she watches him.
When at last he turns his back on her, at the edge of her circle, he feels that familiar stirring inside himself, knowing that despite all the misery House suffers and produces, the man is his cause – and his connection. It is not perfect, and it need not be. It is right. And that is the highest plateau of love a human being can ever reach.
Wilson will not cease in his lust for the next pretty nurse or secretary or passer-by. He knows House will not stop loving Stacy in vain or fail to hire more hookers. But Wilson sees, as he exhales in his car, that their love – as fucked up as it is, as different from romance as it is, as lacking in sex as it is – transcends everything they've ever known and will ever know. He cannot say he will never marry again, or that House will never find another woman to fail. All that he knows is the constancy and the mysticism of their friendship, which he rarely stops to observe until times like this.
And when he finds himself shaking, crossing back into Jersey, he knows it's not because he's cold and wet.
Bethesda stands in the rain, like a mere cherub in the fountain base of God's Kingdom, and by herself, she almost smiles.