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Title: Peace Rests (1/1)
Author: Antigone a.k.a. Anty
Pairing: House/Wilson
Rating: PG-13
Keywords: Angst, Short, Character Death.
Summary: Unlike that which is most beloved, some grief never does pass into yesterday.
Notes & Disclaimer: If they were mine, I wouldn't be doing this. This story came to me while pondering how the "Five Stages of Grief" originated by Elisabeth Kuebler-Ross are such a popular concept in fanfiction (in any fandom), they're now on the brink of becoming a cliché. Mulling over how to break it, I also found that, if it's true that some people are the world to others, it's quite presumptuous to assume you'll ever come to terms with their passing. Throwing in the passing of time in general, I ended up with the sad thing this is. Enjoy. And many thanks to my patient beta Sorrel.
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Peace Rests
© Antigone, October 2nd & 3rd,
2006
"Perhaps every person is happy only once in their lives. Just once. And the rest of it, they're being punished— because they can never forget that single moment."
—Was nuetzt die Liebe in Gedanken
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Epilogue
You used to think them unbearably dumb, but maybe all those sentimental movies your wives made you sit through were right. That you can only overcome yourself and conclusively find happiness if there is the one person to go through life with you. Several of the movies were wrong about another thing of course – holding on to said person's memory with them forever gone is in no way romantic. It sucks. But you tolerate their shortcomings; they're sentimental after all.
Instead you've come to despise that twerp and her stages that everyone anxiously twittered about to you, as if labeling your grief made them understand what you felt. On top of which, the famous lady got it wrong. Or chose to hide the truth; considering her inevitable subject matter, it was a lot more likely.
The final stage of grief isn't about acceptance. It's about rendering fate pretty.
After all, life still has many precious moments in store for you, and the dead wouldn't want you to suffer, so it's better to not be bitter and instead cherish the time you were granted with them.
So you proceed to do just that, and for half a decade pretend (for your surroundings' sake and your own) to have come to terms with the absence and to still be positively inspired by the person who left it behind. Until one day you turn around and it strikes you that in all those transcendent moments you've been talking to thin air, that the mystic sense of somebody being there with you is for people who will not face the rotting facts, that you are doomed to exist under a shadow whose giver lies in the past, until you too, die, and that is the only option. Transience doesn't give you a second shot, and the desperation that recognition brings is too overwhelming to bear.
If you didn't yearn so badly to feel alive, you'd go ahead and end the sorry affair. Looking back at the various levels, you wonder why you even made the effort to drag yourself through them. Being once more the detached spectator to your own life should have told you enough.
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Acceptance
You marry again.
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Depression
Being is doctor is nifty. The prescription pad comes in so handy.
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Bargaining
You didn't even believe as a child that the puppy would wake up if you promised to be a good boy from now on. But if you tear yourself up over your work, maybe you'll find meaning again.
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Anger
You stare at the teary, doe-eyed young thing in the nurses' room, who's only in this to marry above her place, and to the shock of everyone, spit at her in disgust.
"People die. Deal with it."
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Denial
It lasted too short a time.
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Prologue
A sentence falls from your lips, again and again, and the more often it does, the more you feel that for the first time in your life, you can actually breathe.
"I love you," you gasp, and the words have never been more than an awkward chore, but this time, as you urgently stumble backwards through the darkened hallway towards the bedroom, hands grabbing at your best friend's jaw and lips desperately clinging to his, they take with them a burden of nearly forty years, and its sudden absence leaves you crying and sobbing over trying to handle a feeling your body has never known.
"Girl," House murmurs, and stops to stroke his thumb across your wet cheek, and you let out a shaky laugh and rest your forehead against his, still trying to grasp that after more than three decades, you've finally been granted your life's most perfect moment.
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(Ω&A.)