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I had a dream about you. We were in the gold room
where everyone finally gets what they want.
You said Tell me about your books, your visions made
of flesh and light and I said This is the Moon. This is
the Sun. Let me name the stars for you. Let me take you
there. The splash of my tongue melting you like a sugar
cube…
When he opens his eyes, it’s water.
Which is odd, because when he closed his eyes, it was all sterile white. Popcorn ceiling tiles and pristine walls that you can scrub down with lye and never lose color; clear plastic tubing with thin, syrupy morphine pushed under papery skin. Now he can see nothing but sparkling, crystalline blue all the way to the horizon.
Experimentally, he turns his head to the right. White sands stretching out thinner and thinner until that disappears into the distance, too. The same thing to the left, mostly, except that there’s also House, reclining in an Adirondack chair, balancing a margarita in one outstretched hand.
“Want one?” House asks, and hands it over to Wilson. He’s sitting too, he realizes, sprawled out in an identical chair, still dressed like he’s headed in for work. Silently, Wilson takes the drink, looking down with furrowed brows into the swirling salt-rim liquid. House, for his part, reaches down and plucks another one, identical, out of the sand.
“Oh, God damn it,” Wilson groans. “I’m dead.”
Not dead yet, House (who isn’t House, who is Wilson’s memory of House, which, his House-memory assures him, is just as real as House, maybe realer) clarifies, after he lets Wilson lament for a bit with his head between his knees. Just dying, a little slowly and definitely surely, with enough time to let the last neuronal firings in his brain conjure up a peaceful little dream on his way out.
“So this is my life flashing before my eyes,” Wilson says. “You, talking to me, and I have no way to escape.”
House grins, conspiratorial. “Well, there is one way,” he says. “But judging by the beach and the hallucinating and the me being here, I’m gathering you’re not quite ready for that one yet.”
It’s strange. Well, the whole thing is strange, but this part especially—hearing his imperfect impression of House spill out of House’s mouth. He’s known the man for over two decades now, but there’s still something off-center about the way this memory of him moves, acts, speaks.
Nobody is House but House.
“Well, I’d better get ready, according to you,” Wilson says, pushing the thought away.
“Eh,” House says, waving his hand vaguely. “Time’s about perception. And considering you think you’re on a magical, endless beach right now instead of dying in Nevada… I’d say yours is more than a little off.”
Wilson scoffs. “Nevada,” he echoes, more of a question than anything. His memory is blurry; when he reaches back he can see flashes of motel rooms and bloodied lips, but if he tries to hold onto it too long it fuzzes, like trying to remember the details of a dream.
“You said you wanted to see the stars,” House says, and for the first time, it sounds like he might be sad.
For… a while, however long that is, they don’t say anything. Wilson watches the water, the little white-peaked waves rolling in rhythmically off the horizon. He wonders if House is right, that it’s endless, that he could walk down the beach or swim off into the sea for miles and miles and never see anything different. He wonders if it’s stupid to question if House is right, because House isn’t real and neither is this place, so if House says it’s true it must be true. He wonders if he’s ever stopped believing that, even in life.
“You really do think too much,” House groans, his head tilted back to the sky. “Here’s an idea: stop worrying about it. You’ve got a little slice of heaven here, and you’re wasting it doing the same thing you did on Earth, which is think about it until it runs away.”
Wilson glares at him. He smiles right back.
Dimly, he remembers House (the real House), outrageously drunk, telling him about the moments after he was shot all those years ago. The multi-day dream that unfolded in those few seconds; the idea for ketamine bubbling up through the hallucinations as a sudden bolt of clarity. And you, he’d said, told me… and then he’d stopped, shaking his head like he was coming to his senses. It doesn’t matter what you told me. Wasn’t you.
It wasn’t, Wilson thinks, looking at his private little House facsimile. But it might still matter.
“So,” House says, grinning at him, that dark and giddy spark behind his eyes. “What have you always wanted to do?”
It turns out, much to even this version of House’s dismay, that what Wilson would really like to do is rest. They’ve both been essentially on the run for the last four months (”Ahead of schedule,” House had kept saying with every new symptom, with this grim line in his voice), not to mention trying to tick off dual bucket lists for middle-aged men who had drowned their entire personal lives in their work. Moments of respite have been few and far between on the road, and for the most part, Wilson is content to lie in the warm sand and turn his face towards the sun, eyes closed.
Eventually, though, he hears an uneven shuffling in the sands, and then feels the darkening of a shadow fall across his face. He opens his eyes.
“You realize this place isn’t real, right?” House prods. “Take us somewhere interesting.”
Wilson sighs, sits up on his elbows. “Fine,” he acquiesces, always acquiesces. “How’s this?”
Wilson has only been to Johns Hopkins campus once, for a small conference on new radiation technologies maybe ten years ago. His recreation of the grounds is probably a little off, then; not to mention that he’s really trying to conjure the image of it thirty years ago, and who knows how much has changed since then. New trees gone up, old buildings come down. But he remembers distinctly a sprawling quad, the kind you see in pamphlets, and shuffling across it overdressed.
“Oh, great,” House sighs. He sits next to Wilson on the grass; together, the two of them watch undergraduates mill back and forth like ants. “You know, the medical school is a couple blocks that way.”
“I know,” Wilson says. “This was your undergrad too, though, wasn’t it?”
On cue, there’s the younger version of House; cobbled together out of a handful of old photographs and some extrapolation from the time when they first met. He’s laughing, bright and easy, wearing a thin wool sweater and with a bag slung carelessly over his shoulder. Next to him is a boy, nondescript. Wilson can’t quite sculpt his features into anything worth noting.
“You mentioned a friend of yours a couple times,” Wilson says as they watch the two of them walk. “He came to the hospital once, I think, with some girl who was his daughter?”
“Crandall,” House supplies, his features perfectly unreadable. “You don’t know his first name. And she wasn’t his daughter.”
“Right,” Wilson says. “Right. You only liked him for his car.”
“Your dying wish is to hear more about my friend’s beater car?” House asks, but he knows it’s not, because Wilson knows it’s not.
They watch the younger House stop, put a palm on Crandall’s chest. He pushes the two of them back, back, until they’re up against the heavy brick of a physics building, or maybe chemistry. And then he kisses him: hungry, insistent, the way Wilson knows he kisses now, like he’s trying to make sure you know he means it. Their fingers are in each other’s shirts; the world is buzzing by around them.
“I just always wondered,” Wilson admits. “You don’t have… casual friends.”
House scoffs. He’s not looking at the two of them; he’s grimacing off into the distance, a specialty of his. “I can have serious friends who I don’t sleep with,” he counters.
Wilson laughs. “Name one.”
He doesn’t.
“It wouldn’t have been like this,” he says instead, gesturing to the two boys, frozen in intimacy. The campus has stopped moving around them, Wilson directing his attention to the real-er version of House beside him. “If it happened, which you don’t know, and never will.”
“So then it could have been like this,” Wilson says defensively, shoving aside the sharp point of pain House’s words spark in his chest.
House shakes his head. “It was the 80s,” he reminds Wilson, “and I wasn’t suicidal. Yet.” He looks away. “If I kissed him, it was in that car.”
The thought of it starts to bubble up in Wilson’s brain, but it’s too white-hot to hold for long; it melds with the memories, real memories, of House leaning over him against his motorcycle, his teeth scraping the edge of Wilson’s throat, the smell of leather and sweat and diesel fumes, and all at once they’re back on the beach, that memory of House flung far away and this one settled down at his side, feet dug into the sand.
“You’re no fun,” House sighs.
“Sorry,” Wilson shrugs. “Dying doesn’t put me in the mood.”
“You still have your cane here,” Wilson notes, gesturing towards it. House picks it up, spins it with a flourish over his knuckles to illustrate the point.
“Yup,” he says. “Thanks for that.”
Wilson frowns, worry spreading through his stomach. “Does it hurt?”
House blinks. He stretches his leg out, testing it. “Do you want it to?”
Wilson shakes his head. “No,” he says, never more sure of anything in his life. “No.”
“Okay,” House nods. When he stands, he’s still leaning heavy on the cane, impossibly steady in the sand; still limping as he paces around. But there’s something different about him. The lines of his face, the way that he moves. A wince that’s always there is smoothed out now. “Then it doesn’t hurt.”
“That easy all along,” Wilson says, and House gives him a smile that warms down to his belly.
“Say it.”
Wilson glares at him, inanely defensive. His fingers won’t stop drumming on the arm of the chair, except to clench and unclench a fist. This is how he waits (waited) inside his office for scans, lab results, films and papers to tell him his favorite patients are, medically speaking, fucked.
Still, he says, “You don’t know what I was thinking.”
Even here, with Wilson’s subconscious pulling the puppet strings, House manages to look utterly exasperated.
Wilson sighs. Taptaptaptap, clench, release.
He says, “I wish Amber was here.”
House looks self-satisfied, but he speaks to him like he’s a very small or very stupid child. “No, you don’t,” he says. “If you did, she’d be here.”
“Okay, okay, I wish—” he starts, bites down on it before realizing it’s pointless. “I wish I wanted her to be here.”
“There you go,” House says approvingly, and it bubbles rage in Wilson’s chest.
“I did love her,” he snaps. “You know that. Don’t pretend you don’t.”
House is silent for a while, just staring at him with icy eyes. Then he says, “I know.”
“I just can’t…” Wilson starts, shakes his head.
House, for once, takes pity on him. “Yeah,” he says. “You don’t want her to find out she was right.”
It was a fight they’d had—or, not even. Not really a fight. Just a conversation, something Amber asked him over coffee at her favorite breakfast place, which had the best pecan pancakes in New Jersey and which Wilson never went back to for the last four years. She’d taken a long drink, studied him with the kind of look that slices right through you, and said, “Are you going to choose House over me one day?”
He’d sputtered, nearly did an actual spit take. The most dignified thing he could come up with to say was “Wh—What?”
She’d counted on her fingers as she spoke. “Your first marriage isn’t a good data point because you didn’t know him then. Your second marriage you said fell apart because you cheated, but Bonnie said she was tired of being pushed down the priority list, although she wouldn’t say who was above her.”
He’d stared. “You spoke to Bonnie?”
“I’m thinking of getting a new condo. Your third marriage you admitted fell apart because you were spending all your time ‘cleaning up House’s messes’, which, from what I can tell, mostly are just House. I’ve watched you leave patient rooms to humor him, I’ve seen you ignore your own case load to sit in on a differential. And… I’m sharing custody of you with him. So it’s just a question. Do you think you’ll choose him over me someday?”
The thing that had confused him—although confusion isn’t the right feeling, more like horror or guilt or a vague and creeping nausea—is that she hadn’t seemed afraid. She hadn’t even seemed upset. She asked it like asking coffee or tea, pancakes or toast? Me or him?
“No,” he’d promised her. “No.” And then he’d laughed, like it was ridiculous, and once more for good measure, “No.”
He’d kept that promise, as if it mattered. Clung to it until he was cracking House’s skull in half with bursts of electricity. And then he lost her anyway.
“I did love her,” Wilson repeats, and it isn’t even a lie. “And I wanted… I want to believe I’ll see her again.”
This version of House is—must be—softer around the edges, because he doesn’t mock that particular fantasy. He just says, like always, “I know.” And then, “Just not yet.”
Wilson looks away. From House, from everything. Off into the clear blue expanse. “No,” he admits. “Not yet.”
“I was jealous of you.”
“I know.”
“Just—just let me—sorry.”
“I’m you. It’s fine. Say the thing you have to get off your chest.”
“…I. Was jealous of you. When you were hallucinating.”
“Psychotic breaks aren’t all they’re cracked up to be on TV.”
“I just… I thought… it’s horrible. It’s disgusting.”
“It’s normal. It’s human psychology. Grief, et cetera. It’s not supposed to be rational.”
“You were suffering.”
“You missed her.”
“…Yeah. I did.”
“She missed you, too.”
“You don’t know that.”
“No. But it helps, doesn’t it?”
“Maybe. Maybe a little.”
“See? Irrational.”
“Four months,” Wilson says. He’s digging his fingers into the line of the beach at low tide, pulling up seashells and hurling them as far into the ocean as they’ll go. He doesn’t know what else to do; he’s paced in circles for as long as he could stomach, House watching him without moving. He’s tried to take a nap. He’s swam out into the sea and thought about not coming back, only to find himself reclining back on shore as soon as the thought crossed his mind. “Four fucking months.”
House checks an imaginary watch. “And sixteen days,” he says. “Ethically, you could round up to five.”
Wilson laughs, mirthless. “It’s insulting,” he says, hurling a sand dollar into the horizon. “It’s—it’s—”
It’s not enough, he wants to say, but he can’t even get the words out here.
Neither of them have said it, the entire time. All four months and sixteen days. It was like they didn’t want to waste any time on it; regretting, when they had so much to do and so little space to fill. But it was there, hiding; there, angry. Every time their teeth sunk into each other’s skin, every cash-only motel room and pay-by-plate car lot. It’s not enough, it’s not enough. We should’ve had more time.
“Why didn’t we?” he says instead, standing up, brushing the sand off his hands. He reels on House, takes a step towards him with patent-leather shoes sinking into the beach. “Why not? Why the—the games and avoidance for the last twenty years?”
House just stares at him, intractable. He shrugs. “You tell me.”
“Shut up,” Wilson snaps. “This is not my fault. You—you didn’t do anything either.”
“I,” House says patiently, “am a manifestation of your subconscious.”
Wilson throws his hands up in defeat. “You knew what I meant,” he says, and tries to stalk away angrily, but just finds himself pacing again, around a trench worn into the sand.
House watches him. Around, around, around. If they stayed here long enough, Wilson wonders, could he wear through the sand into the water under it? Further still—fall down below the earth? Straight through, until he’s sinking into the open ocean of outer space?
“Is this what you wanted?” House says finally, and gestures a chin out in front of them.
Wilson stops.
He sits down on his own living room couch.
Everything in the room is pushed aside: the couch itself, but also the coffee table, the TV stand, the end table where he drops his keys and phone, all lined up against the wall to clear a space. The only thing in its place is the church organ, the one he bought for House that still sits in what used to be their condo, just in case House wants to come over to play. There’s the lofty smell of rain outside. There’s a record player on the kitchen counter.
In the center of it all is themselves. Copies of copies, fingers laced together, faces flushed red with alcohol, feet clumsy, but swaying back and forth, back and forth, dancing in a shuffle to the tune of the record. Wilson is holding the two of them up, badly; they keep stumbling, and laughing, and dancing again, this picture of intimacy so clear and bright that Wilson has to look away.
“I don’t know,” Wilson admits. “I don’t—”
The scene melts around them. Amber’s apartment, now, nothing moved aside, just them shuffling through the kitchen, the living room, bumping their shins into this furniture or that, laughing to the sound of a tinny radio while they sweep through the space.
“Why didn’t we?” House presses.
Wilson shakes his head. “I asked you that,” he says, around the lump suffocating his throat.
“I’m asking you, now,” House says.
Wilson’s office, now. Princeton-Plainsboro. They’re not dancing anymore; they’re kissing, slow, laborious. House has him pressed against the wall, his hand around Wilson’s jaw.
“Why didn’t we?” House asks again.
Wilson swallows. “I didn’t want to ruin things,” he says. “I’ve seen you in relationships, the way you self-destruct, I didn’t want that to happen to us.”
“Wrong,” House says. They’re in Wilson’s old place, where he and Julie used to live, except it’s clear Julie never lived here; there’s none of the landscape paintngs she was so fond of, the wicker decorations she thought made the place look homey. It’s all sharp angles and black lines, House’s minimalism stamped over the walls.
“What do you mean, wrong,” Wilson bites, as the other pair of them go crashing through the space. Hungry, desperate. Fingers unbuttoning shirts, Wilson dropping to his knees.
“I mean,” House says, “that isn’t why.”
Wilson groans. “Come on,” he says. “This is—”
New Orleans. The hotel room at the conference. House’s, because he’d booked a room with a single bed, paid for it out-of-pocket to not have to have a roommate. On the bed, the two of them look ruined, Wilson’s mouth red and puffy from being kissed the way he knows now House can kiss.
“Stop it,” Wilson says, but he doesn’t know to who.
“Why didn’t we,” House asks again.
“I was,” Wilson grits out, “scared. I don’t know. I was scared of… being gay, of being interested in men. In you. I wasn’t ready.”
“That… is true,” House concedes. “But that isn’t why.”
Wilson bristles. “Obviously I know the answer somewhere deep down inside,” he spits, “so can we just—”
His fingers are interlaced with House’s.
There is no other them; there is no scene played out. There’s the two of them, in House’s apartment or the skeleton of it: no furniture, no decorations, not even any music, but the two of them are swaying softly like the beginning of a waltz.
“Don’t do this,” Wilson warns, but he doesn’t know what.
“You watched my relationships fail,” House says, his mouth pressed against Wilson’s ear, “but I always came to you, when they did. And you were and are horrifically repressed, but if that was all that was stopping you, I could’ve picked the lock on that closet door years ago.”
“House,” Wilson warns, but he isn’t here. Neither of them are. They’re in his apartment, and it’s empty. Nothing left.
“Why didn’t we?” House asks him, one last time.
Wilson feels his chest crack open; the shattering of antique glass.
“I was so scared,” he finally says, “that you were going to die and leave me all alone.”
Here they are, in House’s apartment. Here’s the spot on the floor where he found him, heart slowed to a crawl on scotch and oxycodone. Here’s the bathtub smeared with blood, three missed calls, a scalpel all the way down to the muscle. Here’s the vicodin stashed behind the mirror, shoved into electrical sockets, desperate caches just in case, just in case, just in case he finally wanted to do it. Here’s the worst thing Wilson could imagine happening to him; the only thing House ever seemed like he wanted.
“You could handle being a divorcee, three times over,” House says. “Couldn’t handle being a widower.” He pulls back, just enough for Wilson to see his face, the smile that doesn’t fill his eyes. “Irony of ironies.”
“Please don’t do it,” Wilson says. “When I’m gone, please don’t—”
“I’m not here.”
“Please.”
“What do you care?” House asks. He pulls away; the dance stops. “You won’t be there either.”
“I just,” Wilson begs. “I can’t—I don’t want you to—”
“Don’t want what?” House says. “Don’t want to have burned through two marriages, your career, every other friendship you’ve ever had, all for me to blow my brains out anyway?”
“House—”
“I’m not here.”
“Stop saying that, just—”
“There’s nothing left for me but you,” he says. “I made sure of that, and you know it. You know I’ll do it, you’ve known I was going to do it since the funeral, which, again, ironic—”
“Stop.”
“You never let yourself admit you were in love because you didn’t want to find out what it was like to live through it afterwards.” House is pressed against him now, crowding him against the wall, arms braced against the plaster. “And now you’re asking me to do it?”
He closes his eyes; he can’t, he can’t. Hardwood floors, porcelain tub, pills in plasterboard. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I’m sorry. I'm
Pain explodes through his body.
It tears through his chest, all-encompasing, all-consuming; draws down into his fingers and the soles of his feet, burns a cavity through his throat as he tries to draw in a breath to sedate it.
Then it ebbs. Another second, and it flows again, ricocheting off the insides of his bones.
It’s his heartbeat, he realizes.
“Hey,” he hears, and he feels calm wash over him, as automatic as his pupils constricting in bright light.
“Don’t try to talk, don’t be an idiot,” he hears next. He tries to let his unfocused gaze drift over towards the sound, but he isn’t sure if he manages it; everything is a swimming blur.
“You’re ventilated,” House tells him. “On high-dose morphine, although I ticked it down to medium-dose for the purposes of this conversation. Sorry about all the, you know, mind-numbing agony.”
The sarcasm is painted thin over every word, but thinnest over sorry. House’s voice cracks when he says it. Sorry, sorry, sorry.
“Wilson,” House says, and he must’ve let his gaze drift again; he tries to turn it back. “They’re going to pull the vent tube out tomorrow.”
It’s funny, Wilson thinks. The way tomorrow still exists for House.
Wilson tries to nod, finds out that his neck is too heavy for the motion. He tries to reach for House’s hand, and feels a grinding pain crawling up the bones and tendons of his wrist.
So he just closes his eyes, slowly and deliberately, before opening them again.
He hears the creak in House’s voice when he says, “Okay.” He says, “Good.”
He doesn’t say anything else, but he doesn’t really need to. They must’ve gone over this a hundred times. A thousand. I want to know, Wilson had told him, like an idiot. You’re the one who gets to make the call, but don’t you dare do it without telling me. I want to know.
You won’t know if you don’t know, House reminded him, over and over, but he never said he wouldn’t do it.
He feels something that isn’t pain against the line of his forehead. Maybe just a thumb brushing the hair from his eyes. Maybe the back of a palm to check the temperature. Maybe—and he really must be dying, if it is—a kiss pressed to overheated skin.
Whatever it is, House must be turning the morphine back up now, because the pain in the rest of his body is receding, crawling back towards its epicenter underneath his sternum. He can hear the ocean rushing in, feel the sand shift underneath his feet.
“Don’t sleep too long,” House says, a biting edge to the joke, and Wilson hopes he sees the laugh spreading across his face. He owes him that, at least.
They’re back on the beach.
House, this memory, is hanging his head.
“Sorry,” he says.
Wilson doesn’t say anything at all.
They could make a home here, Wilson thinks. They have all the time he can conjure up. One grain of sand at a time, they could construct a house to live in. They could have children who walk out of the sea up to their doorstep. They could dance endlessly in a living room painted with seashells.
“It isn’t real,” House reminds him. For now, all they’re doing is skipping stones across the waves.
“I know,” Wilson says. That one skips four, maybe five times. It wasn’t even a very good rock.
“More importantly,” House says, “you know I’d hate it.”
Wilson laughs. It gets stuck so far back in his throat that it comes out as a punched-out breath. “I could come up with puzzles to keep you occupied.”
House smiles. “Even if I wasn’t just the part of your subconscious that is, in fact, capable of coming up with puzzles,” he says, “I could figure them all out pretty easily.”
He tries to skip another rock; it sinks unceremoniously down to the bottom.
“It’s just a fantasy,” Wilson reminds him. “Like a last meal.”
“Last meals are stupid,” House says. “Any meal could be a last meal, for one. For another, your bowels are going to open up after death anyway, so you don’t even get to take it with you.”
Wilson wrinkles his nose. “Characteristically disgusting.”
House grins at him. “What can I say?” he says. “You know me so well.”
Wilson watches him now. The curve of his spine, the arch of his fingers. The bullet wound like a permanent hickey against his throat. The pockmarked skin of his thigh. Imperfect, even here: bits and pieces carved away. Sometimes Wilson wishes he could take a knife and just keep carving, until he’s excised all the misery out of him like cutting out a tumor. Other times, he understands that it’s inoperable.
“What was the last thing I said to you?” he asks, soft. “The real you.”
House presses his lips together, shakes his head. “I don’t remember.”
Wilson doesn’t budge. “Yes,” he says, “I do.”
House stops. He sighs, thumbs at the rock he found that he had been planning to toss into the waves. It’s a perfect circle, flat and smooth. It could’ve skipped all the way out of sight.
“We checked you into the hospital,” House says, “because you couldn’t breathe at the hotel, and I said I didn’t want to watch you die in pain.”
Oh, Wilson thinks. He remembers it now, the agony of every breath, House begging him. I know, House had said. I know what it feels like. Don’t make me watch you go through it here.
House continues. “Got you settled, hooked the morphine up. Once it kicked in you were… calm. Happy. You asked me when the last time I slept was.”
“Or ate,” Wilson says, remembering. House had looked sunken, sallow. He was worried, he remembers. Happy, and worried.
“Or ate,” House agrees. “And I didn’t answer you, so you told me to go to the cafeteria, get a sandwich. Said you’d pay for it.”
“You didn’t want to go,” Wilson says. He’d hesitated, watched Wilson with razor-sharp eyes, the nurse’s station with only vaguely less contempt. House had never trusted doctors.
“No,” House says. “So you said—”
“I’ll be here.”
House nods. Wilson closes his eyes. The memory stops there; the next thing he remembers is the sun, the sand, the water.
“You must have coded while I was gone,” House tells him. He finally throws the rock in his hand; Wilson doesn’t watch it go. “We didn’t have time to fill out a DNR, so they intubated, got your heart started again for the moment. Don’t know how long it’s been since then.”
“Not long, I’m sure,” Wilson says, hoping. “You’re practical.”
“How long would it take you?” House counters.
The water rolls, clean and clear.
Time only stretches; it doesn’t stop. Not for anyone but never for Wilson. Somewhere, he is dying. That somewhere starts to creep in around the edges: now his lungs are aching when he stands. Now his heart is beating faster in his chest. Now, when he looks out into the distance, all he can see is fog.
“House,” Wilson says. They’ve been walking for hours, or years, or seconds, testing the boundaries like they always do. Wilson always feels like around the next curve of rock there should be a city, or at least a gleaming white gate, but every time it’s just more sand, and the ocean stretching out beside them. His feet are starting to hurt; his heart already feels cold in his chest. “House.”
He stops. Wilson catches up to him, stands beside him. Like always.
“I do have to go eventually, you know,” he says. He doesn’t know why he’s talking to House like he’s real, like he’s not just Wilson’s dying dream. Worse, he doesn’t know why he feels so reluctant to leave him behind.
Worse still, he does.
He steals a glance at House’s face. House looks the way he always looks when he’s on the verge of tears: sliced open.
“Just a little longer,” he says, without meeting Wilson’s eyes.
Grief pours through Wilson like the tide.
His hands in his pockets, he shakes his head. He knows what it is he has to say.
The lawn drowned, the sky on fire,
the gold light falling backward through the glass
of every room. I'll give you my heart to make a place
for it to happen, evidence of a love that transcends hunger.
Everything is cold—the sand, the sea, his skin in the air, except his right hand. Wilson flexes and extends his fingers; he touches them to his cheek. Warm, clammy. Like—
He looks over at House, in that chair next to him, on the beach, in that room. He says, “Are you holding my hand?”
House turns towards him, glacial. His eyes are ocean blue.
“Yeah,” he says, and he is now when they look down, his fingers laced between Wilson’s, thrumming hot. “Not letting go until you do.”
It sends a shiver down Wilson’s spine. Those aren’t words his subconscious conjured up and puppeteered from House’s mouth. They’re more real than that, less playful. More terrified. Less angry.
The tide is coming in, all the way up to his chest.
He can see flashes of it every time he blinks, spliced in like single frames against the back of his eyelids. His own lungs shivering, O2—Wilson—sats dropping. Breath coming in—go—hitching, ugly waves. House—it’s okay—next to him—you’re—, leaning down to—look—his ear so that the nurses don’t hear, hand shaking as it knits into his, and he says, I’m here, okay? I’m here. I’m not letting go until you do.
“Oh,” Wilson says, a mouthful of seawater, his hand crushed tight in the anchor. “Now I’m dead.”
He can't imagine how else it was ever supposed to end.
The splash of my tongue melting you like a sugar
cube… We were in the gold room where everyone
finally gets what they want, so I said What do you
want, sweetheart? and you said Kiss me. Here I am
leaving you clues. I am singing now while Rome
burns. We are all just trying to be holy. My applejack,
my silent night, just mash your lips against me.
We are all going forward. None of us are going back.
— Richard Siken, “Snow and Dirty Rain”