[Title]: Husk
[Summary]: Just two old vagabonds trying to make sense.

A/N: Any and all of your thoughts appreciated. Looking to improve :D.

More importantly, thank you very much to lurker_of_note for her looking through this... aaand putting up with me. Apologies for my rushing lovely, and thank you.





so please
lets take these broken hearts, and use
lets use only what we really need
you know we only have so little, so please
take these broken hearts and leave

- Cocoon by Jack Johnson.



The trophies with the big names of grant-givers were packed away first and the knickknacks last. They had names too. The Zen garden was called Peter, the strange little play dough blob with eyes and hair and a big red mouth was called Raju, and the small slip of paper with a tiny poem about life called Shakeila.

And the resignation letter was signed by James Wilson, which was the only knickknack in the memory shack which hadn't reached its final owner.

Lisa Cuddy frowned and flinched and refused to accept it, glared when she authorised it and hadn't stopped frowning when Wilson came to say his final - and partially obligatory - goodbyes.

"You were a good... well, you used me well."

"He's not the only one who wants you to stay."

"Thank you. So... if there's nothing else I can do for you?"

She hummed and considered.

"Dinner would be great, thank you."

And maybe she was predictable in her incapability to give up a fight, but he needed someone to snipe at and to hold his hand while he left his job, his twenty years of semi-abusive ridiculousness and the state of New Jersey. And maybe he needed to confirm that she still loved House as much as she used to.

----

"A table for two, best seats in the house."

Cuddy slipped the doorman a fiver and got them settled in front of the massive glass windows of the bistro. Wilson was in scruffy jeans, a thoroughly beaten up McGill jumper (with pit stains and lipstick on the collar) and flip flops. He felt very accomplished. He'd gone all the way home, only sat on the couch staring at nothing for one hour, smoked only one joint and managed to change his clothes without crying or stabbing. He'd also managed to get inside his car with only his fast-thudding heart as a physical sign of his fear (or anticipation), driven over without more than one passing thought about finding a garbage truck or a tree or a wall of his own to die against, and he hadn't cringed when he saw Cuddy.

His life had suddenly turned into a list of things he mustn't do. Mustn't stay near House, head may implode. Mustn't fall into tiny pieces, mustn't pass out on the bed. It's horrible, he'd found, to wake up with a hangover on a bed he used to share with a person who was now dead. Hangovers and lost love didn't mix. Usually he found the couch, or a hotel room or a floor or a bathtub. Resourceful man, that James Wilson.

So anyway, there they were. Dressed, with an overpriced table, two plates of salad and two glasses of water between them. The view was spectacular - city at dusk. Cuddy wish she was on top of a mountain with endorphins running through her, dancing and singing and back in 1985. Wilson thought about death. They weren't sure what they were doing there, but there was nowhere else for them to be.

"Wilson, you're not supposed to leave. You're old."

"Hey. You left your stupid Angus after fifteen years, and that was three years ago. And you're older than me. AND you haven't gone back."

"Angus sang songs about the Irish revolution and made me fruit breakfasts in bed." She paused and rubbed the bridge of her nose. "And then he got more interested in the corporate than the poetic and I got bored, I moved on. You won't."

"Yeah, well." He flinched and rubbed the bridge of his own nose.

Again with the silence. Those who negotiate for a living don't do silence that great, Cuddy had found. Or maybe that was just her and her screwed up head.

"He's going to burn out."

"And you can stay and watch!"

"Everybody's watching. And hey, I enable him more than you do."

"You let him do what he does because you think he's principally right."

And Wilson did it because he liked House's smile, he liked his wit, he liked it when House made him feel like he was a little better, but that he had a long, long way to work before being great.

Cuddy sighed. A musing Wilson was a sad Wilson - but he was already a very sad Wilson, so she knew she had to do something to keep him crashing for a little while longer. Getting emotionally invested in erstwhile puppies was exhausting.

The piano thrummed and riddled her this and that as she drank her white wine and watched him mope into his cognac. And Wilson worried about his waistline, wondered when he was going to die too and wondered if the number of people he'd tried to help counted as enough of an accomplishment to give up and die.

"So. So I found The Life of Brian on the internet," she starts.

"There's a bench with that title carved on it, up by the belfry at McGill."

"I thought it was the best thing I had ever seen. God, my family tried so hard not to be offended by it they almost forgot to laugh."

"Mm... we tried to stage it. I had just the right nose."

"And?"

"And... well, we got the uniforms. wrote up the battle plans for the... lighting crew, for some reason. And then we got stoned and quizzed each other on anatomy."

There was the sound of the squeak of a chair being pushed back that squealed above the piano and the humdrum of voices.

"I HAVE... a REQUEST, sir..." sang out a tweedy lady in a long black dress.

"Do you m'am?" queried the piano player.

"Yes. I do." And that seemed to be that, until her equally sober friend jabbed her in the side and whisper-yelled in her year.

"I WANT TO SING FERNANDO!" she declared, with renewed vigour.

"… I do not have drums m'am," the piano player tried to smile and hush her simultaneously. The management, represented in the form of a harried man sitting at the bar, just glared.

"That is okay. That is okay. We have cutlery and tables and and we have players and musicians and…" off she launched. "CAN YOU HEAR THE DRUMS, FERNANDOOO?"

And then everything turned a bit pantomime.

Sometimes, historically, there are moments. The Christmas shared by the Germans and the English in the First World War, the conversations held between Castro and McNamara years after the Cuban missile crisis, wondering if they would have done it. And there was that moment, in that café, when the right song, the right moment of the night, the right people and the right manager had all convened in one place.

So nobody yelled or hustled, the people watching didn't cuss and interrupt, and the manager just signaled for another drink. The piano player got the hint and managed to start an unneeded accompaniment by the third line.

"… In the firelight Fernando …" Wilson hummed, staring at the elderly lady praising the ceiling.

"You were humming to yourself and softly strumming your guitar…" Cuddy reached across and stroked his hand, because that's what she'd always wanted someone to do to her when that song played.

Catching her eye he smiled and called out a little louder: "They were closer now Fernando, every hour every minute seemed to last eternally."

Cuddy refused to let go and his smile only wavered slightly at, "I was so afraid Fernando, we were young and full of life and none of us prepared to die…"

"And I'm not ashamed to say, the roar of guns and cannons almost made me cry…" The lady tried to sit down, but there was no stopping the ridiculous nostalgia train now.

"UP, UP," her friend cried and the piano player stumbled forward bravely.

"… THERE was something in the AIR that night
The STARS were BRIGHT, Fernando
They were shining there for you are me,
For LIBerty, Fernandoooo…"

Cuddy signaled for a check. "Nana always told me to leave on a good note, " slurred across to Wilson.

"Yes, boss."

"Good boy."

They had paid by the last note and stumbled out in the midst of lady-who-wouldn't-remember-tomorrow's ovation.

"… I have some good weed."

"I have The Gods Must be Crazy."

"… good plan."

So the taxi driver man, who Wilson thought was very kind and responsible and didn't kill them or cheat from them, took them to his house for the papes and weed and roaches and a quick kiss by the door, and then took them to hers.

----

At two in the morning, watching the credits rolled, they leaned into each other and tried to make sense.

"What does he have that I don't have?" They asked each other.

"He makes me think."

"He makes me cry."

"You make me cry, Wilson."

"I make you smile, too."

"Puppies make me smile, and I cry when they get hurt. He makes us question why."

"Why the puppy matters?"

"… Puppies makes me feel huge. He makes me feel small."

"He makes me feel like I'm missing something."

"Me too. Because… he makes me feel small. He makes me want to be better."

"He broke everything. Maybe I'm happy coasting for a while."

But his Fernando was House, and hers' was some washed up old accountant who occasionally brought out his bodhran to sing folk songs about rapes and infanticide on the Emerald Isle.

And he was going back someday, perhaps to hold his hand and recount the memories of their past self-discoveries. But Wilson wasn't in the mood to watch House die right then, so he decided to run away and have some adventures of his own before he came home, to sit next to his Fernando and recount their adventures as life told them goodbye.