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the-hopeless-haze · 1 year

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When Will the Clouds All Disappear? (ch1)

Gregory House x Reader - part of Series If You Want It, You Can Bleed on Me

Word Count: 2k

Warnings: heavy suicidal ideation

“Kind of rude to make a cripple head to the roof of a building to look for you.” You hear his voice, loud and clear behind you, gravelly and distinctly masculine. You’d know it was him anywhere.

“What do you want, Greg?” You ask, sniffling. You're sitting on the ground, your back against the ledge, having made yourself sick staring off it for a good ten minutes before he arrived. Your head is in your hands, blocking him out, blocking everything out. You can’t open your eyes. You can’t bring yourself to look at him.

“You know,” he says firmly. You wish you had four hands so you could block your ears, too. You wish you were senseless. It would be so much easier. So much more peaceful.

“You wouldn’t have to worry anymore. I would just be gone,” you say, and you hate this, you hate everything, you wish he didn’t come up here so you could jump. Guilt-free. You know you look fucking ridiculous, with your hospital gown riding up to your thighs and those stupid non-slip socks damn near falling off your feet. Your hair is blowing wildly in the bitter January wind, and you feel lightheaded and woozy as it is, having pulled out your IV that hooked you up to fluids a half hour ago now.

“That isn’t what I want. I want you to come back downstairs with me.”

“How did you even know I was up here?” you question.

“You’re the one thing I can and can’t predict. Knew you’d come up here when they said you left the bed… still don’t know if anything I can say can get through to you. If you jump I jump?”

You shake your head. “No. You deserve to live.”

“And you don’t think you do?”

“No. And I don’t want to either.”

“Why not? I thought we had fun together.”“But you don’t care—“

“Why am I up here with you freezing my ass off if I don’t care?”

“Just go.”

“Not without you, sweetheart.”

You grimace at the pet name, it sounds so fake coming from his lips. “You didn’t even come to see me,” you whisper.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “I didn’t know… I didn’t know what to say.”“Anything would’ve been better than nothing.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I know. You’ll say anything so I don’t jump,” you say, tasting bitterness acrid on your tongue. You wish you could turn off your brain, but you’ve been here before, seconds to an attempt and still gone through with it with no one to stop you except for your diseased brain. And it was diseased, every impulse usually hardwired to keep your body alive at all costs screaming to be let out of its misery and to just let you die, please. It’s almost like an addiction, instead of one more hit, it’s just like, one more thing to let go of. One more thing to convince yourself doesn’t matter, one more person to convince yourself wants you to die or doesn’t care if you go, one more event you’ll never get to live through that you convince yourself you didn’t want to attend anyway.

“I mean it,” he says urgently. “I’m sorry. Okay? I’ve been a shitty boyfriend, lover, friend with benefits, or whatever you want to call me. I know I’m not the reason you’re contemplating this right now. You’ve struggled with this all your life. I’m not going to fix it. But Jesus Christ. You and I both know this isn’t the goddamn answer. You spent your whole life going to school and working to prevent people from offing themselves.”

“Fuck you,” you mutter. “I’m sorry I didn’t come to see you,” he says. “I came for the surgery—“

“You had plenty of time to see me. You weren’t there when I needed you to be! I’m just another patient, is that it? Don’t come visit them unless you think you’ll learn something? What was it, you never got to see a D&C before? I called you, Greg. You never answered. I had to call Wilson to make sure you weren’t dead but of course, you weren’t, you were just avoiding me and why should I expect anything more from you? Of course you run when things get hard; when the woman you’ve been fucking might need a little more than after-sex cuddles.” You stand up as you say this, turning your back to him, looking over the ledge. Fuck.

“I’m sorry. Just please don’t jump,” he says and if you were in your right mind you’d notice that he was getting increasingly desperate, but you aren’t noticing much of anything right now. Except that your plans were thwarted. You see firefighters and they’ve already set up a trampoline on the side of the building. You don’t say anything, nothing at all, and you start to walk away from that ledge and then sprint toward the other one, hoping that you can get over there, run faster than he can, but he’s on you, and he moves fast for someone with an injured leg when the adrenaline kicks in, and you feel yourself knocked to the ground, his warm breath fanning your face.

“Got you. You’re not getting away from me that easy,” he says, and you finally look at him for the first time since you’ve been up here. You wish he would crush you to death but he’s barely putting his weight on you, just enough that you can’t move.

“I can’t go through this again,” you mutter, squeezing your eyes shut, and you expect the hysterical tears but they never come. You feel numb. Empty.

“You can. You can and you will.”

“You’re going to put me on a hold?”

“I have to,” he says, and you could trick yourself into thinking there’s guilt in his blue eyes when you open yours again. “I’ll make sure they give you the good stuff. Say you need to be chemically restrained. Order you Haldol, Ativan, or whatever you want. But I need… I need to know you’re safe.”

“So you’ll sedate me?”

“It’s the only way I’ll be able to sleep.”

“Just like you to make it about yourself, huh?”

“Shut up,” he says sternly, tacking your name on the end of the command like a warning. “This isn’t about me. None of this is about me. I know that.”

“Then you should have let me go.”

“One day you’ll thank me,” he says, digging his phone out of his jacket pocket. “Hey. Yeah. I need help bringing her downstairs. She’s not going to go willingly.”

You hate how he’s talking about you the way you would talk about patients to your coworkers, and you hate him for calling Wilson to help him walk you down the stairs. Wilson’s a certified sap, and the look on his face, his brown eyes sympathetic and his brows furrowed… makes you want to hit him, and maybe you’d try if you had the energy to. You don’t want pity. You want to be left to your own devices. You want nothing, hatred, you could stand, but Wilson looking at you like you were a kicked puppy is more than you can handle right now.

“I wasn’t going to jump,” you say, and it’s unconvincing even to your own ears. “I wasn’t even on the ledge when you came up here.”

“Yeah. Well. It’s enough that I don’t believe you,” Greg says. “Your track record sucks. Every attempt has been after a traumatic event. Forgive me for being a little worried.”

You’re about to protest, say he doesn’t know anything, but you know he went through your medical files before the first time your lips touched his. Fair enough. Two could play at that game, certainly, and you took what you felt you could without him getting suspicious out of your file. You looked through his, too, because what’s good for him is by all means fucking good for you too, and if you can’t have normal conversations like a normal couple, at least you could learn about each other unconventionally. Isn’t that love, at least kind of love, searching high and low for information, trying to memorize somebody else like you know yourself?

Never mind that it’s illegal.

You feel his mouth on yours, his scruff scratching pleasantly at your skin, and… yeah. That’s when the fucking tears come.

You wish neither of these men saw you like this. You were meant to be firm, cold but compassionate, distant but likable, albeit only from that distance. You didn’t get close to people, not since you were younger, because you knew how you’d get and you knew it was a horrific sight. Wilson, you love like a brother, but Gregory… you love irrevocably, irreverently, irreversibly. Intense is an understatement, and you wish it wasn’t the case, you wish so badly you could turn it off and become the woman you were before that man and his cane hobbled into your life. You wish more than anything you were alone right now.

But then again. You might not be alive.

“Shh. It’s okay,” he says, and you don’t believe him. He doesn’t believe it himself. It’s just something to say. And he hates those clichés. He hates talking just to talk. Yet … he says that to you. He lies to you, just for your benefit. Everybody lies.. but it's usually for their own gain. “I don’t want to make this worse than it has to be,” he says slowly. “Make this easy for us.”

“You have drugs on you, Greg,” you say, rolling your eyes through your tears. You hate that you know him this well. “You’re prepared to sedate me regardless.”

“Maybe. Maybe not. I don’t want to have to get to that point. Would you rather be sedated? Because I can arrange that.”

“Get off me.”

“Are you going to walk with us?”

“Yeah,” you huff.

“Good girl,” he says, and in a different context that would lead to something very different than this. But no. He lifts himself off you instead of dicking you down, wincing when he puts his weight back on his leg, and he and Wilson both help you off the concrete roof. It’s now you realize your back is scraped from when Greg pushed you down, and you grimace as you stand up. Everything hurts.

You have four strong hands on your body now, Wilson’s thin graceful fingers wrapping around your left arm, the other hand on the small of your back to steady you. Greg, you’re more fine with seeing you this way, he’s a train wreck himself and you’ve gotten him out of his shell before. But Wilson? He’s got everything together, well, except for his marriages. House’s larger hands grip you too, one hand firm on your right shoulder and the other around your side.

It’s a slow walk down the stairs, back into the building and you feel a rush of relief at the feeling of heat on your body, but then it becomes too much and you don’t know what you’re fighting for because you know there’s no way you could run, you may be faster than Greg but there’s no way you’d get by Wilson in your current state, and then you’re pushed against the wall in the staircase, Wilson’s calling for security on a radio and a gurney on the radio, and they’re both holding you there and you’re struggling against them, arms you try to push out of the way and legs you try to kick but it’s to no avail, you feel the slight pinch of a needle in your arm and … that’s it. Maybe this is what you were asking for but you were too ashamed to say, too ashamed to acquiesce verbally to the sedation, too embarrassed to say “no, I need to be unconscious for this, thank you.” But you weren’t too embarrassed to pull a fucking nutty in the staircase of the hospital you work at.

“I would’ve just given it to you,” you hear Greg say. “You don’t have to do everything the hard way.”

And then, thankfully, mercifully, pleasantly, you fade out and away.

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