"Werewolf Saga" one-shot.
Nov. 8th, 2009 09:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lit_luminaryTitle: Last Wall Down
Author: dominus_trinus (lit_luminary)
Rating: PG
Characters/Pairings: House/Wilson (established), House/Chase mentorship/friendship with father/son implications.
Summary: House hates knowing being immortal means being left behind.
Warning: Character death mentioned; implications of character aging and mortality.
Note: This story takes place approximately twenty-five years afterruby_took 's "With Our Eyes Upon the Moon." It's written with her knowledge and gracious permission.
“Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out…”
—Robert Frost, “Mending Wall.”
“I hate, hate, hate making that flight,” House gripes as Wilson pulls their luggage out of the trunk of the taxi. Eight exhausting hours on a plane and the bite of mid-February cold are not a mood-lifting combination, particularly since this is the second time they’ve made this flight in the last three months. (Although if he has the choice—a twist of grief as he thinks of Cuddy—better for a birthday than a funeral.) “The minute Chase finally retires, I demand all your persuasive power goes into getting him and the kids to move.”
“You might discuss it with him,” Wilson says.
House shrugs noncommittally and grabs his half of the luggage; rings the bell. From inside, eighteen-month-old Diana’s piping little voice says, “Door!”
“I’ve got it,” Jamie answers, and lets them in; hugs him and then Wilson.
“Where’s your partner-in-crime?” House asks when she lets go and the door’s been shut behind them. “You’d think he’d show up for his dad’s sixty-fifth.”
“He visited this morning,” Chase says from the kitchen, “but Adam has an ear infection and won’t stop screaming, and it’s better Greg and Rachel are both home with him so they can take it in turns.”
That, and the fact that Rachel is probably in no mood to celebrate so soon after her mother’s death—not that a cranky baby will cheer her up. He winces, remembering Greg’s first ear infection and how he’d spent the day in the clinic rather than stay in his office with Chase, the paperwork and the practically nonstop wailing: sometimes, wolf-enhanced hearing isn’t necessarily an improvement. “Good call. Is he on antibiotics yet?”
“Since yesterday. Greg called me after the first dose to ask if I could recommend something that worked faster.” He shakes his head, amused, then, looking back at Diana in her highchair, “Angel, what did granddad say about dumping the vegetables on the floor?”
“No,” Diana says.
“Right.” Chase grabs a napkin and bends to wipe up diced carrot. “And do you remember what ‘no’ means?”
“No,” she says again.
Either she’s heard the ‘no means no’ line from one or both parents, or she’s responding as best as her current vocabulary allows.
“‘No’ means you don’t do it; that’s right,” Chase says, and moves to greet them as Jamie returns to the kitchen to supervise the administration of the carrots. House clasps his shoulder; Wilson does the hugging thing. “How was the flight?”
“Don’t ask him that, or Diana’s vocabulary will acquire some interesting additions,” Wilson says dryly. “I would expect the request to move to figure in prominently at your retirement party.”
“That bad?” Chase asks.
“Worse,” House says. “If children absolutely must be brought on planes, I support a mandatory sedation policy.” He opens his suitcase and pulls out two impeccably-wrapped-by-Wilson boxes: navy blue paper and white ribbon. “On a more cheerful note: you get presents. Wilson was needlessly anal-retentive about the packaging.”
“No, it’s fine,” Joan says, coming up the basement stairs and into the kitchen. “Once the ribbon is off, Diana loves to play with wrapping paper. Don’t you, sweetheart?”
Diana grins around a mouthful of pasta, and House smiles despite himself.
“Michael should be here soon,” Jamie says, wiping a smear of carrot off her daughter’s face. “He had to work late.”
Wilson nods, moves to sit down on the couch. House plunks down next to him, then looks to Chase. “Are you going to open those?”
“All right,” Chase says, and sits down in the armchair adjacent. “Any preference which first?”
“The larger one is from both of us together,” Wilson says. “House chose the other himself.”
Chase opens the smaller box first, removing the ribbon carefully but not bothering to spare the wrapping paper, except to ensure it mostly comes off in one piece, and takes out a softly ticking cherry-wood clock, about eight inches high and five across. Hands point to the correct Roman numerals for the time, and House had an inscription engraved below the face.
“Why the Latin?” Chase asks. “To check if I could read it?”
“That and it goes with that pretentious Latin plaque in your office,” House says. He can’t say he doesn’t agree with the sentiment, though: Medicine is the art of guessing. “I can translate if your Latin’s atrophied.”
“By watching, by doing, by consulting well,” Chase reads, “these things—yield?—all things prosperous. Vigilando, agendo, bene consulendo, prospera omnia cedunt.”
House nods. “Nice.”
“It is,” Chase says, his tone confirming receipt of the praise. “Thank you.”
The larger package contains a leather-bound, gold-embossed photo album, the first third or so of which Wilson has already included pictures for. Chase starts to leaf through the first pages, but then Jamie comes in with Diana (sponged clean of whatever food she’d worn instead of eating), who starts to play with the discarded wrapping paper, and Chase puts the album aside.
The pictures it’s open to are old ones, Chase and Joan in their thirties with Greg and Jamie as toddlers, and House reaches to close it: all those images do is whisper loss, and he doesn’t want to listen. Doesn’t want to notice how the passage of years has turned Chase’s hair gray and drawn lines in his face.
The ticking of the clock isn’t any help, either, as long as his mind is going to insist on being morbid.
“Okay if I put that upstairs?” he asks, gesturing to indicate it. “The ticking is getting on my nerves.”
Chase’s expression says I know that’s not the only reason, but he nods, and House takes the clock up to the master bedroom and sticks it on Chase’s bedside table before returning to the living room. Diana’s climbed onto her mom’s lap to show off a large ball of crumpled wrapping paper, and when the doorbell rings—Michael—Joan gets up to answer it, and soon Wilson is enjoying an animated conversation with his nephew on the topic of his great-niece.
He knows he should be trying to derive some enjoyment from the visit, but all he can think is that he hates birthdays: all they do is remind him that the ones he cares about are dying.
After dinner, he excuses himself and goes up to the guest bedroom, because he’s not in the mood for conversation (particularly after Chase puts on reading glasses before he looks at the small print in Jamie and Michael’s birthday card) and sitting sullenly watching the rest of the pack celebrate doesn’t appeal.
He gets in twenty minutes of brooding before footsteps mount the stairs. Chase’s, not Wilson’s, meaning Chase probably asked to field this particular crisis.
“You all right?”
“I thought I taught you not to ask stupid questions,” House says, and Chase chuckles to himself and opens the door; sits down next to House on the end of the bed. His silence is neutral: no expectations, no demands.
“I hate celebrating birthdays,” House says at last. “Another year passing just means one year closer to the next funeral.”
Cuddy’s stroke had been sudden, completely unexpected: she’d died almost instantly. That hadn’t made it easier to write and deliver a eulogy, say Kaddish at the gravesite, or listen to Rachel break down in sobs and Diana and Adam start crying along with her.
They’d stayed to sit shiva at Rachel and Greg’s house for three nights in a row: that’d been exhausting by itself. The Hebrew syllables comprising the prayer service had come fluidly and without thought; it’d been the meaning behind them that he hadn’t wanted to process.
The wound of that loss is still healing.
Someday it’ll be Chase they’re burying: that’s not the way it’s supposed to go, and he hates his immortality for forcing him to be the one left behind. And he hates that he still hopes enough to ask, “Stay.”
“You know I can’t,” Chase says softly, and House nods. He’d said the same thing at sixty, fifty and forty, and four matter-of-fact refusals over thirty-five years are certainty that there will never be a different answer.
“Yeah.” There are so many things he could say, but most of them (I hate that you need reading glasses; I hate watching you age; I hate knowing I’ll see you die; I don’t want to miss you) are completely obvious and completely unhelpful, and he’s no good at dealing with tangled emotions.
Later, he’ll chalk it up to a combination of jet-lag, too-recent grief and too many morbid thoughts, but right now, he does what he’s never been able to bring himself to do and wraps his arms tightly around Chase’s torso, because Chase is getting older; there are more years behind him than ahead.
Eventually he’ll die.
And House doesn’t want to kick himself for eternity because he never gave him a simple hug.
For a split second Chase is completely still; House hears his breath hitch (shock, probably); but then arms close around him in return and he’s surprised: there’s no impulse to tense, no discomfort. The solidity and warmth of a living body makes loss seem more remote.
The new sense-memory won’t erase old ones of John and touch intended to cause pain, but the word father contains more than that now.
When they separate, Chase says, “Thank you.”
He doesn’t want thanks, because he’s realizing that it was such a small thing, and that his own stupid issues kept that wall up and Chase at arm’s length for too much wasted time. He should have forced himself to do it five, ten, fifteen years ago. “Don’t. It’s not supposed to be a whole…thing.”
Watching Chase with Greg and Jamie as children, sometimes he’d wished affectionate touches and words came more easily to him. But the fact is that they don’t; that the kids are allowed some limited contact only because they took for granted in their respective infancies that they were going to have it or scream, and aural discomfort had beaten psychological. Different rules had applied to Chase (and to Cuddy, while she’d lived); changing them now means a similar unpleasant desensitization process.
“All right.” A pause, then, “It—means a lot to me that you let me stay in your life. I know it’d be easier not to have to—”
“No. Going would hurt worse than staying.” He’s quiet for a long moment. “I don’t want to have regrets I could have avoided. Not with as long to dwell on them as I’ve got.”
A measuring look. “Does that mean I can have a hug when you visit?”
The first answer that comes to mind is Don’t make it a habit, but that’s wrong: the point here isn’t to rebuild his personal fortress. “I’ll get used to it,” he says, and realizes after he does that that hadn’t come out right.
The flash of disappointment on Chase’s face confirms it for him.
Damn. “It’s not your fault I don’t like to be touched,” he says. “It’s a Pavlovian conditioning thing, and I should’ve gone to the effort to undo it before now.” He holds Chase’s gaze. “You matter. And I’m proud of you.”
If Cuddy’s death taught him anything, it’s that time runs out; that he doesn’t have forever to wait to feel comfortable saying these things. And he wants Chase to have heard in his lifetime what House’s own father never cared enough to tell him.
Chase nods slightly, draws a shuddering breath—and then House is being hugged again, and although he hadn't expected that, no internal alarms go off. He relaxes into it and hugs Chase back; lets him have his sentimental moment without any mockery, because it’s his birthday and House owes him for sulking over dinner.
“You do not tell anyone that just happened,” House warns when Chase lets him go and stands up.
“I don’t have to,” Chase says, and gestures to indicate the door. “We’re skipping the song and the excessive candles on the cake, so d’you want to come back downstairs?”
“Fine,” House says, and follows him.
The new arrangement is just there, a piece of their shared puzzle. It doesn’t change the previous picture at all, except to make it a little more complete.
He could, he decides, get to like it.
END.
Notes:
The plaque in the Diagnostics office reads, “Coniecturalem artem esse medicinam.” The saying is attributed to Aulus Cornelius Celsus (ca. 25-50), the Roman writer of an encyclopedia whose medical section, De Medicina, survives.
The Kaddish (specifically the Mourners’ Kaddish) is a Jewish prayer for the dead. The full text is linked here.
Sitting shiva is a Jewish mourning ritual. During the mourning period (generally a week for Orthodox Jews; three days for Reform and Conservative Jews), the bereaved are visited and comforted by friends and family. Various rules and restrictions on daily activity apply, but the exactness with which these are observed varies widely.
Author: dominus_trinus (lit_luminary)
Rating: PG
Characters/Pairings: House/Wilson (established), House/Chase mentorship/friendship with father/son implications.
Summary: House hates knowing being immortal means being left behind.
Warning: Character death mentioned; implications of character aging and mortality.
Note: This story takes place approximately twenty-five years after
ruby_took 's "With Our Eyes Upon the Moon." It's written with her knowledge and gracious permission.Reviewing the OCs:
Joan is Chase’s wife; Greg and Jamie are their children. Greg married Rachel, Cuddy’s daughter; they have a son, Adam. Jamie married Wilson’s nephew, Michael; they named their daughter Diana (after the Roman lunar goddess, as a bit of a family in-joke).
Joan is Chase’s wife; Greg and Jamie are their children. Greg married Rachel, Cuddy’s daughter; they have a son, Adam. Jamie married Wilson’s nephew, Michael; they named their daughter Diana (after the Roman lunar goddess, as a bit of a family in-joke).
“Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out…”
—Robert Frost, “Mending Wall.”
Last Wall Down
“I hate, hate, hate making that flight,” House gripes as Wilson pulls their luggage out of the trunk of the taxi. Eight exhausting hours on a plane and the bite of mid-February cold are not a mood-lifting combination, particularly since this is the second time they’ve made this flight in the last three months. (Although if he has the choice—a twist of grief as he thinks of Cuddy—better for a birthday than a funeral.) “The minute Chase finally retires, I demand all your persuasive power goes into getting him and the kids to move.”
“You might discuss it with him,” Wilson says.
House shrugs noncommittally and grabs his half of the luggage; rings the bell. From inside, eighteen-month-old Diana’s piping little voice says, “Door!”
“I’ve got it,” Jamie answers, and lets them in; hugs him and then Wilson.
“Where’s your partner-in-crime?” House asks when she lets go and the door’s been shut behind them. “You’d think he’d show up for his dad’s sixty-fifth.”
“He visited this morning,” Chase says from the kitchen, “but Adam has an ear infection and won’t stop screaming, and it’s better Greg and Rachel are both home with him so they can take it in turns.”
That, and the fact that Rachel is probably in no mood to celebrate so soon after her mother’s death—not that a cranky baby will cheer her up. He winces, remembering Greg’s first ear infection and how he’d spent the day in the clinic rather than stay in his office with Chase, the paperwork and the practically nonstop wailing: sometimes, wolf-enhanced hearing isn’t necessarily an improvement. “Good call. Is he on antibiotics yet?”
“Since yesterday. Greg called me after the first dose to ask if I could recommend something that worked faster.” He shakes his head, amused, then, looking back at Diana in her highchair, “Angel, what did granddad say about dumping the vegetables on the floor?”
“No,” Diana says.
“Right.” Chase grabs a napkin and bends to wipe up diced carrot. “And do you remember what ‘no’ means?”
“No,” she says again.
Either she’s heard the ‘no means no’ line from one or both parents, or she’s responding as best as her current vocabulary allows.
“‘No’ means you don’t do it; that’s right,” Chase says, and moves to greet them as Jamie returns to the kitchen to supervise the administration of the carrots. House clasps his shoulder; Wilson does the hugging thing. “How was the flight?”
“Don’t ask him that, or Diana’s vocabulary will acquire some interesting additions,” Wilson says dryly. “I would expect the request to move to figure in prominently at your retirement party.”
“That bad?” Chase asks.
“Worse,” House says. “If children absolutely must be brought on planes, I support a mandatory sedation policy.” He opens his suitcase and pulls out two impeccably-wrapped-by-Wilson boxes: navy blue paper and white ribbon. “On a more cheerful note: you get presents. Wilson was needlessly anal-retentive about the packaging.”
“No, it’s fine,” Joan says, coming up the basement stairs and into the kitchen. “Once the ribbon is off, Diana loves to play with wrapping paper. Don’t you, sweetheart?”
Diana grins around a mouthful of pasta, and House smiles despite himself.
“Michael should be here soon,” Jamie says, wiping a smear of carrot off her daughter’s face. “He had to work late.”
Wilson nods, moves to sit down on the couch. House plunks down next to him, then looks to Chase. “Are you going to open those?”
“All right,” Chase says, and sits down in the armchair adjacent. “Any preference which first?”
“The larger one is from both of us together,” Wilson says. “House chose the other himself.”
Chase opens the smaller box first, removing the ribbon carefully but not bothering to spare the wrapping paper, except to ensure it mostly comes off in one piece, and takes out a softly ticking cherry-wood clock, about eight inches high and five across. Hands point to the correct Roman numerals for the time, and House had an inscription engraved below the face.
“Why the Latin?” Chase asks. “To check if I could read it?”
“That and it goes with that pretentious Latin plaque in your office,” House says. He can’t say he doesn’t agree with the sentiment, though: Medicine is the art of guessing. “I can translate if your Latin’s atrophied.”
“By watching, by doing, by consulting well,” Chase reads, “these things—yield?—all things prosperous. Vigilando, agendo, bene consulendo, prospera omnia cedunt.”
House nods. “Nice.”
“It is,” Chase says, his tone confirming receipt of the praise. “Thank you.”
The larger package contains a leather-bound, gold-embossed photo album, the first third or so of which Wilson has already included pictures for. Chase starts to leaf through the first pages, but then Jamie comes in with Diana (sponged clean of whatever food she’d worn instead of eating), who starts to play with the discarded wrapping paper, and Chase puts the album aside.
The pictures it’s open to are old ones, Chase and Joan in their thirties with Greg and Jamie as toddlers, and House reaches to close it: all those images do is whisper loss, and he doesn’t want to listen. Doesn’t want to notice how the passage of years has turned Chase’s hair gray and drawn lines in his face.
The ticking of the clock isn’t any help, either, as long as his mind is going to insist on being morbid.
“Okay if I put that upstairs?” he asks, gesturing to indicate it. “The ticking is getting on my nerves.”
Chase’s expression says I know that’s not the only reason, but he nods, and House takes the clock up to the master bedroom and sticks it on Chase’s bedside table before returning to the living room. Diana’s climbed onto her mom’s lap to show off a large ball of crumpled wrapping paper, and when the doorbell rings—Michael—Joan gets up to answer it, and soon Wilson is enjoying an animated conversation with his nephew on the topic of his great-niece.
He knows he should be trying to derive some enjoyment from the visit, but all he can think is that he hates birthdays: all they do is remind him that the ones he cares about are dying.
After dinner, he excuses himself and goes up to the guest bedroom, because he’s not in the mood for conversation (particularly after Chase puts on reading glasses before he looks at the small print in Jamie and Michael’s birthday card) and sitting sullenly watching the rest of the pack celebrate doesn’t appeal.
He gets in twenty minutes of brooding before footsteps mount the stairs. Chase’s, not Wilson’s, meaning Chase probably asked to field this particular crisis.
“You all right?”
“I thought I taught you not to ask stupid questions,” House says, and Chase chuckles to himself and opens the door; sits down next to House on the end of the bed. His silence is neutral: no expectations, no demands.
“I hate celebrating birthdays,” House says at last. “Another year passing just means one year closer to the next funeral.”
Cuddy’s stroke had been sudden, completely unexpected: she’d died almost instantly. That hadn’t made it easier to write and deliver a eulogy, say Kaddish at the gravesite, or listen to Rachel break down in sobs and Diana and Adam start crying along with her.
They’d stayed to sit shiva at Rachel and Greg’s house for three nights in a row: that’d been exhausting by itself. The Hebrew syllables comprising the prayer service had come fluidly and without thought; it’d been the meaning behind them that he hadn’t wanted to process.
The wound of that loss is still healing.
Someday it’ll be Chase they’re burying: that’s not the way it’s supposed to go, and he hates his immortality for forcing him to be the one left behind. And he hates that he still hopes enough to ask, “Stay.”
“You know I can’t,” Chase says softly, and House nods. He’d said the same thing at sixty, fifty and forty, and four matter-of-fact refusals over thirty-five years are certainty that there will never be a different answer.
“Yeah.” There are so many things he could say, but most of them (I hate that you need reading glasses; I hate watching you age; I hate knowing I’ll see you die; I don’t want to miss you) are completely obvious and completely unhelpful, and he’s no good at dealing with tangled emotions.
Later, he’ll chalk it up to a combination of jet-lag, too-recent grief and too many morbid thoughts, but right now, he does what he’s never been able to bring himself to do and wraps his arms tightly around Chase’s torso, because Chase is getting older; there are more years behind him than ahead.
Eventually he’ll die.
And House doesn’t want to kick himself for eternity because he never gave him a simple hug.
For a split second Chase is completely still; House hears his breath hitch (shock, probably); but then arms close around him in return and he’s surprised: there’s no impulse to tense, no discomfort. The solidity and warmth of a living body makes loss seem more remote.
The new sense-memory won’t erase old ones of John and touch intended to cause pain, but the word father contains more than that now.
When they separate, Chase says, “Thank you.”
He doesn’t want thanks, because he’s realizing that it was such a small thing, and that his own stupid issues kept that wall up and Chase at arm’s length for too much wasted time. He should have forced himself to do it five, ten, fifteen years ago. “Don’t. It’s not supposed to be a whole…thing.”
Watching Chase with Greg and Jamie as children, sometimes he’d wished affectionate touches and words came more easily to him. But the fact is that they don’t; that the kids are allowed some limited contact only because they took for granted in their respective infancies that they were going to have it or scream, and aural discomfort had beaten psychological. Different rules had applied to Chase (and to Cuddy, while she’d lived); changing them now means a similar unpleasant desensitization process.
“All right.” A pause, then, “It—means a lot to me that you let me stay in your life. I know it’d be easier not to have to—”
“No. Going would hurt worse than staying.” He’s quiet for a long moment. “I don’t want to have regrets I could have avoided. Not with as long to dwell on them as I’ve got.”
A measuring look. “Does that mean I can have a hug when you visit?”
The first answer that comes to mind is Don’t make it a habit, but that’s wrong: the point here isn’t to rebuild his personal fortress. “I’ll get used to it,” he says, and realizes after he does that that hadn’t come out right.
The flash of disappointment on Chase’s face confirms it for him.
Damn. “It’s not your fault I don’t like to be touched,” he says. “It’s a Pavlovian conditioning thing, and I should’ve gone to the effort to undo it before now.” He holds Chase’s gaze. “You matter. And I’m proud of you.”
If Cuddy’s death taught him anything, it’s that time runs out; that he doesn’t have forever to wait to feel comfortable saying these things. And he wants Chase to have heard in his lifetime what House’s own father never cared enough to tell him.
Chase nods slightly, draws a shuddering breath—and then House is being hugged again, and although he hadn't expected that, no internal alarms go off. He relaxes into it and hugs Chase back; lets him have his sentimental moment without any mockery, because it’s his birthday and House owes him for sulking over dinner.
“You do not tell anyone that just happened,” House warns when Chase lets him go and stands up.
“I don’t have to,” Chase says, and gestures to indicate the door. “We’re skipping the song and the excessive candles on the cake, so d’you want to come back downstairs?”
“Fine,” House says, and follows him.
The new arrangement is just there, a piece of their shared puzzle. It doesn’t change the previous picture at all, except to make it a little more complete.
He could, he decides, get to like it.
END.
Notes:
The plaque in the Diagnostics office reads, “Coniecturalem artem esse medicinam.” The saying is attributed to Aulus Cornelius Celsus (ca. 25-50), the Roman writer of an encyclopedia whose medical section, De Medicina, survives.
The Kaddish (specifically the Mourners’ Kaddish) is a Jewish prayer for the dead. The full text is linked here.
Sitting shiva is a Jewish mourning ritual. During the mourning period (generally a week for Orthodox Jews; three days for Reform and Conservative Jews), the bereaved are visited and comforted by friends and family. Various rules and restrictions on daily activity apply, but the exactness with which these are observed varies widely.
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no subject
Date: 2009-11-09 09:56 am (UTC)That was just to say this was really beautiful and moving.
no subject
Date: 2009-11-10 07:38 pm (UTC)One of the things I love about the werewolf 'verse is the opportunity to write the development of relationships over long spans of time, and I like to think that in that context, House's with Chase could go this way.
no subject
Date: 2009-11-10 07:39 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-11-10 12:24 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-11-10 07:39 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-11-24 05:31 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-06-19 04:48 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-06-20 06:48 am (UTC)It seemed only logical that it would take a death in the family to make House realize that while he has unlimited time to deal with his issues, the others don't--and in particular, that it's time to let the father issues go, or at least enough that he can fully accept his role in Chase's life while he still has the chance.
What I love about this universe is the opportunity to write the development of character relationships over long stretches of time--and in this case, a House who has grown enough and healed enough, psychologically speaking, to be able to give a hug and still be in character.
no subject
Date: 2011-02-23 12:32 pm (UTC)And what you did here is beautiful. You kept the original flavor, but the time distance made it obvious how terrible a fate immortality is. At least they can bear it together. And 40 years seems to be about the right amount of time for House to finally acknowledge his affection for Chase in a physical way :-).
I like also many of your small details, like the 18 months old being able to say understand no, but still doing whatever she wants, and the notion of caring for a baby with ear infection with an enhanced sense of hearing.
I am also wondering whether this sense of loss, of pain of seeing the people we love grow and change, is so easy to empathize with because it's something all parents experience sometime. The desire of having the baby, or the toddler, or the preschooler back. Of stopping time.
I also love your interest in foreign languages. Is this your scientific speciality? It's what I wanted to do as a teenager, but now for me it's just a hobby. I never even found the stamina to learn a slavic language, much less a non-indoeuropean one.
no subject
Date: 2011-02-23 06:35 pm (UTC)'Bittersweet' is very much the tone here, because yes--the only way immortality isn't horrible is if everyone you care about is also immortal. Failing that, being the one who's always left behind is heartbreaking (one does have to wonder how House and Wilson will cope in the long, long run). And yes, about forty years seemed like an appropriate time for House to take to come to terms with his issues with affectionate touch.
(The positive side of immortality is that House can live long enough to reach a reasonable state of psychological and emotional health. He'll never be friendly and sociable, but--very eventually--he does outgrow being a walking basket of unresolved issues.)
I did research on child development and the appropriate levels of understanding for that age, so thank you for appreciating it. And yes--a wailing baby is uncomfortable to listen to under the very best circumstances; throw in enhanced hearing, and it could become downright unbearable. (I do try to incorporate all the logical ramifications of any supernatural condition.)
I imagine that you, as a parent, are able to appreciate the emotional content of this piece in a way I can't: I can imagine, of course, but I don't know firsthand what it is to wish a child didn't have to grow up. I'm glad the piece is tone-true to someone who does.
My professional degree is in English literature, actually. I remember a little bit of my high school Spanish, but that and a rudimentary knowledge of Greek and Latin root words is the extent of my linguistic skills. The Latin came from a book of Latin phrases; it's a detail of my personal canon that Chase picked up a working knowledge of Latin in seminary, so that's why it went in. Thank you again for your interest!
no subject
Date: 2011-02-23 06:44 pm (UTC)So if I write a review on my lj she could get to read it? That's nice.
"he does outgrow being a walking basket of unresolved issues"
I think that applies to Wilson as well. Just because he doesn't slap his issues in everybody's face doesn't mean he's any less disturbed than House. That's why they're such a great fit :-).
no subject
Date: 2011-02-23 07:05 pm (UTC)And yes, Wilson does have just as many issues as House. His are less overt, but he and House are, overall, as screwed up as each other. It's definitely why I write them together.
(Incidentally, if you're interested, I've written a followup to "Last Wall Down." Quietly they Go (http://lit-luminary.livejournal.com/9161.html#cutid1/) deals with House's reaction after Chase passes away.)