20. Epilogue: A Thread That Has No End

The man in the seat beside Kevin Butler was thin, with penetrating eyes and a – presumably practiced – sarcastic undertone in his voice that made the stewardess look insulted when he asked for more ice. Butler waited until the cabin settled into movies and the man opened a medical journal.

"Sorry, but you look familiar to me."

The blue eyes turned to him.

"I mean, have you been on TV?" Nothing. "It's just that it's going to drive me nuts." He uttered a few more idiocies. "Like it's eight more hours to Copenhagen –"

"Have you had that hyperlogia of yours looked into?" The man's voice sounded doctorly now.

"My what?"

"It's been known to be fatal." He gazed for a moment longer, then seemed to give in. "Try terrorism."

"Oh…right. That. Nealy and all…that." Butler looked away, down at the laptop he had taken out to pretend he was getting some work done. "You were the boyfriend."

"Husband."

"Husband? I didn't know that." He bit his lip. More idiocy.

"Doesn't matter now." The man was gazing out the window on his side now, where the berry-blue of night met the end of the world. "It's been four years."

"Surprised they let you out of the country." If he was going to say stupid things the rest of the flight he could just as well pretend to sleep.

The iron gaze had leveled on him again. "Surprised they let you out of your barn."

"So what's in Copenhagen?"

"The Tenth International Conference on Diagnostic Medicine. And yes, I had a hard time convincing the Powers That Be Morons to let me go. That I would be an asset to the American contingent and wouldn't secretly be guzzling ale with wild Danish terrorists every night."

"That was good of them."

A mean smile played around his eyes. "Oh yes, the U.S. government's learned to be good in the last few years. You can only get so many pies in the face before you start to duck." The man named House glanced at him with the gleam of an agenda. "Let's see – " Something had made him want to talk. "There's the pie of their star prisoner being killed in an escape attempt. I suppose you remember that. Could have gone in their favor, of course, except someone leaked the news that the terrorists didn't use kill ammunition, to stay true to their non-violent principles, and that that's what got them all killed, including Ailyn McCullough. Garnered the Christians a lot of sympathy and made CA out to be the meanies. Pie Number Two – hope you're following me here - this guy Henderson turns himself in and confirms that Blenheim was the terrorist Darren Blackwell, so McCullough is exonerated after the fact. She was actually saving the country from another Dirty May when she shot her CA boss. Didn't help her much since she was dead." He twisted away again for a moment to the window and swallowed before turning back. "An awful lot of pie on CA's face by this time. Then Number Three - a letter shows up, the one Michael Nealy sent to authorities before the world ever blew up, listing Kyle Henderson and Darren Blackwell as radicals, basically proof that Nealy had done everything he could to keep it all from happening. No one knows where the letter's been all this time or who's now making it public on the Internet, but CA can't even see straight for all the cream in their eyes, so Michael Nealy is exonerated too. Didn't do twiddly for him either, since he'd died in prison of a heart attack when he heard his daughter had been shot." Another sadness blanked his face. Across the aisle a woman laughed, engrossed in her movie; throughout the cabin blue-lit faces smirked or looked bored while others slept, everyone caught in their little world.

"Leaving you," Butler finally said.

"Leaving Norxylam. That was the pie they choked on. Still being debated, that one, since Saunders-Glesco refused to recall it, but my little nudge during the trial caused so much suspicion that you won't find a doctor today who'll prescribe it. I should have gone public with it sooner, might have saved more lives." The last was said with a fading thoughtfulness as he twirled the glass with its remnant of scotch and then bolted down the dregs. "I was Hamlet."

"Who?"

"Guy in this play by William Shakespeare."

"Sorry, I'm not into the Broadway stuff."

His smile was for himself. "Not someone anyone's ever heard of. Minor writer, 1500's. I did a lot of research for a while, came across his plays and liked them. He might have become popular if the world had taken a different course. Hamlet was one of his characters. This guy sitting on the fence, who could never make up his mind what to do about evil in the world until it was too late."

The guy was hard to follow, fast brain constantly shunting to a new track, but he could grasp the basic poignancy. He knew the regret of having waited too long with things.

"Which comes back to why they let me go on this trip."

"Which is?"

"Appeasement. To prove they're trying to make amends for being such fuck-ups. Society's changed so much since it all happened that they have to watch what they're doing." House bent closer. "In reality they've been pooping in their pants ever since they took the no-fly off my passport. That's why they've assigned an agent to tail me every second of the trip."

"You think so?"

"He's sitting next to me."

They were in a two-seater row. The small heart-stopping moment of being made was something Butler wasn't used to. He waited a long moment before shrugging. "You're smarter than they said you'd be."

"Unless that bulge under the ankle of your pants is a Guinness-record sized epidermal cyst, it's a gun. Plus you blinked a lot when I talked about the pie in CA's eye. So now that we've got that straight – " House yawned. "Since I'll be seeing so much of you in Copenhagen, if only at a distance, I'd rather get some shut-eye myself now so I don't have to look at you." He put away his journal, turned his back on his shadower and was snoring softly in under a minute.

Better than smart, Butler realized. Gregory House was a magician, pretending to show all his cards in a masterly play at misdirection. Anyone else would have kept secret the fact that they knew they were being followed. He would have to stick closer to House than an epidermal cyst, he supposed, if he didn't want to lose him – and lose his job in the process - in Copenhagen. The thought kept the CA agent awake the rest of the flight.

****

He could see the shape his face would have in age – the lines already deepening, a thinness to the lips. The Copenhagen hotel was an airy womb of wood paneling and glass that included mirrored walls in the elevator. He rode down to the lobby alone, studying himself in the mirror. He had passed the half-century mark in the four years since she had been gone. A milestone that had meant nothing to him, though his face conceded it. A lonely face, with lips that touched no one. Arriving in the lobby he waved to the CA agent tailing him whose name he hadn't bothered to ask, the guy stupidly pretending to read a newspaper by the door, and then he picked out the most likely-looking clerk at the desk, a buxom blonde that approached his ideal of the Scandinavian beauty.

"You know who I am?"

"Yes, Dr. House."

"So you probably know my political situation. Look, I need a favor. I'm being followed, not supposed to leave the conference I spent a gruesomely boring day in yesterday, but I want to see more of your beautiful country than just a slide show on epithelial cells and I want to see it without being followed. Think you can help me out?" He let his eyes drop to the two hundred-dollar bills half hidden by his hand.

He had picked the right clerk. "Keep that." She gave him a straightforward look, not letting her eyes wander to seek his follower, then spoke more loudly. "We have safe-deposit boxes where you can put in your watch, Dr. House. Here, in our back office." She directed him behind the counter, couching him from sight of the lobby, and then down a hallway to a back door. His heart was pounding a little harder than it should have been. "You can circle around to the cab-stand when you are quick," she told him. She looked like she was having fun. "Good luck."

Then it was "Go go go" to the cab driver who had been half-asleep, a glance at the hotel entrance where he could see the CA agent through the glass, looking back into the lobby only to turn at the last moment to see a cab containing his suspect peeling away from the front. The agent's face was a kick. He hoped it made him lose his job.

"Trelleborg," he told his driver and leaned back.

An hour outside of Copenhagen lay the open-air museum of the ancient Viking fortress, oldest remnant of a warrior caste. Trelleborg was nothing more than a ring mound, he realized, as he paid the admission and limped down the long graveled walk that wound through meadow grass to the rounded hill which, according to the brochure, had once been topped by mighty wooden walls. The earth fortress had the shape of a modern-day stadium, with an entranceway cut through the circle which had once been the main gate. The sun had left his throat dry, his heart pounding again – from the walk, he told himself - and he stopped outside the ring, at the dry moat which, a sign informed him, had contained not only water but long sharpened wood spikes to impale enemies who tried to leap the moat and climb the walls. He decided he liked the Vikings.

His leg throbbed. There were few people around. A group of Japanese tourists appeared from the swath of gateway and he took a deep breath and entered the ring.

She was sitting at the base of the hill inside, knees drawn up. Her hair had grown out enough to make a braid. For a second he thought she wasn't going to look up, fear that it wouldn't be true, he knew, the same fear that had kept him standing outside at the moat for ten minutes, but her eyes, cast down, were on the tip of the cane and then his face, and then he had dropped beside her and they were buried in each other. Words that were only dissected jumbles floated up between them.

"I didn't know if –"

"The one-time pad worked."

Two months before, his favorite medical journal had printed some highly discrepant data on depression which, when decoded with his pad, revealed the name of a tourist site in Denmark and a date.

"A group of Christian doctors here worked it so the bad data got in." She was stroking his arm, a soft obsessive movement as though she thought he might disappear again while his lips lingered in her hair. Touching once more after so long. He didn't trust his throat. Crying hadn't been part of the plan. Laughing apparently was, because she was doing both, and then he was too, uncontrollable whoops that turned to tearful giggles. Around them the few tourists, stretched in the sun on the hill or exploring the ancient foundations in the center, were locked in another world, oblivious to their little drama of happiness. A group of children nearby scrambled up and down the slope, their play shouts a punctuation to his joy.

"I was so afraid you'd believe whatever story they put out." Ailyn finally looked at him. She had wiped her own eyes with big swipes of her hands, not caring if anyone saw. Four years had left her face harder, he could tell, though it was soft now looking at him, melted with emotion. It was still the loveliest thing he had ever seen and he shook his head.

"Galt warned me," he told her, "when we talked in the restroom at the trial. Told me not to believe what I heard. That I would have to be an actor."

"You must have done one hell of a job."

"I was no slouch." He told her about the plans made with Wilson in advance, the stomach pump purposefully placed at the back of the closet. Bourbon poured down his shirt front.

"The pills had to be real. And it had to be timed right. Or I might have stopped breathing ten minutes before anyone got there." The acting had been easy, the very real fear gnawing at him that the news story might not be manipulated, that her Christian rescuers had failed. The layer-upon-layer hide-and-seek game he had played with CA. "They bought it. I think Cuddy had it figured out. She never said anything." Not in four years. "When I told her a month ago that I was going to the Copenhagen conference, I believe she knew then that I wouldn't be back."

The words that should have been sad echoed in a hollow place inside him. He felt light, breezy. If he didn't look at the world it wasn't there, no people, no hard four years, only their two forms on a hill, so close their scents mingled, and so he kept his eyes on her and kissed her again.

"CA must have been on you like a fungus."

"Ah, fungus is the operative word. Not known to move very fast." He described the hotel lobby trick. "I had to look like I was headed to the conference. All I could bring with me was what I could carry on me." And in the end that was all that had mattered. He had said goodbye to his guitars before he left America. Ailyn rubbed the back of her hand against his where it lay lightly on his leg, acknowledging the sacrifice, and their rings touched. All he could carry on him.

"Time for your story," he told her, and watched the hard lines around her mouth deepen.

The Christians had slipped a message to her after the trial so she had known what to expect. It had still been terrifying, cuffed in the back of the van as they drove, not knowing if and when it would happen.

"The story about the beanbag bullets was true," she said. "What got lost in the telling is that the Christians had a mole among the guards, who used tear gas to take them out the moment the van stopped. The guards didn't have a chance to shoot at their attackers before they were blinded by the gas, on the ground and cuffed. No one was killed, on either side." The first thing she had seen when the doors were thrown open was a gas-masked figure, Robert Chase from his voice, tossing her a mask of her own and yelling for her to put it on. She had only learned much later that she was supposed to be dead and bullet-ridden.

They sat in silence for a moment watching the tourists. "You can work here," she informed him. "Under your own name. Denmark doesn't extradite. English is an international language in medicine and I've found a hospital that can't wait for you to start."

It was like her, the old her. For him the four years had been like one long dark rainy day that might never end and it must have been the same for her, but she had always been able to substitute pragmatism for the melancholy, just keep doing what you have to do.

A boy who looked to be three or four detached himself from the racing children and sank down in front of Ailyn. "Can I have a cookie, Mama?" he asked her. The boy had curly brown hair and blue eyes. She dug in her bag, not looking up, and handed him a cookie. The boy stared at the stranger beside his mother and then bounded away.

The hill was spinning. He had to hold on to the ground, palms pressed flat. Ailyn still hadn't looked back at him. "I was going to tell you in the motel room," she finally said, "but then we were arrested. I'd…stopped taking the pill a month before." She took a shuddering breath. "I was so scared we were going to be separated and I knew I wouldn't survive without…something of you. In me. Beside me."

The fist that had held his heart from the second he understood let go, blood pumping back through him; he could see his hands pressed into the grass flushing red, little storms in his fingers. If you could have thyroid storm, he supposed you could have a heart hurricane. When he looked at his son, the light glinting in his hair, shouting Danish to his interim playmates, he felt he would burst. You thought you were alive again already but there was more.

"Are you mad at me?" Ailyn asked. "That I stopped taking the pill without telling you?"

He shook his head until he could speak. That she could think that. "It's the most beautiful thing anyone's ever done for me." Her eyes lit up. "Oh shit." She looked alarmed again. "I'm a dad! I skipped class the day they covered that subject. I don't know how to be a dad."

"Greg, it'll work. I've always told him his father had to be away traveling. We'll just tell him you've finally…come home." The words were like a spell. "We'll manage it. Just…be you." From anyone else the command would have meant the speaker had no idea who he was. From her it was a seal of trust. "His name is Michael," she added.

For a moment they watched little Mike play. "I wish my father could be here," she murmured. "I wish he could just be alive to know…" She glanced at him, a timid look, fear of some new idea he might reject. "Sometimes I tell myself he does know." He began to understand. "My…thoughts on things have changed a lot, Greg. I never realized how much strength I was getting from Christianity without believing in it – during the mastectomy and through all the things that happened to us. I was denying it inside, but it was working for me. I'm in a group here that worships openly. It's so much easier when it's not all tangled up with resentment about my dad's imprisonment and false charges of terrorism."

"Glad you're telling me this. Now I can report you. How do you say 'thought police' in Danish? Come to think of it, that CA agent may still be at the hotel."

Her smile was glorious. "I…want to raise Mike the way my dad raised me, but explaining to him what it's all about."

He nodded and it was simple. It had been a revelation, when he first realized it, that at some point he had reached a place where he could accept someone else's view without arguing. Wilson had done that for him. They had spent four years not talking about things, except on days when he had needed it to keep from going insane, and then only in coded words, out at their picnic table in the park. He had come to see that the world did not end because someone thought differently than he did. And he couldn't be sure he wasn't a little aberrant himself. If he had learned to draw strength from himself, to bear the pain that still wracked him night and day, then that strength had been given to him, whether by chance or not, a present wrapped up and gleaming in the shape of his love for her. The fact that he had kept going was a kind of religion, faith in the unseen. He had come to love his life, and that was a miracle. He was as aberrant as the rest of them.

"A few miles from here," Ailyn mused, "there are neolithic tombs, much older than the Vikings. Huge stone cairns built by hand, when hands were all they had. The people who buried their dead put jewelry in with the corpses and scattered flowers over them. They had a religion. They believed in some kind of resurrection. It's…like we've always had this need – " She ran her hands through her hair. "Death makes us religious, I think. You can love someone, love their mind so much you want it to go on forever because it's beautiful -" He was floating again, light inside, and he leaned into her. "And when you see it stop in this world, it's only natural to want to believe it's still alive somewhere else. I think that's how it all got started, in our heads."

"Belief in an afterlife is only one small aspect of religion," he murmured.

"I know. It just… seems so pertinent. When you love."

At the bottom of the hill the boy named Michael stopped playing long enough to look back at him, a preparatory glance, as though he sensed that the man beside his mother would play a role in his life, his face curious and open to whatever the world had to offer, then the figure turned and launched itself back into the game with a shout. The sun had warmed him, easing the ache in his leg. Bodies and the earth seem lifted, borne up by the very light that anchored them. He could lie back and look up at the sky. On the grass his son played and his wife gazed at him and he felt as if he would live forever.

****

END of story

……………………………

(A/N: For those of you who wrote She's dead? – it's not over until the tall guy twirls his cane.)

(More A/N: Just wheew. I never expected this to get as big as it did. Sad to end it, but after almost exactly a year (and 100,000 words – a first for me) I'm also a little happy to move on. The next story – really a short one this time – is already in the works.

Write on!

The lyrics House hears when certain things happen to him in the story are from the following songs:

"You must not know about me" – Irreplaceable, Beyonce

"Bucket's got a hole in it" – My Bucket's Got A Hole In It, Hank Williams/Clarence Williams

"Can't get off this ride" – Hot N Cold, Katy Perry

"All the people who were doin' wrong" – Long Cool Woman in a Black Dress, The Hollies

"Blood at the root" - Strange Fruit, Billie Holiday/Abel Meeropol

"Prisoners of our own device" – Hotel California, The Eagles

"Wish I was sober" – 1973, James Blunt

"My poetry to protect me" – I Am A Rock, Simon and Garfunkel

"I remember when I lost my mind" – Crazy, Gnarls Barkley

"Hoping for the best, expecting the worst" – Forever Young, Alphaville

"Sunny days that I thought would never end" – Fire and Rain, James Taylor

"The questions run so deep" – The Logical Song, Supertramp

"Hoping it was a lie" – After the Gold Rush, Neil Young

"Beneath your wisdom like a stone" – Suzanne, Leonard Cohen

"The world's a better place when it's upside down" – Nothing Sweet About Me, Gabriella Cilmi

"If the boys wanna fight" – The Boys Are Back In Town, Thin Lizzy

"It's a cold and it's a broken hallelujah" – Hallelujah, Leonard Cohen

"When the future's architectured by a carnival of idiots" – Violet Hill, Coldplay

"All is loneliness" – All Is Loneliness, Janis Joplin

"A thread that has no end" – All of My Love, Led Zeppelin