IV. Elegy

The blood is visible on her skirt: ivory-colored silk, now mottled with damning red. She's been through this before, and knows there's no possibility of this being anything besides unequivocal, total loss. What she'd pushed aside as soreness and spotting she now recognizes as foreboding. Not that it would have helped to realize, she thinks morosely. This was the inevitable end. Just like always.

She calls Marina and lies about a crisis at work, would she please stay the night? She agrees, leaving Cuddy to seek sanctuary in one place she never imagined she'd consider for that purpose.

House is still at the hospital, and she doubts he'll be back before midnight. She knows that she should call him, if for no other reason than to let him know that she's not at home, but can't bring herself to dial. Instead, she shuts off her Blackberry, changes into a pair of House's pajama pants, and searches for what she knows must still be there, somewhere. It doesn't take her long. She knows him, knows how he thinks. It's lucky, she muses, that she's dating someone who has a constant supply of heavy-duty painkillers. Judging from experience, she knows she'll need them. The fact that they'll numb the biting sense of grief is a merciful bonus.

She climbs into his bed and waits - for the Vicodin's effects, for the cramps to subside, or to intensify, for what comes next. She doesn't want to think about it, but it lingers, relentless, in her mind as she drifts off.

The sound of his voice drags her from sedated sleep. She doesn't know how long she's been asleep, but the ache is still there. She's not sure if it's physical or emotion, and she doesn't really care. It hurts all the same.

The look on his face makes it clear. She shifts, her head swimming, and realizes with a delayed sense of dread that it's not just intuition that told him what he needed to know. There's blood on his sheets.

"House," she manages.

"Did you do an ultrasound?"

Whatever she expected him to say first, it wasn't that. "No."

"It could be placenta previa." His tone is almost impatient. "We should get you seen. If you don't want to go to - "

"When was the last time you miscarried?" She doesn't mean for it to sound so harsh. "It's not a zebra, House."

He stands silent a few moments, and she realizes: he knows exactly what it is. He just doesn't want it to be the truth.

"Okay." His voice is softer than she's heard it in a long time. Awkwardly, he sits on the edge of the bed. "Tell me what to do. I don't..." He doesn't finish.

"Help me into the tub."

It's strange, him pulling her up, wrapping an arm around her to walk her to the bathroom. She's lost count of how many times she done that for him, run him a hot bath and been his brace when he could barely manage to sit down. Now he's the one holding her up, lowering her down, sitting out the pain with one eye on her vital signs. She doesn't need him or anyone else to tell him what's going to happen, or how stupid it was for her to seclude herself when she's at risk for heavy blood loss. There's a part of her that still wants to be alone for this, both because she doesn't want him to see her like this, and because the image she had in her mind of him by her side as their child came into the world is one she wishes she could preserve. She doesn't want it tarnished by the reality that he'll be holding her hand as her body betrays her, rejecting the prospect of life.

The Vicodin helps, until it doesn't anymore. She doesn't know how long they've been sitting there, how long she's been silently watching the rivulets of blood trickle towards the drain. She wants to scream at the drain to stop, that it can't have this, can't have it. She feels robbed.

She draws her eyes from the porcelain and crimson and to House. He's said maybe five words in all the time they've been sitting here. It's almost frightening, how submissive he's being, sitting on the tile, trying not to let on that his leg is beginning to cramp, intermittently reaching over to feel her pulse and let his hand linger, and she thinks she'll kill him if he says it aloud, but she knows he's sorry.

"It's worse," she says, almost in a whisper. He meets her eyes, and in that moment, she thinks she'd give anything to know if their child would have had the same ones.

"Do you want another pill?" He nods to the orange bottle on the sink. He knows she's not talking about relative pain.

"No." She leans her head back against the wall. "It's the closest I'm ever going to get to labor. I might as well feel it."

"Lisa," he murmurs. She feels a bolt of something go through her – it's the first time he's called her that since they've been together. "You can still – "

She cuts him off. "Don't. I'm can't do this again. Just…don't."

He's carried back to the night she lost Joy, and a question forms that he knows he can't ask. Instead, he reaches over and laces his fingers with hers.

The small action overwhelms her, in its tenderness, in the implication that he is there for her, in the knowledge that this is happening in his bathtub and not a delivery room.

Finally, she lets herself cry.

They spend the night in the bathroom. He leaves her only for water and tea, and as the sun comes up, to call them both in sick. He peers into the bathroom, watching her with her head in her hands as she sits on the toilet. He's had a thousand horrific moments in that bathroom, detoxing, searching for his stash, feeling alone, but none of them have scared him as much as this. He has no idea how to help her. There isn't an answer to this puzzle.

Rays of light creep across the living room floorboards and he glances at them as he hobbles through the apartment, the dull ache in his thigh now a searing knot of pain, still acting under the pretense of bringing her a blanket. Rarely is he grateful for his handicap, but now, it relieves him of having to face the possibility that this too, this strange amalgamation of emotion hanging like a cloud, might actually hurt.

In the bathroom she takes in a sharp breath of air as the feeling of loss penetrates to muscle and bone, spreading from her ribs to her shins. Hope leaves her in another warm gush that drains her of the last chance at carrying a child.

The unthinkable is still to come, and she knows that this, in comparison, will be nothing. In hours or days, she will have to face the reality of a miscarriage at this stage, and when she plants another star magnolia along the edge of the back yard, it will be a memory and a grave at once. She waits in silent dread, certain that this will be the last attempt at duping nature.

A sudden burst of rage erupts as tears, and she folds forward to lay her head on her hands, grimace buried in the creases of her palms. The sheer totality of impossible events that have led her to this moment should not have culminated this way. It was supposed to be the apex of an unlikely story, the validation of all the things that were never supposed to be: hers and House's, the prodigal child of the tortured genius and the woman damned to love him.

She thinks to herself that nature has wasted a precious chance.

The day wears on, and the bleeding wanes, though they both know it won't be for long. He changes the sheets and brings her to bed, a white pill and a glass of water on the nightstand a silent suggestion. She lies down and lets him cover her, eyes trained on the glass and how the room appears to float behind it.

His weight and form behind her are unexpected, but she doesn't move, doesn't speak, only allows the feeling of his body against hers to keep her tethered to sanity until she drifts off to sleep.

When she wakes, it's dark again, and she is alone.

The first notes bounce off of her subconscious, impenetrable to all else but the hollow feeling that encases her, but eventually she hears them, slow but spontaneous and elegantly mournful, echoing around walls and saturating the air. Maybe it's only in the lowest of moments, when she reaches the same place of melancholy that he revels in, that she can truly hear his music, but as she listens, connecting the threads and slivers of their time together, she hears for the first time what he's been playing all along, note by note, chord by cord: a sonata in full, movements across decades, fragmented for her to hear without knowing what it was.

He's been playing her a symphony since Ann Arbor.

The music surrounds her in an embrace that reminds her of the first night they spent together after the collapse, after she found him in the same bathroom, at the same point of desperation and aching she feels now. His arms encircling her, his breaths on her shoulder, the thump of his heartbeat against her filling her with a sense of having finally found home.

If this is the extent of what she is allowed in life – House and Rachel – it will be enough.

She wills herself up and stands on legs that feel like lead, but it is with purpose that she moves to meet him, beside him on the piano bench, huddling against him as he plays on. She can feel the vibrations of the notes in the sinews of his muscles and wonders if their child would have been a virtuoso as well.

The music stops in a graceful denouement and he lets his hands linger on the keys a moment before allowing the one closest to her to fall and find her fingers. She can feel his anticipation, his uncertainty at how to grapple with this unknown tangle of emotion. Quietly, she asks him what she's wanted to know every time he has played, and now that she realizes the significance of his songs, the need to know overwhelms caution.

"What's it called?"

She knows the answer before it comes, but the confirmation affirms to her the thing she's needed to know, perhaps all along.

"Lisa," he tells her. "It's called 'Lisa.'"

( end )