AU drabble+ about House losing his mind that I wrote back in July. Am doing some fanfic house cleaning. So I'll probably be posting a few more random things like this.

Casino

The first few nights he spends in a real room, he wakes up every two or three hours. He dreams that he's falling, eyes popping open just seconds before he's about to hit the ground. Each time there's a jolt in his chest, a momentary shock. He draws air into his lungs, in desperate, heaving gulps. Then he takes in all the foreign sounds and the pitch black darkness, and remembers where he is.

Between the dreams there are unwelcome thoughts. But they still elbow their way in.

He doesn't like the food. Not that it's particularly bad. It's not particularly good either. He doesn't have the motivation to force anything down, just for the sake of meeting his body's minimum daily caloric requirement. He inspects the contents of the plate in front of him, regards their color and texture, and finds himself wondering if he's ever really tasted anything before.

By the end of the second week, he looks in the mirror over the sink in the bathroom that he shares with another resident, and doesn't recognize himself. And it's not that he's changed much, outside of the short cropped hairdo they gave him upon admittance. It's that he's not entirely sure who the hell he is, or if the person he thought he used to be ever really existed. Time spent tossing around that abnormally large tennis ball, while minions danced to whatever tune he saw fit to play, now feels like a scene from a movie about someone else's life. He finds himself wondering whether or not his eyes have always been blue or his hair has always been brown. While he's aware of his approximate physical age, he can't seem to recall having lived that long. He's not certain whether or not he was ever really alive. But he knows now, that he never had control of anything. However long he's been around, that time has been spent floating freely and rootless. He's a tiny flake of artificial snow, shaken about inside a globe, never settling for more than a minute.

At the end of the fifth week, House places a collect call to Wilson on the pay phone. It starts out like all their conversations do now. Wilson answers. House gives a generic greeting and Wilson returns it. Then Wilson fills the silence with polite dialogue about nothing in particular. House holds the receiver to his ear for fifteen minutes. Slowly the sound of Wilson's voice is replaced by white noise, a fine, organic static that is just loud enough to drown out everything else. And it suddenly takes real effort to listen, to make sense of speech, to tell when one word ends and the next begins.

When House licks his lips in preparation to speak, he should be alarmed by the discovery that his mouth has forgotten how. But he realizes that he actually doesn't have anything to say. He already knows that none of his answers will provide anyone with an explanation for why he is slowly losing his mind. They won't provide an explanation for anything.

Because really, there's no reason to talk if no one is going to listen, or if whatever he says will inevitably be misconstrued or ignored. He has long since lost count of all the things that he said out loud, but somehow managed to go unheard: I’m sorry, I’m in pain, I love you, I need you, please don’t go. And of course there are some that he'd prefer to forget ever having said at all. Words are coins in a slot machine, continuously spent in hope of an eventual payoff. But the machine is broken now, and it's not like those three sevens were ever going to line up anyway. He quietly sets the phone down and walks away. Time to leave the casino and never look back.