My feet are aching
And your back is pretty tired
And we've drunk a couple bottles, baby
And set our grief aside

Wilson's diagnosis was four months behind him.

Princeton was a lifetime away. The prognosis kept getting gloomier with every minute, every hour, every agonisingly slow day. Even Lisa didn't call him anymore, wary of his wrath and woes. He was on a road of no return; there was no coming back from his predetermined destination because there was simply no coming back from death itself. It wasn't like he planned on ever crawling back. He told himself, and sometimes House, that he'd made peace with eventual demise. He had not. He thought he wouldn't ever be able to.

They coped. They made empty promises and breakable vows. They left hearty home-cooked meals uneaten and exquisite silk sheets unmade. They spent nights after days wasting away in a pool of luxurious liquors, with no one but the TV to bear witness. They rode to California, then Florida, then North Dakota, crossed the border for one unmemorable trip, and then California again. They bought more houses than they could afford to stay in. They crashed in Mouth of Wilson, Virginia for a night just so House could make mirthless puns and ridiculous innuendos about the place. Wilson had half the mind to feel bad when the group of students sharing their dinner space gagged over a particularly nasty joke, but then decided it wasn't worth his limited time. They settled in Oxnard two weeks ago, as House declared himself bored of all the mindless travelling. Wilson knew it wasn't true; it was the fatigue sapping at his bones and the insomnia gnawing at his skin that betrayed their hopes. They didn't mention it at all.

Somewhere along the way, they came up with an idea. Or Wilson came up with an idea, more so.

Wilson didn't remember which one of them initiated The Talk, but the resignation in House's cerulean blues and the shake of the man's bum leg against his slimming ones burnt a tad too bright in his cancer-addled brain. The flimsy hotel bed whined eerily beneath them; a twin was a twin, but it was not meant for two grown men over six feet tall to share anyhow. Their feet curled together in a futile search for warmth, because the A/C had had the gall to break down and dip the temp to below 65. He almost wanted to ask House to have this conversation out on the balcony where the frigid air could not touch them, but lugging his trembling body the few steps there was too tremendous an effort to be put on House alone. House's left hand graced his forehead, featherlike; and then his lanky figure wrapped securely around Wilson, chest to chest and arms to quivering arms. The woollen afghan House crocheted for him a month back cocooned them like the hug of a desperate mother.

The clouds were rounding in from the beach. On TV, a forecaster announced the arrival of a storm with the grimmest tone Wilson had ever heard—and he'd been the bearer of bad news enough times to master that particular sort of sombreness. God knows he bore his own bad news. Salty winds picked up a cacophony of animalistic howls outside tightly closed windows. The sky darkened with every passing minute, the trees keened, the overhead lights flickered weakly, and House's scent drenched him not unlike spilt extrait de parfum on the splotchy floor. This near, the glisten of those unbearably intelligent eyes scalded Wilson; the hurt too bright, the vulnerability too heart-wrenching. It only struck him then that House had been holding his sharp tongue, had been bottling up his anguish like an archaeologist scrambling the remains of dinosaurs. Tears clawed at his throat.

"When the time comes," he muttered, fisting at House's collar, feeling the soft cotton scrunch up. The gesture was a familiar one in the sense that it shouldn't have happened, yet had befell them after all. "When I can't stand or brush my teeth anymore," he forced out, and House shook his head vehemently. He powered through nevertheless.

"Promise me, when I become dead weight"—and House was sobbing in earnest now, a dam broken by the sudden, thirty-years-too-late flood of mountain rain—"don't make me suffer longer than necessary. I want death with dignity. Give it to me before I lose myself. Promise me, House. Promise me."

"You have no right," House heaved, stuttering breaths viscous on Wilson's goosebumped shoulder. His sorrow punched Wilson's head woozy. "You have no right, you coward, you have no damn right to ask that of me!"

They stared at each other, frightened anger clashing against composed pleas, a snowstorm rioting in scorching July heat. House's bony fingers clutched his waist like a lifeline, the lifeline. Wilson imagined he was waging a war—a war against the inevitable, the irrational, himself—and was pathetically stuck on the losing side. Wilson knew what this meant for the older one. Cancer, hospice care, death; all these words House had tried to make nonexistent, even though it was undeniable that the process had already started when the X-rays came out with those coloured patches so blatantly obvious. Gregory House was codependency reincarnated, which Wilson much understood, so it didn't feel out of place when House wiggled impossibly closer, outgrown nails digging deep into the sensitive meat of his gaunt wrists, socked toes seeking refuge in between his svelte thighs. He wouldn't survive a day without Wilson. And Wilson, ever cruel, ever selfish, was asking him to.

Oh, how the turns have tabled.

"You have no right," House repeated, a shattered cuckoo clock hanging precariously on rotten wall. "You have no right, James Wilson, you cannot do this to me—"

"And yet I will, no matter what you have to say," Wilson whispered as one would, facing a mid-tantrum child. "I will because this is something we can't stop just for the sake of stopping. I will because this is my life, and no amount of kicking or screaming is going to change the outcome of it. I have a thymoma, not a sore throat, House. We both have foreseen this as soon as my reckless plan fell through, did we not?"

House silenced; abrupt, painful, so distinctly rigid. His knuckles blanched plasma over Wilson's unkempt hair, dimmed, ashen—withering. The cogs turned, slowly, as if House was a rusty piece of machine waiting to be cleaned inside and out. Wilson was a rusty piece of machine waiting to be cleaned, but he would never survive the wait. House would have to see it through, alone, because a dead man couldn't die again and couldn't ask for help, for company, for the coarsest of sympathy.

"Listen to me," House gurgled, delirious in his unfathomable lucidity. "Fucking listen to me, you dumb, pathetic airhead. You can live with dignity, we can't die with it. Our bodies break down, sometimes when we're 90, sometimes before we're even born, but it always happens and there's never any dignity in it. I don't care if you can walk, see, wipe your own ass. It's always ugly. Always. You hear me? You can live with dignity, we can't ever fucking die with it!"

And Wilson was a dumb, pathetic airhead whose heart trumped the brain, whose need for dignity ruled over the will to live; he smiled, muffled, serene; his eyes crinkling like a hopeless dork. He lunged; chest to heaving chest, mouth to salty mouth; their kiss came as a raging shorebreak, carnivorous, catastrophic. The end was near, the end was here, so stop your crying, baby, it's a sign of the times Wilson wanted to say, to bring comfort where condolences were redundant, where the void consumed the mind and left no crumbs. House palmed at his back, sinking, losing, breathless; so unaccustomed to love, so blissfully ravaged; Wilson bit at sinewy tongues, chewed on grazing teeth; limbs snatched limbs, chins dug cheeks; and they were done, done, done, thoroughly done in, devastatingly done for.

There was no comma. There was no question mark. There was not even an ellipsis. Beside a fin lies nothing, except for a period.

And here it is, our final night alive
And as the earth burns to the ground