Four:

Lucas didn't want to be sat on a plane. He'd spent the last six weeks elbow deep in a church's charity box theft case. In the final days, he'd figured out that one of the volunteer parishioners wasn't just fiddling the books; he'd been fiddling with the altar boys too. What Lucas wanted, after that, was to be at home, with the radio on full blast, in a hot bath full of fluffy bubbles, with his beer hat on. He wanted to sing loudly and out of tune and to glug a microbrew through a twirly straw until he forgot about it. But, as an old friend of his once told him, the universe didn't give a damn about what he wanted.

It just figured that it was that same old friend who was currently helping the universe to screw him over.

"You're an ass, pal," he told the shameless biker in the photograph Stacy had given him, as he slumped down in the plane's bucket seat while it shot up from the runway and began the steady hike to thirty-six thousand feet. "Even dead, you're an ass."

The orange-skinned, bottle-blonde, matron in the seat beside him eyed him sideways, straining to contort her botoxed features into disapproving frown.

"He is," Lucas defended himself, and put the picture away before she could get a good look at it.

By rights, he thought, tilting his head back and focusing aimlessly on the little overhead reading light controls as the sky rushed past the window in a diagonal blur, he should hate the man at lot more than he did. House had hired him, fired him, hung out with him, dropped him when Wilson got over the pissy fit that had made him stop returning House's calls, helped him hook up with his fiancée, and nabbed her off him a few months before the wedding.

But Lucas didn't hold grudges. People were people: erratic, selfish, altruistic, and unpredictable. Either a man kept them in separate compartments – customers, friends, and everything else – or he shut up and sucked up the consequences. And the consequences had sucked. But then there had been the post-mortem present – House's favourite, breath-takingly gorgeous, acoustic guitar – and, since it had been mailed to his doorstep a week after House's death, along with a signed copy of The Clash's cover of I Fought the Law (And the Law Won), one of the most spine-tinglingly tantalising puzzles Lucas had come across in a lifetime's worth of obsession with them. Shallow, to forgive a man all his faults for a shiny object and a catch-me-if-you-can taunt? Yeah. But Lucas was okay with that. Shallow, schmallow. He was interested.

He'd had his doubts about House's demise from the start. He could play credulous, and had, when Lisa had called him, voice hoarse with shock. But his first reaction hadn't been astonishment, disbelief or even grief. He'd wanted to snicker and to call the bluff. A lonely OD on Vicodin or morphine in his apartment, sure, au revoir, House, good to have known you, man. But an OD of horse with a drug-addicted patient in a burning building? It was a little too dramatic – and a lot too social – to be believed.

It had been convenient too. Okay, screwing up a prank and winding up with another six-month stint in jail while his best, maybe only, friend spent five months dying of cancer, that was a pretty good reason for a guy to top himself. But in a fire? One of the surest ways to tie a corpse into a crispy balloon animal and twist the post-mortem evidence and identification procedures six ways to hell and back? Right before an arrest warrant was issued? Uh huh. Give the other one a good pull. It's got bells on.

He'd kept his mouth shut, of course. At the time, he hadn't had much more than gut suspicion to go on and it was funeral, for God's sake. Black suits, black streaks of eyeliner on cheeks, black moods, and a big black urn in the middle of it. But there had been one too many oddities in the midst of all the mourning for Lucas to buy into it as a bad goodbye.

The first had been Wilson, wretched and ranting, saying what they were all thinking, with angry, hurt, desperate, tears in his eyes. It hadn't been his speech so much – a heartfelt love you, hate you, fuck you for doing this to me disaster – or that his phone went off halfway through – a text from the hospital, he'd said – or even that he bailed mid-sentence, apparently breaking down beyond the point at which he could pull it back together. It had been that it wasn't a text from the hospital at all. Or, for that matter, his cell phone.

Lucas had swiped it from the plinth, where Wilson had abandoned it when he bolted out of the ceremony. He'd stepped up to cover the ghastly pause, told a few stories that summed up House's ass-hattery and turned it back into a good thing. They all knew House was a bastard. Whether he knew it or not, they'd loved him anyway. Because of it, sometimes. When he'd got things back on track, Lucas had slipped to the shadows, checked the cell's still glowing screen.

Shut up, you idiot!

It could've been from Stacy, Cuddy, Foreman or even Blythe. A fond but firm reproach for a little too much honesty. As House would've observed: people don't speak ill of the dead; funerals are a big fun festival of lies. Or half-truths. Or whatever. But Lucas had been sat close enough to hear Wilson's surprised mutter as he found the phone in his pocket: This isn't mine.

It wasn't, as it turned out. And maybe Stacy, Cuddy, Foreman or even Blythe knew him well enough to have figured he might lose it mid-speech and start cussing out House's brisket to have salvaged his phone from the front desk where everyone had left theirs and snuck it into his back pocket en route to the pews. But no way, no how, would any of them have planned far enough ahead to purchase, with cash, a burner phone, from one of the few shops in town with no CCTV inside or within a block of the store. Or, according to the guy at the store, to have bought it while wearing a brilliant orange and green Hawaiian with coconuts on it, a giant SLR around the neck, a stupid blue I heart Princeton baseball hat, riding in a wheelchair, and putting on a British accent.

With no one paying him to investigate a case, Lucas had held off flashing his ID around to find out more. He had no interest in stirring up a storm without a better reason than his own curiosity. But he'd turned over a Stones' album late that night, thought hard about what he knew and where he might subtly unearth a little more information.

His second stop had been Foreman. A few days after the funeral, Lucas had dropped by to speak to him and caught the Dean in a pensive daze. He'd been speaking to the man's brother, checking he wouldn't be interrupting to go in, while Foreman idly paced his office pouring over a folder. As Lucas watched, he'd sat down in one of the chairs that formed two conversational crescents adjacent to the big picture windows and set the folder down on a table. The thing had wobbled furiously. Big deal, right? Who cared about a wonky table? Except that Foreman was the kind of guy who'd spend an hour fussing around with bits of folded up paper while he waited for maintenance to come and do an emergency fix. And he'd nearly jumped out of his skin when the folder spasmed, reaching down not to catch it but to snatch something out from under the table leg.

He'd picked it up and stared at it, as if he'd seen a ghost, then laughed and sat back, eyes unfocusing thoughtfully. Marcus had waved Lucas in then and Foreman had hurriedly slid the little piece of plastic back under the table leg. It had taken Lucas a few minutes to subtly get a good look at it. But when he did there was no mistaking it. The piece of plastic ineffectively stabilising the table was House's hospital ID tag.

Lucas hadn't asked why it was there – or why it had made Foreman snicker and the squared, stoic set of his shoulders unclench a little. The Dean would never have told him. But he'd made another little mental note in the neurological jotter he'd opened and, after the preliminary enquiries about how each other was bearing up, turned the conversation to his pretext for being there.

He'd come armed with a ruse about an unpaid bill, figuring he could always segue into some tripe about needing a good grief counsellor or hug and hand-holding group to get Foreman to talk about his former boss a little. But after the tag episode, he hadn't needed to and he'd simply rattled off the bill spiel to cover his tracks. The best lies, as House would've slyly reminded him, were half true. After all, though he'd written the money off years ago, the bill – dating back to House hiring him to help hassle Wilson – hadn't ever been paid.

Unexpectedly, though, it had provided him with another clue. There had been a cheque waiting for him – signed by Wilson and, according to a note on the back, sans the amount it had cost to replace the flatscreen and bath-tub safety rail after a prank war he'd got into with House had got out of hand. Even so, it had been more than double what he was owed. There'd been no explanation. Only a note that read: Thank you – for helping him bring me Home. A bad pun? he'd wondered, eyeing it thoughtfully in the middle of Foreman's office. A belated thank-you for the last few years? Wilson was dying, after all. But he'd caught Foreman watching him with the same wary curiosity he'd felt himself as he watched the Dean through the glass doors and hurriedly took his leave. It was still only a gut feeling; but he was pretty sure there was a third option here. After all, Wilson had been full-throttle in the stage of anger during the funeral – and he didn't seem likely to have been in a better mood having to spend his last few weeks before he quit Princeton to go live out his bucket list helping Blythe go through House's effects as well as his own.

It had been Blythe, though, who had got Lucas really digging around in the details of House's death. They'd got to chatting at the funeral, after Wilson had fled. He'd found her standing out in the cemetery, staring rather sadly at the place his car had been parked and an empty motorbike bay beside it, and overheard her murmur to herself that she'd better get used to having neither of them. Lucas had smiled at her, empathising with this self-controlled, upright, lonely woman, whose love and motherliness had shone like a beacon in the sea of funereal blackness.

He'd caught glimpses of it before: in the white-knuckled grip Wilson had developed when he hugged her outside before the ceremony, buried his face in her shoulder and choked for a moment on his fragile composure; in the raw ache in her voice as she told them all that Greg had been a goodson, whatever his faults; in the way she'd cradled his urn in both hands and kissed the face of it farewell, as if it were the little boy she'd birthed fifty-three years ago.

He'd been lonely too, Lucas guessed, and in need of a hug himself. She'd given him one and, a few days later, he'd found himself sitting in House's kitchen with her, sharing stories like old friends.

They'd kept in touch, after that, sporadically. The odd walk in a park here. A Thanksgiving there. He was someone for her to care for and she was tough, clever, kind and welcoming, all the things his own mother had never been. He talked to his own mom too, of course, went on awkward Christmas visits where he was the centre of her world for a good five minutes before she lost interest and went back to poking around in their ancestry. Family was important, didn't he know? Some years, she didn't even remember to buy him a gift.

But Blythe sent him cards with long stories from House's past – and her own lively escapades as a young adult. And she'd called him, all aflutter and fretting, when the first card came to her six months after House's death and a few months before Christmas. It wasn't Lucas's own to her. That had turned up a few days before and she'd phoned him then to thank him. No. This card had been unsigned. But, he'd supposed, it hadn't really needed a signature. On the front was a picture of a giant, heart-shaped lollipop, bearing the slogan: love sucks. Inside, a familiar hand had scrawled simply: Dear Mom, the afterlife is boring, the company isn't. Love, XXX.

They'd come each year, after that, all but confirming Lucas's initial suspicions. A man who had committed unplanned suicide had first made sure he'd written up a couple of decades worth of Christmas and birthday cards and arranged them to be posted, year after year, by different people across the US? No way. Nuh uh. Never. It was then that Lucas had understood the tag in Foreman's office. The note with Wilson's cheque. It was a breadcrumb trail. House wasn't dead. He was Sherlock goddamn Holmes.

Left to himself, Lucas would've kept his nose out of it once he'd figured it out. He was a P.I. not a C.I.; he wasn't going to nark. Okay, House was a jerk for making his mom cry. But love, well, love sucked, like the card had said. And it could make a man do some damn fool things. Like drive a car into his ex-girlfriend's house. Or go to jail instead of plea-bargain his way out of it. Or become buddies with his ex-fiancée because he still adored her kid (and her) and, oh wait, that was Lucas himself being a fool… But whatever. He'd've skipped town and jail for Lisa, even now. The brief spell he'd spent working for House had proven to him over and over that there was no one on earth whom he loved as much as Wilson and it wasn't unreciprocated. They'd earned whatever time they had left together.

That was, until Lisa called, scared out of her skin because Rachel was sick. And then Rachel was dying. And Lucas, beyond frightened himself, had started to hunt for the one person he knew could help her. It had taken months to get anywhere: there were endless dead end leads, stupid guessing games trying to form codes and messages out of the postmarks from the various towns and cities the cards had come from, phone-calls to hospitals, estate agents, drug mules and forgers, all of which he'd tried to do without tipping anyone else off. But, and maybe the universe did give a crap after all, just as he'd got it narrowed down to a single city Stacy had called, offering him the perfect excuse – and a legal safety net for the sheer havoc he could unleash in digging up a dead man's grave.

If he'd needed another sign, he'd surely got it, not that he ought to have done by then. Still, it was a little weird to go to someone's funeral and stay convinced they were driving around out there somewhere and not on a phantom bike, incorporeal, haunting an otherwhere. With Stacy, though, the chain of connections had been complete: there was the best friend, Wilson; a powerful medic, Foreman; a family member, Blythe, and then a lover who was also a lawyer, Stacy - all the people House had loved and trusted the most, and who could help him if the time ever came to return to life. Each had been left a single clue and, if Lucas wasn't very much mistaken, each was a person House knew that he, Lucas, would know to look to for signs of his life. Catch me if you can? You're on, buddy. Lucas had grabbed his proverbial net, stun-gun, and carry cage, otherwise known as his cell, his passport, and his bank cards. He'd met with Stacy, put a call in to his own lawyer, and boarded the very next plane that would take him two-thirds of the way across the country.

Nearly two thousand miles away, in a private room, a middle-aged man was fighting for every breath. The vast thymic mass in his chest had compressed his surrounding organs. Stoke's collar bulged, heavy and odemous, around his throat, masking the painful jerks of his Adam's apple as he gulped at and gagged on his own saliva. Pemberton's sign had distorted his puffy features, flushing them a dull scarlet. Chemotherapy, a lengthy fight for life, and the ongoing presence of myasthenia gravis, the symptoms of which had first tipped him off to the presence of his tumour, had weakened his muscles all but beyond use. His left eye would not open. His arms were too weak to lift. It was his partner's hand that clutched the oxygen mask to his face for him, knuckles white as he sought to keep his own fingers from shaking. The partner's thin lips moved beneath a week's worth of greying stubble, muttering out a hopeless mantra:

"C'mon, c'mon, you son of a bitch. Don't leave me. Don't leave me alone."

The whimper of machines was constant. The laboured wheeze of the patient's breathing was punctuated by lengthy stops and ragged starts. Several feet back from the partner's long huddle of limbs on the mattress edge and the bloated, jaundiced figure dying between lank white sheets, the oncologist stood monitoring the situation with the grave, hollow-stomached, sense of resignation. There was now very little he could do.

Habitually, nonetheless, he glanced down at the chart tucked in the foot of the bed. Part of the name James W— was just visible behind the sheaf of consent papers that had been signed a few weeks ago for entry into this clinical trial. Conventional therapies had all failed: resection of the malignant mass, six rounds of chemotherapy, radiation, three more rounds of chemo. The mass had reached stage three by the time James had been put forward for the trial. The oncologist had allowed it, even encouraged it; the data would be useful for his study. Logically, he had suspected the outcome would not be a success. Professionally, he had offered the couple the realistic odds. Privately, he understood why they had grasped at the chance, however slight. Dying sucked if you had something, or someone, to live for.

He was of a similar age, the oncologist. Though there was precious little of his patient's swollen features, threadbare skull, and wasted body in which to recognise it, there was a physical similarity between them too. Six feet tall, medium-build, bright brown hair, of the west coast, originally, before winding up here in the mid-west. He'd even been living out his own bucket list, a few years before.

Not that the mirror would show it now. His skin was tanned by the summer sun. Regular sports events kept him trim and fit. James's partner had even jokingly demanded photo id before he'd allow him to administer any treatment. The oncologist had snorted at that. Picture of health he might be, but he knew there were flashes of silver visible at his temples where his shoulder-length hair was knotted back in a ponytail. He was a lucky bastard to still be alive to get them.

Unconsciously, one hand came up to touch the skin around his neat goatee and moustache, checking that his own temperature was within normal ranges, and to skim down to the lean length of his own throat, feeling the burning agony of his patient's every hard won inhale as if he were experiencing it again. He turned his back momentarily to erase the memories of his own struggle from his features. This was James's battle. His – in spite of what he had learned from it, this trial that had evolved from it – was of no help here.

Beyond the glass doors of the private room, a blue overalls-clad janitor was mopping away the invisible lurgies that lurked on the hospital's corridor floor. Briefly, both recognising the sight of impending death, their eyes met through the glass. The oncologist twisted one corner of his mouth down in grim acknowledgement. The janitor held his gaze a beat longer, then, with the resigned shrug of the helpless, carried on mopping.

"I can't be here for this."

The oncologist wheeled back toward the bed as James's partner staggered to his feet. He seized the black wood cane that had been leaning against the dresser and started to stumble toward the door. The patient's eyes were both closed now, the twitches and contortions of his countenance weakening. He was slipping into a coma. Mercifully.

The oncologist stalled James's partner with a firm hand on the shoulder.

"You've been here for the last five years," he reminded him gently. "You can be here for the next five minutes."

The older man struck his hand away, face drawn down to bone and tears blazing in his eyes.

"And the next?" he demanded. "And the next?"

The oncologist, as always, weighed the inevitable decision. There had been no strong religious views expressed, no indications that what he was about to offer might go against either the patient's or his partner's wishes.

"I can make them a little easier."

Blue eyes pierced him to the core. The man's whole posture was spiky with angry desperation, frail with impending loneliness. It took him a long moment to nod as well.

"Yes. Please."

"Okay."

The oncologist moved over to the machines that surrounded James's bedside and, taking a deep breath, opened the cover on the morphine pump controls. He was careful to stand to one side, so that the code he punched in was clearly visible as he gave himself access to elevate the dose pouring into the dying man's veins. A sidelong glance told him that the haggard-faced partner was watching, that his silent suggestion had been noticed, and accepted. If he stayed here, without leaving, there could be a few more wretched days of this: grating in and out of consciousness, every heartbeat hurting, every thread of air sucked in prolonging James's suffering. If he left, it need only be minutes. There wasn't really a choice to make.

He allowed himself only a sad, consolatory smile of sympathy, directed first toward the trembling partner, then towards his oblivious patient. Then, taking a deep breath, almost to remind himself that he could, he stepped out of the room.

"G-ddamnit!"

In the relative privacy afforded by the quiet corridor, the oncologist drew back his fist to reproach the wall. He checked himself a split-second from split knuckles and dealt a savage kick to the janitor's nearby bucket instead. Filthy, greyish water splattered up the wall and cascaded across the blue linoleum, undoing an hour's worth of work.

"You can't save them all."

Chin propped on the handle of his mop, both hands loosely coiled around the wooden shaft, the janitor regarded his colleague without rancour.

The oncologist breathed out hard. Unclenching slowly, he leaned back against the bespattered wall, grubby water sluicing the outdoor dust off his black leather loafers.

"I know." He removed his glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose frustratedly. "I know."

The janitor was unsympathetic. "Should've stayed working in the free clinic if it's going to get to you this much. You didn't have to go back to your specialty."

"Yeah…" Dark eyes grew pensive, cleared. "No. No, this clinical trial was to good an idea to dismiss."

"The revisitation of the acute febrile process in cases of so-called spontaneous remission and regression was long overdue." The janitor waved a hand vaguely, indicating his opinion of the laxity of the oncology community in general. "Deliberately inducing fever in cancer patients by reworking Coley's Toxin and his experiments in a clinical environment was guaranteed to get funding, whenever you morons caught on. You didn't have to be that moron. You could have left it to someone else."

The oncologist snorted, recognising the baiting tone for what it was.

"I left the use of pyrogenic cytokines for someone else," he retorted. "I wanted to be—" a wry, knowing, glance at his companion "—that moron."

"Then stop whining." The janitor scuffed a small wave of the dissipating water toward him with the side of a blue and orange sneaker. "The trial has been producing positive results. But the better results are in the cases where your patients weren't already significantly immunocompromised by recent bouts of chemotherapy—"

"I know," the oncologist repeated, a little more forcefully. "I do, Joe. I just…I wanted this guy to survive."

The janitor made a noise of disgust. "You identified with him. Doctor. Medical and mid-life crises coinciding. Married his best friend in some cock-eyed drunken Vegas ceremony. All around nice guy—"

"Jackass best friend," the oncologist corrected, one eyebrow hitched reprovingly. "Yeah, minimise the significance of my dying patient's life – and mine, by the way. Thanks for that."

"He's nothing like you!" the janitor snapped. "You were an idiot before you became a moron. Just because you didn't wind up being a boring cancer statistic, not everyone starts out by surrendering to the here-comes-the-corpse mentality. This guy got himself treated, after a few months of woe-is-meing. He didn't just ride off into the sunset to meet his non-existent maker!"

The oncologist rolled his eyes at the familiar rant.

"Turns out," he countered smugly, "I wasn't so much of an idiot." Their gazes met again as he replaced his glasses and he allowed more softly, "Thanks to you."

The janitor's eyes dashed away from his, jaw stiffening and the oncologist bit back another sigh. Not for the first time, he wished it were possible that he could have put the janitor's name on the clinical trial paperwork too, instead of simply his own and those of the two medical fellows he had roped in.

"Yeah, yeah," the janitor scoffed, after a heartbeat's uncomfortable pause. He straightened up and a wicked glint returned to his eyes. "You know what really says 'thank you for saving my life'? Cleaning up your own damn mess!"

The oncologist caught the mop as it scudded across the wet floor towards him. He chuckled, inclining his head in concession. The janitor popped a strip of gum into his mouth and strolled off, loudly blowing and popping bubbles as he went.

TBC...