Fic: Aubade
Title: Aubade
Author: isaytoodlepip
Rating: PG
Note: Based on Philip Larkin's Aubade



He works all day, and gets half drunk at night. Trying to sleep, to stop. Always in the back of his mind, necrosis. He startles awake in his bed sometimes, sees a sliver of light under his door and imagines that Wilson is still with him, doing his best to stop his own restless wandering. He startles awake on his couch sometimes, sunlight filtered by curtains and blinds, and he wonders who among the dead and dying he’ll meet that day. Through his morning routine of coffee and toast, a pill or two and a soothing shower, he thinks of diseases he wants to see in action, of the havoc he could wreak in the world of General Hospital, of the lunches he’s spent with Foreman or alone ever since Wilson attached himself to the bitch he can’t bring himself to harass anymore. As he stares at the face in his mirror, trying to decide if he’ll trim his beard and trying to remember what Cuddy had scribbled in her date book for that day, he imagines he sees a yellow tint in his sclera, but he blinks and it’s gone. The bourbon isn’t there just to help him sleep, sometimes. But he makes himself remember the smell of the morgue, the earth in Stacy’s hand when they buried her mom, the way he smelled a rotting limb, argued for amputation and wondered if that was the smell his surgeons faced, when they cut open his thigh and pared away so many things he’d never get a chance to…

At the hospital, mental Yentl comes by the office to thank them. He turns his back and pours himself some more coffee, leaving Foreman to pretend that he cares. When she is gone, Foreman is staring at him. “You wish they were right, don’t you?” he asks. Accuses, his eyebrows doing the dance they always do when he finds himself surprised. “You want there to be something more.”

“As opposed to total emptiness forever?” he clarifies, wrapping his long, cold fingers around his red mug. “Nothing more terrible, nothing more true,” he shrugs, and readjusts his grip on things before walking off to find Wilson.

He goes to Wilson’s office to be with a friend, but instead found one of those terminal cases that Wilson does so well with. He backs out of the room, not needing to see the look on Wilson’s face. It’s too early for lunch, so he goes to the clinic and wastes his time on people who are dying at a slower rate. Cuddy plays her game with him, he plays his game with her, and it’s an easy way to wait for lunch. He has a date with Wilson, a reservation of the man’s time, but instead of meaningless talk of TV and trannies, Wilson ends up droning about how the latest sad sack is meeting his death with grace. He lets his mind drift, lets Wilson go on about yet another way he wants to die (“it’s a great idea, a wake when you’re still well enough to attend,” Wilson says, and he thinks, what the hell do you think we’re doing here?). He tries to remember the hazy days of spiked coffees, the fireplace splashing warmth on his computer screen as a woman bared her neck to him, the feel of Wilson’s carpal bones in his fingers as he slipped his hand into warm water and watched him sleep. “Death is no different whined at than withstood,” he snaps, and leaves Wilson sitting there, gaping.

He works all day, and gets half drunk at night. Wilson comes by with some food, complains that Amber’s casserole makes his diet of canned soup and peanut butter look appetizing. He wants to ask Wilson why he’s there, when it took so much to step back and give him room to be with someone who might actually make him happy. But he also wants to forget the ways he’s bared himself lately and just sit there, a little too close to his friend, and rate Hefner’s girlfriends. Laugh at the face Wilson make when there’s a close up on Adam Savage’s fingernails. “Such a girl,” he says. Not fondly. He looks over at Wilson, and it’s not a far-reaching gaze, considering how close the other is to him. Most things may never happen: this one will, is what he thinks. And blinks at himself in surprise. “What?” Wilson asks, defensive.

“Don’t you have somewhere more important to be?”

Wilson just shrugs, but twenty minutes later he’s pulling on his coat, talking about an early day. He waves him goodbye and listens for the start of an engine before he moves over to the window. He stares at the soft amber light scattered across his piano and in his realization that it is dawn, he plays Aubade.

Aubade by Philip Larkin

I work all day, and get half drunk at night.
Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.
In time the curtain edges will grow light.
Till then I see what's really always there:
Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,
Making all thought impossible but how
And where and when I shall myself die.
Arid interrogation: yet the dread
Of dying, and being dead,
Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.

The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse
- The good not used, the love not given, time
Torn off unused - nor wretchedly because
An only life can take so long to climb
Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never:
But at the total emptiness forever,
The sure extinction that we travel to
And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,
Not to be anywhere,
And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.

This is a special way of being afraid
No trick dispels. Religion used to try,
That vast moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die,
And specious stuff that says no rational being
Can fear a thing it cannot feel, not seeing
that this is what we fear - no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
The anaesthetic from which none come round.

And so it stays just on the edge of vision,
A small unfocused blur, a standing chill
That slows each impulse down to indecision
Most things may never happen: this one will,
And realisation of it rages out
In furnace fear when we are caught without
People or drink. Courage is no good:
It means not scaring others. Being brave
Lets no-one off the grave.
Death is no different whined at than withstood.

Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape.
It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,
Have always known, know that we can't escape
Yet can't accept. One side will have to go.
Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring
In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring
Intricate rented world begins to rouse.
The sky is white as clay, with no sun.
Work has to be done.
Postmen like doctors go from house to house.