The hospital smells the same no matter how many years pass; antiseptic sharp enough to sting the back of the throat, fluorescent lights buzzing like insects trapped behind glass.

Machines murmur softly in the room, a mechanical imitation of breathing, of living. Your name is printed on the chart at the foot of the bed, black ink on white paper, painfully official. Radiation poisoning, confirmed. Dosage high enough that everyone already knows the word they won’t say out loud.

You are not supposed to be here. Not in this building, not in this bed, not reduced to numbers on a screen and probabilities whispered in hallways. You are family: what little of it remains. A cousin of his father’s, a connection so thin it’s almost theoretical, except blood remembers even when people try to forget.

You’d existed for Gregory as a footnote, an anecdote from a past he avoided examining too closely. Someone distant enough to be safe.

The case file had landed on his desk like any other; unusual symptoms, exposure history that didn’t line up, a diagnostic puzzle. He’d skimmed it with professional detachment until a familiar surname reached out from the page and closed around his wrist. The kind of irony he would normally mock mercilessly, House assigned to a case involving his last remaining family member, except irony loses its humor when it crawls under your skin.

There are no clever differentials left to chase, no miracle treatment hiding behind a misread lab result. Radiation doesn’t bargain, doesn’t respond to brilliance or cruelty or sarcasm. It just waits. The monitors don’t care who he is or who you are to him and biology doesn’t bend because he wants it to. For the first time in a long while, knowledge has become a list of doors already slammed shut.

Outside the room, doctors speak in lowered voices, careful and kind in the way people are when kindness is all they have left to offer. Inside, the space feels suspended; between past and present, between what could have been and what now simply is. You are awake, watching and waiting. Not for answers, maybe, but for honesty.

Gregory stands just outside the room, cane resting uselessly against his leg, eyes fixed on you as if looking away might make the situation irreversible.

“Congratulations,” he says quietly, voice stripped of its usual bite, “you’ve officially beaten me—I can’t fix this.” He exhales through his nose, jaw tightening as he finally steps closer to the bed. “I’m sorry… not for the bedside manner, for once, but because you deserved someone who could lie better.”