Chapter Text
A young boy with an inscrutable face and a slightly outgrown military haircut was slouched in the uncomfortable chair of headmaster Gale Nolan’s office. Outside, snow swirled in the courtyard, and students were throwing cold ammunition at each other and laughing. Upon hearing footsteps approaching the door, the boy straightened up in his chair, and the headmaster took his place in the armchair across the wooden desk.
“Good morning, Mr House. As you must know, your father met with me earlier this month and explained your… situation . As he himself attended Welton Academy, he asked me to take you in. We both expect you to do honour to this school and its motto,” said Mr Nolan, a severe look in his eyes.
“Yes Sir, my father told me: Tradition, Discipline, Honour, and Excellence. I will do my best to live up to your expectations.” Gregory recited the school's four pillars his father had engraved in his mind, hoping most of all to sound earnest. Truth be told, while he could abide by the last ones, he couldn't care less about tradition.
“Good, then you can take your belongings and go to your bedroom, it's on the first floor, third door to the right. You're sharing the room with Mr Perry as his previous roommate, Mr Anderson, had to leave due to health reasons.” There was a pause, not quite long enough to invite questions.
House nodded. “Thank you for having me here, Mr Nolan.” He waited to be told to leave, and the door softly clicked shut behind him. So much for a warm welcome.
He slowly climbed up the stairs, heavy luggage in hand, and knocked on the indicated door. A tall student with hazelnut eyes opened the door and greeted him with a smile. “You must be Gregory House. Welcome to your new home.” Neil Perry held out a hand, and House shook it with a faint smile.
“Just Greg will do. You're Neil Perry, right?” Neil softly chuckled at the casualness. This roommate was going to be an interesting one.
“In flesh and blood,” he replied as he stepped aside to let him inside.
Greg tossed his coat onto his desk and lay on his bed, shoes still on, crossing his ankles.
“So, Greg , who paved the way for you? Brother? Dad?” Asked Neil, sitting on the edge of his own bed.
“My father. Spent his teenage years here before enrolling in the Navy.”
Judging by the curt reply, Neil guessed his father wasn’t someone he liked to talk about. It seemed to be a common pattern here; he didn't particularly like his father either. Deciding not to bother his new roommate, he took a Latin textbook from his desk and started reading the lesson for the next morning.
After a quiet lunch, they headed to arithmetic with Mr Johnson, where House was expected to introduce himself to his classmates—his first chance to make an impression, whether good or bad.
Twenty bright young lads were waiting in the corridor when Perry and House arrived, House’s bag slung over one shoulder. Neil greeted Knox, Charlie, and Steven, while House stayed back, leaning against the wall, flipping through the arithmetic textbook. He tried his best to focus on the words in front of him, but he’d always had a keen ear, and scraps of conversation kept slipping through.
“— your Thanksgiving holidays? Yeah, great—Awful, father left—belt buckle…”
Greg stiffened when one of the boys mentioned their father — too close to home. He exhaled softly, relieved, when an old, greying man finally unlocked the classroom door.
When all students sat at their desks and opened their textbooks to page 394, Mr Johnson adjusted his glasses and cleared his throat. “Before we begin today’s lesson, we have a new student joining us. Gregory House.”
Twenty pairs of eyes turned.
Greg sighed inwardly and stood up with little urgency, clearly unimpressed by the formality. He walked to the front, glancing up at the crucifix, then the blackboard. He turned to face the class.
“Gregory House,” he said, standing with a loose posture. “New. Not by choice. My father thinks Welton will teach me character. Or Latin. Possibly both.”
A few muffled laughs, mostly from the back rows.
“I’ve been told I’m clever, which usually means I talk too much in class. I’ll try to do less of that here. Unless the lesson’s dull. Then no promises.”
More laughter now — this time with more genuine interest.
Mr Johnson gave him a long, thin-lipped look. “Thank you, Mr House. Please take your seat.”
House made his way back to his desk with the same lazy gait, flopping into his chair like he belonged there already. He didn’t meet any gazes, but he felt a few linger.
Neil leaned over. “Do you always make that kind of entrance?”
Greg didn’t look at him. “Only when I’m bored.”
The rest of the day passed slowly, and after dinner, House was more than glad to have some spare time. Most of the students returned to the dorms — either to study, play cards, or sleep — and the remaining ones went for a walk, chatting excitedly about the Christmas holidays. House dropped his bag on his bed, put on his coat, and headed for the snow-covered courtyard.
The cold wind bit his cheeks, and he regretted not having brought a woolly hat, considering how short his father made him cut his hair. His feet dug holes in the snow as he circled the main building, until he found a corner in a blind spot from the teachers’ tower to light a fag. Before his father sent him off to Welton, House made sure to steal a cartridge of his favourite brand — partly out of spite, partly because he liked the taste.
It also came with the added perk of keeping his hands busy enough to hide the stimming John House hated, and didn't hesitate to criticise whenever he had an opportunity. Sometimes, Greg caught himself wondering if concealing all the things that made him him would make his father like him better. But then he remembered that he made no effort to get along with subordinates, and wouldn't make an exception for his offspring.
Greg took a long drag, the smoke filling his lungs, and looked at the darkening sky as he exhaled. Seconds stretched out into minutes, when he heard footsteps coming his way. Shit . Without thinking, he dropped the remains of his cigarette and hid it with his foot. When he lifted his head, Neil looked at him, a smile playing on his lips.
“Caught in the act!”
“That’s two dollars’ worth of spite you just interrupted,” replied House.
“Absolutely not!” Neil offered him a big smile, feigning innocence. He never smoked, but he did know that when you were a student, it was expensive.
House rolled his eyes and, without saying a word, extended an arm.
“You strike me as a peppermint tea kind of rebel, but maybe I'm wrong.”
Neil didn't answer, but slid a cigarette between his lips and stood closer to House, back against the stone wall. He lit his cigarette and they both looked up at the stars — a comfortable silence settling between them.
Chapter 2
Summary:
A month or so went by, and the boys slowly but surely grew closer — sharing the same dorm played a part, but they also had interests in common.
Notes:
Hey! Chapter 2 is here!
Here are the songs and books mentioned, if you're curious:Shakespeare "A Midsummer Night's Dream"
Shakespeare "Hamlet"
ABBA - Dancing Queen
CAN - ThiefMidsummer summary:
Romantic comedy about four young Athenians who enter a magical forest to escape arranged marriages and unrequited love. The mischievous fairy Puck uses a magic flower to enchant characters into falling in love with the first person or creature they see, causing lots of confusion. Meanwhile, amateur actors rehearse a play for a royal wedding. In the end, order is restored, lovers are reunited, and the play is performed at a joyful triple wedding.Hamlet summary:
The ghost of the King of Denmark tells his son, Hamlet, to avenge his murder by killing the new king, Hamlet's uncle. Hamlet feigns madness, contemplates life and death, and seeks revenge. His uncle, fearing for his life, also devises plots to kill Hamlet. The play ends with a duel.If you're a perfectionist like me, here's what I changed, and the years I chosed to ignore:
In canon Dead Poets Society, Neil actually plays Puck, not Lysander.
DPS is set in Vermont in 1959, but "Thief" was released in 1969, and "Dancing Queen" in 1976.
Chapter Text
Neil sat cross-legged on his bed, thumbing through a worn paperback of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, mouthing lines to himself. His brow furrowed slightly in concentration, but there was a faint smile on his lips, like the words were an old friend.
From across the room, Greg glanced up from the crossword he'd been half-filling, half-ignoring. His pencil dangled loosely between his teeth.
“You’re not seriously into Shakespeare, are you?” he asked out of the blue.
Neil looked up, surprised. “Of course I do. It’s poetry in motion.”
“It’s word salad in tights.”
Neil blinked, then chuckled. “You must be fun at parties.”
“I wouldn’t know,” Greg replied, stretching out on his bed and tossing the crossword aside. “Traditionally, my presence at parties has been discouraged.”
Neil grinned. “Because of opinions like that?”
“No,” Greg said, “because I tend to ruin the punch with existential dread.”
That earned a laugh.
Greg sat up slightly, propping himself on one elbow. “Seriously. It’s all whimsy and fairies and people mistaking each other in the woods. That’s not depth, that’s confusion with iambic pentameter.”
Neil held up the book. “You don’t think there’s anything clever in here? The way he plays with language, structure, love, loss—”
“I think he liked the sound of his own voice.”
“You sound like someone who’s never properly read him.”
“I read Hamlet ,” Greg said, eyes narrowing. “I got halfway through his ‘to be or not to be’ and realised he didn’t actually decide anything. He just talked himself in a circle and called it introspection.”
Neil’s smile faded into something more thoughtful. “Sometimes talking in circles is the only way you get closer to the truth.”
Greg paused. That hit a little too close. He looked away and picked at the fraying thread on his cuff.
“Anyway,” Neil said after a beat, trying to soften the moment, “I’m playing Lysander next term. Assuming I don’t get expelled before then.”
Greg looked back, an eyebrow raised. “Lysander. That's the one who gets dosed with a love potion and chases the wrong girl for half the play, right?”
“That’s one way to put it.”
“Seems fitting.”
Neil tossed a pillow at him, and Greg actually laughed—a short, sharp sound like he wasn’t used to hearing himself do it.
“You’re impossible,” Neil said, smiling.
“I’m logical,” Greg countered. “You just like stories that let you feel things without actually doing anything.”
Neil tilted his head. “And you pretend not to care so nobody looks too closely.”
Greg didn’t reply. He lay back down, an arm folded behind his head, staring at the ceiling.
But he was smiling, faintly.
The heater in their dorm room rattled every few minutes like it was trying and failing to cough up warmth. Greg was lying on his stomach, elbows propped on his mattress, thumbing through a handful of unlabelled cassettes he kept hidden in an old Latin textbook sleeve. Most of them were filled with things nobody at Welton would voluntarily listen to — least of all his roommate.
He glanced at Neil across the room. The boy was sketching something dramatic-looking in his notebook — probably a prop design or a stage concept. He’d been humming something vaguely cheerful for the past ten minutes.
Greg clicked a cassette into the player with the kind of reverence other people reserved for holy scripture.
“Listen to this,” he said, pressing play.
The tape began with an off-kilter rhythm: guitar notes falling in and out of sync, a voice echoing like it was trapped in a concrete room. Uneven. Tense. Hypnotic.
Neil looked up, brows knitting together. “Is it broken?”
“It’s German ,” House replied, settling back into his pillow. “They don’t do broken. Just dissonant.”
The song wasn’t catchy. That was the point. You had to listen for the patterns, the way the voice wove through the noise without needing to make sense. It felt like falling without hitting the ground.
Neil listened a little longer, uncertain. The vocals kick in—moaning, whispered, barely decipherable.
“This sounds like anxiety,” Neil eventually said.
“It is,” Greg replied. “Anxiety with rhythm.”
Neil shook his head in disbelief. “You voluntarily put this in your ears?”
“Better than glittery denial set to piano ,” House smirked. “Which, I assume, is your genre of choice.”
Neil bit back a smile. He crossed the room, opened his drawer, and pulled out a brightly labelled cassette with neatly handwritten track names. He’d hesitated before bringing it to Welton, but now he was glad he had.
“Right. My turn,” he said, slipping it into the player with a mock flourish. “Brace yourself, Doctor Doom.”
Bright piano and strings burst into the room like sunshine through drawn curtains. The beat was unapologetically upbeat.
Greg groaned audibly. “You’re killing me.”
“Come on. She’s seventeen. She owns the dance floor. You don’t remember what joy sounds like?”
“That’s not joy. That’s capitalist sparkle noise,” Greg muttered, flipping his pillow over his head.
“You can’t intellectualise everything, Greg.”
“Watch me.”
Neil laughed and turned down the volume, but not before singing along to the chorus just to spite him.
Three Days Later
Neil had gone out to rehearse a scene with Knox, leaving Greg alone in the room with nothing but half-finished homework and the familiar hum of boredom.
The ABBA cassette was still sitting on Neil’s desk — left in the open, probably on purpose.
It wasn’t like he wanted to like it. He just wanted to understand what Neil saw in something so... shiny.
House glanced at the cassette, and after a few seconds of hesitation, he eventually got up, clicked it in and hit play.
The piano intro started again. He braced himself, ready to hate it — ready to turn it off. But by the second chorus, his foot was tapping. Traitor .
House didn't smile, not quite, but he let the song play to the end. Then again. He started to understand what drew Neil to that song, the joy that radiated from it was infectious.
A week later
It was raining hard enough to forget about doing rehearsal outside, and there weren't any available rooms in the building. Neil was restless, wandering the corridors. Everyone else was busy studying, and out of despair, he returned to his dorm — Greg was gone off somewhere winning a chemistry competition.
He opened Greg’s drawer out of idle curiosity and found his cassette, marked only with a label in messy block letters: “CAN - THIEF”.
He almost put it back, but curiosity got the best of him. Neil slid it into the player and waited.
The first few seconds made him want to turn it off. But he didn’t. Instead, he closed his eyes and let it play, sitting cross-legged on his bed. The song crept in like fog: no melody to latch onto, just rhythm and unease. He didn’t like it — but the beat caught him.
When it ended, Neil sat quietly for a long time. No humming. No sketching. Just silence.
Days later, Greg and Neil were walking back to their dorm from dinner, taking a detour outside to have a smoke. The snow was crunching under their shoes, their breath misting in the cold, and the woollen scarves were more than welcome.
As they arrived at their hidden spot behind the main building, Neil nudged Greg gently with a shoulder. “So. I listened to Thief .”
His friend raised an eyebrow. “Voluntarily?”
“I still don’t know what it’s about,” Neil admitted. “But it made me feel like I was being followed by my own thoughts.”
House snorted. “Sounds about right.”
They paused for a moment, House rummaging into his bag to retrieve the already started packet of cigarettes. When he handed one to Neil, the latter was fidgeting with his silver lighter. “You ever finished Dancing Queen ?”
House lit his fag and didn’t look at him when he replied. “Listened to it twice.”
“And?”
“Sorry to disappoint, but it’s annoying.”
Neil grinned widely. “You liked it.” He was already feeling victorious that Greg listened to his favourite song.
“I didn’t hate it,” Greg said, rolling his eyes. “Which, for me, is practically affection.”
Neil laughed. “You actually liked it.”
Greg feigned a pout, but he didn’t deny. They stood next to each other, watching the smoke swirl in the air. There was no music now — just a snowy night, the sizzling embers of their cigarettes, and quiet understanding.
Chapter 3
Notes:
Here's the mentioned poem, if you're curious:
Emily Dickinson - "Hope" is the thing with feathers
Chapter Text
February passed in the blink of an eye as students were all busy studying for the upcoming exams. Classes came one after the other — Literature, arithmetic, philosophy, history — and Neil was often on the phone, his father inquiring about how much time he'd spent studying at the library and how his grades were doing. Very little was asked about how he was feeling and how he dealt with the pressure, even less about his hobbies.
When Neil wasn't talking to his father, he spent most of his spare time in a remote space of the Academy's library, away from his friends, reading page after page of Evans Pritchard’s views on poetry, calculus, Manifest Destiny, Dickens and Shelley.
He was scribbling furiously for hours on end, but sometimes, out of tiredness, words would become long lines of black ink as he dozed off on the mahogany table. Greg would usually come on Tuesdays and Fridays to keep him company, but the rest of the week, it was only him, his textbooks, and his notes.
His other friends often studied together, sitting around the library's fireplace, books and snacks sprawled on the floor — reading and laughing, commenting on texts and bickering. They talked about the exams, about Knox and Chris, about Todd. About House.
A lot of the students were talking behind his back — for some it was admiration, for others it was annoyance —, but as far as the group was concerned, it was genuine interest. After all, they still hadn't heard a lot from his mouth — nothing too personal, at least. The teenager was shrouded in mystery, and no teacher or peer had been able to figure him out yet.
In the 3 months he had been at Welton Academy, the only person he let come close was Neil Perry.
While Thomas Perry was on his son's back, John House was quite the opposite — radio silence. Blythe called Greg every other week, telling him that his father was busy, or overseas. It was Cuba, Seattle, or Tokyo. It was far away. He was never there — not for him, anyway.
House was sitting on his bed, back propped up with pillows, reading a medical notebook and drawing anatomy charts — his revision was already done, and his homework sat in a neat pile on his desk, completed the day it was given. Despite his lack of interest in him, John House had high expectations for his son, but it wasn't Greg's main motivation — med school was. He was aiming for John Hopkins, one of the most prestigious schools in the country.
He knew he could make it; all he had to do was survive Hellton and move out on his own. He barely had any ties to his family anymore, and he would've already run away if it wasn't for his mother.
A few days later, Neil went to the library during the lunch break to complete his homework, a literature essay. He wasn’t looking for poetry. He was looking for The Catcher In The Rye , or trying to, wedged between two oversized anthologies in the back corner of the library.
Instead, his fingers closed around a slim, battered volume of Collected American Verse . No catalogue sticker, and the spine was deeply creased. It seemed like someone had read it a lot.
He opened it out of curiosity, and because to him, anything was better than The Catcher In The Rye . It was Emily Dickinson, “‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers”. It was one of his favourite poems, familiar and comforting.
Well, it was — until he noticed the margin notes.
“Hope” is the thing with feathers –
That perches in the soul –
Or claws at it. Depending on your upbringing.
Neil frowned. The handwriting was neat, slanted — and not gentle.
And sweetest – in the Gale – is heard –
And sore must be the storm –
Hope doesn’t help in a storm. A life raft does, perhaps. Or morphine.
And sings the tune without the words –
And never stops – at all –
Ever considered seeing a shrink?
I’ve heard it in the chillest land –
And on the strangest Sea –
Of course you did, Emily. Try a military base.
Yet – never – in Extremity,
It asked a crumb – of Me.
Of course hope didn't ask for crumbs, it's a concept.
He let the book settle open in his hands. The annotations weren’t chaotic — they were deliberate, constructed like arguments. It wasn’t a student practicing close reading. It was… something else. It looked like a conversation, though not the kindest of all. He wondered if these harsh words were intended for Emily Dickinson, or for the mysterious student.
It didn’t take long before Neil sat at the nearest table and began rereading the original poem through the notes. Their bitterness, their tiredness, made the verses feel different. He still loved the poem — but now, it stung a little.
Try a military base.
That line stuck.
It wasn’t signed, and the handwriting wasn’t familiar. But something about the tone — too intelligent to be careless, too angry to be academic — lingered in his head longer than he expected.
Later, when Greg cracked a dry joke about poetry and refused to translate a Dickinson line for their English homework, Neil caught himself looking at him sideways.
Next day
The classroom was too warm for a March afternoon; someone must have played with the radiator again .
Neil shifted in his seat, collar sticking slightly to the back of his neck as Mr McAllister droned on about dative and ablative cases. Grammar, the great heartbeat of Latin, according to him. Neil usually liked this part. But today, the words thudded dully against his skull, like a metronome ticking out of time.
He glanced sideways. Charlie Dalton, two desks away, had already given up pretending to take notes. His book lay open but untouched, and his pencil was dancing across the margin of his page, sketching what looked suspiciously like a stick-figure version of McAllister, complete with large ears and a toga.
Neil coughed lightly to hide a grin. Charlie caught his eye and tilted the notebook in invitation.
Your turn.
Neil turned his own book to a blank corner and began sketching — quickly, fluidly — a caricature of Mr Nolan in profile: chin sharp, brow thunderous, one hand clutching a copy of the Welton Code of Conduct like it was the Holy Bible.
From behind, Knox Overstreet leaned forward and whispered, “Give him a halo.”
Neil arched a brow but complied, giving the headmaster a glowing ring above his head — and then, at Knox’s amused smirk, added a set of horns poking through it.
Steven Meeks, sitting to Neil’s left, glanced over briefly and muttered, “You’re all going to hell.”
Charlie covered a laugh with an exaggerated cough. Neil held back his own, eyes bright with mischief.
The sketch was absurd, exaggerated — and yet, for a moment, it was better than any verse in McAllister’s mouth. It felt like resistance, albeit harmless and pencil-soft.
He tucked the drawing into the back of his notebook when the bell rang.
Later, when he opened the same notebook again in the library, the edge of Nolan’s paper chin peeked out from behind a dog-eared page. The Collected American Verse lay open in front of him on another Emily Dickinson’s poem, not for him to study, but only to revel in the verse.
He smiled as he flipped the pages to “‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers” and slid the sketch into the book, beside the annotated margins.
Neil sat on the shore, knees drawn up, his sketchbook balanced but unopened in his lap. The lake was pale with morning light, the air damp and cool against his skin, but his gaze was fixed on the boats cutting slow, clean lines through the water. In the second one, House rowed near the back — not quite in sync with the others, but striking in his own rhythm. His movements were sharp, powerful, sleeves shoved up to his elbows, the curve of muscle and tension in his forearms catching the light when he leaned back. He wasn’t graceful, not really, but there was something compelling in the way he fought the cadence, like he refused to be absorbed into it.
Neil found himself holding his breath for reasons he couldn’t quite understand. With Knox and Charlie and the rest, affection had always been easy, something he could fold into laughter. But with House, it was different — taut and wordless, like a song he hadn’t learned the melody to yet.
He looked down at the sketchbook but didn’t open it. He wasn’t sure he’d know how to draw what he was seeing.
Minutes later, Neil flipped the sketchbook open and set pencil to page. He told himself it was just practice — nothing more — the way he sometimes drew Charlie’s hands mid-gesture or Knox’s lopsided grin. But Greg was harder — every time he tried to capture the set of his shoulders or the defiance in his posture, it came out stiff, vague, wrong. The angles didn’t translate. He frowned, erased, redrew.
On the lake, House dipped his oar too early and scowled at himself, adjusting. Neil glanced up again, just in time to catch him looking back. For a second, their eyes locked — then House, still rowing, smirked and winked.
Neil’s grip slipped. His pencil fell into the grass.
A splash of oars faltered behind Greg, the boat’s rhythm breaking with a mutter of annoyance from the rower behind him. House didn’t seem to care. If anything, the tilt of his head as he turned back forward said, yeah, I saw you looking.
Neil sat frozen, cheeks warm, sketchbook half-slid off his lap. He didn’t pick up the pencil right away.
Greg caught the slip in Neil’s hand out of the corner of his eye — the falling pencil, the startled flush rising on his face. Cute, in a way. Not that he’d say that — not even to himself.
The rower behind him had cursed when his own oar broke rhythm, but House barely heard him. He fell back into step a moment later, letting the burn in his shoulders distract from the other kind of heat gathering low behind his ribs. He didn’t look back again. He didn’t need to.
Neil had been watching him — really watching — with that same theatre-kid intensity he used on books and stage lighting and people he liked too much. But it wasn’t the kind of gaze Greg was used to getting. It wasn’t competitive. It wasn’t judgmental.
It felt like being studied. And maybe Neil didn’t know what he was looking for yet, but Greg did. He didn’t have the word for it — not one that fit neatly — but it wasn’t friendship. He knew that much, and he winked, because it was easier than saying I see you too .
Chapter Text
The room was quiet except for the steady scratch of a pencil. Neil sat at his desk, a pool of lamplight spreading across his Latin notes, though his eyes had skimmed the same sentence three times without taking it in. Behind him, House was stretched out on his bed, legs crossed at the ankles, thumbing through their Philosophy notebook with a face that suggested he wasn’t reading so much as letting the pages pass in front of him.
Neil shifted in his chair, the urge to reach for the book in his drawer tugging at him again. The annotated poetry volume waited there like a secret. He had found it by accident — a fortunate one — its margins crowded with dismissive, sardonic, and raw comments. He wanted to answer them, and yet, the thought of Greg seeing him do it made his stomach tighten. He would laugh. Or worse, he’d sneer . He’d say something cutting about Neil wasting his time “conversing with a stranger in a book’s margins.” And maybe he’d be right.
Neil bent his head lower over his Latin, hoping the scratching of his pencil would slow down his racing thoughts. He didn’t move until House finally shifted upright, swinging his legs off the bed.
“I’m going out for a fag,” Greg announced casually, slipping his feet into his shoes. His tone carried that usual mixture of nonchalance and defiance, as if smoking were less a choice than a statement.
Neil only nodded. The door clicked shut behind him, and Neil waited a little before pulling open the drawer, just in case Greg had forgotten his lighter in the bedroom.
The door remained closed, and he got the book out, heavy and familiar, the faint smell of old paper rising as he opened it. His eyes went straight to the page he’d marked — Emily Dickinson’s “Hope is the thing with feathers.” He read the marginalia again, hearing the other voice as if it were speaking over his shoulder:
Hope doesn’t help in a storm. A life raft does, perhaps. Or morphine.
Of course you did, Emily. Try a military base.
Hope didn't ask for crumbs, it's a concept.
The handwriting was jagged, impatient, the ink pressing deep grooves into the paper. Whoever had written it was angry — or at least, not buying Dickinson’s calm assurance. Neil’s fingers brushed the edge of the page and he took up his pen. His hand hovered for a moment, then settled into careful lines beneath the neatly written upper-case notes.
Hope doesn’t stop the storm. But sometimes it keeps you rowing.
The words looked too plain against the sharpness above, and for a moment Neil thought about crossing them out, but he didn’t, adding another note instead, further down the page.
Hope asks nothing, but it gives more than you expect. Maybe that’s why it frightens you.
He leaned back, biting his lip. The dialogue felt lopsided, yet strangely alive. He didn’t know who had written the original comments, only that the voice was acerb, lonely, and perhaps too certain. Writing back felt like stretching a hand over a ravine — foolish, maybe, but impossible to resist.
The sound of footsteps in the corridor startled him. Neil snapped the book shut and slid it quickly back into the drawer. He had barely settled his Latin notes in front of him when the door opened again. Greg came in with smoke clinging to his jacket, eyes glinting as though he’d seen something amusing on his walk. “Still buried in Latin?” he asked, shrugging back onto his bed.
Neil forced a smile and bent his head over his notes again. The ink stains on his fingers were barely dry.
Class had been circling back to Dickinson, and House hadn’t bothered to keep track of where his own copy of Collected American Verse had gone. One evening, he leaned towards his roommate’s bed and asked lazily, “Mind if I borrow yours for a bit?”
Neil didn’t look up from his papers. “Sure. Top drawer.”
House dragged the book out, flipping through with little interest until the familiar poem snagged his attention. Hope is the thing with feathers . He almost skipped it, but the margins stopped him. His own notes stared back, cramped handwriting he hadn’t seen in months — but threaded between them, new lines in tidy script.
Hope doesn’t stop the storm. But sometimes it keeps you rowing.
Hope asks nothing, but it gives more than you expect. Maybe that’s why it frightens you.
House stilled, thumb pressing against the edge of the page. He didn’t need a signature to know. Neil’s writing was precise, earnest — the opposite of his own scrawl. He glanced across the room. Neil was bent over his desk, brow furrowed, pretending to concentrate on declensions. House let the corner of his mouth twitch. So his roommate had been reading him. Answering him. That explained the ink stains on Neil’s fingers the other night, and the way he’d seemed embarrassed when he came back from smoking.
House leaned back against his pillows, the book open on his lap. He felt the smallest pull low in his chest — not surprise exactly, more like curiosity.
Neil thought he was writing back to a stranger, he hadn’t realised the stranger was sitting three feet away every night… Yet.
Two weeks later
The forest path was slick with frost, breath clouding in the night air. Neil kept glancing over his shoulder, half-expecting Greg to have turned back already. But there he was, hands jammed into his coat pockets, stumbling on rocks every now and then despite Neil’s torch, expression caught somewhere between annoyance and amusement.
“This had better not be a choir practice,” House muttered, boots crunching on dead leaves.
“You’ll see,” Neil said, fighting a grin. His chest buzzed with anticipation — and nerves. He hoped, against reason, that House wouldn't mock the theatricality.
The cave flickered with candlelight as they stepped inside. Shadows leapt against the rough stone walls, the air thick with wax and pipe smoke. House felt a pang of recognition — gatherings in hushed corners, rules made by boys who wanted to believe in something bigger. He’d seen versions of this before, on bases and in barracks. Only here, the uniforms were different.
Knox, Meeks, and Pitts sat cross-legged in a circle, jackets pulled close against the cold, while Charlie was perched on a bigger rock in a corner. They all looked up as Neil ducked inside, Greg behind him.
“Look who I managed to bring along,” Neil announced, a note of pride he hadn’t intended slipping into his voice.
Charlie smirked. “Greg House, in the flesh.”
Greg raised one eyebrow. “What is this? A cult? A boy band's rehearsal? ”
The others chuckled, not offended — if anything, leaning forward with interest. Still sitting in the corner, Charlie smiled mischeviously. "You wish."
The group settled in a circle, Neil coaxing Greg down beside him. The meeting began with their usual rhythm. Knox read Byron with exaggerated feeling, Charlie performed a dramatically whispered Whitman, and Pitts stumbled shyly through a few lines before everyone cheered him on. House watched, head tilted, expression unreadable, while the others clapped, laughed, and argued fondly.
When it came to Neil, he chose Shakespeare — a sonnet about love and time’s passing. His voice filled the cave, warm and confident, and the others leaned in. Even Greg didn’t scoff — not immediately.
Silence lingered after the last line, then eyes turned to Greg. Charlie nudged him. “Your turn, new blood.”
House snorted. “I didn’t bring anything. I wasn’t exactly planning on joining your... club.”
“Then read something of yours,” Neil said encouragingly.
For a moment, Greg hesitated. He’d scoffed his way here, yet Neil hadn’t turned him out — had wanted him here, and some ridiculous part of him liked that. Maybe reading would wipe the smile off Neil’s face… or maybe it would keep it there. Finally pulling a folded sheet of paper from his pocket, he smoothed it against his knee. “Fine. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
His poem was jagged, raw. Lines about thunderstorms with no shelter, about boats breaking on rocks, about hope as a fraud, tearing you apart and clawing at your soul. The rhythm was compelling, his voice cutting with bitter humour:
Hope is feathers, sure — until the gale snaps the wings.
Then it’s just bones in the tide.
When he finished, the silence stretched in the cave. Charlie frowned, Knox opened his mouth to comment, and closed it, thinking better. As for Meeks, he seemed to calculate something in his head. For a heartbeat, it seemed too much.
Neil’s gaze never left Greg. The voice on the page, cynical and painfully honest, the scrawled margins in the book — it was the same sharp rhythm, the same refusal to let anything stand unchallenged. The realisation clicked into place with startling clarity.
It’s him. It’s been him all along.
Then Charlie let out a low whistle. “Well. Bloody hell.” He grinned crookedly. “That was… dark. But brilliant.”
Meeks nodded. “Unusual metre, but effective. Very effective.”
Even Knox gave a slow nod. “It makes you think.”
Neil’s stomach twisted — the words were darker than anything they’d read here, and part of him wanted to shrink from them. But the stronger part wanted to reach out. He forced himself to meet Greg’s eyes and said, out of the blue, “Why don’t you come back?” He glanced quickly at the others before adding, “Read with us again. We need more diverse poems.”
Greg’s smirk returned, but it looked weary. “I don’t do clubs. And you don’t need me — you’ve got enough earnestness to keep the world afloat.”
He stood, folding the paper. For a moment Neil thought he would pocket it, but instead House dropped it into the centre of the circle, where it landed among the candle stubs. “Souvenir.”
Before Neil could protest, he turned, walking out of the cave and into the night.
Neil scrambled up, nearly tripping over Meeks. “Greg, wait—!”
He rushed after him, stumbling into the cold. The forest was silent but for the crunch of fading footsteps. Neil jogged a few steps, heart pounding, but the path twisted away, and Greg was gone.
He stood alone in the cold, shaking breath misting in the air, the cave’s glow spilling faintly behind him. His fingers twitched at his side, aching to hold onto something — the poem, the moment, the certainty hammering in his chest.
He’s the one I’ve been writing to. It’s him.
karousel on Chapter 1 Thu 14 Aug 2025 02:16AM UTC
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ShemJawn on Chapter 1 Tue 19 Aug 2025 02:24PM UTC
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karousel on Chapter 2 Thu 14 Aug 2025 02:30AM UTC
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R_D4N33L_0L1V4VV on Chapter 4 Sun 24 Aug 2025 05:58AM UTC
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