Amnesty fic post: "All We Have to Fear," House/HP Halloweenish crossover idea
Okay, I am calling amnesty on this one. It's a House/Harry Potter crossover. I started it on Halloween in 200...7? Two jobs, one degree and two changes of canon fellows ago, anyway. It's apparently still too much effort to bring this up to date (e.g. changing the part with Cameron to Thirteen) and finish it, but perhaps you will enjoy what's here. It's meant to be a spooky and ultimately nifty character development piece. Some of you may recall seeing a draft of the beginning. I've filled in the missing pieces with bracketed explication, so it does have an ending and everything. Happy Halloween?
Title: All We Have To Fear
Fandom: House, gen, and a crossover I wasn't going to tell people about until the end because it's spoilery.
Rating/Warning: PG-13 for potentially disturbing themes (temporary character death, birth defects, spiders).
Word Count: About 1,800 words of actual story and another 1,800 of description.
A/N: Originally set during Season Three sometime after "Merry Little Christmas." Thanks, four years ago, to cryptictac for the crash course in native Australian spiders and to queenzulu for CPR correction. I'm just going to handwave other stuff on account of amnesty, like how maternal age doesn't cause the specific defect mentioned.
Wednesday afternoon, and House was nowhere to be found-hadn't, in fact, been heard from since shortly after lunch. Playing hooky when clinic duty called was nothing new; what knocked everyone for a loop was his lack of response to a series of increasingly frantic pages about his latest patient, whose lungs had suddenly and inexplicably begun filling with fluid.
Thus Wilson found himself in the basement of the hospital in case House had decided to kick back with the corpses while the fellows scrambled to stabilize their not-yet-dead patient and modify their differential to account for the pulmonary edema and decide which tests to run and reassure the family and locate their boss at the same time.
"House?" Wilson called, pushing open the set of swinging doors to the morgue. "You in there?"
No answer. He stood and listened for a few moments longer, straining to make out the telltale sounds of beeping video games or snoring. Nothing; just the soft rattle of the circulating air conditioners and the hum of the refrigeration units.
He let the doors swing shut and continued down the hall to the autopsy room. Poking his head inside, he called again, "House?" His voice echoed back at him. The rows of steel sinks and tables gleamed silently in the dim light. A body had been laid out on one of them and covered with a sheet. It looked like a child; too small to be House playing hide and seek.
Wilson tried one last time: "Your patient's upstairs slowly drowning in her bed," which you'd know if you'd answer your damn pages. "Just come out and do your genius thing until you figure out what's killing her, and I promise I won't lecture you about playing hide and seek at work."
Neither a scalpel-wielding pathologist nor a game-wielding House made himself known. He sighed. So much for the basement, then.
As he turned to leave, he thought something moved in his peripheral vision, thought he felt the slightest shift of air, and stopped cold. Morgues didn't usually bother him, but he felt a frisson of some nameless, primitive fear.
Turning back around and stepping further into the room, he looked around again but still didn't see anything out of the ordinary. Then, squinting, he caught sight of someone's prone legs behind one of the tables. He could just make out the person's jeans and sneakers. They weren't moving.
"Hello?" he called. "Are you okay? Do you need help?"
The person didn't move or speak.
He walked closer, slowly, cautiously. The sneakers were Nikes with orange accents. Wilson's breathing quickened, but he forced himself to remain calm, to not jump to any conclusions. As he rounded the table, though, his lips parted and his heart clenched at the sight of the familiar cane abandoned a few feet away. A few quick steps and he had a full view of House sprawled on his back, eyes closed, lips parted, pale and utterly still. An empty pill bottle had rolled out of his open left hand and come to rest against the table leg.
"Oh, God," Wilson breathed. "Oh, God, not again." He dropped gracelessly to his knees, already reaching out to check House's vitals, take stock of his condition. Unconscious. Skin gray, cool, clammy. No pulse. No respiration. No pupillary response. No, no, no.
"No," he said, sharp and loud, as if by declaring it he could make it true. He tore at House's half-unbuttoned blazer with shaking hands, then braced himself and started chest compressions. "House, don't you dare, don't you dare do this, you goddamn-"
He bent to pinch House's nose shut and breathe life back into him. Once. Twice. Compressions again. I should be calling for help, observed some tiny, faraway part of him that wasn't screaming with grief and denial. I should check for a portable defibrillator in the hallway, I should get him upstairs, I should figure out how this happened, this doesn't make sense. But he couldn't process it, and soon the swell of emotions blocked it out. He kept working, kept trying to resuscitate his suicidal asshole of a best friend with words and brute force. "You ass, you think your death wish doesn't affect the rest of us? You think killing yourself is some kind of ultimate analgesic? You're the one always saying there's no afterlife! You won't be around to appreciate that the pain is gone! What were you thinking? Were you thinking at all? Dammit, House, we could have gotten you help!"
He didn't know how long he kept it up. Ribs cracked; his own breaths stuttered; his eyes burned with tears; he kept going. Eventually, his voice broke and his elbows gave out, and he collapsed, panting, sweating, nose running, on top of House.
On top of the body.
House had been down here too long; he was gone.
Wilson turned away from House's face, its earlier peace disturbed by swollen, parted lips, mussed hair, neck at an uncomfortable angle. His gaze fell on the pill bottle beside them, at the stark black letters announcing the prescribing physician: JAMES WILSON. He stared until his vision blurred and the words no longer meant anything.
* * *
M. Stanley Forsythe was a generous and long-standing patron of the hospital, but an entertaining conversationalist he was not-even less so since he'd begun repeating rambling anecdotes that hadn't been interesting the first time. Still, Cuddy didn't have the heart to cut him off, especially when the point of the call was to confirm his financial support for the next year. She tucked the phone under her ear and allocated both hands and most of her attention to shuffling and signing her way through the interminable stacks of papers on her desk.
Someone was hovering in the doorway. She looked up and instantly the file she was reviewing. Forsythe's voice degenerated into a senseless buzz.
Wilson was standing there, pale and sweaty, his tie askew, a haunted look in his eyes, clutching the door jamb with one hand as if he might fall if he let go.
"I'm sorry," she said absently into the phone, "I'm going to have to call you back." She hung up, realizing too late that she hadn't transferred the call to this week's assistant to schedule a follow-up.
"Dr. Wilson?" she asked. Wilson showed no sign of having heard her. She got up and came around the desk towards him, but he still didn't seem to be tracking. He looked somehow insubstantial, as if he were a ghost, or had just seen one.
Putting a hand out to touch him lightly on the arm drew him back into himself, and he looked at her with that terribly raw gaze. "James?" she tried, gently. "What happened?"
His lips worked silently for a few seconds before he said, "In the autopsy room. He's-" And he turned to go without elaborating or changing his expression.
[She asks again if he's all right. He just walks across the lobby.]
"Did you find House?" she called after him.
[She tells her assistant to hold her appointments and goes downstairs. As she walks down the hall, a girl comes out of the autopsy room and runs past her, crying.]
Cuddy frowned and made a mental note to send out a hospital-wide memo about preventing personal issues from interfering with people's jobs.
[Cuddy goes inside. She doesn't see what Wilson was talking about. She's about to leave when-]
Wait-what was that?
[There's a baby crying behind one of the tables. It's swaddled in a blanket. She wonders out loud where its parents are as she walks over and bends to pick it up. That's when she sees the birth defect-holoprosencephaly, the unfinished face, the single eye staring up at her as the baby cries and cries. She gasps. The wailing goes on. Multiplies. There are more babies. Some are terribly deformed, the sort of mutations that mean they won't survive more than a few hours after birth. Some are already dead. She covers her mouth with her hand. It doesn't make sense, but she can't think straight. She can't think of anything but the baby she's trying to have, the baby she's wanted for so long now, the baby that could be any one of these, the risks involved in conceiving at her age.
She backs blindly out of the room. Ends up in the basement bathroom, crying.]
* * *
[CAMERON & CHASE haven't heard from Wilson, so they take a wander themselves. In the basement, they split up. Cameron goes to the autopsy room first.]
Silence, and chill. She rubbed her arms.
[Suddenly, her dead husband is there. She's frozen and speechless. He starts snapping at her.]
"You never loved me," he said. "You only felt sorry for me."
"What?"
"You wanted to be with Joe."
"N-no!"
[Etc. Then Chase comes in.]
"Cameron, he's not in the-oh, sorry."
[He sees that Cameron is upset. Says some combination of the following:]
"Who're you? Are you supposed to be down here?" / "Cameron, are you all right?" / "Hey, man, let's go upst-"
Then he stopped. "What the hell?"
Joe's face was-melting, twisting, losing form, but not just on the surface, it was as if his whole head and now his torso-skeleton, muscle, skin, everything-was boiling thickly, lumpy and bubbling, too disturbing to fully comprehend, and then he wasn't Joe anymore, he was something dark, writhing, a towering mass dropping pieces to the floor beside his fully formed legs and feet, he was-it was-they were-
"Oh, God," Chase moaned.
One of the fallen pieces scrabbled upright next to Joe's bare foot, and Cameron had just enough time to think legs and brown and big before the spider skittered across the floor towards Chase (she added fast to the list), followed by two, five, ten more in the time it took Cameron to gasp.
They sprang onto him, just jumped one after the other from the ground onto Chase's pants legs and started crawling up and around while he tried to shake them off, frantic, making panting, high-pitched sounds. Each one he managed to knock loose righted itself on the floor and jumped back up, and more joined them every second. Cameron stood frozen, dumb, looking back and forth between Chase swiping at the spiders and the writhing mass where not-Joe's shins and ankles were still visible, until in his panic Chase stumbled and fell.
"God, get 'em off me, get 'em the fuck off me-"
[Her head clearing as Joe disappears, she realizes:]
"Chase! Chase, it can't be real! Chase, it's not real! Robert!"
[He panics as the huntsman spiders crawl all over him. Eventually Cameron drags him up and out of the room. The spiders don't follow.
Before they reach the elevators, they run into two people in dark robes.]
* * *
[Meanwhile, upstairs, FOREMAN & WILSON meet at House's office. Still glazed over with grief, Wilson asks:]
"Where are Chase and Cameron?"
"House sent them to get permission from Cuddy."
"House?"
"Yeah. Are you okay? You look a little shaky."
"House sent them?"
"Yeah. Seriously, are you okay?"
"When?"
"Ten minutes ago."
Wilson went pale.
"Whoa! Whoa, hey, sit down."
[After a few moments of confusion, Wilson learns that House was… somewhere in the hospital nobody had looked, doing something stupid, then reemerged to solve the edema issue and probably three other symptoms no one had noticed yet. So what did Wilson see in the basement? House couldn't fake his own death like that to play a prank. He sits and tries to absorb the news. Tries to figure out whether he hallucinated.]
* * *
[HOUSE, sniffing out adventure whenever and wherever it happens, has gone downstairs for real this time. A crowd has gathered by the autopsy room, murmuring, staring at the people in capes. It's a wizard and a witch from Hogwarts-take your pick of favorites-post-war, taking care of magical aberrations that pop up in the Muggle world and Obliviating (wiping the memories of) the poor bastards who don't know what to do with the memory of that sort of encounter.
House stops them as they're about to go into the autopsy room. They tell him there's a boggart* inside-a creature that manifests as the deepest fear of whoever comes across it. House insists on going inside with them to meet it and watch them deal with it. The door closes behind them. Moments later, there comes a shouted "Riddikulus!", a sharp laugh and a popping sound.
They come back out. House doesn't talk to anyone. The HP folks may Obliviate the onlookers. They don't Obliviate House, or Wilson, or the team who're still upstairs. Probably not Cuddy either.
*"A shape shifter that prefers to live in dark, confined spaces, taking the form of the thing most feared by the person it encounters; nobody knows what a boggart looks like in its natural state […]. A boggart appears to feed on the emotion of fear rather than simply deploying this ability as a defense mechanism…" (HP & the Prisoner of Azkaban) ]
* * *
[The TEAM reconvenes in House's office, spooked/unsettled. They drink cocoa/coffee and talk quietly about what everyone saw or would have seen. Wilson asks House what he saw. House deflects. When they ask Wilson, they're able to guess by the expression on his face and the way he glances over at House. Touching ending reaffirming their friendship, etc.]
The end!
Additional notes:
So that's the "boggart in the hospital" idea I thought of four years ago and have never been able to execute.
It was kind of neat to see what I'd written when I opened this back up last week and note a few ways in which my style has improved since 2007. Stuff that I knew I could cut, and stuff that sounded too over the top even for the boggart encounters, which were trying to straddle the line between melodrama and the heightened emotions that would come with facing one's darkest fears.
Wilson's fear was easy; it had basically already been shown on screen in "Merry Little Christmas" and has come up again more than once since then. I mean, he has other fears, of course, but they felt more abstract than what a boggart could simply embody. Same for Cameron and Cuddy. If I were to update this, I'd put Thirteen in Cameron's place and have her freeze in fear at seeing herself in the degenerated end stages of Huntington's. Cuddy would need something new, now that she has Rachel; actually, maybe it's as simple as something happening to Rachel. Taub is more of a mystery. Kutner would have been, too, had I set this in the middle seasons. Foreman I would have said "becoming more like House," but he's surely afraid of something more complicated these days. House, though, take your pick: losing his mental acuity; losing control; being helpless in front of his raging father.
I dunno. It's interesting to ruminate on. What do you think?
Title: All We Have To Fear
Fandom: House, gen, and a crossover I wasn't going to tell people about until the end because it's spoilery.
Rating/Warning: PG-13 for potentially disturbing themes (temporary character death, birth defects, spiders).
Word Count: About 1,800 words of actual story and another 1,800 of description.
A/N: Originally set during Season Three sometime after "Merry Little Christmas." Thanks, four years ago, to cryptictac for the crash course in native Australian spiders and to queenzulu for CPR correction. I'm just going to handwave other stuff on account of amnesty, like how maternal age doesn't cause the specific defect mentioned.
Wednesday afternoon, and House was nowhere to be found-hadn't, in fact, been heard from since shortly after lunch. Playing hooky when clinic duty called was nothing new; what knocked everyone for a loop was his lack of response to a series of increasingly frantic pages about his latest patient, whose lungs had suddenly and inexplicably begun filling with fluid.
Thus Wilson found himself in the basement of the hospital in case House had decided to kick back with the corpses while the fellows scrambled to stabilize their not-yet-dead patient and modify their differential to account for the pulmonary edema and decide which tests to run and reassure the family and locate their boss at the same time.
"House?" Wilson called, pushing open the set of swinging doors to the morgue. "You in there?"
No answer. He stood and listened for a few moments longer, straining to make out the telltale sounds of beeping video games or snoring. Nothing; just the soft rattle of the circulating air conditioners and the hum of the refrigeration units.
He let the doors swing shut and continued down the hall to the autopsy room. Poking his head inside, he called again, "House?" His voice echoed back at him. The rows of steel sinks and tables gleamed silently in the dim light. A body had been laid out on one of them and covered with a sheet. It looked like a child; too small to be House playing hide and seek.
Wilson tried one last time: "Your patient's upstairs slowly drowning in her bed," which you'd know if you'd answer your damn pages. "Just come out and do your genius thing until you figure out what's killing her, and I promise I won't lecture you about playing hide and seek at work."
Neither a scalpel-wielding pathologist nor a game-wielding House made himself known. He sighed. So much for the basement, then.
As he turned to leave, he thought something moved in his peripheral vision, thought he felt the slightest shift of air, and stopped cold. Morgues didn't usually bother him, but he felt a frisson of some nameless, primitive fear.
Turning back around and stepping further into the room, he looked around again but still didn't see anything out of the ordinary. Then, squinting, he caught sight of someone's prone legs behind one of the tables. He could just make out the person's jeans and sneakers. They weren't moving.
"Hello?" he called. "Are you okay? Do you need help?"
The person didn't move or speak.
He walked closer, slowly, cautiously. The sneakers were Nikes with orange accents. Wilson's breathing quickened, but he forced himself to remain calm, to not jump to any conclusions. As he rounded the table, though, his lips parted and his heart clenched at the sight of the familiar cane abandoned a few feet away. A few quick steps and he had a full view of House sprawled on his back, eyes closed, lips parted, pale and utterly still. An empty pill bottle had rolled out of his open left hand and come to rest against the table leg.
"Oh, God," Wilson breathed. "Oh, God, not again." He dropped gracelessly to his knees, already reaching out to check House's vitals, take stock of his condition. Unconscious. Skin gray, cool, clammy. No pulse. No respiration. No pupillary response. No, no, no.
"No," he said, sharp and loud, as if by declaring it he could make it true. He tore at House's half-unbuttoned blazer with shaking hands, then braced himself and started chest compressions. "House, don't you dare, don't you dare do this, you goddamn-"
He bent to pinch House's nose shut and breathe life back into him. Once. Twice. Compressions again. I should be calling for help, observed some tiny, faraway part of him that wasn't screaming with grief and denial. I should check for a portable defibrillator in the hallway, I should get him upstairs, I should figure out how this happened, this doesn't make sense. But he couldn't process it, and soon the swell of emotions blocked it out. He kept working, kept trying to resuscitate his suicidal asshole of a best friend with words and brute force. "You ass, you think your death wish doesn't affect the rest of us? You think killing yourself is some kind of ultimate analgesic? You're the one always saying there's no afterlife! You won't be around to appreciate that the pain is gone! What were you thinking? Were you thinking at all? Dammit, House, we could have gotten you help!"
He didn't know how long he kept it up. Ribs cracked; his own breaths stuttered; his eyes burned with tears; he kept going. Eventually, his voice broke and his elbows gave out, and he collapsed, panting, sweating, nose running, on top of House.
On top of the body.
House had been down here too long; he was gone.
Wilson turned away from House's face, its earlier peace disturbed by swollen, parted lips, mussed hair, neck at an uncomfortable angle. His gaze fell on the pill bottle beside them, at the stark black letters announcing the prescribing physician: JAMES WILSON. He stared until his vision blurred and the words no longer meant anything.
* * *
M. Stanley Forsythe was a generous and long-standing patron of the hospital, but an entertaining conversationalist he was not-even less so since he'd begun repeating rambling anecdotes that hadn't been interesting the first time. Still, Cuddy didn't have the heart to cut him off, especially when the point of the call was to confirm his financial support for the next year. She tucked the phone under her ear and allocated both hands and most of her attention to shuffling and signing her way through the interminable stacks of papers on her desk.
Someone was hovering in the doorway. She looked up and instantly the file she was reviewing. Forsythe's voice degenerated into a senseless buzz.
Wilson was standing there, pale and sweaty, his tie askew, a haunted look in his eyes, clutching the door jamb with one hand as if he might fall if he let go.
"I'm sorry," she said absently into the phone, "I'm going to have to call you back." She hung up, realizing too late that she hadn't transferred the call to this week's assistant to schedule a follow-up.
"Dr. Wilson?" she asked. Wilson showed no sign of having heard her. She got up and came around the desk towards him, but he still didn't seem to be tracking. He looked somehow insubstantial, as if he were a ghost, or had just seen one.
Putting a hand out to touch him lightly on the arm drew him back into himself, and he looked at her with that terribly raw gaze. "James?" she tried, gently. "What happened?"
His lips worked silently for a few seconds before he said, "In the autopsy room. He's-" And he turned to go without elaborating or changing his expression.
[She asks again if he's all right. He just walks across the lobby.]
"Did you find House?" she called after him.
[She tells her assistant to hold her appointments and goes downstairs. As she walks down the hall, a girl comes out of the autopsy room and runs past her, crying.]
Cuddy frowned and made a mental note to send out a hospital-wide memo about preventing personal issues from interfering with people's jobs.
[Cuddy goes inside. She doesn't see what Wilson was talking about. She's about to leave when-]
Wait-what was that?
[There's a baby crying behind one of the tables. It's swaddled in a blanket. She wonders out loud where its parents are as she walks over and bends to pick it up. That's when she sees the birth defect-holoprosencephaly, the unfinished face, the single eye staring up at her as the baby cries and cries. She gasps. The wailing goes on. Multiplies. There are more babies. Some are terribly deformed, the sort of mutations that mean they won't survive more than a few hours after birth. Some are already dead. She covers her mouth with her hand. It doesn't make sense, but she can't think straight. She can't think of anything but the baby she's trying to have, the baby she's wanted for so long now, the baby that could be any one of these, the risks involved in conceiving at her age.
She backs blindly out of the room. Ends up in the basement bathroom, crying.]
* * *
[CAMERON & CHASE haven't heard from Wilson, so they take a wander themselves. In the basement, they split up. Cameron goes to the autopsy room first.]
Silence, and chill. She rubbed her arms.
[Suddenly, her dead husband is there. She's frozen and speechless. He starts snapping at her.]
"You never loved me," he said. "You only felt sorry for me."
"What?"
"You wanted to be with Joe."
"N-no!"
[Etc. Then Chase comes in.]
"Cameron, he's not in the-oh, sorry."
[He sees that Cameron is upset. Says some combination of the following:]
"Who're you? Are you supposed to be down here?" / "Cameron, are you all right?" / "Hey, man, let's go upst-"
Then he stopped. "What the hell?"
Joe's face was-melting, twisting, losing form, but not just on the surface, it was as if his whole head and now his torso-skeleton, muscle, skin, everything-was boiling thickly, lumpy and bubbling, too disturbing to fully comprehend, and then he wasn't Joe anymore, he was something dark, writhing, a towering mass dropping pieces to the floor beside his fully formed legs and feet, he was-it was-they were-
"Oh, God," Chase moaned.
One of the fallen pieces scrabbled upright next to Joe's bare foot, and Cameron had just enough time to think legs and brown and big before the spider skittered across the floor towards Chase (she added fast to the list), followed by two, five, ten more in the time it took Cameron to gasp.
They sprang onto him, just jumped one after the other from the ground onto Chase's pants legs and started crawling up and around while he tried to shake them off, frantic, making panting, high-pitched sounds. Each one he managed to knock loose righted itself on the floor and jumped back up, and more joined them every second. Cameron stood frozen, dumb, looking back and forth between Chase swiping at the spiders and the writhing mass where not-Joe's shins and ankles were still visible, until in his panic Chase stumbled and fell.
"God, get 'em off me, get 'em the fuck off me-"
[Her head clearing as Joe disappears, she realizes:]
"Chase! Chase, it can't be real! Chase, it's not real! Robert!"
[He panics as the huntsman spiders crawl all over him. Eventually Cameron drags him up and out of the room. The spiders don't follow.
Before they reach the elevators, they run into two people in dark robes.]
* * *
[Meanwhile, upstairs, FOREMAN & WILSON meet at House's office. Still glazed over with grief, Wilson asks:]
"Where are Chase and Cameron?"
"House sent them to get permission from Cuddy."
"House?"
"Yeah. Are you okay? You look a little shaky."
"House sent them?"
"Yeah. Seriously, are you okay?"
"When?"
"Ten minutes ago."
Wilson went pale.
"Whoa! Whoa, hey, sit down."
[After a few moments of confusion, Wilson learns that House was… somewhere in the hospital nobody had looked, doing something stupid, then reemerged to solve the edema issue and probably three other symptoms no one had noticed yet. So what did Wilson see in the basement? House couldn't fake his own death like that to play a prank. He sits and tries to absorb the news. Tries to figure out whether he hallucinated.]
* * *
[HOUSE, sniffing out adventure whenever and wherever it happens, has gone downstairs for real this time. A crowd has gathered by the autopsy room, murmuring, staring at the people in capes. It's a wizard and a witch from Hogwarts-take your pick of favorites-post-war, taking care of magical aberrations that pop up in the Muggle world and Obliviating (wiping the memories of) the poor bastards who don't know what to do with the memory of that sort of encounter.
House stops them as they're about to go into the autopsy room. They tell him there's a boggart* inside-a creature that manifests as the deepest fear of whoever comes across it. House insists on going inside with them to meet it and watch them deal with it. The door closes behind them. Moments later, there comes a shouted "Riddikulus!", a sharp laugh and a popping sound.
They come back out. House doesn't talk to anyone. The HP folks may Obliviate the onlookers. They don't Obliviate House, or Wilson, or the team who're still upstairs. Probably not Cuddy either.
*"A shape shifter that prefers to live in dark, confined spaces, taking the form of the thing most feared by the person it encounters; nobody knows what a boggart looks like in its natural state […]. A boggart appears to feed on the emotion of fear rather than simply deploying this ability as a defense mechanism…" (HP & the Prisoner of Azkaban) ]
* * *
[The TEAM reconvenes in House's office, spooked/unsettled. They drink cocoa/coffee and talk quietly about what everyone saw or would have seen. Wilson asks House what he saw. House deflects. When they ask Wilson, they're able to guess by the expression on his face and the way he glances over at House. Touching ending reaffirming their friendship, etc.]
The end!
Additional notes:
So that's the "boggart in the hospital" idea I thought of four years ago and have never been able to execute.
It was kind of neat to see what I'd written when I opened this back up last week and note a few ways in which my style has improved since 2007. Stuff that I knew I could cut, and stuff that sounded too over the top even for the boggart encounters, which were trying to straddle the line between melodrama and the heightened emotions that would come with facing one's darkest fears.
Wilson's fear was easy; it had basically already been shown on screen in "Merry Little Christmas" and has come up again more than once since then. I mean, he has other fears, of course, but they felt more abstract than what a boggart could simply embody. Same for Cameron and Cuddy. If I were to update this, I'd put Thirteen in Cameron's place and have her freeze in fear at seeing herself in the degenerated end stages of Huntington's. Cuddy would need something new, now that she has Rachel; actually, maybe it's as simple as something happening to Rachel. Taub is more of a mystery. Kutner would have been, too, had I set this in the middle seasons. Foreman I would have said "becoming more like House," but he's surely afraid of something more complicated these days. House, though, take your pick: losing his mental acuity; losing control; being helpless in front of his raging father.
I dunno. It's interesting to ruminate on. What do you think?