FIC: you say I took the Name in vain (House MD, House/Wilson-ish)
Title: you say I took the Name in vain
Author: Drea (bluerosefairy)
Rating: PG-13, for language. Nothing too shocking if you’ve seen the show, though.
Fandom/Pairing: House M.D. James Wilson, with a bit of House/Wilson at the end.
Disclaimer: Despite my most sincere wishes to the contrary, I do not own House. My name isn’t David Shore or Bad Hat Harry Productions. Neither do I own - again, despite my sincerest wishes - Robert Sean Leonard, or his fictional counterpart, James Wilson. Please to not sue, because you won’t get anything but my extensive student loan debt and a bunch of books if you do. Oh, and Lane. She’s the only thing that’s mine.
Spoilers/Warnings: For “Histories” (106). Nothing past S3 for spoilers. Consider yourself warned for character death, though not of a main canon character.
Author’s Notes: Written for wilson_fest prompt #24 - Wilson gets a tattoo. Title and quoted portion below from Leonard Cohen’s brilliant, overused “Hallelujah”. Much, much love and hugs to carla_scribbles for her brilliant last-minute beta skills and for letting me wibble about this for two months straight.
~*~*~*~
You say I took the Name in vain, but I don’t even know the Name
And if I did, well really, what’s it to you?
There’s a blaze of light in every word, it doesn’t matter which you’ve heard
The holy or the broken hallelujah . . .
~*~*~*~
“Yo, Lane! Your 2:00 canceled, but your guy’s on the phone and wants to know if you can fit him in.”
Good God, she’s loud. We have an intercom. We’ve had it for all three years Jenny’s been our receptionist. She knows damn well how to use it, since she does it when Alec’s in - no sane person wants to piss off the boss. You think she uses it any other time?
Not so much.
I finish autoclaving my equipment and wait until the machine cycles down before replacing it on the table. Sticking my head out the door, I return fire.
“Tell him I’m free, Jen! I’ve got Sketch at 5, so if it’s anything bigger than some cover-up work or a small piece, he’s going to have to come back next week.”
“Okay! He’ll be here in ten!”, she yells, juggling our design files, fresh from the copier, and making her way back to her desk and her internet poker game.
Whoa. Did Jenny just let her favorite target for gossip go by without a single comment? I’m shocked - she usually can’t shut up when he calls. Has to know why I have to do all his tats. Why I’m on a first-name basis with him. Why he’s such an outrageous flirt. Jen thinks he’s got the hots for me, but it’s actually never been like that. He’s funny and tips obscenely well - what the man does in his free time is none of my business.
He’s pretty infamous around here. The first time he came in to check us out, six years ago, he was wearing jeans and a Motley Crue shirt. Gave Alec his business card and told him his bronchitis medicine was outdated and to pick up a new one at this clinic he worked at. Alec and I dubbed him “Doctor Feelgood” after that, but never to his face.
Doc’s got four tats, total, and I’ve worked on three of them. I did cover-up work on his third, and designed his fourth myself, but I’ve never touched what he tells me was his first. Doesn’t mind chatting while I’m working - and I’ve mentioned the funny, right? - but I learned real quick to not mention that particular piece.
Then again, I can understand. Religion is a private thing, even when the manner of expression of that religion is forbidden.
I replace the inks and wipe down my table, stripping off my stained gloves for a fresh pair. The intercom buzzes, and Jenny’s voice comes out crackling. “Doctor bzzzzzzzzzt bzzzzzzt bzzzzzzt here. Bzzzzzt to park bzz bzzzzzzzt. Should I tell bzzzzzzt Brick bzzzzzzt?”
Luckily, I speak intercom.
“If he wants to park closer than Poughkeepsie, tell him he can have Alec’s spot. Brick’s in his office, if you need him for billing. I can wait.”
“Bzzzzzt wants to bzzzzzzt.”
“No problem. Send him back.”
Doc’s apparently not up to fighting with Brick over his usual discount. As he opens the door, I can see why. The man’s got circles under his eyes deeper than the Marianas Trench and a tear across the right side of his shirt. Sure, he’s a doctor. He keeps crazy hours, but really, he’s come in after 20-hour shifts smelling like disinfectant and stale coffee and looked better than this.
“Afternoon, Lane,” he says, hanging up his coat on the door hook and heading straight for the table. “Been a while.”
Yeah, it has. Eight months, actually, but it’s not completely unheard-of, even for a regular like him.
I was surprised that he even has any tats at all, but I should know better, considering the Escher back piece I’ve got under my suit jacket. Everyone makes fun of me for dressing so corporate at a tattoo parlor, but hey, I work two jobs. I don’t have time to change. Also, it’s useful in other ways. Nervous customers - especially Mrs. Soccer Mom taking little Suzie to get that first butterfly tattoo - walk into my office, see my pulled-back hair and plain blue suit, and immediately relax.
And so do attractive, sleep-deprived oncologists, as it turns out.
~*~*~*~
“Kinda early on a Friday for you, James,” I say, shoving at my rolled-up shirt cuffs. “Did you free the psych ward patients and escape in an ambulance?”
James - who never, ever, wants to be called “Doctor Wilson” in my office - shakes his head and sits on the table. “I wish. I haven‘t plotted a good breakout in a while. No, my boss told me to go home.”
“From what I know about her, that’s kind of like Christmas, right? Or, well - Chanukkah.”
At the mention of Chanukkah, his gaze drops around the vicinity of his shoelaces. Uh-oh, not a good sign. When he gets bottled-up and avoids looking at you, it usually precludes a later meltdown of epic proportions. We do not talk about that night a few years ago I had to talk a drunken James out of tattooing a picture of a donkey and the name “House” onto his ass. Not that I’d have minded seeing it, but it would have been awkward trying to explain to his wife at the time why I let him get such a stupid tattoo. Or my boss. Or him, when he sobered up.
“What happened?” I ask, rummaging through my desk for his file.
He rubs absently at the base of his neck and doesn’t answer for a minute. “I lost my temper with a patient. They were refusing treatment, and I kind of went off on them.”
“Everyone loses their temper sometimes. I mean, if I were a doctor, I’d scream at people all day long. People are stupid, in case you haven’t noticed.”
“I don’t lose my temper. I’m Mr. Nice Guy. I get hugs and tears and thank-you’s. They don’t come to me to get screamed at.”
True. I wouldn’t want to be yelled at by James - he’s so calm most of the time that it’s a shock when he does yell - but more than that, I don’t think I want to get into this discussion. He’s got a perfectly good therapist that he pays a hell of a lot more than he pays me to listen to his problems. It’s not that I don’t want to help, but I’m just not equipped for this.
“And you don’t come see me to talk about work.” I say, giving him the out. “So what’s it going to be? New tat?”
He tugs at the knot of his tie. “Not exactly. I want you to finish my left bicep for me.”
Oh shit. Shit. That tattoo. The one nobody’s allowed to touch. Not Brick, to sharpen the bled-together lines of the edges, or Alec, to touch up the faded script. Stuff they’d have done for very little money and I’d probably do gratis, if it meant getting to work on a piece like that.
It’s gorgeous, really. Most people’s first tattoos are crappy pieces they pick off a wall while drunk off their ass on Spring Break in South Beach. Happens to all of us - I’ve got an Aries symbol on my ankle that Brick loves to make fun of. Not James, though: his is a Torah scroll with the final two lines of the Kaddish and a blank space across the top of the scroll. I’d kill to touch it up - highlight the copper color of the scroll, re-ink the words, anything. It’s just that awesome a piece of work.
Never in a million years would I have expected him to ask me to work on it.
“Lane?” His voice snaps my attention back to the concerned-looking man in front of me. “You okay?”
“Yeah.”
I sit down on my stool and slide in front of him, sketchbook in one hand and pencil in the other. I need an idea of what he wants before I start inking - customers tend to have radically differing ideas about design than artists do. And of course, the customer usually likes to see what you’re thinking of doing before you start sticking needles into their skin.
“Finish it how?”
“Define the edges of the scroll. Re-ink the last line where the words are blurring into the bottom. Maybe add some white ink to the background of the scroll - make it look more like paper. And well - do you think you can reapproximate the text? The letters?”
He speaks calmly. Reasonably. Just the right amount of comfort in his tone to disguise anything that might be amiss. Probably the same voice he uses on his cancer patients. But he still isn’t telling me the whole story. He didn’t mention the space on the top of the scroll, and it’s going to look incomplete without something there.
“You know script work isn’t my specialty. I can do the overlay, but if you want new text, it’s going to look different than the previous work. If you had a sample of the new text, I could probably work with it.”
“Can I borrow your sketchbook?” he asks, holding out his hand.
I pass it over. He hesitates for a moment, but soon the pencil is moving over the blank page. Smooth, deft strokes, using the edge for shading and the tip for fine work. After four years at Moore and eight working for Alec and the District Court, I can recognize a fellow artist when I see one.
He finishes, his other hand gripping the edge of the book unconsciously, as if he’s anchoring himself to the drawing. He doesn’t move to show me what he’s drawn, and so I gently tilt the book downward so I can get a good look at it.
I may be a lapsed Jew, but I can still read Hebrew. Right to left, the letters are sketched out in a slightly canted style: bet, nun, yod, mem, yod, nun.
Benjamin.
~*~*~*~
Most customers, when I design pieces for them, are very general about what they want. They don’t go into specifics: they want a rose, they have some general ideas about color, but that’s it. It’s up to me as an artist to divine style, detail, realism - and translate that into a design.
Not James.
He’s always been very specific about what he wants (and now that I know he’s an artist, I suspect he did the initial sketches he showed me when I did his other tats) and what he doesn’t want. The first time he walked into my office, he was very straightforward - he wanted a certain design, with specific colors and linework. The rest was up to me.
My style isn’t what you’d normally think a guy would like. It’s usually very flowing, like something out of Waterhouse or a fantasy novel. With James, I’ve adjusted it - bolder strokes, more realism in the sketching - and the result is a pretty awesome blend, if I do say so myself. I get a lot of compliments on the photos of his work that I keep in my scrapbook.
“Do you mind doing the color work first?” he asks, out of the blue. “I kind of - I wanted to save the text for last.”
I shake my head. “No can do. Linework goes on first, then I’ll switch to the mags for coloring. Keeps the linework from bleeding into the color, and vice-versa.”
He takes a deep breath. “All right. I’ll stop being difficult. Sorry.”
“If you’re not-” I founder, for a couple seconds, trying not to say ‘comfortable’, because it’s abundantly clear he isn’t. “ . . . ready, I can just do the color work for the scroll today. Save the text for another session.”
“No. I said I wanted it done. Finished. Might as well do it now - it’s as good a time as any.”
He gives a soft, low laugh, and it’s not particularly happy. I don’t think he’s been drinking, but I’m not sure how else to explain his mood.
“Okay,” I say slowly, setting a new pair of gloves, the inks I’ll need, and my two guns on the tray. I make my motions deliberate, the way you’d surrender a real gun to a cop. “You haven’t-”
“I’m not drunk. Though right now, I’d consider selling my soul for a bottle of whiskey and some sleeping pills.”
Fuck. Self-destructive clients are not fun. I never expected to see this out of James: Doctor Feelgood’s just as depressed as the rest of us, it looks like.
“Sorry. Left my medical and liquor licenses in my other office.”
This time, he does laugh a little out of amusement. It’s nice - does him good. Even under the sweet, understanding exterior, there’s always something too-serious about him. You can just see the chemo and tumors and people constantly dying. They leave fingerprints all over him.
Fingerprints. Smudges. Like the scroll on his arm.
He swings his gaze up to mine, exhaling and rolling his shoulders in a quick, pained movement. The shadows under his eyes have gotten deeper, and his eyes are rimmed in red. He looks like hell, and he knows it.
“My brother’s dead. I haven’t seen him in twelve years - no one has - and now I have to bury him tomorrow. And sit shiva after.”
Oh, God. That’s why his shirt was torn. I can’t believe I didn’t figure it out.
I wish I could tell him something. Anything. But any words that would come out of my mouth that might console, or offer comfort, or mourn his brother would only be an imposition. What could I say? ‘I’m sorry’? No, he’s probably heard that all day and not believed a word of it. ‘It’ll be okay’? That would be worse. I’d hug him, but it’d be even more inappropriate.
But finish that tattoo? Yeah. That I can do.
~*~*~*~
I’ve run the new design through the thermal-fax. As James removed his shirt, I had to stifle a smile, but not for that reason. No, it’s that he’s so used to the tattoo process, he’d already shaved his upper arm and had pulled out a tube of hospital-grade antiseptic ointment.
“Want me to just hand over the gun?” I ask, teasing. “It’s not quite color-by-numbers, but you’re a pretty smart guy. You could do it.”
Never let it be said that I don’t fully support inappropriate humor in the face of grief.
He stops swabbing his arm and looks at me. “I - no. I’m sorry. I wasn’t trying to step on your toes or anything, I just-”
“It’s fine. You - you want to feel useful. I get that.”
Ouch. Oh yeah, that hit a nerve. He puts the swab back on the rolling tray and grips the smooth plastic covering of the table. Doesn’t trust his hands not to shake, and that’s got to hurt, for a doctor.
“Lane, I swear to God, I didn’t let bzzzzzzt security bzzzzzt. Bzzzzt got in bzzzzzz,” the intercom squawks loudly, making us both jump.
I clack over to the unit and pound the call button. “What’re you talking about? You swear to God what?”
The door opens before Jenny can get back to me, and a tall guy walks - no, wait, limps - into the room. I have to snicker at the flames on the bottom of his cane - I should get one for my mother, she‘d love it. His wardrobe’s heavy on the jeans and rock tees, as he’s got a Hendrix tee layered under a Pink Floyd button-down, and either he’s colorblind, or really thinks that pink and purple go together.
“House, how did - no, never mind. You’ve probably got my car LoJacked. Why are you here?”
Oh. So this is House. Taller than I’d expected - the visual of ‘limping twerp’ had somehow translated as ‘shorter than James’ - and thinner. Broad shoulders hidden underneath a half-buttoned suit jacket, blue eyes flicking first to James and then me, assessing immediately.
Interesting.
He ignores James for the time being, and steps closer to me. “Mind if I sit in?”
James answers, and I can practically hear him rolling his eyes from across the room. “Yes. Or does my opinion not matter?”
House turns around in irritation. “When have you ever known me to care about your feelings, Wilson?” He turns back to me. “How about it? I won’t be in your way - I just want to watch. Never seen someone being tattooed before. Could be an enlightening experience.”
I’m almost speechless. It’s kind of like standing in front of a steamroller - all that force and power barreling toward you, and you can either hop on board, get run over, or get the hell out of the way. And good Lord, does he know how to manipulate. He knows that by bypassing James and coming straight to me, it puts all the blame on me if something goes badly.
I slowly nod. “As long as you don’t disrupt me or my customer, Dr. House, you’re welcome to do what you like.”
“Don’t give him the opening, Lane,” James warns, arms folded, the fingers of one hand tapping out a fast rhythm on his bicep. “It never ends well.”
“I’ll behave, all right? I just - I wanted . . .” House trails off, pulling a stool up to the other side of the table and hoisting himself onto it. He overbalances and almost goes tumbling off, but James reaches out a hand to steady him. His eyes flick from James’s hand to his own hand to James’s bicep.
“This is important to you,” he finishes quietly.
~*~*~*~*~
“Thought you were supposed to be an artiste,” House says, using his cane to spin himself counterclockwise on the stool, then balance when he comes to a stop. “Went to the Moore College of Art and Design.”
I don’t look up from the stencil I’m inking. “I am, and I did.”
“Then why do you need the stencil? They didn’t teach you how to color without the lines?”
“She’s not-” James starts, but I tighten my latex-covered grip on his arm.
“It's a guideline. She can also speak for herself, and she’s going to have to smack you if you move again. Moving makes my stencil go all screwy, so unless you want the bet to look more like a smiley face, you’ll quit it.”
“Bet? As in the Hebrew letter for ‘B’ and that would be the last letter of the name Benjamin?” House’s voice comes out low and surprised. “You’re really getting his name on your arm, Jimmy? He cut and run twelve years ago and pissed you off so much you didn’t even tell me he existed!”
James breathes in slowly, half to calm down from House’s diatribe and half to block out the pain receptors. He’s never been one of my clients who doesn’t feel pain when I work on them - he feels it all, and never says a word about if it’s too much.
House is still declaiming, though: “In what universe do you owe him anything?”
“Oh, I don’t know. The one in which he’s my brother. The one in which I watched him piss away three and a half years of college and a full scholarship because E was more fun. The one in which I didn’t listen to David and drag Ben’s sorry ass back to Jersey when we found him squatting in some shithole apartment in Camden twelve years ago.”
God, I don’t think I’ve ever heard James that bitter. Ever. No, not even the night Julie finally signed the papers and I ran into him getting drunk at the bar in the Carlton. Obviously, there was bad blood between him and this brother of his, but how is it any of House’s business?
“Because you’ve gotta be the responsible one, huh? That’s why you’re still beating yourself up twelve years later?”
Okay, fine. Whatever. I’m just the tattoo girl. What do I know? Let them hash it out - I should be concentrating on the linework that’s slowly getting crisper and darker. I finish the outlines of all the letters - both the name and the Kaddish lines - and detach the first needle. I replace it with a thicker needle for the shading in black, and open a new black ink.
Over the buzzing, they’re still going at it.
“Oh, don’t give me that! ‘You’re an only child, House’. ‘You’ve never had anyone dependent on you in your life’. Like it’s really all that different?”
“Yes, it is! It’s different!”
“How?”
“Because you can’t just write off your brother when he’s being an idiot. You don’t get to say ‘to hell with him - let him dig his own grave, if that’s what he wants’. You shouldn’t ever give up on a brother.”
“But you did. It was the only thing you could do - you and David. You both made that decision. And so did your parents. It wasn’t like you did it all by yourself.”
“So we’re all to blame for this? He’s fucking dead, House! Philly PD found him lying in a pool of his own vomit and feces somewhere on Cambria Street! He’d been dealing drugs out of there for years-”
Fuck. I know Philadelphia - I grew up at Fifth and Olney, went to Girls’ High and Moore for art school. Cambria Street in North Philly is just about as low as you can go; there’s a reason they call it “the Badlands”. You don’t really get out of there, unless you’re in a body bag or a police car.
House has stopped spinning, or twirling his cane, or bouncing his tennis ball off the floor, or any of the other irritating habits I’ve discovered in this hour or so we’ve been in this room. He looks right at James, and there’s something in his eyes that I can’t (or possibly, won’t) put a name to.
“I didn’t mean it, you know. I shouldn’t have said that about Ben.”
James makes a low sound in his throat, body tightening up, and he bends to touch his head to House’s - and fuck it, I can’t yell at him for moving. Twisting downward to finish the last curve of the second yod and shading whatever I can reach is all I can do.
~*~*~*~*~
This is James Wilson's aninut, and House is there to bear witness.
They’re sitting, side-by-side on the table, shoulders touching as they bend their heads together to speak in low whispers. I’m pretty sure me and my tattoo gun are simply a minor annoyance to be ignored, but that smile is back on James’s face, so I’m fine with it.
I’d switched to the mags about half an hour ago, and the gold undertones of the scroll are starting to shine through. I’m currently doing a bit of silver highlight to bring out the first of the lines of Kaddish text.
He who makes peace in his heights, may he make peace upon us and upon all Israel
And though I haven’t said Kaddish or gone to synagogue or kept Sabbath in years, I can hear Nana Devorah’s voice teaching it to me, the pitch of her voice sliding up and down. I finish the arch of the aleph, and look over to James and his friend - whose button-down has slid aside to reveal a tear in the Hendrix tee, over his right pectoral.
Keriyah: Greg House, armchair shrink and pain in the tuchis extraordinaire, is a better Jew than I am.
Gently, I finish the last curve on the hei, and wipe the extra ink and blood off with a clean gauze. I rub on the ointment - the last thing he needs is for it to get infected - and tape a bandage to it. As I start cleaning up my supplies, trashing the needles and inks and setting aside the gun, needle bar, and tube to autoclave, I notice that James hasn’t moved. He just sits there, staring at the Rembrandt print above my desk.
House has gotten himself down from the table and retrieved James’s shirt, bracing himself against the edge of the table so he can pull it onto James, one sleeve at a time. I try to tug it over one shoulder, but House gives me a glare that I don’t care to challenge: this is his job now.
Mine is over.
House eases the shirt over James’s arm, careful not to brush the new tattoo, and buttons it. He eases James down off the table, and into his suit jacket. When James is on his own two feet, House turns to me.
“Thank you.” He pulls out his wallet, and counts out an extra hundred, but I hold up my hand. “You- don’t you usually?”
“I’d have done this for free. He didn’t tell me his brother died until after Jenny had worked out payment. Keep it.”
House smiles slightly - an unnerving look, on him - and nods. “I’ll get him home, and tell him to give you a call in a week.”
“It’ll have to be more than that, if he’s sitting shiva.”
“I know.”
He goes to guide James toward the door, and before I know it, I’ve stopped him.
“James?“ He looks over at me, brown eyes gone hazy with endorphins and mourning. “Yit'gadal v'yit'kadash sh'mei raba, b'al'ma di v'ra khir'utei.”
James bows his head . . . and so does House.
“Amen.”
~*~*~*~
Kaddish - the traditional mourner’s prayer in Judaism.
Aninut - the period of mourning from the time of death to the burial, in which the mourners prepare for the burial.
Aleph - "A", in the Hebrew alphabet.
Bet - "B", in Hebrew.
Hei - "H", in Hebrew.
Keriyah - the ritual tear made over the right side (or left, for parents) of the piece of clothing, honoring the death of a loved one.
Tuchis - Yiddish for "behind" or "buttocks".
Shiva - required seven-day mourning period in which the family of the deceased
Yit'gadal v'yit'kadash sh'mei raba, b'al'ma di v'ra khir'utei. - May His great Name grow exalted and sanctified, in the world that He created as He willed. (opening lines of the Kaddish)
Feedback is, of course, loved and hugged and squeezed and called George.
Author: Drea (bluerosefairy)
Rating: PG-13, for language. Nothing too shocking if you’ve seen the show, though.
Fandom/Pairing: House M.D. James Wilson, with a bit of House/Wilson at the end.
Disclaimer: Despite my most sincere wishes to the contrary, I do not own House. My name isn’t David Shore or Bad Hat Harry Productions. Neither do I own - again, despite my sincerest wishes - Robert Sean Leonard, or his fictional counterpart, James Wilson. Please to not sue, because you won’t get anything but my extensive student loan debt and a bunch of books if you do. Oh, and Lane. She’s the only thing that’s mine.
Spoilers/Warnings: For “Histories” (106). Nothing past S3 for spoilers. Consider yourself warned for character death, though not of a main canon character.
Author’s Notes: Written for wilson_fest prompt #24 - Wilson gets a tattoo. Title and quoted portion below from Leonard Cohen’s brilliant, overused “Hallelujah”. Much, much love and hugs to carla_scribbles for her brilliant last-minute beta skills and for letting me wibble about this for two months straight.
~*~*~*~
You say I took the Name in vain, but I don’t even know the Name
And if I did, well really, what’s it to you?
There’s a blaze of light in every word, it doesn’t matter which you’ve heard
The holy or the broken hallelujah . . .
~*~*~*~
“Yo, Lane! Your 2:00 canceled, but your guy’s on the phone and wants to know if you can fit him in.”
Good God, she’s loud. We have an intercom. We’ve had it for all three years Jenny’s been our receptionist. She knows damn well how to use it, since she does it when Alec’s in - no sane person wants to piss off the boss. You think she uses it any other time?
Not so much.
I finish autoclaving my equipment and wait until the machine cycles down before replacing it on the table. Sticking my head out the door, I return fire.
“Tell him I’m free, Jen! I’ve got Sketch at 5, so if it’s anything bigger than some cover-up work or a small piece, he’s going to have to come back next week.”
“Okay! He’ll be here in ten!”, she yells, juggling our design files, fresh from the copier, and making her way back to her desk and her internet poker game.
Whoa. Did Jenny just let her favorite target for gossip go by without a single comment? I’m shocked - she usually can’t shut up when he calls. Has to know why I have to do all his tats. Why I’m on a first-name basis with him. Why he’s such an outrageous flirt. Jen thinks he’s got the hots for me, but it’s actually never been like that. He’s funny and tips obscenely well - what the man does in his free time is none of my business.
He’s pretty infamous around here. The first time he came in to check us out, six years ago, he was wearing jeans and a Motley Crue shirt. Gave Alec his business card and told him his bronchitis medicine was outdated and to pick up a new one at this clinic he worked at. Alec and I dubbed him “Doctor Feelgood” after that, but never to his face.
Doc’s got four tats, total, and I’ve worked on three of them. I did cover-up work on his third, and designed his fourth myself, but I’ve never touched what he tells me was his first. Doesn’t mind chatting while I’m working - and I’ve mentioned the funny, right? - but I learned real quick to not mention that particular piece.
Then again, I can understand. Religion is a private thing, even when the manner of expression of that religion is forbidden.
I replace the inks and wipe down my table, stripping off my stained gloves for a fresh pair. The intercom buzzes, and Jenny’s voice comes out crackling. “Doctor bzzzzzzzzzt bzzzzzzt bzzzzzzt here. Bzzzzzt to park bzz bzzzzzzzt. Should I tell bzzzzzzt Brick bzzzzzzt?”
Luckily, I speak intercom.
“If he wants to park closer than Poughkeepsie, tell him he can have Alec’s spot. Brick’s in his office, if you need him for billing. I can wait.”
“Bzzzzzt wants to bzzzzzzt.”
“No problem. Send him back.”
Doc’s apparently not up to fighting with Brick over his usual discount. As he opens the door, I can see why. The man’s got circles under his eyes deeper than the Marianas Trench and a tear across the right side of his shirt. Sure, he’s a doctor. He keeps crazy hours, but really, he’s come in after 20-hour shifts smelling like disinfectant and stale coffee and looked better than this.
“Afternoon, Lane,” he says, hanging up his coat on the door hook and heading straight for the table. “Been a while.”
Yeah, it has. Eight months, actually, but it’s not completely unheard-of, even for a regular like him.
I was surprised that he even has any tats at all, but I should know better, considering the Escher back piece I’ve got under my suit jacket. Everyone makes fun of me for dressing so corporate at a tattoo parlor, but hey, I work two jobs. I don’t have time to change. Also, it’s useful in other ways. Nervous customers - especially Mrs. Soccer Mom taking little Suzie to get that first butterfly tattoo - walk into my office, see my pulled-back hair and plain blue suit, and immediately relax.
And so do attractive, sleep-deprived oncologists, as it turns out.
~*~*~*~
“Kinda early on a Friday for you, James,” I say, shoving at my rolled-up shirt cuffs. “Did you free the psych ward patients and escape in an ambulance?”
James - who never, ever, wants to be called “Doctor Wilson” in my office - shakes his head and sits on the table. “I wish. I haven‘t plotted a good breakout in a while. No, my boss told me to go home.”
“From what I know about her, that’s kind of like Christmas, right? Or, well - Chanukkah.”
At the mention of Chanukkah, his gaze drops around the vicinity of his shoelaces. Uh-oh, not a good sign. When he gets bottled-up and avoids looking at you, it usually precludes a later meltdown of epic proportions. We do not talk about that night a few years ago I had to talk a drunken James out of tattooing a picture of a donkey and the name “House” onto his ass. Not that I’d have minded seeing it, but it would have been awkward trying to explain to his wife at the time why I let him get such a stupid tattoo. Or my boss. Or him, when he sobered up.
“What happened?” I ask, rummaging through my desk for his file.
He rubs absently at the base of his neck and doesn’t answer for a minute. “I lost my temper with a patient. They were refusing treatment, and I kind of went off on them.”
“Everyone loses their temper sometimes. I mean, if I were a doctor, I’d scream at people all day long. People are stupid, in case you haven’t noticed.”
“I don’t lose my temper. I’m Mr. Nice Guy. I get hugs and tears and thank-you’s. They don’t come to me to get screamed at.”
True. I wouldn’t want to be yelled at by James - he’s so calm most of the time that it’s a shock when he does yell - but more than that, I don’t think I want to get into this discussion. He’s got a perfectly good therapist that he pays a hell of a lot more than he pays me to listen to his problems. It’s not that I don’t want to help, but I’m just not equipped for this.
“And you don’t come see me to talk about work.” I say, giving him the out. “So what’s it going to be? New tat?”
He tugs at the knot of his tie. “Not exactly. I want you to finish my left bicep for me.”
Oh shit. Shit. That tattoo. The one nobody’s allowed to touch. Not Brick, to sharpen the bled-together lines of the edges, or Alec, to touch up the faded script. Stuff they’d have done for very little money and I’d probably do gratis, if it meant getting to work on a piece like that.
It’s gorgeous, really. Most people’s first tattoos are crappy pieces they pick off a wall while drunk off their ass on Spring Break in South Beach. Happens to all of us - I’ve got an Aries symbol on my ankle that Brick loves to make fun of. Not James, though: his is a Torah scroll with the final two lines of the Kaddish and a blank space across the top of the scroll. I’d kill to touch it up - highlight the copper color of the scroll, re-ink the words, anything. It’s just that awesome a piece of work.
Never in a million years would I have expected him to ask me to work on it.
“Lane?” His voice snaps my attention back to the concerned-looking man in front of me. “You okay?”
“Yeah.”
I sit down on my stool and slide in front of him, sketchbook in one hand and pencil in the other. I need an idea of what he wants before I start inking - customers tend to have radically differing ideas about design than artists do. And of course, the customer usually likes to see what you’re thinking of doing before you start sticking needles into their skin.
“Finish it how?”
“Define the edges of the scroll. Re-ink the last line where the words are blurring into the bottom. Maybe add some white ink to the background of the scroll - make it look more like paper. And well - do you think you can reapproximate the text? The letters?”
He speaks calmly. Reasonably. Just the right amount of comfort in his tone to disguise anything that might be amiss. Probably the same voice he uses on his cancer patients. But he still isn’t telling me the whole story. He didn’t mention the space on the top of the scroll, and it’s going to look incomplete without something there.
“You know script work isn’t my specialty. I can do the overlay, but if you want new text, it’s going to look different than the previous work. If you had a sample of the new text, I could probably work with it.”
“Can I borrow your sketchbook?” he asks, holding out his hand.
I pass it over. He hesitates for a moment, but soon the pencil is moving over the blank page. Smooth, deft strokes, using the edge for shading and the tip for fine work. After four years at Moore and eight working for Alec and the District Court, I can recognize a fellow artist when I see one.
He finishes, his other hand gripping the edge of the book unconsciously, as if he’s anchoring himself to the drawing. He doesn’t move to show me what he’s drawn, and so I gently tilt the book downward so I can get a good look at it.
I may be a lapsed Jew, but I can still read Hebrew. Right to left, the letters are sketched out in a slightly canted style: bet, nun, yod, mem, yod, nun.
Benjamin.
~*~*~*~
Most customers, when I design pieces for them, are very general about what they want. They don’t go into specifics: they want a rose, they have some general ideas about color, but that’s it. It’s up to me as an artist to divine style, detail, realism - and translate that into a design.
Not James.
He’s always been very specific about what he wants (and now that I know he’s an artist, I suspect he did the initial sketches he showed me when I did his other tats) and what he doesn’t want. The first time he walked into my office, he was very straightforward - he wanted a certain design, with specific colors and linework. The rest was up to me.
My style isn’t what you’d normally think a guy would like. It’s usually very flowing, like something out of Waterhouse or a fantasy novel. With James, I’ve adjusted it - bolder strokes, more realism in the sketching - and the result is a pretty awesome blend, if I do say so myself. I get a lot of compliments on the photos of his work that I keep in my scrapbook.
“Do you mind doing the color work first?” he asks, out of the blue. “I kind of - I wanted to save the text for last.”
I shake my head. “No can do. Linework goes on first, then I’ll switch to the mags for coloring. Keeps the linework from bleeding into the color, and vice-versa.”
He takes a deep breath. “All right. I’ll stop being difficult. Sorry.”
“If you’re not-” I founder, for a couple seconds, trying not to say ‘comfortable’, because it’s abundantly clear he isn’t. “ . . . ready, I can just do the color work for the scroll today. Save the text for another session.”
“No. I said I wanted it done. Finished. Might as well do it now - it’s as good a time as any.”
He gives a soft, low laugh, and it’s not particularly happy. I don’t think he’s been drinking, but I’m not sure how else to explain his mood.
“Okay,” I say slowly, setting a new pair of gloves, the inks I’ll need, and my two guns on the tray. I make my motions deliberate, the way you’d surrender a real gun to a cop. “You haven’t-”
“I’m not drunk. Though right now, I’d consider selling my soul for a bottle of whiskey and some sleeping pills.”
Fuck. Self-destructive clients are not fun. I never expected to see this out of James: Doctor Feelgood’s just as depressed as the rest of us, it looks like.
“Sorry. Left my medical and liquor licenses in my other office.”
This time, he does laugh a little out of amusement. It’s nice - does him good. Even under the sweet, understanding exterior, there’s always something too-serious about him. You can just see the chemo and tumors and people constantly dying. They leave fingerprints all over him.
Fingerprints. Smudges. Like the scroll on his arm.
He swings his gaze up to mine, exhaling and rolling his shoulders in a quick, pained movement. The shadows under his eyes have gotten deeper, and his eyes are rimmed in red. He looks like hell, and he knows it.
“My brother’s dead. I haven’t seen him in twelve years - no one has - and now I have to bury him tomorrow. And sit shiva after.”
Oh, God. That’s why his shirt was torn. I can’t believe I didn’t figure it out.
I wish I could tell him something. Anything. But any words that would come out of my mouth that might console, or offer comfort, or mourn his brother would only be an imposition. What could I say? ‘I’m sorry’? No, he’s probably heard that all day and not believed a word of it. ‘It’ll be okay’? That would be worse. I’d hug him, but it’d be even more inappropriate.
But finish that tattoo? Yeah. That I can do.
~*~*~*~
I’ve run the new design through the thermal-fax. As James removed his shirt, I had to stifle a smile, but not for that reason. No, it’s that he’s so used to the tattoo process, he’d already shaved his upper arm and had pulled out a tube of hospital-grade antiseptic ointment.
“Want me to just hand over the gun?” I ask, teasing. “It’s not quite color-by-numbers, but you’re a pretty smart guy. You could do it.”
Never let it be said that I don’t fully support inappropriate humor in the face of grief.
He stops swabbing his arm and looks at me. “I - no. I’m sorry. I wasn’t trying to step on your toes or anything, I just-”
“It’s fine. You - you want to feel useful. I get that.”
Ouch. Oh yeah, that hit a nerve. He puts the swab back on the rolling tray and grips the smooth plastic covering of the table. Doesn’t trust his hands not to shake, and that’s got to hurt, for a doctor.
“Lane, I swear to God, I didn’t let bzzzzzzt security bzzzzzt. Bzzzzt got in bzzzzzz,” the intercom squawks loudly, making us both jump.
I clack over to the unit and pound the call button. “What’re you talking about? You swear to God what?”
The door opens before Jenny can get back to me, and a tall guy walks - no, wait, limps - into the room. I have to snicker at the flames on the bottom of his cane - I should get one for my mother, she‘d love it. His wardrobe’s heavy on the jeans and rock tees, as he’s got a Hendrix tee layered under a Pink Floyd button-down, and either he’s colorblind, or really thinks that pink and purple go together.
“House, how did - no, never mind. You’ve probably got my car LoJacked. Why are you here?”
Oh. So this is House. Taller than I’d expected - the visual of ‘limping twerp’ had somehow translated as ‘shorter than James’ - and thinner. Broad shoulders hidden underneath a half-buttoned suit jacket, blue eyes flicking first to James and then me, assessing immediately.
Interesting.
He ignores James for the time being, and steps closer to me. “Mind if I sit in?”
James answers, and I can practically hear him rolling his eyes from across the room. “Yes. Or does my opinion not matter?”
House turns around in irritation. “When have you ever known me to care about your feelings, Wilson?” He turns back to me. “How about it? I won’t be in your way - I just want to watch. Never seen someone being tattooed before. Could be an enlightening experience.”
I’m almost speechless. It’s kind of like standing in front of a steamroller - all that force and power barreling toward you, and you can either hop on board, get run over, or get the hell out of the way. And good Lord, does he know how to manipulate. He knows that by bypassing James and coming straight to me, it puts all the blame on me if something goes badly.
I slowly nod. “As long as you don’t disrupt me or my customer, Dr. House, you’re welcome to do what you like.”
“Don’t give him the opening, Lane,” James warns, arms folded, the fingers of one hand tapping out a fast rhythm on his bicep. “It never ends well.”
“I’ll behave, all right? I just - I wanted . . .” House trails off, pulling a stool up to the other side of the table and hoisting himself onto it. He overbalances and almost goes tumbling off, but James reaches out a hand to steady him. His eyes flick from James’s hand to his own hand to James’s bicep.
“This is important to you,” he finishes quietly.
~*~*~*~*~
“Thought you were supposed to be an artiste,” House says, using his cane to spin himself counterclockwise on the stool, then balance when he comes to a stop. “Went to the Moore College of Art and Design.”
I don’t look up from the stencil I’m inking. “I am, and I did.”
“Then why do you need the stencil? They didn’t teach you how to color without the lines?”
“She’s not-” James starts, but I tighten my latex-covered grip on his arm.
“It's a guideline. She can also speak for herself, and she’s going to have to smack you if you move again. Moving makes my stencil go all screwy, so unless you want the bet to look more like a smiley face, you’ll quit it.”
“Bet? As in the Hebrew letter for ‘B’ and that would be the last letter of the name Benjamin?” House’s voice comes out low and surprised. “You’re really getting his name on your arm, Jimmy? He cut and run twelve years ago and pissed you off so much you didn’t even tell me he existed!”
James breathes in slowly, half to calm down from House’s diatribe and half to block out the pain receptors. He’s never been one of my clients who doesn’t feel pain when I work on them - he feels it all, and never says a word about if it’s too much.
House is still declaiming, though: “In what universe do you owe him anything?”
“Oh, I don’t know. The one in which he’s my brother. The one in which I watched him piss away three and a half years of college and a full scholarship because E was more fun. The one in which I didn’t listen to David and drag Ben’s sorry ass back to Jersey when we found him squatting in some shithole apartment in Camden twelve years ago.”
God, I don’t think I’ve ever heard James that bitter. Ever. No, not even the night Julie finally signed the papers and I ran into him getting drunk at the bar in the Carlton. Obviously, there was bad blood between him and this brother of his, but how is it any of House’s business?
“Because you’ve gotta be the responsible one, huh? That’s why you’re still beating yourself up twelve years later?”
Okay, fine. Whatever. I’m just the tattoo girl. What do I know? Let them hash it out - I should be concentrating on the linework that’s slowly getting crisper and darker. I finish the outlines of all the letters - both the name and the Kaddish lines - and detach the first needle. I replace it with a thicker needle for the shading in black, and open a new black ink.
Over the buzzing, they’re still going at it.
“Oh, don’t give me that! ‘You’re an only child, House’. ‘You’ve never had anyone dependent on you in your life’. Like it’s really all that different?”
“Yes, it is! It’s different!”
“How?”
“Because you can’t just write off your brother when he’s being an idiot. You don’t get to say ‘to hell with him - let him dig his own grave, if that’s what he wants’. You shouldn’t ever give up on a brother.”
“But you did. It was the only thing you could do - you and David. You both made that decision. And so did your parents. It wasn’t like you did it all by yourself.”
“So we’re all to blame for this? He’s fucking dead, House! Philly PD found him lying in a pool of his own vomit and feces somewhere on Cambria Street! He’d been dealing drugs out of there for years-”
Fuck. I know Philadelphia - I grew up at Fifth and Olney, went to Girls’ High and Moore for art school. Cambria Street in North Philly is just about as low as you can go; there’s a reason they call it “the Badlands”. You don’t really get out of there, unless you’re in a body bag or a police car.
House has stopped spinning, or twirling his cane, or bouncing his tennis ball off the floor, or any of the other irritating habits I’ve discovered in this hour or so we’ve been in this room. He looks right at James, and there’s something in his eyes that I can’t (or possibly, won’t) put a name to.
“I didn’t mean it, you know. I shouldn’t have said that about Ben.”
James makes a low sound in his throat, body tightening up, and he bends to touch his head to House’s - and fuck it, I can’t yell at him for moving. Twisting downward to finish the last curve of the second yod and shading whatever I can reach is all I can do.
~*~*~*~*~
This is James Wilson's aninut, and House is there to bear witness.
They’re sitting, side-by-side on the table, shoulders touching as they bend their heads together to speak in low whispers. I’m pretty sure me and my tattoo gun are simply a minor annoyance to be ignored, but that smile is back on James’s face, so I’m fine with it.
I’d switched to the mags about half an hour ago, and the gold undertones of the scroll are starting to shine through. I’m currently doing a bit of silver highlight to bring out the first of the lines of Kaddish text.
He who makes peace in his heights, may he make peace upon us and upon all Israel
And though I haven’t said Kaddish or gone to synagogue or kept Sabbath in years, I can hear Nana Devorah’s voice teaching it to me, the pitch of her voice sliding up and down. I finish the arch of the aleph, and look over to James and his friend - whose button-down has slid aside to reveal a tear in the Hendrix tee, over his right pectoral.
Keriyah: Greg House, armchair shrink and pain in the tuchis extraordinaire, is a better Jew than I am.
Gently, I finish the last curve on the hei, and wipe the extra ink and blood off with a clean gauze. I rub on the ointment - the last thing he needs is for it to get infected - and tape a bandage to it. As I start cleaning up my supplies, trashing the needles and inks and setting aside the gun, needle bar, and tube to autoclave, I notice that James hasn’t moved. He just sits there, staring at the Rembrandt print above my desk.
House has gotten himself down from the table and retrieved James’s shirt, bracing himself against the edge of the table so he can pull it onto James, one sleeve at a time. I try to tug it over one shoulder, but House gives me a glare that I don’t care to challenge: this is his job now.
Mine is over.
House eases the shirt over James’s arm, careful not to brush the new tattoo, and buttons it. He eases James down off the table, and into his suit jacket. When James is on his own two feet, House turns to me.
“Thank you.” He pulls out his wallet, and counts out an extra hundred, but I hold up my hand. “You- don’t you usually?”
“I’d have done this for free. He didn’t tell me his brother died until after Jenny had worked out payment. Keep it.”
House smiles slightly - an unnerving look, on him - and nods. “I’ll get him home, and tell him to give you a call in a week.”
“It’ll have to be more than that, if he’s sitting shiva.”
“I know.”
He goes to guide James toward the door, and before I know it, I’ve stopped him.
“James?“ He looks over at me, brown eyes gone hazy with endorphins and mourning. “Yit'gadal v'yit'kadash sh'mei raba, b'al'ma di v'ra khir'utei.”
James bows his head . . . and so does House.
“Amen.”
~*~*~*~
Kaddish - the traditional mourner’s prayer in Judaism.
Aninut - the period of mourning from the time of death to the burial, in which the mourners prepare for the burial.
Aleph - "A", in the Hebrew alphabet.
Bet - "B", in Hebrew.
Hei - "H", in Hebrew.
Keriyah - the ritual tear made over the right side (or left, for parents) of the piece of clothing, honoring the death of a loved one.
Tuchis - Yiddish for "behind" or "buttocks".
Shiva - required seven-day mourning period in which the family of the deceased
Yit'gadal v'yit'kadash sh'mei raba, b'al'ma di v'ra khir'utei. - May His great Name grow exalted and sanctified, in the world that He created as He willed. (opening lines of the Kaddish)
Feedback is, of course, loved and hugged and squeezed and called George.