New Fic: Doesn't mean that much to me/to mean that much to you
Title: Doesn't mean that much to me/to mean that much to you
Author: joe_pike_junior
Characters: House, John House, House/Wilson friendship, implied House/Cuddy.
Summary: "You're scared," Amber says. "You're scared you can't be trusted any more." Now and then, and the space in between.
Disclaimer: Not mine.
Notes: Huge thanks to those who read this first: blackmare_9, daasgrrl, nomad1328 and pwcorgigirl. Spoilers for Both Sides Now. Rated teen for some swearing, a little bit of violence and a whole lot of general creepiness. The title is from Old Man, by Neil Young. 4,557 words.
When House wakes up, someone else is in his room.
He knows he’ll just be looking at the same four walls, painted in a pukey green. A row of round chips above the door frame where off-white paint shows through like teeth.
The same vinyl-backed chair, the same chest of drawers.
All of his clothes fit on one particle-board shelf. One bag, three shirts, underwear. He wishes he had something to put on the other two shelves - books, maybe - but he doesn’t. He remembers handing over a handful of plastic and metal to Wilson, keys cold against his sweaty palm. The bag seemed too light.
In the reception area a grim-faced nurse upended his bag into the table and searched through everything, checking the pockets and the lining with her lips pursed in a thin line. Amber stood close to him while he was being processed. He could smell her perfume, and the odour of his own acrid sweat.
Something is different.
It isn’t the room that’s changed, it’s something within him. It’s different from when Amber came. Then, he opened his eyes and saw her leaning against his piano, his fingers suddenly damp on the keys (he knew before that, though: he could sense perfume he couldn’t really smell, feel something in the still air of his apartment). Suddenly everything crystallized: the tight sour feeling in his stomach, the unbalanced, out-of-place feeling in his head.
This time it’s different, but it’s the same. There's something like static or a subaudible hum in his head. Something wrong.
The cottage-cheese stucco on the ceiling fills his field of vision. He can smell wet wool and Old Spice. The smell of his father. Hot bitumen and sweat is the smell of summer runs. Sweet ozone and sharp autumn leaves the smell of fall motorcycle rides. This particular smell, sweet and full, conjures only one image. Hi, dad.
He rolls over on to his side.
“Greg,” his dad says. “Wake up.” There's a creak of shoeleather at the foot of the bed. The smell is stronger. Sweat and cologne and shoe polish. It smells like the shuffling, apologetic Marines at his dad's funeral. It smells like the closet full of uniforms House had to go through afterwards. It smells like warm piss and a thick radio belt smacking across his eight-year-old shoulders. It smells like being hoisted aloft, screaming happily into the summer sky of Egypt. All those things.
His dad’s shoes are wet. There’s water and grass flecked over the parade gloss, and already a little puddle of water on the floor. He’s in his uniform, blue dress C, and his hair is wet. It's not the guy from the casket, it's the guy House knew as a teenager. Harder face, a solid black jarhead buzzcut. The forehead less lined, the eyes clearer and harder.
House clears his throat. It feels dry. He puts his feet on the floor, and just for a second he's so dizzy he thinks he's going to pitch forward onto the linoleum. He swallows again, and the feeling goes away. The buzzing is gone, too. His head feels clear again.
“Why are you here?” House looks through the door into the corridor. There's nobody out there.
“Don't you mean to ask me why I'm not still dead?"
House looks up at his father, his not-father, sees that he’s smiling in a benevolent sort of way. Funny, but he can’t really remember him doing that much in real life.
“No,” House says. “I mean, why you? Amber’s prettier.”
Christ. His leg hurts. It’s hard to sleep here. It’s a restless building, and if he wakes up he only has these few yards of air to move about in. He can walk around the ward, of course, but there are people and questions and the same dull, filtered air. It's all the same. All the same air. The same breath. The same -- water drips slowly from the sleeve of his father's coat. Perfect spheres, moving to break on the floor. The same water.
“We’re going somewhere.”
House doesn’t have grounds privileges yet. Those have to be earned, and they’re right up there at the top of the list. First you get to take a shit without somebody watching, and then you get to go outside. The pale-faced guy in the next room comes and goes a lot, tremulously smoking cigarette after cigarette. House doesn't get to go outside.
“Can I choose where?”
“Where do you want to go?” His father's voice is low, almost conspiratorial.
House thinks about that. “Desolation.”
“Desolation Bay? Alaska?” This is fucking crazy, House thinks, as if that will make his father go away. As if he could absorb that sharp piece of self, collected personality, back into himself.
They leave.
…
They’re standing on soft grass. It’s dark. At first all House can make out is soft, heavy rain, falling through the clear white beam cast by an arc lamp. It falls into and out of the cylinder of light, toward the darkness beyond.
Then he smells the rain and the earth and he sees the receding backs of the other players, trudging away from the field, and he realises he’s on the lacrosse field. His father is standing in front of him, and he can feel the rain on his shoulders and his hands and the top of his head. House’s leg hurts, but not the rusty-chainsaw roar it’d be sending out if he was actually standing here in the cold, having just trudged over half an acre of wet grass. So. He isn't actually here. He is, but he isn't. He can feel the wet tape of his crosse in his hands, that's real enough, but just enough of his senses are blunted to tell him that this is a dream.
“I want a refund,” House says. “I thought we were going to Desolation.” He looks at his father, at the rain running through his flattop buzz cut and down his face. He looks like a statue. His face is dark, his eyes unreadable, his mouth a flat line breaking rivulets of water.
House can hear the rain all around them, the soft patter of it. He can feel his t-shirt sticking to his back now, as well. Cold water seeping into his shoes. His father’s uniform is well-soaked, so he can see the droplets of water momentarily shining on the surface before they soak in. Red doesn't show blood. Wet doesn't show water. They've been standing here a long time.
“Sorry,” Dad says, and then he smirks. Yeah, House recognises that one. “Doesn’t work like that.”
“What do you mean?” House says, glancing up and around him, blinking as the droplets hit his face. “I watched a documentary on Alaska the other day.” It was months ago, actually, but he remembers it. Waking up on the couch in the sudden self-awareness and slight nausea of a morphine comedown. One of those IMAX-type things, sweeping views of glaciers and dark water. When he opens his mouth he can taste disuse, the bitterness of loneliness, the dust of his room at Mayfield.
“Yeah,” Dad says, “but you’ve never been there.” His voice has that half-patronising tone that pissed House off royally for at least thirty years. House is momentarily struck with a juvenile compulsion to scream you’re not my dad!, but that fades away as soon as he thinks it. Of course an hallucination with this ass would have to have rules.
Maybe his dad wants his earlobe back.
House looks around, taking more time about it now. They’re in Havelock. He’s just played a game of lacrosse. Something like a semi-final. His body is still 49, but House knows exactly how old he should be. Fifteen. He remembers this.
Three months after this, he told this man, "I know you're not my father." After that were two months of jumping out his bedroom window into the warmth of the summer night. Two months of notes his dad slowly hunt-and-peck typed with two fingers. And now he knows it to be true, what he knew back then. It doesn't feel any different.
His leg kind of hurts, but he doesn’t need the cane. That’s the cool thing about dreams. He tests himself by dropping into a squat, and it’s easy. He puts his hands behind him and sits down on the grass. It should be gross, because it’s cold and rainy and dark, but it’s just cool. He lies back until he’s looking up into the sky, the rain softly hitting his face.
Why doesn't this feel any different? Because he knew it for sure half a lifetime ago, when he saw the pink birthmark through his real father's bald spot. Because the DNA results were just another confirmation of the empty feeling. Because knowing what he already knows never makes it better. Because because -- He closes his eyes and goes on feeling the rain.
His stomach still wants to churn when he smells his dad. There's more there, more than just the memory of shared space.
His father chuckles. He’s still standing at House’s feet, ramrod straight. It’s very silent, just the patter of the rain and his rumbling laugh.
“You know why we’re here, don’t you?” Thirty years ago, some real estate.
House knows, all right, and so of course his dad knows, too. Because he’s not talking to his dad, he’s talking to himself. Wonder what Freud would have to say about that, House thinks. Freud was an asshole.
“It’s that semifinal I asked you to come to.”
His father nods.
Then. It was a weird juvenile thing. He already hated his dad, and already knew he wasn’t really his dad, but he was fifteen and he wanted his dad to come to one damn lacrosse game. Maybe afterwards his dad could offer him one little grudging “Well done, son." Something like that. And House could feel vindicated and just a little bit proud, at the same time. Stupid. He didn't care what anyone else thought and the closest he got to girls were the porno mags he kept between the box spring and the mattress. Friends were sly, jabbing conversations over cheap cans of metallic-tasting beer. But he wanted his dad at the game. Go figure.
When the game was over, he looked where the small group of people stood -- coach, girlfriends, classmates and parents. There were quite a few jarheads, parents mostly. House caught just a glimpse of the back of his father’s head, the square set of his shoulders, as he turned and walked quickly towards the parking lot. The rain was cold but his cheeks were still hot with exertion, and sour anger had bloomed quickly in the pit of his stomach. Being angry at his dad was easy. It only got easier, as the memories of hurt and silence increased.
House trudged off the field with the rest of his teammates. He dressed quickly, pulling some sweatpants on and changing his t-shirt. Another kid asked him if he wanted a ride home, but he said no. It was wet, but he felt like walking. A few stragglers pulled out of the parking lot, and then he set off down the sidewalk, breathing deep the smell of wet road, enjoying the soft ache in his calf muscles. All he could hear was the soft hushing of the rain on the grass, the occasional sibbilant rush of a car going by in the rain. It was a nice walk, a route he often followed on his afternoon runs. He was alone with the soft rain, running down the back of his neck, dripping from his hair into his eyes. Cool rain, hot anger.
Now again. Silence. House realises that he isn’t getting rained on any more. They’re sitting in a car. No engine rumble, the quiet pressing against his ears. Can't even hear his heartbeat.
He notices his heartbeat in dreams sometimes, but only when it's too fast or absent. A memory of something slips into the back of his mind, a crushing pain in his chest, a phrase forming itself on his tongue: (calcium gluconate). Every now and then he dreams that he's trying to say it, but can't.
House looks across. His father's face is dry, but his hair is dark and tousled. Like he dried it off. And on his face is the same frustrating look of unwavering competence that the nurse wore, the second-last thing he saw before he died. The last thing he saw was the acoustical tiles on the ceiling, fuzzy and wavering and black around the edges. He woke up hours later with a dull pain in his chest.
"What did you see, Greg?" Instead of his father, just for a second, he sees what he saw when he woke up: a brief blur of Stacy's tearful, fatigue-worn face. With that comes the unbalanced feeling that something was fundamentally wrong. It took a long time for that feeling to leave him.
"Nothing. I hallucinated."
"This is a hallucination."
That was different. He has control of what happens here. He can talk to Amber and pretend he's talking into his telephone. He can lock the bathroom door and listen to her voice bounce off the tiles. He's too comfortable in this not-world, this artificial reality. He's too comfortable here. That. That wasn't comfortable.
Then. He was half a mile down the road when his dad pulled the car over to the shoulder a few yards in front of him and leaned across to open the passenger door.
Now. “You picked me up,” House says. This memory is particularly clear: the master-sergeant rumble of his dad’s LeBaron, the sharp, gasoline-heavy smell of wet asphalt, the weight his duffel bag made against his leg.
“Yeah. You were pissed.”
His father's tone is what House guesses to be an attempt at sardonic, but he was never very good at that. He was always more gruff than mocking, more cruel than sarcastic. Maybe if the guy had even attempted to have a sense of fucking humour, House would have gotten less pleasure out of hating him. Of course he was pissed. They lost the game. He was fifteen.
“Yeah.” House licks his lips. They're wet.
He’d got so close then to telling his dad he knew. Telling his dad he could stop expecting some sort of filial devotion, because the guy he bumped beer bottles with over the Weber grill was the father of his kid. But he didn't. He held back until he was a little bigger. Until he had no sport to be barred from attending.
A sharp intake of breath. "You had some smart mouth on you."
The words sound rough, but they're supposed to. That's what his dad always said, You've got some smart mouth on you. That was shorthand, a way of abbreviating a whole life of grievances into one neat package: he didn't work hard enough, he didn't make friends because sarcasm came easier than being friendly, he didn't make nice with his dad's work buddies. He wouldn't pitch balls at his dad for hours in the backyard once he discovered that lacrosse was faster and it came easier. He talked back. He got bored with fishing and he'd rather hike than crouch in wet leaves for hours waiting for deer. He talked back. He drove too fast. Half a lifetime later he wasn't grateful enough about waking up missing three-quarters of his vastus lateralis.
Then. His dad bailed out over some overgrown tropical shithole. It was a routine flight gone wrong, a mechanical failure and a prudent ejection, everything by the book except for the stray bullet he caught on the way down. He came home on crutches with bandages from knee to crotch. Years later, when House learned about femoral arteries and blood loss and fluid volume and first aid, he imagined his father lying on soggy ground, his hand holding the blood in, panting with shock and pain and fear. That was probably the first and last time he felt empathy for his father. Imagining him alone and in pain.
It ended as well as it could have. He might have died.
Now. His father stares openly at him. House lets his gaze fall down to his father's hands, imagining them slick with blood and grime.
House doesn't remember what he said first. Maybe he didn't thank his dad for stopping. Maybe he sounded petulant or crabby.
He remembers that when his dad said "You looked pretty wet out there, son," he was so angry his throat felt tight and constricted. Smug bastard.
Then. "Well," House said, "maybe if you cared you'd have waited for me instead of hauling ass." Not that he cared. His father left because he wanted to avoid conflict, because he didn't want to talk, because it was easier not to push, to go on disliking his son. "I think that's pretty chickenshit," House said, all the while staring at the side of his dad's head, the square tense line of his jaw. The swearword was easy to say. It slid out of his mouth like spitting.
The last words were barely out of his mouth before his dad's hand left the steering wheel. Half a second later, an ear-ringing backhand to the side of his head. Rainwater sprayed from his father's lips as he yelled something like get out!
Then he was on the sidewalk again, an odd remote hurt in his chest, the last five minutes already invested with the murky quality of a dream. All except for the slap. Which felt. It felt.
Now. It felt real enough. It stung, it still stings.
The silence inside the car is complete. They're not moving, and now there's no rain falling onto the roof. The lighting is harsh, almost fluorescent, but the air is hot and dry. It has an almost mouldy smell to it. Like a museum. House has a momentary flash of dread, as if his disconnection from reality has set him loose from time as well. As if winter is already here to replace the first days of summer, even this natural order disrupted. Abandoned. The wheels stop turning, and meanwhile his throat tightens with dread. What he felt when he looked at Cuddy in her office and saw the confusion on her face and knew.
"You hit me. What, you're gonna say you're sorry?" House wants to clear his throat.
Then. Clawing at the door handle, stumbling out onto the shoulder of the road before the car stopped rolling. He came home late to spare his dad the satisfaction of seeing him ice the numb-hot patch on his cheek.
"It wasn't always like that." Fine lines appear at the corner of his father's eyes.
A bright greenish summery light shines through the windshield. House can see father rough-housing (rough House, haha) with a small towheaded boy on Kodachrome green grass in front of a square tract home. He realises it's him, at four or five. They're both laughing. His father is wearing chinos, and he's wearing little overalls with grass stains at the knees. A high-pitched laugh rolls through the car, bubbly like that of a little kid. House feels the hair stand up on the back of his neck.
"That's one for the family album." He can see through the windscreen again. To the darkness outside, to his hollow-eyed reflection in the glass.
There's a creak of leather beside him as his father moves slightly. "You're scared," he says.
House nods. Swallows. More scared than he's been for a long, long time. Of course there was the fear when he got shot, and when he stuck the knife in the socket. But this trumps all of them. He can hear it roaring behind everything. The fear in Wilson's voice. The fear in Cuddy's eyes.
"You didn't need to come here to tell me I'm scared, Dad. I knew that already."
His leg is starting to hurt again. He fidgets. Puts his fingers against the warm leather of the bench seat.
"It was always like this. You felt trapped at home, in med school." Like crawling out of his own skin. In his office with Amber, like a rat in a cage.
I can't..., he thinks. I can't. I can't.
"You can't think."
He hears stiff clothing rustle. House turns his head to see his father staring at him. His voice is soft.
"You didn't really believe it, did you? It was a lie. You knew it wasn't true when you stopped to think." But he didn't stop to think until he was in Cuddy's office, his back to the wall and his head swimming. Ears ringing with it. His balls shrinking with dread.
House stares at the darkness outside the windows, clear and dark, like ink in water.
He feels like crying.
…
"What did he say?" Amber sits on the floor with her back against the wall.
"You already know." House thinks of detox. The unrelenting nausea. The sweat, the confusion. It didn't seem any less real.
"Yeah, but you want to mull it over. That's why I'm here."
House stands up and goes to the door of the room. He doesn't know what time it is. There's a clock out in the hall.
"He said I knew it was a lie."
Amber speaks woodenly. "It's the story you made up about who you are."
House is fucking sick of hearing her say that. He pauses at the door. Amber raises her voice.
"He didn't say what you wanted to hear, either." You did the right thing, son.
"It wouldn't matter," House said. "That wasn't my dad."
House doesn't go outside to see what time it is. But soon it's dinner time, and he eats something. The pale guy from the room next door sobs quietly into his mashed potatoes until one of the aides takes him back to his room. Amber sits across from him. "I know how he feels," she says. "Food totally sucks."
House stares hard at his plate. He tries to concentrate on what he's eating. He tries to will Amber away. She knows what he's thinking.
"Don't do it," Amber says. "Who'd want to give this up?"
While he's trying to sleep, Amber hums her way through every song from Tommy. They check on him every half hour.
…
There's a payphone in the lobby. They give House a few quarters, and he stares stupidly at them until a guy with dingy dreadlocks says, "If you don't want those, I'll give you five cigarettes for them. I want to call my girlfriend again." Cannabis-related psychosis. Hydroponic pot and paranoia. He probably wants to call her up to rave about the monitoring device the government put in his overhead light.
House puts the coins in and dials Wilson's number. It's already ringing before he realises he doesn't remember how long he's been here. It's less than a week. He hasn't been outside. There's no window in his room. He feels disconnected again. He remembers a gravel drive and a grey building. The side of Wilson's face as he drove, his lips thin.
"Hello?" No caller ID. Could be anybody. Maybe he thinks it's his brother. The crazy one.
"It's me." That's all he can say, all he has to say.
Wilson draws in breath, and before he can say something well-thought-out and touching and considerate, House speaks again. He knows Wilson has been going through this conversation in his mind, weighing alternatives and trying to fashion the perfect thing to say. "Tell me about your patients," he says.
"House, I-"
"Wilson, please." Amber is staring straight at him. She doesn't want him to be right.
A sigh, then: "Forty-five year old guy presented with dyspnea and weight loss. He's on our service for malignant melanoma. We put him on chemo after we removed mets in his liver."
Amber bounces on the balls of her feet. "Bronchitis. Put him on Amoxyl."
"Did you-" House takes a deep breath, grips the receiver hard. It feels like he's forcing the words out between his teeth. "You did a d-dimer and a CT scan?"
"Yeah, it was a pulmonary embolism," Wilson says. "We caught it in time."
House guesses he should say something, so he says "People you know keep going insane. You should look into that."
There's a short silence at the other end of the line. A sharp intake of breath. "House, are you-"
House hangs up. For a couple of seconds he imagines Wilson with his mouth still open and the dial tone buzzing. Amber laughs close to his ear.
"You're scared," she says. "You're scared you can't be trusted any more."
…
The sheets on the bed are white. They smell like an industrial laundry. House knows exactly what an industrial laundry smells like, he worked in one for a summer in undergrad. Hot and clean and noisy.
Tonight is the first night he gets to spend with the door closed. He celebrates by beating off into the sheet. Amber watches. He actually thought of fucking her, once. Now he closes his eyes tight and tries to think of Cuddy, think of how he thought his head was going to burst when he pushed her up against his door. All he can see is the empty look in her eyes as he stood in her office. Nothing else happened. Nothing else matters. He comes anyway, maybe thinking of her but maybe thinking of a different Amber, an Amber who ended with a whisky-soaked half-memory, the scream of twisting metal on pavement.
He lies back on his back and waits to fall asleep. The sheets rub against him. The air conditioning buzzes. His cock throbs.
"You won't get out of here," Amber whispers in his ear.
He doesn't whisper back.
He dreams that he's in his apartment. There's a hole in the ceiling like a smile. He stands in his living room in a flurry of books and papers, stirred by the wind that sweeps through the gaping hole into the sky and sets all the doors swinging crazily on their hinges.
In the dream he's afraid that the ceiling will break away fully, because outside there's nothing but the sky, the air so thick it's like liquid. The moon hangs nebulous and huge, yellow like the jaundiced sclera of an eye. Everything else is dark.
House stands rooted to the floor in the living room because that's all he can do, and he watches pieces of plaster and lathe shudder and fall up into the nothing up there.
Then Amber is standing beside him, and he opens his mouth to scream because he isn't sure if he's dreaming or if this is a newer version of his new skewed reality.
He wakes up screaming, with a flashlight shining on his face and Amber beside him, her laugh rising up to the too-low ceiling, still in the same four walls.
Author: joe_pike_junior
Characters: House, John House, House/Wilson friendship, implied House/Cuddy.
Summary: "You're scared," Amber says. "You're scared you can't be trusted any more." Now and then, and the space in between.
Disclaimer: Not mine.
Notes: Huge thanks to those who read this first: blackmare_9, daasgrrl, nomad1328 and pwcorgigirl. Spoilers for Both Sides Now. Rated teen for some swearing, a little bit of violence and a whole lot of general creepiness. The title is from Old Man, by Neil Young. 4,557 words.
When House wakes up, someone else is in his room.
He knows he’ll just be looking at the same four walls, painted in a pukey green. A row of round chips above the door frame where off-white paint shows through like teeth.
The same vinyl-backed chair, the same chest of drawers.
All of his clothes fit on one particle-board shelf. One bag, three shirts, underwear. He wishes he had something to put on the other two shelves - books, maybe - but he doesn’t. He remembers handing over a handful of plastic and metal to Wilson, keys cold against his sweaty palm. The bag seemed too light.
In the reception area a grim-faced nurse upended his bag into the table and searched through everything, checking the pockets and the lining with her lips pursed in a thin line. Amber stood close to him while he was being processed. He could smell her perfume, and the odour of his own acrid sweat.
Something is different.
It isn’t the room that’s changed, it’s something within him. It’s different from when Amber came. Then, he opened his eyes and saw her leaning against his piano, his fingers suddenly damp on the keys (he knew before that, though: he could sense perfume he couldn’t really smell, feel something in the still air of his apartment). Suddenly everything crystallized: the tight sour feeling in his stomach, the unbalanced, out-of-place feeling in his head.
This time it’s different, but it’s the same. There's something like static or a subaudible hum in his head. Something wrong.
The cottage-cheese stucco on the ceiling fills his field of vision. He can smell wet wool and Old Spice. The smell of his father. Hot bitumen and sweat is the smell of summer runs. Sweet ozone and sharp autumn leaves the smell of fall motorcycle rides. This particular smell, sweet and full, conjures only one image. Hi, dad.
He rolls over on to his side.
“Greg,” his dad says. “Wake up.” There's a creak of shoeleather at the foot of the bed. The smell is stronger. Sweat and cologne and shoe polish. It smells like the shuffling, apologetic Marines at his dad's funeral. It smells like the closet full of uniforms House had to go through afterwards. It smells like warm piss and a thick radio belt smacking across his eight-year-old shoulders. It smells like being hoisted aloft, screaming happily into the summer sky of Egypt. All those things.
His dad’s shoes are wet. There’s water and grass flecked over the parade gloss, and already a little puddle of water on the floor. He’s in his uniform, blue dress C, and his hair is wet. It's not the guy from the casket, it's the guy House knew as a teenager. Harder face, a solid black jarhead buzzcut. The forehead less lined, the eyes clearer and harder.
House clears his throat. It feels dry. He puts his feet on the floor, and just for a second he's so dizzy he thinks he's going to pitch forward onto the linoleum. He swallows again, and the feeling goes away. The buzzing is gone, too. His head feels clear again.
“Why are you here?” House looks through the door into the corridor. There's nobody out there.
“Don't you mean to ask me why I'm not still dead?"
House looks up at his father, his not-father, sees that he’s smiling in a benevolent sort of way. Funny, but he can’t really remember him doing that much in real life.
“No,” House says. “I mean, why you? Amber’s prettier.”
Christ. His leg hurts. It’s hard to sleep here. It’s a restless building, and if he wakes up he only has these few yards of air to move about in. He can walk around the ward, of course, but there are people and questions and the same dull, filtered air. It's all the same. All the same air. The same breath. The same -- water drips slowly from the sleeve of his father's coat. Perfect spheres, moving to break on the floor. The same water.
“We’re going somewhere.”
House doesn’t have grounds privileges yet. Those have to be earned, and they’re right up there at the top of the list. First you get to take a shit without somebody watching, and then you get to go outside. The pale-faced guy in the next room comes and goes a lot, tremulously smoking cigarette after cigarette. House doesn't get to go outside.
“Can I choose where?”
“Where do you want to go?” His father's voice is low, almost conspiratorial.
House thinks about that. “Desolation.”
“Desolation Bay? Alaska?” This is fucking crazy, House thinks, as if that will make his father go away. As if he could absorb that sharp piece of self, collected personality, back into himself.
They leave.
…
They’re standing on soft grass. It’s dark. At first all House can make out is soft, heavy rain, falling through the clear white beam cast by an arc lamp. It falls into and out of the cylinder of light, toward the darkness beyond.
Then he smells the rain and the earth and he sees the receding backs of the other players, trudging away from the field, and he realises he’s on the lacrosse field. His father is standing in front of him, and he can feel the rain on his shoulders and his hands and the top of his head. House’s leg hurts, but not the rusty-chainsaw roar it’d be sending out if he was actually standing here in the cold, having just trudged over half an acre of wet grass. So. He isn't actually here. He is, but he isn't. He can feel the wet tape of his crosse in his hands, that's real enough, but just enough of his senses are blunted to tell him that this is a dream.
“I want a refund,” House says. “I thought we were going to Desolation.” He looks at his father, at the rain running through his flattop buzz cut and down his face. He looks like a statue. His face is dark, his eyes unreadable, his mouth a flat line breaking rivulets of water.
House can hear the rain all around them, the soft patter of it. He can feel his t-shirt sticking to his back now, as well. Cold water seeping into his shoes. His father’s uniform is well-soaked, so he can see the droplets of water momentarily shining on the surface before they soak in. Red doesn't show blood. Wet doesn't show water. They've been standing here a long time.
“Sorry,” Dad says, and then he smirks. Yeah, House recognises that one. “Doesn’t work like that.”
“What do you mean?” House says, glancing up and around him, blinking as the droplets hit his face. “I watched a documentary on Alaska the other day.” It was months ago, actually, but he remembers it. Waking up on the couch in the sudden self-awareness and slight nausea of a morphine comedown. One of those IMAX-type things, sweeping views of glaciers and dark water. When he opens his mouth he can taste disuse, the bitterness of loneliness, the dust of his room at Mayfield.
“Yeah,” Dad says, “but you’ve never been there.” His voice has that half-patronising tone that pissed House off royally for at least thirty years. House is momentarily struck with a juvenile compulsion to scream you’re not my dad!, but that fades away as soon as he thinks it. Of course an hallucination with this ass would have to have rules.
Maybe his dad wants his earlobe back.
House looks around, taking more time about it now. They’re in Havelock. He’s just played a game of lacrosse. Something like a semi-final. His body is still 49, but House knows exactly how old he should be. Fifteen. He remembers this.
Three months after this, he told this man, "I know you're not my father." After that were two months of jumping out his bedroom window into the warmth of the summer night. Two months of notes his dad slowly hunt-and-peck typed with two fingers. And now he knows it to be true, what he knew back then. It doesn't feel any different.
His leg kind of hurts, but he doesn’t need the cane. That’s the cool thing about dreams. He tests himself by dropping into a squat, and it’s easy. He puts his hands behind him and sits down on the grass. It should be gross, because it’s cold and rainy and dark, but it’s just cool. He lies back until he’s looking up into the sky, the rain softly hitting his face.
Why doesn't this feel any different? Because he knew it for sure half a lifetime ago, when he saw the pink birthmark through his real father's bald spot. Because the DNA results were just another confirmation of the empty feeling. Because knowing what he already knows never makes it better. Because because -- He closes his eyes and goes on feeling the rain.
His stomach still wants to churn when he smells his dad. There's more there, more than just the memory of shared space.
His father chuckles. He’s still standing at House’s feet, ramrod straight. It’s very silent, just the patter of the rain and his rumbling laugh.
“You know why we’re here, don’t you?” Thirty years ago, some real estate.
House knows, all right, and so of course his dad knows, too. Because he’s not talking to his dad, he’s talking to himself. Wonder what Freud would have to say about that, House thinks. Freud was an asshole.
“It’s that semifinal I asked you to come to.”
His father nods.
Then. It was a weird juvenile thing. He already hated his dad, and already knew he wasn’t really his dad, but he was fifteen and he wanted his dad to come to one damn lacrosse game. Maybe afterwards his dad could offer him one little grudging “Well done, son." Something like that. And House could feel vindicated and just a little bit proud, at the same time. Stupid. He didn't care what anyone else thought and the closest he got to girls were the porno mags he kept between the box spring and the mattress. Friends were sly, jabbing conversations over cheap cans of metallic-tasting beer. But he wanted his dad at the game. Go figure.
When the game was over, he looked where the small group of people stood -- coach, girlfriends, classmates and parents. There were quite a few jarheads, parents mostly. House caught just a glimpse of the back of his father’s head, the square set of his shoulders, as he turned and walked quickly towards the parking lot. The rain was cold but his cheeks were still hot with exertion, and sour anger had bloomed quickly in the pit of his stomach. Being angry at his dad was easy. It only got easier, as the memories of hurt and silence increased.
House trudged off the field with the rest of his teammates. He dressed quickly, pulling some sweatpants on and changing his t-shirt. Another kid asked him if he wanted a ride home, but he said no. It was wet, but he felt like walking. A few stragglers pulled out of the parking lot, and then he set off down the sidewalk, breathing deep the smell of wet road, enjoying the soft ache in his calf muscles. All he could hear was the soft hushing of the rain on the grass, the occasional sibbilant rush of a car going by in the rain. It was a nice walk, a route he often followed on his afternoon runs. He was alone with the soft rain, running down the back of his neck, dripping from his hair into his eyes. Cool rain, hot anger.
Now again. Silence. House realises that he isn’t getting rained on any more. They’re sitting in a car. No engine rumble, the quiet pressing against his ears. Can't even hear his heartbeat.
He notices his heartbeat in dreams sometimes, but only when it's too fast or absent. A memory of something slips into the back of his mind, a crushing pain in his chest, a phrase forming itself on his tongue: (calcium gluconate). Every now and then he dreams that he's trying to say it, but can't.
House looks across. His father's face is dry, but his hair is dark and tousled. Like he dried it off. And on his face is the same frustrating look of unwavering competence that the nurse wore, the second-last thing he saw before he died. The last thing he saw was the acoustical tiles on the ceiling, fuzzy and wavering and black around the edges. He woke up hours later with a dull pain in his chest.
"What did you see, Greg?" Instead of his father, just for a second, he sees what he saw when he woke up: a brief blur of Stacy's tearful, fatigue-worn face. With that comes the unbalanced feeling that something was fundamentally wrong. It took a long time for that feeling to leave him.
"Nothing. I hallucinated."
"This is a hallucination."
That was different. He has control of what happens here. He can talk to Amber and pretend he's talking into his telephone. He can lock the bathroom door and listen to her voice bounce off the tiles. He's too comfortable in this not-world, this artificial reality. He's too comfortable here. That. That wasn't comfortable.
Then. He was half a mile down the road when his dad pulled the car over to the shoulder a few yards in front of him and leaned across to open the passenger door.
Now. “You picked me up,” House says. This memory is particularly clear: the master-sergeant rumble of his dad’s LeBaron, the sharp, gasoline-heavy smell of wet asphalt, the weight his duffel bag made against his leg.
“Yeah. You were pissed.”
His father's tone is what House guesses to be an attempt at sardonic, but he was never very good at that. He was always more gruff than mocking, more cruel than sarcastic. Maybe if the guy had even attempted to have a sense of fucking humour, House would have gotten less pleasure out of hating him. Of course he was pissed. They lost the game. He was fifteen.
“Yeah.” House licks his lips. They're wet.
He’d got so close then to telling his dad he knew. Telling his dad he could stop expecting some sort of filial devotion, because the guy he bumped beer bottles with over the Weber grill was the father of his kid. But he didn't. He held back until he was a little bigger. Until he had no sport to be barred from attending.
A sharp intake of breath. "You had some smart mouth on you."
The words sound rough, but they're supposed to. That's what his dad always said, You've got some smart mouth on you. That was shorthand, a way of abbreviating a whole life of grievances into one neat package: he didn't work hard enough, he didn't make friends because sarcasm came easier than being friendly, he didn't make nice with his dad's work buddies. He wouldn't pitch balls at his dad for hours in the backyard once he discovered that lacrosse was faster and it came easier. He talked back. He got bored with fishing and he'd rather hike than crouch in wet leaves for hours waiting for deer. He talked back. He drove too fast. Half a lifetime later he wasn't grateful enough about waking up missing three-quarters of his vastus lateralis.
Then. His dad bailed out over some overgrown tropical shithole. It was a routine flight gone wrong, a mechanical failure and a prudent ejection, everything by the book except for the stray bullet he caught on the way down. He came home on crutches with bandages from knee to crotch. Years later, when House learned about femoral arteries and blood loss and fluid volume and first aid, he imagined his father lying on soggy ground, his hand holding the blood in, panting with shock and pain and fear. That was probably the first and last time he felt empathy for his father. Imagining him alone and in pain.
It ended as well as it could have. He might have died.
Now. His father stares openly at him. House lets his gaze fall down to his father's hands, imagining them slick with blood and grime.
House doesn't remember what he said first. Maybe he didn't thank his dad for stopping. Maybe he sounded petulant or crabby.
He remembers that when his dad said "You looked pretty wet out there, son," he was so angry his throat felt tight and constricted. Smug bastard.
Then. "Well," House said, "maybe if you cared you'd have waited for me instead of hauling ass." Not that he cared. His father left because he wanted to avoid conflict, because he didn't want to talk, because it was easier not to push, to go on disliking his son. "I think that's pretty chickenshit," House said, all the while staring at the side of his dad's head, the square tense line of his jaw. The swearword was easy to say. It slid out of his mouth like spitting.
The last words were barely out of his mouth before his dad's hand left the steering wheel. Half a second later, an ear-ringing backhand to the side of his head. Rainwater sprayed from his father's lips as he yelled something like get out!
Then he was on the sidewalk again, an odd remote hurt in his chest, the last five minutes already invested with the murky quality of a dream. All except for the slap. Which felt. It felt.
Now. It felt real enough. It stung, it still stings.
The silence inside the car is complete. They're not moving, and now there's no rain falling onto the roof. The lighting is harsh, almost fluorescent, but the air is hot and dry. It has an almost mouldy smell to it. Like a museum. House has a momentary flash of dread, as if his disconnection from reality has set him loose from time as well. As if winter is already here to replace the first days of summer, even this natural order disrupted. Abandoned. The wheels stop turning, and meanwhile his throat tightens with dread. What he felt when he looked at Cuddy in her office and saw the confusion on her face and knew.
"You hit me. What, you're gonna say you're sorry?" House wants to clear his throat.
Then. Clawing at the door handle, stumbling out onto the shoulder of the road before the car stopped rolling. He came home late to spare his dad the satisfaction of seeing him ice the numb-hot patch on his cheek.
"It wasn't always like that." Fine lines appear at the corner of his father's eyes.
A bright greenish summery light shines through the windshield. House can see father rough-housing (rough House, haha) with a small towheaded boy on Kodachrome green grass in front of a square tract home. He realises it's him, at four or five. They're both laughing. His father is wearing chinos, and he's wearing little overalls with grass stains at the knees. A high-pitched laugh rolls through the car, bubbly like that of a little kid. House feels the hair stand up on the back of his neck.
"That's one for the family album." He can see through the windscreen again. To the darkness outside, to his hollow-eyed reflection in the glass.
There's a creak of leather beside him as his father moves slightly. "You're scared," he says.
House nods. Swallows. More scared than he's been for a long, long time. Of course there was the fear when he got shot, and when he stuck the knife in the socket. But this trumps all of them. He can hear it roaring behind everything. The fear in Wilson's voice. The fear in Cuddy's eyes.
"You didn't need to come here to tell me I'm scared, Dad. I knew that already."
His leg is starting to hurt again. He fidgets. Puts his fingers against the warm leather of the bench seat.
"It was always like this. You felt trapped at home, in med school." Like crawling out of his own skin. In his office with Amber, like a rat in a cage.
I can't..., he thinks. I can't. I can't.
"You can't think."
He hears stiff clothing rustle. House turns his head to see his father staring at him. His voice is soft.
"You didn't really believe it, did you? It was a lie. You knew it wasn't true when you stopped to think." But he didn't stop to think until he was in Cuddy's office, his back to the wall and his head swimming. Ears ringing with it. His balls shrinking with dread.
House stares at the darkness outside the windows, clear and dark, like ink in water.
He feels like crying.
…
"What did he say?" Amber sits on the floor with her back against the wall.
"You already know." House thinks of detox. The unrelenting nausea. The sweat, the confusion. It didn't seem any less real.
"Yeah, but you want to mull it over. That's why I'm here."
House stands up and goes to the door of the room. He doesn't know what time it is. There's a clock out in the hall.
"He said I knew it was a lie."
Amber speaks woodenly. "It's the story you made up about who you are."
House is fucking sick of hearing her say that. He pauses at the door. Amber raises her voice.
"He didn't say what you wanted to hear, either." You did the right thing, son.
"It wouldn't matter," House said. "That wasn't my dad."
House doesn't go outside to see what time it is. But soon it's dinner time, and he eats something. The pale guy from the room next door sobs quietly into his mashed potatoes until one of the aides takes him back to his room. Amber sits across from him. "I know how he feels," she says. "Food totally sucks."
House stares hard at his plate. He tries to concentrate on what he's eating. He tries to will Amber away. She knows what he's thinking.
"Don't do it," Amber says. "Who'd want to give this up?"
While he's trying to sleep, Amber hums her way through every song from Tommy. They check on him every half hour.
…
There's a payphone in the lobby. They give House a few quarters, and he stares stupidly at them until a guy with dingy dreadlocks says, "If you don't want those, I'll give you five cigarettes for them. I want to call my girlfriend again." Cannabis-related psychosis. Hydroponic pot and paranoia. He probably wants to call her up to rave about the monitoring device the government put in his overhead light.
House puts the coins in and dials Wilson's number. It's already ringing before he realises he doesn't remember how long he's been here. It's less than a week. He hasn't been outside. There's no window in his room. He feels disconnected again. He remembers a gravel drive and a grey building. The side of Wilson's face as he drove, his lips thin.
"Hello?" No caller ID. Could be anybody. Maybe he thinks it's his brother. The crazy one.
"It's me." That's all he can say, all he has to say.
Wilson draws in breath, and before he can say something well-thought-out and touching and considerate, House speaks again. He knows Wilson has been going through this conversation in his mind, weighing alternatives and trying to fashion the perfect thing to say. "Tell me about your patients," he says.
"House, I-"
"Wilson, please." Amber is staring straight at him. She doesn't want him to be right.
A sigh, then: "Forty-five year old guy presented with dyspnea and weight loss. He's on our service for malignant melanoma. We put him on chemo after we removed mets in his liver."
Amber bounces on the balls of her feet. "Bronchitis. Put him on Amoxyl."
"Did you-" House takes a deep breath, grips the receiver hard. It feels like he's forcing the words out between his teeth. "You did a d-dimer and a CT scan?"
"Yeah, it was a pulmonary embolism," Wilson says. "We caught it in time."
House guesses he should say something, so he says "People you know keep going insane. You should look into that."
There's a short silence at the other end of the line. A sharp intake of breath. "House, are you-"
House hangs up. For a couple of seconds he imagines Wilson with his mouth still open and the dial tone buzzing. Amber laughs close to his ear.
"You're scared," she says. "You're scared you can't be trusted any more."
…
The sheets on the bed are white. They smell like an industrial laundry. House knows exactly what an industrial laundry smells like, he worked in one for a summer in undergrad. Hot and clean and noisy.
Tonight is the first night he gets to spend with the door closed. He celebrates by beating off into the sheet. Amber watches. He actually thought of fucking her, once. Now he closes his eyes tight and tries to think of Cuddy, think of how he thought his head was going to burst when he pushed her up against his door. All he can see is the empty look in her eyes as he stood in her office. Nothing else happened. Nothing else matters. He comes anyway, maybe thinking of her but maybe thinking of a different Amber, an Amber who ended with a whisky-soaked half-memory, the scream of twisting metal on pavement.
He lies back on his back and waits to fall asleep. The sheets rub against him. The air conditioning buzzes. His cock throbs.
"You won't get out of here," Amber whispers in his ear.
He doesn't whisper back.
He dreams that he's in his apartment. There's a hole in the ceiling like a smile. He stands in his living room in a flurry of books and papers, stirred by the wind that sweeps through the gaping hole into the sky and sets all the doors swinging crazily on their hinges.
In the dream he's afraid that the ceiling will break away fully, because outside there's nothing but the sky, the air so thick it's like liquid. The moon hangs nebulous and huge, yellow like the jaundiced sclera of an eye. Everything else is dark.
House stands rooted to the floor in the living room because that's all he can do, and he watches pieces of plaster and lathe shudder and fall up into the nothing up there.
Then Amber is standing beside him, and he opens his mouth to scream because he isn't sure if he's dreaming or if this is a newer version of his new skewed reality.
He wakes up screaming, with a flashlight shining on his face and Amber beside him, her laugh rising up to the too-low ceiling, still in the same four walls.