The Piano, chapter 6
Title: The Piano (6/8)
Author: logastellus
Rating: R (fic as a whole for sex, language, themes)
Disclaimers: I only wish I had some claim to House, Wilson, and the other denizens of PPTH. My eternal adoration to David Shore and the writers who bring these characters to life each week.
Notes: Vaguely spoilerish for Season 2, through "The Mistake." Also, I am not a medical professional. Please don't scold me if the medicine isn't quite right. Many, many thanks to Meldraw and magicsnail!
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Brilliant mid-morning sunlight drenches the lobby as if rewarding Ella for good behavior. She minds clinic duty less than some doctors she knows, but still tries to schedule herself for the earliest possible hours. She finds that people who show up to a walk-in clinic first thing in the morning tend to actually be sick. They’re also generally less cranky than late-afternoon patients who may have been waiting for hours to see a doctor. And she just enjoys the feeling of having the obligation behind her instead of looming ahead of her.
Greg House falls neatly into step beside her as she leaves the clinic. Ella hasn’t really ever spoken to him, but she knows who he is, of course.
She looks at him curiously, and offers a polite greeting. “Dr. House.”
“Dr. Morgen,” he responds, and walks with her to the elevator without another word. His silence discomfits her, and Ella is tempted to take the stairs to avoid him - but that would be both obvious and rude. Not that she cares much about rude, not with this man who has made it an art form, but she has heard enough to understand that it would be a mistake to let him know he’d gotten under her skin. So she lets him press the “Up” button and waits for him to speak, or the elevator to come, or the sky to fall.
The elevator doors open, and he courteously gestures for her to precede him. Ella glances warily at him. Courtesy seems out of character, and she wonders what he wants.
House is, depending on who she talks to, a misunderstood genius, a reckless maniac, a misanthropic bastard, or a scrooge with a heart of gold. Everyone - including James Wilson - seems to agree that he’s an arrogant son of a bitch. Despite that, he’s also James’ closest friend. It’s a relationship she doesn’t quite understand.
She’d asked James about it over lunch a few weeks ago. “House is… different,” he’d said with a bemused smile. “He sees things other people don’t see.” The comment hadn’t exactly been enlightening, but it did feel insightful. It is the only thing anyone has said about who House is, apart from how he interacts with other people.
Stepping in, they stand side by side, carefully pretending to ignore each other in the way that strangers do on elevators. His posture is a study in nonchalance, both hands propped loosely on the head of his cane. He waits until the doors slide shut before speaking.
“So, why does a fourth-year medical student up and murder her husband?”
Ella keeps her face carefully neutral. How the hell had he learned about that? James, it had to be James, damn the man. Her hands tingle. Fight, or flight, whispers the adrenaline pouring into her veins. She’s on a bloody elevator; there’s nowhere to go, and she’s never been the running type anyway.
With deliberate mildness, she offers her standard response to questions about her husband. “He died on duty.” This is technically true, but she assumes House knows that it is also highly misleading.
“So the reports said. But when a cop dies in the line, there’s press, lots of it. This not only didn’t make the front page, it got just 193 words, below the fold, on page 4. Your husband did not die a hero.”
His voice is conversational, as deceptively casual as his slouch.
“If he was a dirty cop and got himself killed doing something illicit, the media would have been all over it. Juicy scandals are so good for ratings. But they let the story drop. So it was something the department wanted to keep quiet, and the press cooperated.”
Ella is beginning to think the elevator has fallen into a pothole in the space-time continuum when she finally feels it slow. She turns at last to look at House, who is watching for her reaction with an intensity she imagines must rival that of a circling hawk watching for prey. She spares a moment of pity for creatures who might find themselves pinned by that gaze; then, letting a faintly sardonic smile touch her lips, she leans in close for a conspiratorial whisper. “James Wilson has a big mouth.”
The doors open and she steps briskly into the hall, unsurprised to hear the syncopated rhythm of his footsteps follow her.
“I don’t need Wilson to connect the dots for me. The information is all right there in the public record.”
She slants an amused look at him. It is really sort of sweet that House has gone out of his way to cover James’ involvement. He needn’t have worried - she has a pretty good guess how that revelation came about, and she isn’t going to jump on James for it. Not hard, anyway.
“Dr. House, I have every faith that you could have connected the dots. I just don’t think you did. I’ve been pretty much a nonentity to you since I got here, and that’s okay; I’ve got no ego tied up in being worth your notice. But I do find your sudden interest in seventeen year old news rather intriguing. I commend your thoroughness, but I have to wonder - why bother looking, unless you knew there was something to look for?”
They have reached her office, and he follows her in.
“I’m a diagnostician. Curiosity is pretty much in the job description.”
She sits behind her desk and leans back, trying not to telegraph the tension knotting her spine. “Sure, but you weren’t curious last week. Something changed. And given the way you hassle James about chasing skirts, I’m betting the ‘something’ is that he got fed up with your fixation on the number of times he’s had lunch with me, and told you flat out that we aren’t sleeping together. But you’re the guy who lives by the maxim that everybody lies, and you know his history, so you didn’t believe him. He had to tell you something more to get you to leave it alone.”
House steps closer and she tries not to feel trapped. “That’s all very fascinating, and also beside the point.”
“What is the point, exactly?”
“Why did you kill your husband?”
“Why do you care?” She meets his icy stare without flinching.
After a long moment, he relaxes minutely, lips twitching in what could charitably have been called a smile. “I’m concerned for Wilson’s personal safety.”
Ella chuckles ruefully and feels her shoulders loosen. “Lucky for James he has a knight-errant to watch out for him. Emphasis on the errant, in your case.” She looks at him consideringly. “I think you’ve already guessed why I did what I did. So you’re here either because you think James has misjudged the safety of his maidenly virtue in my presence, or because I became more interesting to you after you realized that I’m his friend, not his mistress.”
House looks down and taps his cane against the floor. It thumps dully against the carpet. “He’s trying to make his marriage work.”
“And you think I’m a threat to that?”
“I want to make sure you aren’t.”
Her pager beeps, saving her the necessity of a response. She pulls it from the pocket of her lab coat and checks the display - PICU 3. “I have to go.”
House doesn’t move when she stands. He is in her way, and Ella edges carefully around him. At the doorway, she pauses and turns. “Whatever’s wrong with his marriage, I’m not it.”
----------------------------------------
Wilson stands outside Seth’s room in the pediatric intensive care unit, reviewing the latest bloodwork with the resident. The infection, which had stubbornly resisted the original broad-spectrum antibiotics, had played merry hell with Seth’s heart rate and blood pressure, prompting a move to the PICU.
“It’s hard to diagnose, and can be touchy to manage. Don’t screw around with it; call in hematology when you think you’ve got a case.”
As if on cue, Ella materializes at his side. “Excellent advice, Dr. Wilson.” She throws a playful glance at the resident. “Were you taking notes?”
Wilson hands her a binder heavy with meticulously recorded clinical observations and lab results. “You got here fast.”
“I wasn’t with a patient.” There is an edge to her voice, and he wonders what he interrupted.
Ella flips through the chart, comparing the previous sets of labs to the fresh one. “So the staph proved to be a resistant strain.”
He nods. “I switched him to vancomycin before the cultures were even back - the ceftriaxone wasn’t helping - but in the meantime his platelets dropped and renal function started to decline. BUN, creatinine, and potassium are all elevated.”
She looks up at him, green eyes sharp and interested. “And based on that you ran a D-dimer? Rituximab can be hard on the kidneys.”
“Except that we gave him a prophylactic course of rasburicase before the chemo, and he’s been on twice the maintenance hydration volume of IV fluids. His kidneys had been holding up well until the staph. This was the first sign of any renal failure, and in combination with dropping platelets and a gram-positive infection, it was suggestive. The D-dimer came back positive, so I paged you.”
She raises an eyebrow. “Nice catch, James. The damn staph triggered DIC, as if Seth didn’t have enough problems. Thanks for calling me in. It looks like you caught it early, his platelets aren’t too out of whack yet. Is there any indication of hemorrhage?”
“Not yet, just the localized microvascular clotting in his kidneys.”
“Let’s take a look.” Ella heads into the room to examine Seth. Wilson watches from the doorway as she sets the child at ease with silly banter. She slides her clinical questions in smoothly amidst inquiries about his favorite Power Rangers.
It occurs to Wilson that Ella would have been a good mother if things had been different.
For an instant he is seized by the memory of Julie waiting up for him, the traces of wine in her kiss, the sorrowful ache of the sonata. He sucks in a sharp breath, and the faintly antiseptic taste of hospital air brings him back to the present.
Finished with her exam, Ella rejoins him in the corridor and gives him a nod. “Okay. Let’s treat with IV heparin for the DIC, go to three times maintenance fluids to help his kidneys out, and see if he can hold his own. Absent any hemorrhage, I don’t think a platelet transfusion is called for at this point, but I’ll make sure one of my residents is checking in every seven seconds or so. I want to stay ahead of this thing, especially since he’s scheduled for his second dose of chemo in a couple of hours.”
She scrawls her orders on the chart and returns it to him. Wilson initials it and hands the binder off to the resident. “He gets the second round of rituximab at eleven; we’ll be back then to check on him and talk with his mom. Page me or Dr. Morgen if anything changes.”
Leaving the resident to handle the orders, Wilson turns to walk Ella back to the elevators.
“Why,” he muses dryly, “do I think you’ve probably bribed my nurses to time exactly how often the resident does come by to check on Seth?”
“Perhaps because you know from experience that I’m an ornery bitch?”
The line wins a genuine smile from him. “I was going with sneaky, but ornery works too.”
“Speaking of ornery, your friend Greg House cornered me earlier.”
Wilson drops his eyes. “I’m sorry about that.” He’s not even sure which part of the situation he’s apologizing for. For telling House where to find the chink in her armor? For not warning her to expect an ambush? He could have - should have - told her first thing yesterday. Instead he’d waited, and the longer he’d waited the easier it became not to say anything.
Really, he’s sorry for all of it, and settles on something vague enough for her to interpret however she likes. “I should have handled things better.”
He waits for her to ream him out like she would have when he was an intern, listing the things he should have thought of in the dangerously patient voice she saves for residents who’ve done something spectacularly stupid. It doesn’t come.
For a moment, he remembers House, remembers the unexpected gentleness House had offered him two nights ago, instead of the usual edged wit.
Internship was a long time ago. He looks up, and finds no condemnation in her face, not even anger, just the weariness of old and familiar pain.
“Will I be able to avoid this?” Her voice is soft, pitched for his ears alone.
He swallows. “No. House with a puzzle is like … well, there’s really no comparison that would do it justice.”
Her eyes unfocus as she processes this. At length, she meets his gaze again and nods. “Okay then.”
After a pause, she continues. “He’s worried about you, you know. And so am I.”
Wilson doesn’t say anything.
“Are you okay?”
He smiles without humor. “I really don’t know.”
“Is there anything I can do?”
Wilson feels his throat close, unaccountably moved at this simple expression of compassion. He thinks of Greg and the silent piano, of Julie and the empty bedroom she’d meant for a nursery. He wants a hug, to be wrapped in simple human affection, but he knows better than to ask. She shakes hands, she examines patients, but he’s never seen Ella touch another person if she could politely avoid it.
So he shakes his head. “Not really, no.”
Her crow’s feet deepen as she looks at him intently. “Well, if there is anything, you’ve got my cell number. Call me anytime.”
He nods, and turns to go as she pushes the elevator call button. He can feel her eyes on his back all the way down the hall.
Chapter 7
Author: logastellus
Rating: R (fic as a whole for sex, language, themes)
Disclaimers: I only wish I had some claim to House, Wilson, and the other denizens of PPTH. My eternal adoration to David Shore and the writers who bring these characters to life each week.
Notes: Vaguely spoilerish for Season 2, through "The Mistake." Also, I am not a medical professional. Please don't scold me if the medicine isn't quite right. Many, many thanks to Meldraw and magicsnail!
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Brilliant mid-morning sunlight drenches the lobby as if rewarding Ella for good behavior. She minds clinic duty less than some doctors she knows, but still tries to schedule herself for the earliest possible hours. She finds that people who show up to a walk-in clinic first thing in the morning tend to actually be sick. They’re also generally less cranky than late-afternoon patients who may have been waiting for hours to see a doctor. And she just enjoys the feeling of having the obligation behind her instead of looming ahead of her.
Greg House falls neatly into step beside her as she leaves the clinic. Ella hasn’t really ever spoken to him, but she knows who he is, of course.
She looks at him curiously, and offers a polite greeting. “Dr. House.”
“Dr. Morgen,” he responds, and walks with her to the elevator without another word. His silence discomfits her, and Ella is tempted to take the stairs to avoid him - but that would be both obvious and rude. Not that she cares much about rude, not with this man who has made it an art form, but she has heard enough to understand that it would be a mistake to let him know he’d gotten under her skin. So she lets him press the “Up” button and waits for him to speak, or the elevator to come, or the sky to fall.
The elevator doors open, and he courteously gestures for her to precede him. Ella glances warily at him. Courtesy seems out of character, and she wonders what he wants.
House is, depending on who she talks to, a misunderstood genius, a reckless maniac, a misanthropic bastard, or a scrooge with a heart of gold. Everyone - including James Wilson - seems to agree that he’s an arrogant son of a bitch. Despite that, he’s also James’ closest friend. It’s a relationship she doesn’t quite understand.
She’d asked James about it over lunch a few weeks ago. “House is… different,” he’d said with a bemused smile. “He sees things other people don’t see.” The comment hadn’t exactly been enlightening, but it did feel insightful. It is the only thing anyone has said about who House is, apart from how he interacts with other people.
Stepping in, they stand side by side, carefully pretending to ignore each other in the way that strangers do on elevators. His posture is a study in nonchalance, both hands propped loosely on the head of his cane. He waits until the doors slide shut before speaking.
“So, why does a fourth-year medical student up and murder her husband?”
Ella keeps her face carefully neutral. How the hell had he learned about that? James, it had to be James, damn the man. Her hands tingle. Fight, or flight, whispers the adrenaline pouring into her veins. She’s on a bloody elevator; there’s nowhere to go, and she’s never been the running type anyway.
With deliberate mildness, she offers her standard response to questions about her husband. “He died on duty.” This is technically true, but she assumes House knows that it is also highly misleading.
“So the reports said. But when a cop dies in the line, there’s press, lots of it. This not only didn’t make the front page, it got just 193 words, below the fold, on page 4. Your husband did not die a hero.”
His voice is conversational, as deceptively casual as his slouch.
“If he was a dirty cop and got himself killed doing something illicit, the media would have been all over it. Juicy scandals are so good for ratings. But they let the story drop. So it was something the department wanted to keep quiet, and the press cooperated.”
Ella is beginning to think the elevator has fallen into a pothole in the space-time continuum when she finally feels it slow. She turns at last to look at House, who is watching for her reaction with an intensity she imagines must rival that of a circling hawk watching for prey. She spares a moment of pity for creatures who might find themselves pinned by that gaze; then, letting a faintly sardonic smile touch her lips, she leans in close for a conspiratorial whisper. “James Wilson has a big mouth.”
The doors open and she steps briskly into the hall, unsurprised to hear the syncopated rhythm of his footsteps follow her.
“I don’t need Wilson to connect the dots for me. The information is all right there in the public record.”
She slants an amused look at him. It is really sort of sweet that House has gone out of his way to cover James’ involvement. He needn’t have worried - she has a pretty good guess how that revelation came about, and she isn’t going to jump on James for it. Not hard, anyway.
“Dr. House, I have every faith that you could have connected the dots. I just don’t think you did. I’ve been pretty much a nonentity to you since I got here, and that’s okay; I’ve got no ego tied up in being worth your notice. But I do find your sudden interest in seventeen year old news rather intriguing. I commend your thoroughness, but I have to wonder - why bother looking, unless you knew there was something to look for?”
They have reached her office, and he follows her in.
“I’m a diagnostician. Curiosity is pretty much in the job description.”
She sits behind her desk and leans back, trying not to telegraph the tension knotting her spine. “Sure, but you weren’t curious last week. Something changed. And given the way you hassle James about chasing skirts, I’m betting the ‘something’ is that he got fed up with your fixation on the number of times he’s had lunch with me, and told you flat out that we aren’t sleeping together. But you’re the guy who lives by the maxim that everybody lies, and you know his history, so you didn’t believe him. He had to tell you something more to get you to leave it alone.”
House steps closer and she tries not to feel trapped. “That’s all very fascinating, and also beside the point.”
“What is the point, exactly?”
“Why did you kill your husband?”
“Why do you care?” She meets his icy stare without flinching.
After a long moment, he relaxes minutely, lips twitching in what could charitably have been called a smile. “I’m concerned for Wilson’s personal safety.”
Ella chuckles ruefully and feels her shoulders loosen. “Lucky for James he has a knight-errant to watch out for him. Emphasis on the errant, in your case.” She looks at him consideringly. “I think you’ve already guessed why I did what I did. So you’re here either because you think James has misjudged the safety of his maidenly virtue in my presence, or because I became more interesting to you after you realized that I’m his friend, not his mistress.”
House looks down and taps his cane against the floor. It thumps dully against the carpet. “He’s trying to make his marriage work.”
“And you think I’m a threat to that?”
“I want to make sure you aren’t.”
Her pager beeps, saving her the necessity of a response. She pulls it from the pocket of her lab coat and checks the display - PICU 3. “I have to go.”
House doesn’t move when she stands. He is in her way, and Ella edges carefully around him. At the doorway, she pauses and turns. “Whatever’s wrong with his marriage, I’m not it.”
----------------------------------------
Wilson stands outside Seth’s room in the pediatric intensive care unit, reviewing the latest bloodwork with the resident. The infection, which had stubbornly resisted the original broad-spectrum antibiotics, had played merry hell with Seth’s heart rate and blood pressure, prompting a move to the PICU.
“It’s hard to diagnose, and can be touchy to manage. Don’t screw around with it; call in hematology when you think you’ve got a case.”
As if on cue, Ella materializes at his side. “Excellent advice, Dr. Wilson.” She throws a playful glance at the resident. “Were you taking notes?”
Wilson hands her a binder heavy with meticulously recorded clinical observations and lab results. “You got here fast.”
“I wasn’t with a patient.” There is an edge to her voice, and he wonders what he interrupted.
Ella flips through the chart, comparing the previous sets of labs to the fresh one. “So the staph proved to be a resistant strain.”
He nods. “I switched him to vancomycin before the cultures were even back - the ceftriaxone wasn’t helping - but in the meantime his platelets dropped and renal function started to decline. BUN, creatinine, and potassium are all elevated.”
She looks up at him, green eyes sharp and interested. “And based on that you ran a D-dimer? Rituximab can be hard on the kidneys.”
“Except that we gave him a prophylactic course of rasburicase before the chemo, and he’s been on twice the maintenance hydration volume of IV fluids. His kidneys had been holding up well until the staph. This was the first sign of any renal failure, and in combination with dropping platelets and a gram-positive infection, it was suggestive. The D-dimer came back positive, so I paged you.”
She raises an eyebrow. “Nice catch, James. The damn staph triggered DIC, as if Seth didn’t have enough problems. Thanks for calling me in. It looks like you caught it early, his platelets aren’t too out of whack yet. Is there any indication of hemorrhage?”
“Not yet, just the localized microvascular clotting in his kidneys.”
“Let’s take a look.” Ella heads into the room to examine Seth. Wilson watches from the doorway as she sets the child at ease with silly banter. She slides her clinical questions in smoothly amidst inquiries about his favorite Power Rangers.
It occurs to Wilson that Ella would have been a good mother if things had been different.
For an instant he is seized by the memory of Julie waiting up for him, the traces of wine in her kiss, the sorrowful ache of the sonata. He sucks in a sharp breath, and the faintly antiseptic taste of hospital air brings him back to the present.
Finished with her exam, Ella rejoins him in the corridor and gives him a nod. “Okay. Let’s treat with IV heparin for the DIC, go to three times maintenance fluids to help his kidneys out, and see if he can hold his own. Absent any hemorrhage, I don’t think a platelet transfusion is called for at this point, but I’ll make sure one of my residents is checking in every seven seconds or so. I want to stay ahead of this thing, especially since he’s scheduled for his second dose of chemo in a couple of hours.”
She scrawls her orders on the chart and returns it to him. Wilson initials it and hands the binder off to the resident. “He gets the second round of rituximab at eleven; we’ll be back then to check on him and talk with his mom. Page me or Dr. Morgen if anything changes.”
Leaving the resident to handle the orders, Wilson turns to walk Ella back to the elevators.
“Why,” he muses dryly, “do I think you’ve probably bribed my nurses to time exactly how often the resident does come by to check on Seth?”
“Perhaps because you know from experience that I’m an ornery bitch?”
The line wins a genuine smile from him. “I was going with sneaky, but ornery works too.”
“Speaking of ornery, your friend Greg House cornered me earlier.”
Wilson drops his eyes. “I’m sorry about that.” He’s not even sure which part of the situation he’s apologizing for. For telling House where to find the chink in her armor? For not warning her to expect an ambush? He could have - should have - told her first thing yesterday. Instead he’d waited, and the longer he’d waited the easier it became not to say anything.
Really, he’s sorry for all of it, and settles on something vague enough for her to interpret however she likes. “I should have handled things better.”
He waits for her to ream him out like she would have when he was an intern, listing the things he should have thought of in the dangerously patient voice she saves for residents who’ve done something spectacularly stupid. It doesn’t come.
For a moment, he remembers House, remembers the unexpected gentleness House had offered him two nights ago, instead of the usual edged wit.
Internship was a long time ago. He looks up, and finds no condemnation in her face, not even anger, just the weariness of old and familiar pain.
“Will I be able to avoid this?” Her voice is soft, pitched for his ears alone.
He swallows. “No. House with a puzzle is like … well, there’s really no comparison that would do it justice.”
Her eyes unfocus as she processes this. At length, she meets his gaze again and nods. “Okay then.”
After a pause, she continues. “He’s worried about you, you know. And so am I.”
Wilson doesn’t say anything.
“Are you okay?”
He smiles without humor. “I really don’t know.”
“Is there anything I can do?”
Wilson feels his throat close, unaccountably moved at this simple expression of compassion. He thinks of Greg and the silent piano, of Julie and the empty bedroom she’d meant for a nursery. He wants a hug, to be wrapped in simple human affection, but he knows better than to ask. She shakes hands, she examines patients, but he’s never seen Ella touch another person if she could politely avoid it.
So he shakes his head. “Not really, no.”
Her crow’s feet deepen as she looks at him intently. “Well, if there is anything, you’ve got my cell number. Call me anytime.”
He nods, and turns to go as she pushes the elevator call button. He can feel her eyes on his back all the way down the hall.
Chapter 7