FIC: An Accidental Memory in Case of Psychosis
Title: An Accidental Memory in Case of Psychosis
Author: nomad1328
Rating: T
Summary: It's not one event that drives him. It's this culmination, this pinnacle, a reminder of what he has always been.
a/n: Last fic for a long while probably. Not that I publish that often. Thanks again to joe_pike_junior for the prompt, for the help.
This is what makes his life work. Do or die. Minimize the pain, maximize the pleasure, ultilize the miraculous ability of a disciplined brain, his capability to connect point A to B to Z. He treasures those moments, the slick gratification that comes with knowing that he's right when none of the others could pull their heads out long enough to see truth. He's the point man, the go-to guy. But he's not perfect and proof lies in the ache of his leg, the temptation to obliterate it all with the whiskey on his top shelf. He settles for pills. Once in his hand, the bottle brings him a tinge of satisfaction. He knows it's a conditioned reaction, that Pavlov would be proud. Or it's just the addiction, the craving, the hint of relief that's so near in his grasp. He's tired though, and the pills will bring that to the forefront, allow him (perhaps) a few hours of rest. He flips the cap on the bottle and throws two into his mouth, swallows. In the last moment, an esophageal glitch, a pill turned sideways, and he chokes, sputtering both pills onto the wooden floor beneath his feet.
It's this stumble, and five, ten, twenty others that he's made over the course of the months. It's this feeling in the back of his head, of loose strings, of cerebral glue melting, peeling away. He forgets things; he imagines things. It's a wet bed after a night he didn't drink himself stupid. Half awake, the sound of the solid thin crunch of ice breaking on thick porcelin, the rush of the tap flowing. He didn't mean it. He doesn't deserve it. On the edge of awake, he feels his head shaking, his lips parting to say something and then he's there and the sheets are drenched with piss and sweat.
It's his nose spontaneously beginning to dribble blood on a rainy afternoon at work. He tastes copper as soon as his patient's parents have been ushered out of the room and barely makes it to his desk before it's dripping to his chin. He holds himself over the trashcan with a useless Kleenex, waiting for Wilson or Cuddy to come and worry over him. Instead, Taub comes, eyes the tissues in the trash and tells him that the parents wouldn't allow the test and were having him transferred.
It feels a little like he's dying, and a little like he's teetering over the edge. There was always a thin line and he's pushing at the limits of it physically, mentally. He forgets where he parked the bike one day and spends an hour circling the parking lot, convinced that it's stolen. Just at the point where his leg hurts enough, Wilson starts the walk to his own car and House begs a ride. As they're driving towards the exit, House sees the bike near the corner of the building. It isn't his normal parking spot, but it's not a place he hasn't parked before. If he notices, Wilson doesn't say anything about it.
He never sleeps through the night, regardless of the dose he measures out for himself. Jumbled memories and irrational flights of guilty reminiscing (if he'd only...) seem to seep through the blankets and pillows, probing his eyelids and ringing in his ears. Sometimes, upon waking in the middle of the night, he sees shadows. They're nearly always women, tall, willowy women accusing him.
They speak in tongues, indescipherable at first. He waits it out a bit sometimes, and the language can be understood as German, then Pashtu, then Chinese. You're wrong, they say. You're wrong. Weeks drag by and they occur more and more as he sleeps less. One night he thinks he hears them in English. The next night, it's Stacy's voice. Two nights later, it's Amber and that's how it stays. He tells himself it's because of the insomnia, but the truth is, he can't tune her out.
She tells him that he's been crazy since birth, damaged by genetic flaw. He's aging, nearing fifty, an addict just about to turn towards the downward spiral. There are no answers and no cures. He has the sealed psychiatric records to prove it. It's easier to not sleep, to poke through something scientific, solid and tangible. Something he can wrap his head around without the need for insinuation or self-righteous undercurrent.
There is no objective truth in psychiatry, only subjective guesses and the incomplete theory of a chaotic experiment. A psychiatrist sees a patient, translates their symptoms into diagnosis, and translates the diagnosis into more symptoms and signs that never existed in the first place. Incidents that never mattered at all emerge as causes. It's not medicine. There's no bacteria or virus that can be wiped clean with a prescription. There's no fever, no bodily reaction to insidious disease. There's no simple cure for mental illness. It's a guessing game, a careful play between brain altering drugs and behavior altering therapy. House knows this.
He looks down at the pills again, shining with saliva, , the white powder rubbing off on his fingers. A swipe on his jeans and they're fine. He tosses them into his mouth, this time with a half swig of the glass of bourban next to the keyboard to ease their passage. He doesn't worry about the mix, doesn't worry about whether he'll be sick tomorrow. He wonders, instead, if he'll sleep later.
Back to the science on the screen, but it's been replaced. It's morphed into something altogether different from everything he's looked at before and it's what he's been trying to avoid for a long time. It's a mystery how it arrived; he didn't click on that page and he thinks he's being spammed or maybe just hacked. Somewhere else, in anyone else's home, it is some misplaced advertisement, some tiny shift over of the mouse under his fingers, some unconscious yearning that he has yet to realize. There's no doubt of it's appearance on his screen, even as he blinks and rubs his eyes. House hits the back button before he has a chance to be angry, but the page doesn't reverse. He keeps hitting it, again and again. The content is unmistakable. He'd recognize it anywhere. His name, his own intangible diagnosis: psychotic disorder, NOS. There's another name there, one he barely remembers. The doctor he saw.
The space in his head can only handle one or the other: 2009 or 1972. The screen narrows, ages, displays the pale green of his mother's kitchen. She can't contain her surprise. She squeezes his fingers the whole way there. He doesn't remember leaving class, but he does recall the hushed silence when he'd unexpectedly returned and it was January instead of October. He didn't have friends to ask him where he'd been. Tommy Fontaine thought he knew everything. What Tommy might have known instead was the fuzzy feeling you get in your head after you've been punched by a kid who hasn't had much to do except talk to doctors and do push-ups. Being punched and getting the wind knocked out of your frontal lobe by anti-psychotics isn't so different. Tommy knew something afterall.
House shakes off the memory and shuts the browser, but it comes back open to the same page, and with it, the memory of the months he spent in the hospital. The antiseptic white of his room, the lumpy twin sized bed and his roommate with the bandages on his wrist that covered unblemished skin.
“What happened to your arm?"
“My arm? It's Him. He gets me there. He gets my blood from there. I have to cover it so he can't see.”
Another browser opened, the same page appears. He remembers the group sessions, someone tapping their foot on the linoleum, a scream in the middle of the night waking him from his own nightmare. Again and again. It's 4am. There's no clear thought and no time and no patience and no reason. His heart is pounding. He remembers more.
"...my heart..."
Stacy shakes her head in disbelief. “You want to what?”
He can't remember now. “You want to what?” That same look. “What?” It's that look his mother gave him when he doesn't make sense. He falls asleep on the couch. He wakes to a warm mug of coffee in his hand, Stacy sitting at his side.
“You said something last night.”
“I was drunk.”
“You had one beer.”
“Forget about it.” She takes his hand, squeezes when he looks away from her. “It's nothing. Nothing. I was tired.”
“Okay. Okay.”
It was the first time. Not the last.
A crackling pop resonates in his head as he comes to again, sitting up in the chair, his arms at his side. His eyes, heavy and sore, witness something inexplicable. What was once a screen in front of him is now a blackened smoking hole, wires sparking, shards of glass crinkling under his shoe. The glass he'd been drinking from is empty on the floor beneath the desk and his left hand is bleeding. His watch says 7 a.m. He isn't sure if he slept.
Behind his desk at work, he thinks of brain chemistry. Violence. Did his father forget those times or did he remember each one with as much clarity? If repression was possible for his father, then maybe it was possible for him too. It's organic, a fit of rage, a short circuiting of impulse control.
The file in front of him makes no sense and he offers no advice to his plebes. Later, he yells at Thirteen and her eyes well up, turn red. But she nods and walks away. Moments later, he lifts the phone, the sweat on his hands making it slippery, and dials the numbers he remembers. Maybe it'll work. It probably won't.
“I need an appointment with Dr. Redding. No. I haven't been seen before.” There's a cancellation tomorrow morning, an hour-long slot made for couch surfing and chats about dead relatives. He takes it. Afterwards, he eyes his team sitting around the table in the conference room, their brains working in over-drive to compensate for his brain's sudden deficiencies. He has no choice, but this is never going to work..