Fic: A Ghost Story (part two)
Title: A Ghost Story (part 2)
Characters: House, Thirteen
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: spoilers for season 4, some swearing.
Summary: House talks about his past. Thirteen thinks about her future.
Part one
When he wakes up he hears soft voices talking in Tamil, too quickly for him to understand. He carefully opens his eyes to blurry whiteness that is painfully bright. He rubs his eyes to clear them, but the whiteness remains. Reaches out to brush it away and encounters soft fabric. Mosquito net, he thinks. What the fuck happened?
A dark shape looms over the bed and the net is pulled back to reveal Stevens, one of the other doctors stationed at the clinic and House's current least favorite.
"How you feelin'?" He reaches for House's wrist.
House is still too disoriented -- she grabbed my wrist -- to give in to his first impulse to slap Steven's hand away. Instead, he asks, "What happened?"
"Couple of the locals found you passed out on the floor this morning." He glances up from his watch, gives House one of his trademark insincere grins. "You had a hell of a fever this morning. It finally broke around noon. Looks like malaria." He shakes his head, makes a ridiculous clucking sound. "You know, House, they give us those pills for a reason."
Smarmy asshole. "Malaria infection is still possible even with prophylaxis." He doesn't know why he's arguing -- it's probably just reflex at this point. He glances around the room. There are two emaciated men laid out on cots a few feet away, two nurses gossiping quietly at the desk, but no female patients in sight.
"What happened to…" He suddenly realizes he doesn't even know her name. "My patient. The one from last night. What happened to her?"
"What patient? You had an easy shift, remember? We were empty last night."
"You're wrong. She was here." He struggles to sit up a little higher in the bed, if only to give Stevens less of an opportunity to loom over him. "Mid-twenties, spoke good English with a British accent. She wasn't local."
Stevens smiles again. That shiny Princeton frat boy smile. God, he wants to punch him.
"What?"
"House, you're confused. She died before you even came on shift. And she was never your patient." He pats House on the leg and stands up. "Look. Just get some rest and I'm sure you'll be back on your feet in no time."
What the fuck happened last night? He rubs his eyes again, hoping for a little clarity, but nothing comes. He's tired and his head hurts too badly. He knows what he saw last night. Did he imagine the whole thing?
"Oh, almost forgot." Stevens searches around in the pocket of his lab coat, retrieves a battered white envelope. "You had this in your hand when they found you. Wouldn't want you to lose it."
"Please, doctor." Her fingers are like ice on his arm. He's so cold. How is he so cold? "For my mother. Please…"
Stevens holds out the letter and House takes it warily. His breathing speeds up and he has to wipe away the sweat that has suddenly formed on his head. It wasn't real. None of it was real. The front of the envelope is blank except for a single word written in Sanskrit. Too short to be a person's name, maybe a village.
He closes his eyes and leans back into the pillows, crumples the envelope in his fist. Maybe when he wakes up this will make sense.
"Please, doctor. Please…"
***
"Did you deliver the letter?" Remy asks.
House stares hard at her for a few seconds, like he's trying to remember exactly who she is. "No," he says finally, and looks away.
"Why not?" It comes out sounding like an accusation, and more than a little desperate. She's surprised at how much she wants to know the answer.
"Because it didn't matter." He looks tired now.
"But… how could you just--" She takes a breath and starts over. "Didn't you want to know?"
"Know what?" he snaps.
"Know if it was true," she whispers.
"It wouldn't have proven anything, except that she did have parents somewhere in India." He rubs a hand over his face. "Everything that I experienced has a rational explanation: I heard the patient talking when she'd been brought in the day before, filed it away in my subconscious. Found the letter she'd left. I was sick -- probably delirious out of my mind -- I hallucinated the whole thing." He shrugs, taps his cane gently on the floor. "There are no ghosts. There's no afterlife. Death is the end."
She's confused now. "Then why bother telling me that story?"
"Just wanted to set the mood," House says. "You know, for the ghost hunting."
Remy eyes him suspiciously. She knows it's never that simple.
***
The stairs up to the second floor are huge and dark, light pouring in from a single stained glass window shifts in inky pools on the wood steps. She pauses at the top. Great, she thinks. If House's intention was just to freak her out, he's done a good job. She takes a cautious step forward and wishes for the hundredth time that she'd brought a flashlight.
The landing leads to a long hallway lined with mirrors on both sides. Large and small, oval and square -- every possible combination of shapes and sizes. Strange.
She stops in front of a huge mirror in an ornate gilded frame. The dim light makes it impossible to tell whether it is gold or silver -- everything up here is in shades of gray. Her reflection bounces back and forth between this mirror and those on the wall behind her - a thousand Remys fading into nothingness. She reaches for her phone and so do her many doubles.
House picks up after two rings. "What?" She can hear him faintly from downstairs, and the echo is unsettling.
"The patient's got, like, five hundred mirrors up here. What if that's the cause of the hallucinations?"
"Hmmm… Can't think of too many studies linking brain problems and bad taste in home décor."
"No. I mean, what if the hallucinations aren't actually hallucinations?" She waves her arm experimentally. A hundred Remys wave back. "What if the patient is just seeing herself in the mirror?"
She can tell by the silence on the other end that House isn't satisfied -- that answer is just too mundane to be interesting.
Remy doesn't give a shit about interesting. "Look. She lives all alone in this big scary house. She sees things at night, gets spooked. It makes sense. It even explains why she thinks the 'ghost' looks like her."
A few more seconds of silence, then House says, "maybe," and hangs up.
Remy shakes her head at the phone, puts it back in her pocket. She walks slowly down the hallway, stopping every so often to examine the knickknacks spread out along a low table. In the mirrors, a pale shape follows along.
After a few minutes, she realizes she doesn't like that explanation either. If you take away the neurological problem, the other symptoms don't make sense. There's got to be a lesion, some kind of abnormality in the brain. Maybe something too small to see on an MRI or CT scan, but still big enough to cause problems. She's sure there's something here. Maybe the mirrors are a clue, just not the one she thinks.
She stops in front of a little hall table. There's an oval mirror with what looks like polished metal instead of glass in the frame. The distorted reflection makes her face look almost obscene: empty holes for eyes in a white mask. The face of a dead woman -- her own evil twin. Doppelganger.
She imagines trying to spell it -- the little umlaut over the 'a'-- and something about picturing the word in her mind makes her remember an article she'd read a few years ago. Suddenly, it all comes rushing back.
She hits House's number on speed-dial and he picks up right away, as if he's been expecting her call. She doesn't give him a chance to say anything. "The lesion we're looking for has to be in the left temporoparietal junction."
"Did you just pull that out of your ass? I mean, it's a nice ass and all, but--"
"No, listen." She takes a breath. "Your stupid story reminded me of a study I read. Some Swedish researchers were using electrical stimulation to try to cure epilepsy or something. Anyway, they were just messing around in the brain, playing mad scientist, and they managed to make a patient hallucinate her own double by zapping the left temporoparietal junction." She pauses, waiting for a response, for House to shoot her down and call her an idiot. When nothing happens, she goes on. "It fits. And, more importantly, it gives us a place to start looking."
There's a pause, and then, "Nice. I like it. Get down here and we'll go test out your crazy idea." He hangs up. The case is suddenly interesting again.
Remy tucks the phone back into her pocket. She glances up at the mirror, catches the smile on her dead, white face. She bites at her bottom lip. One happy moment and then everything comes rushing back over her like a cold wave. Don't, she thinks. Don't you dare feel good about this. Being right is meaningless. She's dying. Nothing else matters.
She stares into the distorted reflection in the mirror, tears pricking her eyes and making everything blur and swell. This is stupid, too. Get a grip, for fuck's sake. She shakes her head and straightens up, wipes her eyes quickly. She leans in to check her reflection in the mirror. And stops, hand frozen at her temple, heart suddenly pounding in her chest.
As the face in the mirror winks and smiles.
***
It takes him four days to reach his destination by train. Four days spent in a cramped, smoky train car, surrounded by screaming babies and laughing children, people talking in five different languages. The train breaks down twice, and he's sure the second time will be the end of the journey but the men bang and beat on the old engine until it sputters to life once again. By the third day, all of his tobacco is gone. He barters away his best pair of shoes for more. The old man he buys it from laughs and calls him naśēṛī.
The house is at the very edge of the village, past fields that are thick with bright green stalks -- a parting gift from the rains of the monsoon season. A young boy driving a long-horned steer stops and stares as he makes his way slowly down the road.
In the shade-dappled courtyard, a woman in a red sari, gray threaded liberally through her black hair, sweeps up leaves that have fallen from a large fig tree. She watches as he approaches, her hands gripping the handle of her broom, and he knows he's come to the right place. When he's about five feet away, he stops and waits. She looks searchingly at him for a moment, then shuts her eyes tightly and clasps her hands to her forehead. The broom falls to the ground. It's always the same, he thinks, they always know.
"I have a letter," he says carefully in Hindi. He's been practicing on the long train ride. "From your daughter."