James Wilson, D.I.D. CH3
Author: resm
Title: James Wilson, D.I.D.
Pairing: None
Disclaimer: do not own
Summary: AU, set pre House M.D. - in which House and Cuddy are both med students and encounter Wilson in his youth.
Unbeta'd so please forgive me. Hopefully not too OOC
Previous chapters: One and Two :)
For all of his idiosyncrasies and issues, James Wilson led a relatively quiet life. Even his bedroom, where he spent too much of his time, Greg noted, was void of personality - almost pointedly so. For it wasn’t as if he was lacking. The walls were a champagne cream, but in the wrong light looked off-white and almost dirty. No posters, no personal belongings even. A single bulb suspended from the ceiling on a single wire, no shade around it, nothing, and it acted as a centrepiece to the whole room, ignoring the threadbare rug beneath it.
Everything else had been relegated to opposite corners of the room. The desk was along the same wall as the door, to the left corner with the door to the right. A tall wardrobe that Greg had never seen opened stood proudly against the adjacent wall and opposite this was a single bed with dark linen, adjacent to the door.
The window that hung between the head of the bed and the wardrobe, facing the wall with both desk and door, was tailored with a ridiculously shabby-looking pair of tartan curtains that didn’t match anything let alone the simplicity that James was hoping to achieve. It overlooked the street and Greg wasn’t terribly surprised that the room hadn’t been arranged to accommodate the desk under it instead because James wasn’t altogether fond of the street, or the outside in general.
As he mused about his surroundings some seconds longer, about how the old room smelled distinctly of heavy yellow-paged hardbacks that James kept under his bed gathering dust and probably silverfish too, how the street itself was a place James was neither raised in nor stolen from because the family had thought a fresh environment might have been better, how the bedsprings twinged beneath him at every curve and movement he made just sitting there on the tired mattress, he eventually became aware of a nervous swallowing sound.
It wasn’t unusual for them to sit in companionable silence like this, however boring, especially after James had stumbled upon a semi-revelation and then shied away from his findings in abhorred disbelief. Greg didn’t care for feeding into his delusions, but he didn’t think deliberately breaking them would do any good either. Perhaps Mr Wilson coercing him into writing letters to himself was too much. Too soon.
“But Tuesday, Greg,” James shook his head. “Do you… do you want to read this?”
“Not particularly,” Greg said, turning his face away from him and squinting out of the window.
James dropped his hand, the page crinkling up with the act, and his chin descended slowly onto his chest, “I don’t remember you being here last week either,” he admitted, his voice nothing more than a low embarrassed rumble. “I think there’s something wrong with me.”
“You know there’s something wrong with you. You’re just not willing to accept it.”
“You and Lisa were here last week. In this room?” he told him, but it was sounding less and less like a statement and more like a question at the turn of every new syllable. The self-consciousness, the half-acceptance laced with bottomless doubt, the fear of simultaneously knowing and unknowing a whole world was tuned into something that he has been shut out of. All there. All present, these emotions, all vying for dominance within him just like his fragmented personalities.
“She didn’t think it was a good idea visiting today after last week,” Greg answered him. “Read on. Daniel was out in full force last time.”
“He’s dangerous,” James’ voice shook, the notes spilling completely from his grip. Some floated from the desk and slipped about the wooden floorboards, one even papering Greg’s foot, and some didn’t, trapped now, under James’ folded arms as he crashed his head into the nook of his arm for some peace and quiet.
Greg’s chest swelled as he sucked in a deliberate breath to make his sigh all the more satisfying. And when he lynched himself upwards, the bed gave an aggravated kind of squeak at the sudden loss of weight and the floorboards almost shuddered under his steady gait. It was a decrepit old house that seemed to indulge James’ loneliness, and James’ loneliness seemed to indulge it. It was part and parcel after all when a family was financially humbled because of highly expensive psychotherapy treatment - without one factor, the Wilson’s wouldn’t have the other.
“Do you know what’s dangerous, Jimmy?” Greg pretended to give his words careful consideration as he paced about and wore the rug even thinner, discontent to be sitting if James was sprawling, but not discontent enough to physically approach and comfort the boy.
“The fact that you don’t have one single picture of a girl up on your walls to sleaze over and beat off to. Something wrong with you indeed. You’re still at that age when it’s somewhat acceptable, you know.”
“That’s inappropriate,” James pulled his head up from his crossed arms and Greg was satisfied with the obvious flush in his young friend’s cheeks.
“It’s entirely appropriate.”
“Not when you’re your age.”
“Excuse me?” Greg demanded, and he was genuinely incensed. “I’ll have you know I’m only-”
“Twenty-seven,” James reminded him as if he was old enough to take up residence in the Geriatrics ward that doubled up as God’s waiting room with the rest of the pensioners there. “That’s nearly thirty,” he continued. “And you’re already starting to lose your hair at the back.”
Greg couldn’t suppress the laugh that escaped him, impressed with James’ brashness when usually he was faced with a too-reserved worried version of. He stopped pacing and his comeback died on his lips when it hit him, just as it always did, like a tonne of bricks.
“Hello Daniel,” he half-smiled.
The teenager rolled his eyes and pushed up from the desk, “Why are you even here anyway?”
If James was speculatively quiet, Daniel, in practice, most certainly was not. The switch was brought on by high stress, and James was always stressed when he worried over his illness, and to watch the change was almost like being introduced to an evil twin of sorts.
They both experienced heavy bouts of depression, and they both retreated into themselves although James was still somewhat more sociable given his circumstances - his willingness to talk to Greg and Lisa was evidence of this. As far as Greg was aware they both suffered from insomnia too, a common symptom of DID. Though thankfully Daniel didn’t trigger bulimia in James like his psychotherapist and psychologist had initially feared.
DID patients were typically prone to substance abuse as well but Daniel wouldn’t have the chance to exult in such a lifestyle even if he wanted to. His - their - parents had made it near impossible to leave the house alone since the last attack; a fight, it turned out, that Daniel had started. Though it had been poor James whose personality dominated his conscious mind during the beating itself, explaining his disorientation as much as the concussion did when Greg finally found him.
Instead, his means of escapism, and unfortunately so for James, was a tendency to self-harm and residing in a minimalist room such as he was didn’t stop him any other time. Their parents knew this and were forever confiscating things like scissors and razors - he didn’t shave unsupervised - but Daniel was resourceful and Greg and Lisa had realised just how resourceful only two weeks beforehand.
They were as alarmed as James had been when they discovered that his forearms were raked with blood in deliberate lines. His hands had been trembling and his fingernails were still embedded with dried blood when they’d arrived, and he was repeating over and over again in a distressed keen, “I swear it wasn’t me” as if he was afraid he’d get in trouble for it.
They’d all but convinced a desperate Mr Wilson not to secure his son’s wrists behind his back and Mrs Wilson was openly wailing when the compromise was to tranquilise him. Too many of their evenings, Mrs Wilson had admitted, ended that way.
Daniel didn’t need blunt objects, Greg was all too aware now, for he had James at his own disposal.
“I’m being serious. Just get the hell out of here.”
“What are you going to do, kid? Chuck your desk halfway across the room again?” Greg asked levelly, approaching him regardless. “Because in two seconds tops your folks will be in here and-”
“I don’t give a crap what they do. I don’t give a crap about any of it,” Daniel laughed humourlessly and despite himself Greg empathised with this aspect of James’ being. If he woke up suddenly trapped in some God awful bedroom with a bunch of people suffocating him with their goodwill and trying to make his life as regimented as possible, he would feel every bit the caged animal too. If James had little say over what he was allowed to do, Daniel had even less control.
Greg expertly dodged the left hook that Daniel threw without warning, though he had seen enough over the few short months that he’d met him to know that he needed little provocation. They scuffled for a moment over the beaten floor in a frenzied dance for domination until he had Daniel lodged between the closed bedroom door and his arm that he pressed into his chest.
“Then you won’t give a crap,” he threw his words back in his face, “if I resort to using force when you do. I’m not your father. I’m not going to feel guilty about it afterwards.”
“He’s not my father,” Daniel tried to fight him off.
“You’re right. He’s Jimmy’s,” Greg appeased him. “Are you familiar with Jimmy?”
“Get off of me!”
“See, I’ve grown quite fond of young Jimmy. This kid I know. Well, I say kid… he’s about your age. And he’s not too fond of you to be honest.”
“Are you crazy or something? What the hell are you talking about?”
“Maybe I am,” Greg said, pushing against him a final time before disengaging himself completely. “Maybe we all are.”
Daniel was bent forward with his hands on his thighs and began panting as he struggled to retain some degree of regularity and rhythm when breathing. He lifted his head up so that Greg could feel the full weight of his glare but the older man seemed uncaring or, if he was intimidated, he did well to disguise so much as a flinch.
“Tell me,” Greg started, admiring his fingernails casually. “What’s the last thing you remember before trying to bite my head off and having a pop at me?”
Daniel made to scoff but then sobered, as if only taking in his surroundings for the first time in a long time, “I…” he shook his head, trying to shake the cobwebs right out of every cornerstone in his mind. “No. No this isn’t right. I…” he swallowed compulsively and wrung his neck, looking about the room again, his eyes wide with unqualified paranoia and profound confusion. “I wasn’t here. You weren’t here.”
“This is good,” Greg told him calmly. “You and Jimmy are starting to think and freak out as one."
Chapter 4 >>
Title: James Wilson, D.I.D.
Pairing: None
Disclaimer: do not own
Summary: AU, set pre House M.D. - in which House and Cuddy are both med students and encounter Wilson in his youth.
Unbeta'd so please forgive me. Hopefully not too OOC
Previous chapters: One and Two :)
For all of his idiosyncrasies and issues, James Wilson led a relatively quiet life. Even his bedroom, where he spent too much of his time, Greg noted, was void of personality - almost pointedly so. For it wasn’t as if he was lacking. The walls were a champagne cream, but in the wrong light looked off-white and almost dirty. No posters, no personal belongings even. A single bulb suspended from the ceiling on a single wire, no shade around it, nothing, and it acted as a centrepiece to the whole room, ignoring the threadbare rug beneath it.
Everything else had been relegated to opposite corners of the room. The desk was along the same wall as the door, to the left corner with the door to the right. A tall wardrobe that Greg had never seen opened stood proudly against the adjacent wall and opposite this was a single bed with dark linen, adjacent to the door.
The window that hung between the head of the bed and the wardrobe, facing the wall with both desk and door, was tailored with a ridiculously shabby-looking pair of tartan curtains that didn’t match anything let alone the simplicity that James was hoping to achieve. It overlooked the street and Greg wasn’t terribly surprised that the room hadn’t been arranged to accommodate the desk under it instead because James wasn’t altogether fond of the street, or the outside in general.
As he mused about his surroundings some seconds longer, about how the old room smelled distinctly of heavy yellow-paged hardbacks that James kept under his bed gathering dust and probably silverfish too, how the street itself was a place James was neither raised in nor stolen from because the family had thought a fresh environment might have been better, how the bedsprings twinged beneath him at every curve and movement he made just sitting there on the tired mattress, he eventually became aware of a nervous swallowing sound.
It wasn’t unusual for them to sit in companionable silence like this, however boring, especially after James had stumbled upon a semi-revelation and then shied away from his findings in abhorred disbelief. Greg didn’t care for feeding into his delusions, but he didn’t think deliberately breaking them would do any good either. Perhaps Mr Wilson coercing him into writing letters to himself was too much. Too soon.
“But Tuesday, Greg,” James shook his head. “Do you… do you want to read this?”
“Not particularly,” Greg said, turning his face away from him and squinting out of the window.
James dropped his hand, the page crinkling up with the act, and his chin descended slowly onto his chest, “I don’t remember you being here last week either,” he admitted, his voice nothing more than a low embarrassed rumble. “I think there’s something wrong with me.”
“You know there’s something wrong with you. You’re just not willing to accept it.”
“You and Lisa were here last week. In this room?” he told him, but it was sounding less and less like a statement and more like a question at the turn of every new syllable. The self-consciousness, the half-acceptance laced with bottomless doubt, the fear of simultaneously knowing and unknowing a whole world was tuned into something that he has been shut out of. All there. All present, these emotions, all vying for dominance within him just like his fragmented personalities.
“She didn’t think it was a good idea visiting today after last week,” Greg answered him. “Read on. Daniel was out in full force last time.”
“He’s dangerous,” James’ voice shook, the notes spilling completely from his grip. Some floated from the desk and slipped about the wooden floorboards, one even papering Greg’s foot, and some didn’t, trapped now, under James’ folded arms as he crashed his head into the nook of his arm for some peace and quiet.
Greg’s chest swelled as he sucked in a deliberate breath to make his sigh all the more satisfying. And when he lynched himself upwards, the bed gave an aggravated kind of squeak at the sudden loss of weight and the floorboards almost shuddered under his steady gait. It was a decrepit old house that seemed to indulge James’ loneliness, and James’ loneliness seemed to indulge it. It was part and parcel after all when a family was financially humbled because of highly expensive psychotherapy treatment - without one factor, the Wilson’s wouldn’t have the other.
“Do you know what’s dangerous, Jimmy?” Greg pretended to give his words careful consideration as he paced about and wore the rug even thinner, discontent to be sitting if James was sprawling, but not discontent enough to physically approach and comfort the boy.
“The fact that you don’t have one single picture of a girl up on your walls to sleaze over and beat off to. Something wrong with you indeed. You’re still at that age when it’s somewhat acceptable, you know.”
“That’s inappropriate,” James pulled his head up from his crossed arms and Greg was satisfied with the obvious flush in his young friend’s cheeks.
“It’s entirely appropriate.”
“Not when you’re your age.”
“Excuse me?” Greg demanded, and he was genuinely incensed. “I’ll have you know I’m only-”
“Twenty-seven,” James reminded him as if he was old enough to take up residence in the Geriatrics ward that doubled up as God’s waiting room with the rest of the pensioners there. “That’s nearly thirty,” he continued. “And you’re already starting to lose your hair at the back.”
Greg couldn’t suppress the laugh that escaped him, impressed with James’ brashness when usually he was faced with a too-reserved worried version of. He stopped pacing and his comeback died on his lips when it hit him, just as it always did, like a tonne of bricks.
“Hello Daniel,” he half-smiled.
The teenager rolled his eyes and pushed up from the desk, “Why are you even here anyway?”
If James was speculatively quiet, Daniel, in practice, most certainly was not. The switch was brought on by high stress, and James was always stressed when he worried over his illness, and to watch the change was almost like being introduced to an evil twin of sorts.
They both experienced heavy bouts of depression, and they both retreated into themselves although James was still somewhat more sociable given his circumstances - his willingness to talk to Greg and Lisa was evidence of this. As far as Greg was aware they both suffered from insomnia too, a common symptom of DID. Though thankfully Daniel didn’t trigger bulimia in James like his psychotherapist and psychologist had initially feared.
DID patients were typically prone to substance abuse as well but Daniel wouldn’t have the chance to exult in such a lifestyle even if he wanted to. His - their - parents had made it near impossible to leave the house alone since the last attack; a fight, it turned out, that Daniel had started. Though it had been poor James whose personality dominated his conscious mind during the beating itself, explaining his disorientation as much as the concussion did when Greg finally found him.
Instead, his means of escapism, and unfortunately so for James, was a tendency to self-harm and residing in a minimalist room such as he was didn’t stop him any other time. Their parents knew this and were forever confiscating things like scissors and razors - he didn’t shave unsupervised - but Daniel was resourceful and Greg and Lisa had realised just how resourceful only two weeks beforehand.
They were as alarmed as James had been when they discovered that his forearms were raked with blood in deliberate lines. His hands had been trembling and his fingernails were still embedded with dried blood when they’d arrived, and he was repeating over and over again in a distressed keen, “I swear it wasn’t me” as if he was afraid he’d get in trouble for it.
They’d all but convinced a desperate Mr Wilson not to secure his son’s wrists behind his back and Mrs Wilson was openly wailing when the compromise was to tranquilise him. Too many of their evenings, Mrs Wilson had admitted, ended that way.
Daniel didn’t need blunt objects, Greg was all too aware now, for he had James at his own disposal.
“I’m being serious. Just get the hell out of here.”
“What are you going to do, kid? Chuck your desk halfway across the room again?” Greg asked levelly, approaching him regardless. “Because in two seconds tops your folks will be in here and-”
“I don’t give a crap what they do. I don’t give a crap about any of it,” Daniel laughed humourlessly and despite himself Greg empathised with this aspect of James’ being. If he woke up suddenly trapped in some God awful bedroom with a bunch of people suffocating him with their goodwill and trying to make his life as regimented as possible, he would feel every bit the caged animal too. If James had little say over what he was allowed to do, Daniel had even less control.
Greg expertly dodged the left hook that Daniel threw without warning, though he had seen enough over the few short months that he’d met him to know that he needed little provocation. They scuffled for a moment over the beaten floor in a frenzied dance for domination until he had Daniel lodged between the closed bedroom door and his arm that he pressed into his chest.
“Then you won’t give a crap,” he threw his words back in his face, “if I resort to using force when you do. I’m not your father. I’m not going to feel guilty about it afterwards.”
“He’s not my father,” Daniel tried to fight him off.
“You’re right. He’s Jimmy’s,” Greg appeased him. “Are you familiar with Jimmy?”
“Get off of me!”
“See, I’ve grown quite fond of young Jimmy. This kid I know. Well, I say kid… he’s about your age. And he’s not too fond of you to be honest.”
“Are you crazy or something? What the hell are you talking about?”
“Maybe I am,” Greg said, pushing against him a final time before disengaging himself completely. “Maybe we all are.”
Daniel was bent forward with his hands on his thighs and began panting as he struggled to retain some degree of regularity and rhythm when breathing. He lifted his head up so that Greg could feel the full weight of his glare but the older man seemed uncaring or, if he was intimidated, he did well to disguise so much as a flinch.
“Tell me,” Greg started, admiring his fingernails casually. “What’s the last thing you remember before trying to bite my head off and having a pop at me?”
Daniel made to scoff but then sobered, as if only taking in his surroundings for the first time in a long time, “I…” he shook his head, trying to shake the cobwebs right out of every cornerstone in his mind. “No. No this isn’t right. I…” he swallowed compulsively and wrung his neck, looking about the room again, his eyes wide with unqualified paranoia and profound confusion. “I wasn’t here. You weren’t here.”
“This is good,” Greg told him calmly. “You and Jimmy are starting to think and freak out as one."
Chapter 4 >>