[Dr. Jones, Dr. Jones, Wake Up Now...]
WHO: Daisya Berry, Yu Kanda, Gregory House
WHAT: Kanda needs surgery!
WHERE: House's house... o_O
WHEN: Middle of the night
( The other Exorcist had better be damn careful where exactly under his leg he was putting that arm. )
WHAT: Kanda needs surgery!
WHERE: House's house... o_O
WHEN: Middle of the night
( The other Exorcist had better be damn careful where exactly under his leg he was putting that arm. )
"Here," he said, tossing him his cane as he returned to the table, "hold my metaphor for a minute, would you."
He then turned his attention to the girl. Now that she was lying down, he finally had a really good view of her footwear and thus could immediately cultivate a healthy appreciation for just how…elaborate it was. Great. And there'd probably be objections if he just cut the damn boots off. Well, fine, he could make this work to his advantage too.
Beginning at the topmost fastening, he started to unbuckle and remove the boots. Casting another look at Daisya as he did, he said wickedly, "I'm just gonna undress your girlfriend while you watch. I'm sure you don't mind, right?" All in the service of harvesting information, of course. (Besides, not like you could really tell, what with local trends and all, but she looked like she was about 17, if that: House would only have been interested in dropping sexual innuendos for the shock value of it anyway.)
He dropped one boot unceremoniously to the floor, then the other. And then, delivering a none-too-gentle wake-up call, he leaned in close to the girl and nearly yelled, "Hey! You! Lisa or Linda or whatever your name is! Pay attention! You need to tell me if you feel any discomfort, all right?"
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He rolled his eyes and ran his hands over the girl's bared knees, feeling the contours of the swelling, then bent her legs so that her feet lay flat on the table. He then lifted her injured leg, holding her foot in one hand and, bracing his other palm against her knee, rotated her leg first to one side and then the other, listening for tell-tale clicks. The joint was silent enough--good there.
He placed her foot back on the table again, put one hand on her thigh and the other behind her calf, just below the knee, and pulled. Hmmm. Then, standing beside her, he bent her leg up at the thigh, held her ankle, rotated her knee out, and pushed it down while turning her ankle slightly in. Less than ideal, but always a possible false positive. Finally, he set both her feet back on the table and sat on them (his leg complained slightly; this was usually the kind of thing he'd make one of his lackeys do, but then how often did any of them really have to diagnose torn ligaments--might as well go to sleep right now). Grasping her leg just below the knee, he pushed slightly forward, and then, shifting his grasp, slightly back. Less likely for that one to be false.
Sliding off the table, he moved to where he could get a good look at her eyes, checking to see just how stoned she was. (Regardless, it was more than she should have been, given the dose he'd given her, which made him suspect that a large part of the effect had to be psychosomatic: mild conversion disorder.)
"Made it to the desert tray yet? I'm going to wrap your knee, and you're not going to walk on it until tomorrow," he called down to her deliberately slowly and too loud, over-annunciating his words as though he was talking to a particularly dim child with a speech impediment.
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He also had the feeling that House was suspicious of something, given the glances and such. He twirled the cane absently and looked at the floor.
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Mmmmm.....................fiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiish....
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"And, only because she mentioned it-we do not want to do reconstructive surgery here. Not unless we have no choice. I'd have to take a graft out of her thigh, drill into the bone to repair the damaged ligament, and even with all the toys in that charming old sanitarium that you and Schuldig played Zap the Exorcist in," he gave Daisya a baleful glare, "the facilities here suck.
"So if you'll just try to keep Little Miss Drama Queen off her feet for the next five or six weeks, I'll be a lot happier if I do not have to see her again."
He finished applying the wrap, and snatched his cane back from Daisya's hand. "Carry her into the living room," he said with a jerk of his head. "She can sleep on the couch."
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He lifted Kanda into his arms and sighed, then took her into the living room and knelt next to the couch so he could put her down. He paused a moment, then took off his coat and spread it over her as a blanket.
"Thanks again," he said, standing. "I'll come back for her in the morning."
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Following his patient and her human gurney into the living room with ice packs in hand, House watched the care with which Daisya laid her down and covered her. Silent confirmation: more than just friends. Or at least, that was how he felt about it. Not a huge surprise. But if Sunshine really thought he was getting out of here that easily, then he was definitely in for a surprise of his own.
"Yeah, yeah," House said impatiently, as he packed the ice in place around her knee, "spare me the martyr routine. Kitchen. Go. And take off your shirt."
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When House just stared at him, Daisya sighed and walked into the kitchen. He carefully took his shirt off, wincing a bit as it stuck to the wound in his back. Though small, Daisya was in exceedingly good shape - as well-muscled as his frame would allow, slim and athletic. He sighed a bit and rolled his left shoulder, then peered at House curiously.
"You noticed... but how? My coat's black." He frowned slightly. This fell neatly into the category of things he did not want to talk about, but with House, he wasn't so sure he'd have a choice.
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He collected some antiseptic and swabs, then pulled out a chair and spun it around, motioning for Daisya to have a seat-he could sit in it backwards and give House free access to the wound on his back. Pulling up a second chair for himself, House frowned at the way the skin had been torn: this looked like an exit wound, not a gunshot-style exit wound; it wasn't round enough for that, but it had definitely been made by something on the way out, not on the way in…. "This might sting a bit," he said as he began to wipe away the blood that had gummed the wound.
"So, you went out for a nice moonlit stroll, ran into someone who thought you owed a pound flesh?" he said almost casually. "This isn't a knife wound, not a gunshot-what did this?"
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"The guy who killed me is here," he finally said quietly, staring straight ahead and trying to ignore the cool liquid on his back. "We met up on the docks... and that's how Lenalee got hurt." He paused, then looked at the floor. "His power is ignorin' things around him... reachin' through 'em as though they're not there, touchin' what he wants to. He grabbed hold of my heart."
Spoken that way, it was almost like it had happened to someone else, and it was easier to tell because of that. He hated remembering. "Cross an' the others startled him, I guess, he lost control of his powers... an' he ripped through me when he pulled his hand out. Didn't get it out fast enough."
That had hurt like a bitch, but it was more knowing that the Noah had held his heart. Again. At least this time it hadn't ended as poorly as it had the first time around.
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Leaning back haphazardly in his chair and snatching his stethoscope up from the counter, House listened to the organ in question, then to Daisya's lungs, then felt along his ribs. The man looked tired, a little pale, shaken, but physically there was no trauma besides the wound in his back (which wasn't bleeding freely now, but was a good few inches deep and ragged and needed stitches).
So maybe this Noah guy, whoever he was, really had reached through Daisya's skin and ribs and grabbed hold of something inside of him-the wound was the right size, the right shape; House's own hand would have nearly fit through it, and considering Daisya's small build, that was saying something. But maybe he hadn't-shock and adrenalin could make pain sensations less than perfectly specific. Maybe Daisya didn't know exactly what he'd felt.
"Good news," he said, falsely bright, "your arch nemesis may have held your heart in the palm of his hand, but at least he didn't steal it. I'm thinking the girl on the couch is probably working on that one. You'll be fine. But this needs stitches."
He threaded a suture needle with 3-O silk as he spoke, then lay a steadying hand on Daisya's shoulder before he began. "Slow deep breaths, Sunshine. You're gonna feel a pinch." House's voice was calm, almost casual. He might have been chatting about the weather, except that House never chatted about anything as banal as the weather. "So, guy killed you. What was that like?"
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"He hung me upside down on a lamp post, crucified," Daisya said quietly, staring at the wall again. He didn't know why he was telling House this, or why he was speaking at all. House was cynical, arrogant, rude, and all the things he typically couldn't stand about people... and yet, Daisya trusted him. A lot.
"That was after the torture, of course." Dark blue eyes slid closed. "He wanted information. I wouldn't cough it up. I don't think I need to give you the specifics, but suffice it to say he beat me to within an inch of my life before hangin' me on that pole." He opened his eyes again, not even feeling the pain in his back. "I knew I was fucked, really, and knew there wasn't a damn thing I could do. He asked if I had any last words, I said somethin' smart, an' then I ended up here. Cross told me Kanda and Marie found my body at sunrise, an' my Innocence was destroyed."
That had hurt the most, probably... his best friends finding him that way. And how his Master must have felt, knowing that Daisya had died trying to protect him. He sighed and shifted a bit, then glanced over his shoulder. "That fucking hurts, by the way," he said dryly.
It didn't. He just needed a distraction.
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No, the thing Wilson would never let him hear the end of was what a cruel calculating heartless bastard he was. He wouldn't really have deserved to hear the end of it either, House supposed, because he knew that he should just leave it alone (it was Wilson's voice telling him, even), but as much as House liked Daisya, and as much as he knew that the guy really didn't want to go into details, he simply…couldn't.
"You're almost done." Half a reassurance at best.
"How did he kill you, exactly? Was it like this? He reach inside of you, pull something out? And then, what, everything went black until you woke up here? Don't they promise you people clouds, a pearly gate, guy with a big booming voice?" He pulled a face of mock sympathy and hurt, as though dismayed that Daisya had mentioned seeing nothing of the sort.
It wasn't Daisya's suffering that he was mocking though. It was just that House liked the guy enough to care that he was willing to very literally give his life for a belief system that would happily chew him up, spit him out, and leave him hanging crucified on a lamppost, then expect him to get up and do it again in the morning. It made him angry and bitter, and those were things he was never very good at directing.
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He rested his arms across the back of the chair and rested his chin on them. "It was... unpleasant."
Whatever House was getting at, Daisya fervently hoped he got to it soon.
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"Yeah, well, dying and torture, not really what I'd expect to be a day at the beach," he couldn't keep the sarcasm out of his voice even if he tried. Not even knowing it had to be completely counterproductive, not to mention downright mean. Hell, sometimes House didn't like himself even more than usual.
Taking one more stitch, he tied the suture off, snipping it close to the skin, then smoothed a thin layer of salve over the suture line. Laying a cotton pad to cover the wound, he rolled a long strip of bandage around Daisya's chest and then over his shoulder to hold it in place.
But that was the easy part, the kind of thing House was good at. The human part-the part where he actually said something decent to Daisya, something reassuring or comforting or… Well, that was the kind of thing that House was bad at, and he knew it, and generally he just didn't care.
"You didn't die, all right? You didn't die tonight and you didn't die then-okay, so then you might have come a little closer. But whatever happened to you when you came here, you didn't die, I don't care what Cross says. You're…" Shit, I really do suck at this. He rubbed his forehead.
"There are spare bedrooms upstairs. I don't get up there much, but I went to have a look. You can stay up there." He paused and then added, as if his motives necessitated some clarification, "So I don't have to deal with whatshername if she wakes up in the night."
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