FIC: A Brutal Precedent (7/11)
Title: A Brutal Precedent (7/11)
Author: nomad1328
Rating: T
Pairing: Gen
Warnings: Spoilers for (up to) the end of season 3
Summary: “Acts of kindness may soon be forgotten, but the memory of an offense remains.” When House wakes on the floor of the clinic with no recollection of the preceding events, he begins to not only question the offense, but his own nature.
I keep forgetting this- but thanks for the beta
j_daisy and all others for your comments and reviews!
This is a relatively short section today...
Parts 1-6 can be found here
Coffee is poured and the computer runs hot, fanning the inconceivable small parts that make the world faster, sooner, now. But the search is already dead-ended. Gloria Brown, Princeton. Gloria Brown Trenton. Gloria Brown Gloria Brown Gloria Brown. New Jersey’s own little mystery woman, of which there is little information. But a telephone number. Not in Princeton- South Brunswick. Close enough. Could be her. Give it a ring. One ring, two. The voice is unfamiliar: Nick and Gloria, leave us a message.
Nick. Nicholas. The wonders of the Internet. A wedding announcement. Gloria may be married, but also a divorcee or an unwed mother. Married in 2005. Daniel Mulligan, Jr. was the ring bearer. Little Molly the flower girl. Church wedding- Baptist and big. Praise be to God for Google. Or rather praise be to those California nerds that created it.
Daniel Mulligan, Sr. A much more common name, so many from which to choose. The road less traveled or the path of least resistance? Time is money but slow steady wins the race. e
The apartment in dark. The only light the white from the screen as it glints off his glasses. Couldn’t help it when, last year, he realized he was squinting at Cameron’s newly written article. Better read it this time. The cashier at the drugstore had asked if he needed assistance. Optometrists are better suited for that work. Request denied, cheap glasses purchased despite the pang he’d felt when he’d seen himself in the mirror wearing the damn things. So much like his father. Scares himself sometimes.
Father succumbed at 45 to reading glasses and newspapers. He remembers the day, home from a gig, to find his father in the new thick-rimmed readers at 2AM. Gazing over the newspaper, asking where he’d been. Always the same answer, always the same result. Bullshit. Your fingers are red. Stink like smoke and booze. Guitar is in the trunk of the car. How’d you get in? Got a fake i.d.? Someone you know? Need to study, Greg. School tomorrow and a game the day after. Skip practice again and I swear I’ll call the coach. Greg’s not sick- physically. But he’s already got straight A’s, a scholarship, and he’s the best player the team has on the field. No way he’ll get benched for missing a practice. The boy never learns. The boy never works for anything. He’ll work for this: as Moses, as Arthur, as Odysseus. Suffering is the human condition. That which does not kill, makes one stronger. Lock the doors, have a good night, Greg. Hope it’s not too cold for you out there. By the time he walks to Theresa’s house his father will be looking for him. The grass, at least, is soft. And he wore his heavy jacket out tonight. It’s November. His father stares out the lighted window, the end of the glasses held tight in his lips. Concern. But not enough for the freezing kid out on the back porch.
This train of thought: moot. He shakes his head against it.
Daniel Mulligan. The name- is it familiar? Seems as if. Yes. He thinks. The jacket and the phone numbers on the couch. Copies of admittance. The same name. Daniel Mulligan. Yes. Daniel Mulligan, Jr. and Sr. The Junior with the busted up nose on the playground. Punched, it says. A kid fight. At age 4? Barely out of diapers. The kid’s a boxer. Or a bag. All soft in the middle.
The face is obsolete. He substitutes his own at nine. Dad pulling him across the field, bruising his arm with his grip, warning him time and time again. This better be the last. Last time to skip school. Better be the last time you skip a practical. Better be the last time you talk to a patient like that. Last time you skip clinic. Last time you’re late. Next time you come here, we’ll have you arrested, you addict. Who tells him what to do? He is Prometheus.
Not this kid. Not this Mulligan. Perhaps a coincidence. A bad day for the Mulligan and Brown family.
Interruption in the form of a phone is Wilson. Always Wilson. Just calling to check in. Coming over. Tired of the hotel. Needs a pizza and a beer. On it’s way already, just as House likes it. All grease and meat.
No choices for the rest of the night. There is only pizza. Food for the masses. Made even in the highest reaches of the Himalaya- though not to Italian specifications. And the pleasant buzz of thick German beer. Angelina Jolie on Tomb Raider. But still his mind is racing against the prospect of violence even as gore comes to the screen. His fingers touch the folded papers in his jeans pocket. Violence: self-perpetuated and handed down in the generations of Haus to Huis to House.
The image in his head not the one on the twenty four inch screen. Gloria Brown, with her sprained ankle and her ex-husband two rooms over maybe. Having just recovered his errant son. He imagines it. He says something. She says to fuck him. He says something again. And she resists, badgers, says something back and he loses it. Does he? Does he lose it? Hit her in the face. Her lip cracked, blood on her teeth as he falls forward and cracks his head. She runs. Not likely he knows- for her to cover for him. To leave him there without a report. But this, an extension of his history? Surely, it must not be. He is in control. Always in control. No witnesses. Gloria Brown. Daniel Mulligan. Gloria Brown. Gloria Brown. No help. It’s easier to think of his own violence than that of others