FIC: Lead Me Upstairs (8/?)
Title: Lead Me Upstairs (8/?)
Author: nomad1328
Summary: Decisions are made, fates are altered.
Disclaimed- I gots no moneys
Rating: T because I like it. PG-13?
Gracias for the beta
joe_pike_junior
Rest of this series is here
x-posted to housefic, sickhouse, and house stacy... This list is too long.
Somewhere, buried beneath levels of medications and exhaustion and illness, he knows he’s dreaming. But it doesn’t stop it from hurting because he’s climbing, running, sprinting up the massive bleachers of his high school stadium.
The steps are enormous- two feet in depth each- and his quads (particularly his right) are burning burning burning. But his coach says it’s good for him, helps with his speed, and thus his agility. The burning is a good thing. No pain, no gain.
His heart pounds and he can’t quite catch his breath. Two more, the coach calls. Again again. Two becomes four becomes six and eight. Two more- but there is only upstairs and he never gets the chance to go back down. Two more.
Two more, Stacy says. We need more. He looks for her at the top, but the sun is too bright and it blocks his view. He can’t see. And after he’s looked, his vision darkens in response- overreactive pupils and he is blinded. Two more.
Come on, Greg. You’re wimping out. He is still running though. How can he be wimping out? I’m still going coach. I’m still running. I haven’t quit.
You always did take shortcuts. You don’t use what you have, Greg. His dad is taunting him and he sees him cross his arms, turns his back. His mom grabs his father’s arm and reluctantly turns with him. Doesn’t want to cause trouble.
But I’m still running. I’m not taking a shortcut. I swear it. This time. Too many times he's cried 'wolf.'
House, you can’t do this, Wilson says. You’re going to kill someone or you’re going to get fired. Fired? Fired from what? He is running. His coach says it will make him better.
Feel the burn, Greg. You’re getting stronger. You’re weak Greg, weak. You’re an idiot. Incompetent. Jerk. You almost killed yourself. Die? Don’t want to die. Stacy will be pissed. Can’t die. Got patients to deal with. Don’t deal with the patients, you’ll be fired. Mrs. Harris on the fifth floor with her late stage diabetes and her shrivelled up kidneys. Mr. Valdarama next door with his recurrent kidney stones. Last one blocked him up for days, almost killed him. Failure. Failure. Can't cure them all.
Coldness. Like ice, touching the sides of his ribs, and climbing up into his armpits. He is gripped and it takes away the burn of his quads for a moment. Then they mix, and his skin pricks with icy heat and he’s shivering.
He gasps. The endless concrete stairs are replaced by harsh florescence as light filters through the thin slits of his eyes. Something flies in front of his face and then is gone. Back and then gone. There are voices, mingling, indecipherable.
“Greg?”
Stacy grabs his hand, squeezing.
He is so weak that his fingers barely manage to respond to her touch- but they do. It’s the first time in two days he’s been conscious of anything and the only thing he really thinks of is that his fingers must be sausages. Hard to move them and his skin feels stretched.
It's been two days since Stacy watched Cuddy inject Greg with enough barbiturates to make him unaware of her decision. Then the surgery- three hours of torture as she’d waited outside, drinking coffee after coffee and re-walking the steps of a thousand other patients’ loved ones. The carpet was worn and all her clothes smell like antiseptic and gauze bandage out of the wrapper.
And then this- this fever. The nurses have just shoved two more ice packs around him, hoping to cool him off and Stacy can’t help but know that Greg is miserable despite all the drugs and the half consciousness.
His lips, cracked and dry, open and then close. She takes the opportunity to rub them with a piece of ice and he seems to calm from her touch. His formerly rigid muscles begin to unclench.
“That’s it. Relax. You’re going to feel better soon.” He grips her hand with a weak squeeze and then he is gone again.
A comfortable cottony cloud envelopes him when he comes up again. He hears voices, but they don’t speak his language and, moreover, they just don’t matter because he feels so good, so so comfortable and lethargic. There is no up and no down- only comfort and the mysterious and unfamiliar feeling of being without pain. Briefly, he wonders why that is such a strange thing, but then he begins to think about more pressing issues- like the feeling that his shoulders and his neck don’t quick align right and his arms are free-floating in a vacuum. It feels funny and his mouth, although he doesn’t know it, turns up at the end in a half smile.
The voices come a little nearer to him now, getting a little louder. They’re stretched and faint, but he thinks he hears his name: “Dr. House?” Doctor schmocter. Doctor schmuck. “… Hear me?” He hears, but the part of his brain that translates the sound waves to the language comprehension center is instead focused on the sound of waves breaking on a shore somewhere in his temporal lobe. The beach sand is pristine and limestone cliffs jut out into the water. The water is orange, a reflection of the sun setting over the horizon. He floats down because he is flying and picks up a conch shell, notes it’s pallid interior lip and the wavy sharp spines on the exterior. The conch slips, cuts his finger. Heaviness replaces the feeling of floating. He flails and falls into the sand.
“Dr. House….”
The conch is on the ground and blood mars the white sand surrounding it. His eyes are on level with the sea and it seems to be moving closer, getting louder. Despite the lethargy in his body, he wills himself to move, to get out of the way less the tide consume and drown him. But as soon as he gets to his knees, he realizes something is not quite right. He can’t bring his right leg up to get to the foot. And his levitating ability seems to have been compromised. When he looks down, he sees that his leg ends in a bloody stump. He gasps, speechless and confused. As he opens his mouth and breathes, he smells a durian nearby- a fruit so pungent that it’s been banned from several Southeast Asian markets despite the locals’ love of it. Someone has cut one open on the beach.
The sea is getting closer and it laps at first his left leg and then the stump of his right. The salt water combines with the blood and it begins to sting. From the depths of his mind, he recalls that salt water is good for wounds- helps infections. So despite the pain, he leans back to allow his legs to stretch out in front of him, allowing the water to cascade over the wound. Blue and red. He tries to lift it away from the sand. He grits his teeth, swallows, lies back because he doesn’t know how much he can take of this. The conch shell, shifted by the waves, thunks down on his chest repetitively.
“Greg!” He is aware of a presence. A woman is standing up the shore, her arms crossed, calling him. He and Stacy are on their non-honeymoon. He remembers now. Vacation. Scuba diving. Relaxing on a beach. He doesn’t like beaches in particular. But she does. And this one’s away from everything and cheap as hell. Then what happened to his leg? He can’t recall, but it is still bleeding into the ocean. Scuba diving. Sharks? Sharks and barracudas. They said they were harmless. Blacktips. But Stacy is just standing there, arms crossed, as if she is angry about something. It isn’t his fault, is it? He should’ve taken her to Paris.
“Wake up.”
The words are clear, concise, and so near to him that he flinches. What do they mean? He is awake. “Wake… Up.”
Wake up. Wake up. But he is comfortable. Not quite. His leg stings. Beginning to ache now. Bone deep and solid again. Wake up. Is there a promise of something better? Stacy is crossing her arms. There is someone behind her, another dark-haired woman. She, too, has her arms crossed. But around her neck hangs a stethoscope and she holds something else in her right hand.
Instead of getting dimmer as the sun goes down, the light suddenly increases ten fold and he is blinded. He blinks furiously, tries to put a hand up to shield his eyes. It is no use. The light comes through and then there is no beach. There is white. White ceiling, white walls, white coats, dark shadows.
He tries to open his mouth to say something- how he rather liked where he had been, if he can’t go back now. Why take him away from there? But it sounds, even to him, more like “mmph,” because his lips are cracked and a little stuck together. His throat is raw and the taste inside his mouth resembles the smell of a trashcan with days old rotting vegetables.
“You with us?” The dark haired woman with the penlight asks. Cuddy. That’s her name. Cuddy. Endocrinologist by trade, Vice Dean by ambition. The boss’s boss. He nods his answer. Stacy puts a few ice chips to his lips and he sucks them, cooling the burn in his throat. “You know where you are?”
He swallows then nods again. It’s not hard to figure out. As he’s still taking in his consciousness, he begins to recall why he’s there. Why it feels like he’s been asleep for days and why his throat burns like something was recently shoved down it. Right. Infarction. Leg. It’s still burning like it was in his dream and he winces and tries to shift. Burning isn’t among the list of sensations he should feel.
Stacy is looking to Cuddy with worried glances and despite his remaining lethargy, it doesn’t get pass House’s perception.
“Are you in any pain?” Cuddy asks him.
“My leg hurts,” he whispers, as if it were unexplainable.
“How bad is it?”
“Feels funny.”
He shifts his head around to watch where Cuddy is looking. There are a multitude of bags hanging from the stand but the one that she’s examining looks suspiciously like Morphine. He’d had Fentanyl before, when his kidneys couldn’t handle the morphine. He shifts, growing uneasier by the moment. How long has it been?
He asks.
Cuddy and Stacy glance at each other, obviously uncomfortable. But the door opening distracts House for a moment. Wilson walks in, two coffee cups in his hand. Wilson was away. Wilson was gone for two weeks. Wilson gives a weak smile when he sees House awake, says something like “Of course you wake up when I’m not here…”
There are too many people now. Too many faces and too many questions springing up in House’s mind. Too much input into a lethargic, drugged mind. He wishes that Stacy would stand closer. She hasn’t touched him except to put the ice chips on his lips. She isn’t holding his hand. She isn’t saying anything at all.
“Something’s wrong,” he says.
Cuddy’s brow furrows and she looks up at the monitors to House’s right. He is sure she sees nothing. He’s stable.
“What is it?” she asks. Wilson hands Stacy a coffee and sips from his own cup. There is something there in the way Wilson is looking at her. Something unspoken.
“In some pain?” Wilson asks, looking back at House.
“He’s on 4 milligrams per hour. I don’t want to push it any further than that right now. We still need to watch…”
“My kidneys survived,” House says, suddenly. Then: “Heart’s okay?”
Cuddy nods. “Yeah. You'll be fine.” But there’s something she’s not saying.
“Then… what’s wrong?”
Cuddy and Wilson both realize that House’s insinuation that something is wrong means that something is wrong with them. They are unintentionally reacting to their interior knowledge of the situation. They know they’ve crippled him. They don’t want to upset him. He’s fragile now. Sick. Hurt. Vulnerable.
House is looking at each of their faces, but Stacy is looking at something interesting in the far corner of the room and she’s having trouble swallowing. She won’t meet his eyes. He squints, rolls his eyes back to the monitors. “Everything’s fine. You’re giving me morphine. I’m not on Heparin, which means the aneurysm and the clot are resolved. I’m not on dialysis, which means my kidneys have recovered. So either it’s been a while or…” His voice is cracking up again.
“You… shouldn’t talk. The OR was a little careless… with the trach,” Wilson stammers.
“What OR?” Anger is beginning to boil in the pit of his stomach.
Stacy turns and walks towards the door, her coffee standing on the table beside the bed, forgotten.
“Oh, God… what did you do?”