PATIENT - Chapter 17: Mystery
Title: Patient
Author: zeppomarx
Characters: House, Wilson, Cuddy, plus the characters created for Priority’s Exigencies and zeppomarx’s A Gentle Knock at the Door.
Summary: House’s minions find a new patient, one who is reluctant to allow House to treat him. Begins three months after the opening scene of A Gentle Knock at the Door. Part of the Contract universe, which includes DIY Sheep’s intense and angsty The Contract, and Priority’s sequel Exigencies.
Thanks: To priority and houserocket7 for encouraging me to writing this side story to A Gentle Knock on the Door, and for their faithful diligence in copy editing my sloppy prose.
Warnings, etc.: Generally safe, but references to torture, rape and major character death that has happened in the past. Some chapters are pretty angsty.
Disclaimers: You know the drill. Don’t own `em, never did, never will. Wish I did.
This Chapter: All Wilson knew was that he felt ill at ease, and he felt an inexplicable desire to find House, to make sure he was okay.
Previous Chapters:
Chapter 16
Chapter 15
Chapter 14
Chapter 13
Chapter 12
Chapter 11
Chapter 10
Chapter 9
Chapter 8
Chapter 7
Chapter 6
Chapter 5
Chapter 4
Chapter 3
Chapter 2
Chapter 1
____________________________________
Chapter 17: Mystery
After sharing a quiet lunch with Evan, Wilson headed down to House’s office, not sure what he expected to find. For a destroyed man who had been completely unable to function less than two years ago, House seemed to be handling these latest developments relatively well, except for his blowup in the men’s room. But the way House looked as Rainie’s story unfolded made Wilson vaguely uneasy. The stress of the past three days would have been enough to rattle anyone. For someone in House’s fragile emotional condition, it had to be that much worse.
When he got to the Diagnostics Department, Wilson found the conference room dark and the door to House’s office locked. Flipping on the conference room light, he tried going through the adjoining door, and found it locked as well.
In the old days, when Wilson and House shared adjoining offices, Wilson would have hopped over the dividing wall between their balconies and approached House’s office from the outside. But now, House was on the more accessible first floor, and he never left the balcony door unlocked-a slightly paranoid (but certainly not unreasonable) reaction to having been attacked repeatedly and without warning over a period of years.
Princeton Plainsboro Teaching Hospital was not an old building, but it was old enough to have developed its own legends, and not just of the murdered Dr. Cameron or the return of the mentally, emotionally and physically tortured Gregory House. At different times, nurses claimed to see the spirits of patients and doctors who had died over the years. Right now, Wilson felt a little like a ghost himself, wandering the halls in search of something, not even quite sure what.
All he knew was that he felt ill at ease, and he felt an inexplicable desire to find House, to make sure he was okay. What had happened to Rainie, on the heels of Foreman’s outburst and House’s arrest in the preceding days, had shaken Wilson more than he was willing to admit.
He wandered over to the ER, hoping to run into Chase, but the staff there said they hadn’t seen him since Rainie was brought in the day before. Leaving the ER, he took a 90-degree turn in the lobby and headed to the Clinic. No luck there, either. “Dr. Foreman’s probably in Neurology,” said one of the nurses. “I haven’t seen Dr. Chase. Oh, you know what, though-Dr. Rajghatta was just here. Try the break room.” But when he opened the door to the Clinic’s staff break room, it was empty.
Giving up on finding House’s team, Wilson continued on his quest to find his friend. It wasn’t like House to leave the building, or even his office, so Wilson decided he must have returned to Rainie’s room on the third floor. On his way back to her room, lost in his own emotions, Wilson suddenly realized he’d gotten off the elevator on the wrong floor. Looking around to get his bearings, he found himself in front of Michael Tritter’s room.
After being confronted so glaringly with the police detective’s true vindictive nature, Wilson felt his heart speed up. Refusing to give himself time think better of it, he shoved the door open and marched in. Startled, a dozing Tritter stared at the furious man invading his room.
“You son of a bitch,” said Wilson through gritted teeth, stalking threateningly toward the patient. He was surprised, when Tritter pulled back into the pillows propping him up, as if afraid that Wilson would hurt him. Huh, thought Wilson. Just like a bully-he can dish it out, but he can’t take it.
“What’s the matter with you?!” asked Tritter, looking genuinely nervous.
“Cut the shit,” said Wilson, coming close enough to tower over Tritter in his bed. “You know perfectly well what’s the matter with me. You sent a bunch of goons to destroy House’s home. They beat up and raped a patient of his who was recuperating there, leaving her to die out in the snow.”
For a second, Tritter was speechless. Somebody was in that place? But then, as he considered it, he decided he didn’t actually care-not if it got that junkie to treat him better. So he shifted his position, sitting up taller in the bed, and leaning toward Wilson, his eyes narrowing and his voice dropping into that low whisper that had so scared the crap out of Wilson eight years earlier.
“So what if I did? No one around here was willing to make that drugged-up best friend of yours find out what’s making me sick. He needed to know who was in charge here.”
He’s actually crazy, thought Wilson for the first time. Certifiable. After a startled pause, he shook his head. Mimicking Tritter’s tone of voice, he leaned over the sick man and whispered, “You don’t care that an innocent woman nearly died because of you?”
Without a pause, his eyes locked onto Wilson’s, Tritter answered, “Not particularly. Not if it gets me what I want.”
Wilson grit his teeth. “Well, guess what, Tritter. You’re not in charge. You’re just… useless.”
With that impotent remark, he turned and left the room. He’s confessed, thought Wilson after the fact, reeling with something that felt remarkably like relief. He had to find Joe Roberts and tell him what Tritter had said… but not until he located House.
As he looked back through the glass window into Tritter’s room, Wilson heard a ghostly voice from the past-Tritter as he had been eight years earlier, when his primary motivation was to destroy House’s career.
“Once an addict, always an addict,” said the voice.
Once a bully, always a bully, thought Wilson in return. He felt immensely satisfied with himself as he got back on the elevator, this time making sure he pushed the right button.
Even more than before, Wilson wanted to find House, if only to tell him he’d been right about Tritter all those years ago… as if House hadn’t already known that. When would he learn that House was usually right? Standing in the elevator, his mind racing and his heart pounding, he went over all the places House might have been. There was no logical reason for it, but he felt his palms begin to sweat with anxiety. Arriving at Rainie’s room, he tried to calm himself down before sliding open the door. Surely House was here. Where else could he have gone?
He put on his cheerful doctor mask as he stepped into the room, not wanting House to see the irrational anxiety on his face. Rainie was asleep in the bed straight ahead of him, and Joe Roberts was nowhere to be seen. When he turned his head to the left, expecting to find House dozing in the other bed, his breath caught. The bed was empty.
* * * *
“You’ve looked everywhere?” Cuddy asked.
Wilson nodded mutely. His anxiety had now turned into bare-knuckled fear, and he couldn’t hide it any more. He couldn’t stop thinking about his unpleasant conversation with Tritter. At this point, he wouldn’t put anything past the man. If, even in his paranoia, Tritter still had the power to have House arrested on trumped-up charges and had sent a gang to wreak havoc at the duplex, there was no reason to believe he hadn’t found some other way to try to control House.
Wilson’s fear was contagious and Cuddy was susceptible, especially after he’d told her about talking to Tritter. She tried to reign in her own nerves, but all she managed to do was disguise them just enough so they didn’t escalate Wilson’s near panic attack.
“Okay,” she said, trying to sound calmer than she felt. “Maybe he went to your office while you were looking for him, and then went back to his office… well, you see where I’m going with this. It’s a big hospital. You might have just missed each other. For all you know, he could be in one of the bathrooms.”
That sounded reasonable enough. Maybe that’s what happened. But if it was that simple, then why did Wilson still feel so apprehensive?
“I guess so,” he replied unwillingly.
“So, let’s approach this logically. I’ll call Security, and have them search floor by floor. We’ll check the security videos. Don’t worry-we’ll find him. Did he drive his car in yesterday? Could he have decided to go home to rest?”
Again, it sounded reasonable, but Wilson had driven House into work the day before. Suddenly it hit Wilson: House had no home to go to. So that was out. It was beyond unlikely that he would have taken a cab back to the duplex. If he had decided to go somewhere else, he would have told Wilson first. He never went off on his own anymore.
The Security team’s search turned up Foreman, Devi and Chase, all of whom were in perfectly reasonably places, but no House. Now House’s team gathered together with Wilson in Cuddy’s office, sitting in the conversation corner where she often wooed donors.
“Where did you see him last?” asked Cuddy, who had managed to focus her nervous anxiety onto the constructive task of organizing the search.
The three answered almost simultaneously.
“In the office,” said Devi.
“Going into his office,” said Chase.
“Diagnostics,” said Foreman.
Well, at least there was a certain consistency about it.
“You’re sure he wasn’t there?” Cuddy asked Wilson.
He started to say something sarcastic about how stupid did she think he was, but then the locked doors suddenly came back to haunt him. “I-I… Fuck!” he said unexpectedly. “The doors were locked and the lights were off, so I assumed…” House’s voice from years ago-the strong and mocking voice he’d once had-sang out in his mind, tossing off something caustic about making assumptions.
What if he had been in his office all along? What if he’d locked himself in, or worse yet, what if someone was in that office with him?
Cuddy must have come to the same conclusion, because almost before Wilson had formulated the idea, Cuddy had jumped up, an alarmed expression in her eyes. By the time he’d stumbled to his feet and noticed House’s staff doing the same, Cuddy was on her cell with Security, ordering someone with a set of master keys to meet her at Diagnostics.
The five of them ran out of Cuddy’s office and headed through the lobby toward Diagnostics, close to the back of the building by the ER entrance.
One of the security guards met them at the door to House’s office, keys in hand. He struggled for a moment, trying to find the right key for the door.
“Just open it, Goddammit,” said a now terrified and exasperated Wilson, having difficulty restraining himself from just grabbing the keys.
Finally, the right key was inserted in the lock… and the door still wouldn’t open. The foot-operated bottom bolt had been shot from the inside. Thinking quickly, Cuddy grabbed the keys and ran through the conference room to try the inside door.
While the security guard slammed all his weight against the door, Wilson heard Cuddy’s faint voice, rising in agitation. “This one’s bolted, too.”
As Cuddy returned to the hallway, Foreman, Chase and Wilson all exchanged glances and nodded in nonverbal agreement. Without saying a word, they added their heft to the security guard’s weight against the door. Suddenly, something cracked loudly, and Wilson saw the wood of the door begin to splinter. For a second, he pictured Rainie, safe in her bed, hearing a similar splintering. Then he shoved the thought away. Once more. And again… and finally, they were through.
The hallway was brightly lit, which made House’s office seem that much darker. Wilson fumbled for the switch, his hand shaking, afraid of what he’d find when the lights came on.
It took a second or two for their eyes to adjust to the brightness of the room, and then there was a collective gasp.
“Oh, dear God, no!” cried Cuddy.
Wilson froze, terrors realized.
Foreman, who had stood in this very room three days ago, petrifying House into a shivering heap on the floor, was the first to get to the body.
“House!” yelled Chase, close on Foreman’s heels, as he dropped to the floor near the desk. “House!” His voice dropped to a whisper. “Oh, God! House!”
For Wilson, time slowed down. The voices around him were muffled, colors blurred and movements decelerated. He was completely unaware of having done so, but he sank to his knees, as if in prayer, and crawled across the floor toward the others, not breathing, not thinking, not feeling.
Foreman’s fingers were on House’s neck, which had a bluish cast to it in this low light. Wilson saw Foreman make eye contact with Chase, who was clearly shaken. In Wilson’s slow motion version of time, they seemed to stare eye to eye for an eternity while he heard his own heart beating loudly and ploddingly in his ears. Foreman’s head moved slightly side to side and then up and down, but Wilson couldn’t comprehend what those subtle communications actually meant.
A loud noise snapped everything back into real time, as he felt rather than saw Devi rush past him, pulling the front end of a gurney behind her.
Through it all-slow motion and fast-House remained frighteningly still, crumpled on the floor.
NEXT: Chapter 18: Once a _______, always a _______...
Author: zeppomarx
Characters: House, Wilson, Cuddy, plus the characters created for Priority’s Exigencies and zeppomarx’s A Gentle Knock at the Door.
Summary: House’s minions find a new patient, one who is reluctant to allow House to treat him. Begins three months after the opening scene of A Gentle Knock at the Door. Part of the Contract universe, which includes DIY Sheep’s intense and angsty The Contract, and Priority’s sequel Exigencies.
Thanks: To priority and houserocket7 for encouraging me to writing this side story to A Gentle Knock on the Door, and for their faithful diligence in copy editing my sloppy prose.
Warnings, etc.: Generally safe, but references to torture, rape and major character death that has happened in the past. Some chapters are pretty angsty.
Disclaimers: You know the drill. Don’t own `em, never did, never will. Wish I did.
This Chapter: All Wilson knew was that he felt ill at ease, and he felt an inexplicable desire to find House, to make sure he was okay.
Previous Chapters:
Chapter 16
Chapter 15
Chapter 14
Chapter 13
Chapter 12
Chapter 11
Chapter 10
Chapter 9
Chapter 8
Chapter 7
Chapter 6
Chapter 5
Chapter 4
Chapter 3
Chapter 2
Chapter 1
____________________________________
Chapter 17: Mystery
After sharing a quiet lunch with Evan, Wilson headed down to House’s office, not sure what he expected to find. For a destroyed man who had been completely unable to function less than two years ago, House seemed to be handling these latest developments relatively well, except for his blowup in the men’s room. But the way House looked as Rainie’s story unfolded made Wilson vaguely uneasy. The stress of the past three days would have been enough to rattle anyone. For someone in House’s fragile emotional condition, it had to be that much worse.
When he got to the Diagnostics Department, Wilson found the conference room dark and the door to House’s office locked. Flipping on the conference room light, he tried going through the adjoining door, and found it locked as well.
In the old days, when Wilson and House shared adjoining offices, Wilson would have hopped over the dividing wall between their balconies and approached House’s office from the outside. But now, House was on the more accessible first floor, and he never left the balcony door unlocked-a slightly paranoid (but certainly not unreasonable) reaction to having been attacked repeatedly and without warning over a period of years.
Princeton Plainsboro Teaching Hospital was not an old building, but it was old enough to have developed its own legends, and not just of the murdered Dr. Cameron or the return of the mentally, emotionally and physically tortured Gregory House. At different times, nurses claimed to see the spirits of patients and doctors who had died over the years. Right now, Wilson felt a little like a ghost himself, wandering the halls in search of something, not even quite sure what.
All he knew was that he felt ill at ease, and he felt an inexplicable desire to find House, to make sure he was okay. What had happened to Rainie, on the heels of Foreman’s outburst and House’s arrest in the preceding days, had shaken Wilson more than he was willing to admit.
He wandered over to the ER, hoping to run into Chase, but the staff there said they hadn’t seen him since Rainie was brought in the day before. Leaving the ER, he took a 90-degree turn in the lobby and headed to the Clinic. No luck there, either. “Dr. Foreman’s probably in Neurology,” said one of the nurses. “I haven’t seen Dr. Chase. Oh, you know what, though-Dr. Rajghatta was just here. Try the break room.” But when he opened the door to the Clinic’s staff break room, it was empty.
Giving up on finding House’s team, Wilson continued on his quest to find his friend. It wasn’t like House to leave the building, or even his office, so Wilson decided he must have returned to Rainie’s room on the third floor. On his way back to her room, lost in his own emotions, Wilson suddenly realized he’d gotten off the elevator on the wrong floor. Looking around to get his bearings, he found himself in front of Michael Tritter’s room.
After being confronted so glaringly with the police detective’s true vindictive nature, Wilson felt his heart speed up. Refusing to give himself time think better of it, he shoved the door open and marched in. Startled, a dozing Tritter stared at the furious man invading his room.
“You son of a bitch,” said Wilson through gritted teeth, stalking threateningly toward the patient. He was surprised, when Tritter pulled back into the pillows propping him up, as if afraid that Wilson would hurt him. Huh, thought Wilson. Just like a bully-he can dish it out, but he can’t take it.
“What’s the matter with you?!” asked Tritter, looking genuinely nervous.
“Cut the shit,” said Wilson, coming close enough to tower over Tritter in his bed. “You know perfectly well what’s the matter with me. You sent a bunch of goons to destroy House’s home. They beat up and raped a patient of his who was recuperating there, leaving her to die out in the snow.”
For a second, Tritter was speechless. Somebody was in that place? But then, as he considered it, he decided he didn’t actually care-not if it got that junkie to treat him better. So he shifted his position, sitting up taller in the bed, and leaning toward Wilson, his eyes narrowing and his voice dropping into that low whisper that had so scared the crap out of Wilson eight years earlier.
“So what if I did? No one around here was willing to make that drugged-up best friend of yours find out what’s making me sick. He needed to know who was in charge here.”
He’s actually crazy, thought Wilson for the first time. Certifiable. After a startled pause, he shook his head. Mimicking Tritter’s tone of voice, he leaned over the sick man and whispered, “You don’t care that an innocent woman nearly died because of you?”
Without a pause, his eyes locked onto Wilson’s, Tritter answered, “Not particularly. Not if it gets me what I want.”
Wilson grit his teeth. “Well, guess what, Tritter. You’re not in charge. You’re just… useless.”
With that impotent remark, he turned and left the room. He’s confessed, thought Wilson after the fact, reeling with something that felt remarkably like relief. He had to find Joe Roberts and tell him what Tritter had said… but not until he located House.
As he looked back through the glass window into Tritter’s room, Wilson heard a ghostly voice from the past-Tritter as he had been eight years earlier, when his primary motivation was to destroy House’s career.
“Once an addict, always an addict,” said the voice.
Once a bully, always a bully, thought Wilson in return. He felt immensely satisfied with himself as he got back on the elevator, this time making sure he pushed the right button.
Even more than before, Wilson wanted to find House, if only to tell him he’d been right about Tritter all those years ago… as if House hadn’t already known that. When would he learn that House was usually right? Standing in the elevator, his mind racing and his heart pounding, he went over all the places House might have been. There was no logical reason for it, but he felt his palms begin to sweat with anxiety. Arriving at Rainie’s room, he tried to calm himself down before sliding open the door. Surely House was here. Where else could he have gone?
He put on his cheerful doctor mask as he stepped into the room, not wanting House to see the irrational anxiety on his face. Rainie was asleep in the bed straight ahead of him, and Joe Roberts was nowhere to be seen. When he turned his head to the left, expecting to find House dozing in the other bed, his breath caught. The bed was empty.
* * * *
“You’ve looked everywhere?” Cuddy asked.
Wilson nodded mutely. His anxiety had now turned into bare-knuckled fear, and he couldn’t hide it any more. He couldn’t stop thinking about his unpleasant conversation with Tritter. At this point, he wouldn’t put anything past the man. If, even in his paranoia, Tritter still had the power to have House arrested on trumped-up charges and had sent a gang to wreak havoc at the duplex, there was no reason to believe he hadn’t found some other way to try to control House.
Wilson’s fear was contagious and Cuddy was susceptible, especially after he’d told her about talking to Tritter. She tried to reign in her own nerves, but all she managed to do was disguise them just enough so they didn’t escalate Wilson’s near panic attack.
“Okay,” she said, trying to sound calmer than she felt. “Maybe he went to your office while you were looking for him, and then went back to his office… well, you see where I’m going with this. It’s a big hospital. You might have just missed each other. For all you know, he could be in one of the bathrooms.”
That sounded reasonable enough. Maybe that’s what happened. But if it was that simple, then why did Wilson still feel so apprehensive?
“I guess so,” he replied unwillingly.
“So, let’s approach this logically. I’ll call Security, and have them search floor by floor. We’ll check the security videos. Don’t worry-we’ll find him. Did he drive his car in yesterday? Could he have decided to go home to rest?”
Again, it sounded reasonable, but Wilson had driven House into work the day before. Suddenly it hit Wilson: House had no home to go to. So that was out. It was beyond unlikely that he would have taken a cab back to the duplex. If he had decided to go somewhere else, he would have told Wilson first. He never went off on his own anymore.
The Security team’s search turned up Foreman, Devi and Chase, all of whom were in perfectly reasonably places, but no House. Now House’s team gathered together with Wilson in Cuddy’s office, sitting in the conversation corner where she often wooed donors.
“Where did you see him last?” asked Cuddy, who had managed to focus her nervous anxiety onto the constructive task of organizing the search.
The three answered almost simultaneously.
“In the office,” said Devi.
“Going into his office,” said Chase.
“Diagnostics,” said Foreman.
Well, at least there was a certain consistency about it.
“You’re sure he wasn’t there?” Cuddy asked Wilson.
He started to say something sarcastic about how stupid did she think he was, but then the locked doors suddenly came back to haunt him. “I-I… Fuck!” he said unexpectedly. “The doors were locked and the lights were off, so I assumed…” House’s voice from years ago-the strong and mocking voice he’d once had-sang out in his mind, tossing off something caustic about making assumptions.
What if he had been in his office all along? What if he’d locked himself in, or worse yet, what if someone was in that office with him?
Cuddy must have come to the same conclusion, because almost before Wilson had formulated the idea, Cuddy had jumped up, an alarmed expression in her eyes. By the time he’d stumbled to his feet and noticed House’s staff doing the same, Cuddy was on her cell with Security, ordering someone with a set of master keys to meet her at Diagnostics.
The five of them ran out of Cuddy’s office and headed through the lobby toward Diagnostics, close to the back of the building by the ER entrance.
One of the security guards met them at the door to House’s office, keys in hand. He struggled for a moment, trying to find the right key for the door.
“Just open it, Goddammit,” said a now terrified and exasperated Wilson, having difficulty restraining himself from just grabbing the keys.
Finally, the right key was inserted in the lock… and the door still wouldn’t open. The foot-operated bottom bolt had been shot from the inside. Thinking quickly, Cuddy grabbed the keys and ran through the conference room to try the inside door.
While the security guard slammed all his weight against the door, Wilson heard Cuddy’s faint voice, rising in agitation. “This one’s bolted, too.”
As Cuddy returned to the hallway, Foreman, Chase and Wilson all exchanged glances and nodded in nonverbal agreement. Without saying a word, they added their heft to the security guard’s weight against the door. Suddenly, something cracked loudly, and Wilson saw the wood of the door begin to splinter. For a second, he pictured Rainie, safe in her bed, hearing a similar splintering. Then he shoved the thought away. Once more. And again… and finally, they were through.
The hallway was brightly lit, which made House’s office seem that much darker. Wilson fumbled for the switch, his hand shaking, afraid of what he’d find when the lights came on.
It took a second or two for their eyes to adjust to the brightness of the room, and then there was a collective gasp.
“Oh, dear God, no!” cried Cuddy.
Wilson froze, terrors realized.
Foreman, who had stood in this very room three days ago, petrifying House into a shivering heap on the floor, was the first to get to the body.
“House!” yelled Chase, close on Foreman’s heels, as he dropped to the floor near the desk. “House!” His voice dropped to a whisper. “Oh, God! House!”
For Wilson, time slowed down. The voices around him were muffled, colors blurred and movements decelerated. He was completely unaware of having done so, but he sank to his knees, as if in prayer, and crawled across the floor toward the others, not breathing, not thinking, not feeling.
Foreman’s fingers were on House’s neck, which had a bluish cast to it in this low light. Wilson saw Foreman make eye contact with Chase, who was clearly shaken. In Wilson’s slow motion version of time, they seemed to stare eye to eye for an eternity while he heard his own heart beating loudly and ploddingly in his ears. Foreman’s head moved slightly side to side and then up and down, but Wilson couldn’t comprehend what those subtle communications actually meant.
A loud noise snapped everything back into real time, as he felt rather than saw Devi rush past him, pulling the front end of a gurney behind her.
Through it all-slow motion and fast-House remained frighteningly still, crumpled on the floor.
NEXT: Chapter 18: Once a _______, always a _______...