Fic: Three Faces of Sam (Supernatural/House Crossover)
Title: Three Faces of Sam
Author: brightly_lit
Fandoms: Supernatural, House
Rating: PG -- no language, but Sam's memories of hell, and House's interpretation of them, range into dark territory
Genre: gen, outsider POV (House's POV of the Winchesters), h/c, House casefic, meta
Characters: House, soulless!Sam, hallucinating!Sam, amnesia!Sam, Dean, Cameron, Foreman, Chase
Word Count: ~9,500
Spoilers: None for House, up through part of 7.01 for Supernatural
Warnings: No on-page violence or torture, but mentions of torture and any/all kinds of abuse
Summary: Sam wakes up with amnesia after Cas takes down his mental wall, so he goes to a local hospital clinic for help where he gets treated by Dr. Gregory House, who gives him a new diagnosis: multiple personality disorder.
"Damnit, if he’d killed another patient ... he always knew one day someone would drop dead just from what came out of his mouth."
Dr. Gregory House went into the clinic room, reading the clinic patient’s chart with great interest. Usually he used his considerable intelligence to figure out a way to get out of clinic duty. Dr. Cuddy had talked him into it using her special combination of charm, wit, and dire threats, and now he was rather glad: the paperwork that requested basic information such as name, address, and age was blank except for a few question marks and the “M” circled where it asked “M/F.”
“Didja have a feel before circling the ‘M’?” House asked the remarkably tall young man sitting innocently on a chair. “We want to be sure. I mean, this is good stuff,” House said, waving the chart at him. “Thorough work. I told Cuddy I didn’t even have to look at you to be able to diagnose you, just based on the information you’ve given here--”
He shifted in his seat, the very picture of an earnest young man anxious to do a good job. House pegged him instantly for the kid who sat at the front of the class, raising his hand every time the teacher asked a question. “Sorry,” he said sincerely. “I’m really sorry. That’s ... actually what I’m here about. I, uh ....” He laughed as if ... embarrassed? “I kinda have ... amnesia.”
House couldn’t entirely suppress his grin as he leaned casually against the counter. “Amnesia. Don’t see that one every day. Well, actually, I do. Big fan of the soap operas.” He nodded seriously at the patient, who didn’t seem to know what to do with the information. “But here ... not so much. So was it your evil twin?”
First, there was a strange flinch, as if House had hit uncomfortably close to the truth. Then the young man looked down, and House read something in his posture that changed things: hopelessness, as if he’d come here for help, doubting he’d get any, and now he was sure he wouldn’t. “You aren’t serious, are you?” House said then. Amnesia? For real?
The young man nodded, plainly none too happy at having to admit it.
House set down the chart and had a look, peering intently at the patient’s head and neck, prodding as he looked for signs of bruising through his copious dark hair. “Is that tender?”
The young man shook his head.
“How long?”
“I think since yesterday.”
“’You think’?”
“I, uh ... I remember waking up on a bench, and running, just running, feeling like there’s somewhere I need to be, and then some stuff happened, and then ... I dunno, I blacked out.”
House couldn’t hide his delight as he wrote “black-outs” and “amnesia” on his chart; this case just kept getting better. “And this ‘stuff’ would involve ...?”
“Uh ... running from the cops?” The patient huffed a disbelieving laugh at himself. “I didn’t know why; I just knew I had to. I thought they were catching up to me, but then I blacked out.”
“Guess you got away.”
“Guess so.”
House’s gaze traveled down to the patient’s bloody knuckles, which he was self-consciously kneading. “Well ... we need to admit you,” House said, knowing the patient wouldn’t like hearing it.
Sure enough, he frowned. “I can’t--”
“If it was just the amnesia, I might be able to release you into the care of your family, if we’re able to find them, but with the black-outs ....”
“Can’t you just ... I dunno ... give me something?”
House feigned suddenly remembering something. “Oh, right! I’m so glad you reminded me. I’ll just write you up a prescription for Amnesia-B-Gone--here, the generic is much cheaper.” He scribbled on a prescription pad, tore off the paper, and tried to hand it to him.
The kid was smart; he didn’t reach for it or look hopeful for even a second like some of these idiots would have. He knew House was teasing him ... and for some odd reason, he didn’t seem surprised or even particularly troubled by that, as if ... as if he was thoroughly accustomed to dealing with someone who was a lot like House on a daily basis. “I can take care of myself; I just ... hoped you could help me somehow. I guess that was stupid. Sorry.” He stood up, grabbing his jacket.
There were stories in this kid. House wished he could justify admitting this patient under his own care--it would guarantee himself an interesting week--but there was no point in admitting him to diagnostics when the patient had already accurately diagnosed himself. Still, if he was here in the hospital, House could come around and glean what amusement could be got from the case ... and what medical learning might also be had. “The thing is, amnesia cases aren’t very interesting,” House told the kid, since he seemed smart enough to actually understand what House was saying; House didn’t even bother talking to most people, except to troll them. “Mostly we just wait until your memory comes back, which, as I said, can be done anywhere. But if you’re having black-outs, that indicates trauma, even if I wasn’t able to find it. You might have a concussion, even bleeding--I could order you an MRI--”
“No, I’ll be fine. I probably couldn’t afford it, anyway. Thanks.” That hopeless demeanor. This kid had really been through something. Somethings, maybe. House watched him head for the door, regretting that he would never get a crack at this case. The kid’s eyes met House’s, and his expression abruptly changed--to one of horror. “No!” he cried in a strangled voice. “No! Get away from me! Stay away from me!” He scrambled away from House so violently that he knocked the rolling bed against the far wall with a bang, then he threw himself against the door, pounding at the glass desperately, screaming for help. He scrabbled at the handle, further bloodying his hands.
House didn’t even have to call somebody; all the screaming and lunging at the door attracted several staff members, who burst into the room and immediately grabbed the patient. Usually even the biggest, most violent patients required only four people to subdue them, but this guy took seven, with House’s underling Dr. Chase (also on clinic duty that morning) straddling his back on the floor to hold him still long enough to administer the sedative ... which had no effect. Chase looked up at House, bewildered.
“Twenty more c.c.’s,” House said. He saw Chase’s hesitation, his doubt--the amount he would be giving the patient was enough to kill--but Chase was a follower, or maybe he just trusted House’s judgment that much, and he did it. The patient went down enough to strap to a gurney, though not enough to put him completely under; he was still muttering and struggling as much as he was able. “Take him to diagnostics,” House instructed the staff, who obeyed instantly. House grinned at the shaken Chase. “... And I just got us a case.”
House wrote “amnesia” in large letters at the top of the write-and-wipe board for the differential diagnosis, and turned expectantly to the doctors who worked under his supervision: Dr. Chase, Dr. Cameron, and Dr. Foreman. “Have you read his chart yet?” House said smugly, tossing it to the nearest doctor. “It’s a good one.” He filled in the symptoms on the board as they read the chart: “black-outs,” he added, along with “violence” and “psychotic episodes.”
“Don’t forget superhuman strength,” Chase added in his annoying Australian accent--annoying mainly because it made the chicks fall for him despite his milquetoast personality and lack of charisma ... although his insanely good looks might also have had something to do with that. “I gave him enough sedative to kill a bear and he still wasn’t completely out.”
House added that to the board, along with “no visible trauma,” and then he turned to stare at Foreman, who was reading the chart. Foreman finally looked up when he became aware of the silence, to find every eye on him. “What?” he said.
“Oh, I dunno,” said House. “Maybe I’m interested in what the neurologist thinks of the case.”
Foreman set down the chart with a shrug. “I don’t know,” he said honestly. “We need more information.”
“Initial impression?”
“Amnesia. With trauma,” Foreman said pointedly. He wasn’t much better at being diplomatic than House, but he did know enough not to say directly to his boss that he must have missed something.
“... And the black-outs?”
“Psychotic episodes, either caused by trauma or maybe he hit his head during one and that caused the amnesia. Frankly, it sounds like cascading cerebral hemmorhage; that could account for everything. We need to get an MRI.”
“That’s what I said!” House declared eagerly. His underlings were not impressed. “Fine, don’t be supportive,” he pouted. Still nothing. “You guys are no fun at all,” he complained. “All right, Chase, since you’re now the expert on his sedation requirements, you’d better be there in case he has another case of the crazies while he’s in there. Foreman, obviously you’re there. I wanna be there.” House looked at Cameron, hoping for some dismay at being left out, but she was good at covering it if she felt it. “Oh, what the hell, let’s all go! Party in the MRI lab! You bring the chips; I’ll bring the booze.”
The patient was distressingly aware again already as they prepped him for his MRI; the sedative had mostly worn off in less than three hours. He was calm again, though, the same smart, observant kid he’d been at first. Now hooked up to an IV and shackled firmly to the gurney, he was a far cry from the young man who just this morning had convincingly insisted he could take care of himself. He seemed bewildered to find himself in this position, as if he essentially never had before, which seemed impossible, given the copious numbers of scars they’d discovered when they changed him into a hospital gown. House paused over one, and smirked, meeting the kid’s eye. “Does dental floss ring a bell?” he said. The kid shook his head blankly. “Whoever stitched you up really knew what they were doing,” was all House said. The patient glanced down at himself in confusion, but then Cameron was instructing him to stay as still as he could and sending him into the MRI machine.
House and Cameron joined Chase and Foreman in the adjacent room, where the readings from the MRI scan displayed on a monitor. Foreman looked bored, as if he already was sure of what he would find. The readings refreshed every second, a new slice of the patient’s brain flashing on the screen, until they were down to the brain stem, and still, no sign of trauma. Now Foreman was paying attention. “But that’s not possible,” he said, clicking on the screen to get different displays, scanning them anxiously.
House, of course, wasn’t surprised. “So no trauma, and no bleeding,” he said. “What DO you see?”
Foreman had a hard time letting go, still searching for trauma, which House didn’t interrupt--if Foreman was looking this hard, he would find it, even if it was almost invisible. He must not have found anything, because he finally gave up and did as House asked. “Uh ... well,” he said, flipping through more slices at different angles. “Well ... look at his pain center.” Foreman seemed disturbed as he pointed at a section in the more primitive part of his brain that glowed a dim red. “It’s ... the whole thing is lit up, but dim, like ... maybe he isn’t even aware he’s in constant pain.”
“Looks like this isn’t going to be just a brain scan after all,” Cameron said.
House nodded. “I want a full-body CT scan, too; it might show something that doesn’t show up on the MRI,” he said, but his attention was caught by Foreman’s expression. “What else?” he prompted him.
“I don’t know,” Foreman said, then he said it again, still flipping through the scans as though he didn’t believe what he was seeing. “I’ve never seen a brain like this before--not ever. It’s ... parts of it are completely dark.” He sat back for a second, contemplating. “It’s ... sometimes a traumatic event can cause amnesia, but only surrounding the traumatic events, and there’s usually physical trauma involved. But that’s all I can think of. He must have been through something so ... so bad ....”
“Maybe his whole life was that traumatic,” Cameron said, subdued. “Looking at his scars ... I could believe it.”
“Maybe he’s better off if we don’t find his family,” said Chase. Cameron looked even sadder, so he spoke brightly then. “So, the dark parts--it’s his memory, right?”
“Not just that. And other parts are so bright ... parts most other people barely use. I’m seeing ... the closest thing I’ve ever seen to this is brain injury, when other parts of the brain are trying to learn how to take over the function of the damaged parts.”
“Let’s see if it really was his evil twin, or if Victor’s feckless step-son put him up to it.” House turned on the microphone. “Okay, Patient X, why don’t you try to tell us your name,” he suggested, knowing the patient was smart enough to know they knew he couldn’t remember, they just wanted to see what his attempt to remember looked like on the MRI. They watched with interest as a new area lit up. “You told me this morning you were trying to get somewhere--where were you going?”
More flares in the new area as he attempted to remember, no response in the memory centers. “I ... don’t know. It just feels like it’s really important.”
“Okay,” said House. “Tell me about this evil twin of yours.”
“What the hell?” Foreman said as another part entirely lit up--one of the previously dark parts.
“I--I don’t think I have a twin,” said the patient over the intercom. “Pretty sure.”
“Well, he’s not faking,” Chase noted.
He definitely wasn’t faking. House realized this was the first time he actually believed this kid had amnesia. It was an uncommon event. Even cases deemed legitimate were usually, in House’s opinion, to some degree willful, the patient unwilling to face some aspect of their lives. Faking--or exaggerating--amnesia gave them another option, an excuse to leave the life they knew behind and start completely fresh. It was a scary diagnosis, fraught with uncertainty, but for some people, it was worth it. If House didn’t have so much contempt for fakers, he might try it himself. He could stand to leave this life behind. Still, the proof that this kid had real, honest-to-god amnesia was right there on the screen, as the part that struggles to remember lit up, and the memory center remained stubbornly dark.
“The MRI tells us you DO have a twin,” House said, watching the screen with interest.
Okay, maybe he shouldn’t have said it. Right? The kid had suffered some kind of traumatic event--traumatic enough to cause amnesia. Another doctor would tread carefully, but House would never be that doctor. “What did you do?!” Chase gasped as parts that were lit up a second before went dark, and vice versa, the patient dead silent in the MRI machine--and suddenly, dead still.
House flipped on the microphone. “You okay in there?” he asked uncertainly. Damnit, if he’d killed another patient ... he always knew one day someone would drop dead just from what came out of his mouth.
“Uh ... yeah. Yeah,” said Patient X, and they saw something else new on the monitor: the creativity part of his brain lighting up. He was lying.
Finally, something predictable, if disappointing. House thought he might have finally met that most elusive of things: a patient who didn’t lie. “Great, glad to hear it. So, tell me about this evil twin,” House could not resist saying again, withstanding Chase and Cameron’s glares of disbelief. Foreman was too fascinated with the readings to be upset, and soon, Chase and Cameron were, too, as they all watched flares ripple across the creativity and observation segments of his brain.
“Look at this,” Chase whispered, and pointed to another, smaller section, usually used for things like math problems: he was calculating, and judging by how bright that section was lit up, calculating hard.
“Uh ... what do you want to know?” the patient said finally, carefully.
“His name, for starters,” House said quickly.
“His name’s Sam,” replied the patient instantly, the creativity section blooming brightly. “Yeah, he’s ... he’s done some pretty bad stuff.”
“Why does he suddenly remember?” Foreman hissed, and House flipped the microphone off.
“He doesn’t; he’s making it up,” Cameron corrected.
“It’s neither,” House corrected them both. “I think ....” Suddenly, House felt like he could read that brain like sheet music. He switched the microphone on again. “He’s the one who took out those cops, right?” he said shrewdly into the microphone as his underlings looked on, baffled.
“Yeah. Really did a number on ’em. I hear,” he said.
“First name ‘Sam,’” said House, writing it down. “Last name?”
More bright flares of creativity and calculation ... and now the memory section was getting some action, too. “Winchester,” he said.
House wrote that down, too. “Happen to remember his address? Off the top of your head?”
“He never stays in one place too long,” Patient X said easily.
“Birthdate?”
“May second, 1983.”
House wrote that down and handed the piece of paper to Chase and Cameron. He flipped off the microphone so the patient couldn’t hear him. “Skip trace. Get every bit of information on this guy you can,” he told them. “If you get an address, go to the house and get everything you think might be even slightly relevant.” They took the piece of paper and left. House got up and leaned over Foreman’s shoulder, both of them staring at the screen intently.
Foreman pointed out another area of the brain, previously bright, like a normal brain, now mostly dark: the emotional center, that housed empathy, among other things. House suddenly realized why the absence of activity in this part of the brain looked so familiar: this was what the brains of sociopaths looked like. House flipped on the microphone again. “Even though he’s done those terrible things, I bet you still love your brother, don’t you?” House suggested.
“Oh, yeah,” the patient said, voice gentle and compelling. “You just can’t help but love your brother.” Emotional center still dark, as if family and love and humanity meant nothing to him, as if they never had.
House flipped off the microphone. “What do you make of it?” House asked Foreman.
“It’s like ....” Foreman shook his head, at a complete loss. “It’s like he suddenly turned into a different person.”
“No, his pain center was still lit up, just the same,” Foreman was saying as Chase and Cameron joined them back in front of the write-and-wipe board. “Some of the parts that were dark before lit up, but others stayed dark.”
“What did we get on the CT?” asked House.
Foreman handed him the results. “Lots. But nothing recent.”
“So if there was some kind of physical trauma that led to this, it happened a while ago,” said Chase, stating the obvious, like usual. Sometimes Wilson asked him why House kept him around if he annoyed him so much, but Chase truly was a good doctor ... when he had the courage to say what he really thought about a case.
House gestured grandly to Chase and Cameron. “And what did we get on Sam Winchester’s ‘evil twin’?”
“Well ... he’s not a twin,” Cameron said, shuffling through some pieces of paper, consulting a print-out.
“A shocking development!” House declared. “It was him all along!”
“So you knew,” Chase said, eying House speculatively.
“Of course,” House said dismissively, turning back to the board and adding ‘liar’ to the list.
“He has a brother, ‘Dean,’” Cameron went on. “Both parents deceased, the mom when Sam was an infant--oh, exactly six months after he was born--grew up on the road, and ... oh, also, he’s dead,” she said, knowing better than to look pleased with herself as she handed House a death certificate for Sam Winchester, since House loved to take down cockiness better than anything else--except in himself, of course. “Twice,” she said, and she did smirk just a little as she handed him a second death certificate.
“Hm,” House said, delightedly examining both certificates. “Dying. Twice. That could count as traumatic.” Cameron handed him another collection of print-outs: copious warrants for his arrest. “The resemblance is astonishing,” House said, holding one up with a picture showing that it was indeed their patient.
“That explains the violence,” Foreman muttered.
“Good reason to keep him sedated and shackled, too,” Chase added.
“Maybe,” said House, reading the list of crimes over and over. It wasn’t adding up. The person who did these things was certainly not the earnest young overachiever he had met that morning. It wasn’t even the lying sociopath in the MRI machine. And ... it wasn’t the hallucinating victim who tore up his own hands trying to get away from House, either. House turned abruptly to the board, drew a vertical line beside the previous list of symptoms, and started a whole new column on the other side. In large letters like he’d written “amnesia,” he wrote a new potential diagnosis: “MPD.”
Chase and Cameron glanced at each other. Foreman rolled his eyes. “’Multiple personality’?” he said. “You’re kidding, right?”
“Sam Winchester could make me a believer,” House declared, quickly listing symptoms beneath it.
“There’s no such thing,” Foreman said crossly.
“You’re the one who said he became a different person,” House said unapologetically, and turned to face him when he was done writing symptoms. “I wonder what parts of his brain would light up if our hallucinating bear-man took over while he was in there.” House drew in a slow breath as he remembered the terror, the horror on his face. “Bet his pain center would light up nice and bright then.”
Foreman had a hard time letting go of treasured beliefs ... but ultimately, he was a scientist. House watched him considering the evidence and finding himself unable to come up with anything more plausible. Foreman could read those MRI images better than House could. He knew it was the best explanation they had yet.
“Right,” Cameron said, her eyes widening. House knew he’d have an ally in the MPD diagnosis in her, if in no one else; that was exactly her brand of touchy-feely crap. “He couldn’t remember his own name--we saw it on the monitor, there was no doubt--but when he shifted personalities, suddenly he could.”
“But what’s the treatment?” Chase asked pragmatically, sounding kind of depressed. “Years of therapy, which may or may not work. Drugs barely help, if at all.”
“He doesn’t even have any functional personalities, unless there’s one we haven’t seen,” Foreman said, grudgingly indulging their diagnosis. “A violent schizophrenic, a sociopath, and an amnesiac? He’s screwed.”
“But,” House said, waving the arrest warrants at them triumphantly, “he is innocent. Well, most of him.”
House sat down next to Sam Winchester, whose eyes opened instantly as he did, though he’d hardly made a sound. It was late at night after a day full of upsetting experiences, Sam had to be exhausted ... but you would never know it from the cool, calculating look on his face. House glanced down and was relieved to see Sam’s shackles still in place, since he now knew which personality he was dealing with. “I’m glad it’s you,” House said honestly, “because you’re the only one who knows anything.” House easily read Sam’s quickly darting eyes: Sam was trying to figure out what he meant so he would know how best to answer. Not how honestly--he didn’t care about that--just whatever answer would benefit him the most.
“So here’s the deal,” House went on. “If you tell me the complete truth, I’ll let you out of here. If not ... I’ll have to have you committed, since at least one of your personalities is a danger to himself and others.” Sam made a slight squint of displeasure at this announcement, but not as if it was horrible news; rather as if House was threatening to inflict him with a minor inconvenience. “Deal?”
“Sure,” Sam said easily. So easy for him to lie.
“Do you remember the event that led to the fracturing of your personalities?”
Sam contemplated--not the question, but whether he should answer honestly. When his face relaxed perceptibly, House knew he’d decided he may as well tell the truth. “Not ... personally,” he hedged. “It’s the part that’s ‘dangerous to me and others’ that remembers. But yeah, I know what happened.”
“Well?”
“You wouldn’t believe me. You’d lock me up for sure.”
“Try me.”
“There’s no point. I may as well not tell you anything.”
House shuffled the arrest warrants, then held them up for Sam to see. “Dead ringer, your brother.”
“I don’t have a twin. It was me.”
So he HAD decided to tell the truth. House smiled. “I kinda figured. But you have to tell me. I swear it won’t affect what I decide to do with you. I just have to know.”
Sam looked at him, and looked very slightly amused at what he saw. “You’re curious!” he said, surprised.
“I have to know what kind of event leads to this. So I can recognize this same thing in the future, and see if I can figure out how to treat it.”
Sam had the audacity to laugh, a creepy, cold laugh. “You’ll never see it again,” he said with certainty.
“Why? What was it?”
“I--I mean, he--was in hell, being tortured by Lucifer, for over a century. That’s a Winchester thing, not a normal-person thing. You’ll never see it again. God willing. Unless my half-brother ever gets out of there.” The smirk on his face indicating his complete indifference to the idea of his half-brother being tortured gave even House--who’d a thousand times been called cold, cruel and evil--a shiver right down the base of his spine.
House sat back and regarded this Sam Winchester. His first real case of MPD, who clearly truly believed he had been to hell. Well, House could relate to that. “You’re the only one who can function, you know,” he said matter-of-factly.
“I know!” Sam said, showing a tiny bit of emotion--frustration, as if he was trying his best to take care of the whole gang in his mind and his other personalities kept making it hard, like unruly kids. “And I’ll be going along fine, getting us somewhere we need to go, and then I wake up and find out one of them landed me in something like this.” He lifted his shackled arm as far as he could to make his point. House saw that it was outrage at the injustice that troubled this part of Sam, whereas it was the indignity that bothered the innocent part of him that didn’t remember squat.
“Yeah, that’s the problem,” said House. “They’ll always be getting you into trouble until you figure out a way to merge all of you together again.”
Sam shook his head quickly. “I would be nonfunctional,” he said without hesitation. “Why do you think this happened in the first place? No one can live with memories like that.”
House stared at Sam coolly for a long moment. “People can live with all kinds of memories,” he finally said quietly.
“Not that.”
“Well, I don’t know what to tell you. You’ll always be broken unless you do.”
Sam shrugged. “I’ve always been broken, except this part of me. In some ways, I’m actually better off now ... at least, when this me is in charge.”
“What about your brother Dean? The report of his death was an exaggeration, too, right?”
Sam shook his head slightly. “Yeah ... he doesn’t like me. Well, this me. It’s better if he doesn’t know where I am. He just gets in my way, anyway. And it’s his fault I ended up like this! If he just hadn’t given me back my soul ....”
House quirked his head. This guy. He had no idea how lucky he was it was House here, listening to this mad rambling; anyone else would be locking him up and throwing away the key. But House had had plenty of moments worthy of throwing away the key himself, and anyway, he perversely liked to flaunt the medical establishment’s rules. Sam would be going free. “Just try not to kill anyone, all right?”
Sam’s eyes registered surprise. “You’re really letting me go?”
“Saw the police report. You didn’t kill any of those cops; you just neutralized the threat. Pretty trustworthy for a sociopath. Not to mention there’s an awful lot of reports of things you’ve done that look like good deeds done on the wrong side of the law.”
“I’m not a sociopath,” Sam hissed irritably. Oh, so something did get to the guy after all. “I just ... don’t have a soul,” he finished at a mumble.
House couldn’t hide his grin of delight. “You’re right; that’s much better. I feel great about letting you go now.”
House reached for the shackles and was startled to hear Sam say, “Actually, don’t.”
House drew back. “What?”
“I’m, um ... good, here ... for now. Real good. One of my personalities is trying to get somewhere, and ... if you keep me shackled up here, he won’t be able to go anywhere.”
House remembered him saying this morning that he was trying to get somewhere, he just couldn’t remember where ... but he was willing to bet this part of him knew. “Where’s he going?”
“Somewhere that’ll only get us killed. Back to the guy who did this to us in the first place.”
“Why?”
“Because Dean will be there, and that part of me thinks it’s his ‘duty’ to help him or something,” he said contemptuously. “I dunno. Doesn’t matter. We can just wait it out here; it’ll be over tonight. You can let me go tomorrow. Every time we try to avert something disastrous, it usually ends up happening anyway,” he said, annoyed. “There’s no way we can stop Cas, and we sure as hell can’t help him. After I’ve survived his opening the gate to purgatory, I can assess the damage and see what I can do. Plus ....” He was finally getting sleepy, and he seemed to have decided he was safe enough here; his words were slurring as his eyes closed. “Doctor Cameron’s single, right? Think she’s into ... shackles?”
House snorted. “Maybe if you use ’em on her; her guilt would kill it for her if it was you.”
Sam shrugged, settling down into the pillow unconcernedly, as if the shackles didn’t really get to him at all, almost like ... he didn’t consider them a real impediment to anything he might want to do. “Either way.”
House shook his head, amused. “Okay. Use protection; I don’t want to be treating my own staff for cooties. I get the feeling you get around.”
“Got that right.”
House shook his head, unable to help liking this guy, and finally headed home, eager for what tomorrow would bring. Clinic duty wasn’t so bad. In fact, if it was always like this, he’d sign up for double the hours.
The following morning, House couldn’t be happier--at least, by House’s standards. There was a spring in his step--well, in half of his steps, anyway, he thought wryly--as he crossed the parking lot into the building. He’d thought of dozens of questions for Sam about this hell stuff, and the answers were sure to be highly entertaining; he might even YouTube them, with ads so he could make some money off it. Most of the crazies he’d dealt with didn’t have a whole detailed backstory to their wacky beliefs, but Sam Winchester was the gift that kept on giving ... especially when he walked through the front doors and the first thing he heard was someone saying Sam’s name in a tone of desperation.
“... But they said he was here! I called like three hours ago and you said you had him here! I’m his brother; I have to see him!”
After noting what the slightly shorter, blonder brother looked like so he’d be able to identify him later (useful whether he might want to play a prank or plan an escape, or ... actually, you never knew what information might come in handy later on or for what), House turned abruptly and headed the opposite direction. House knew exactly why they could no longer find his brother; the front desk probably had not been updated with Sam Winchester’s real name. He was still listed as Patient X. If Dean kept at it, he’d eventually find someone who knew Sam’s name and where he was, but in the meantime, House could ask Sam those questions.
Things got even better when the elevator doors opened on his floor and he saw hospital staff swarming around the door to Sam’s room. House hurried his step as much as he was able. As he got closer, it was plain what the ruckus was: crazy ol’ hallucinatin’ Sammy Winchester had popped out again. From the sound of things, he was tearing up the place.
House pushed his way through the crowd. “Out of my way! Let me talk to him!”
For he’d come up with a theory about that, too, sometime in the night, and he was desperate to test it out ... potentially at the cost of his own life and limb. Eh, well, if that happened, no big loss, to him or the world. House managed to push to the front, where orderlies were trying to corner Sam so they could subdue him again. House turned to a frantic Chase. “Good thing you didn’t go into anesthesiology, ’cos you suck at it.” House turned to the crowd at large. “Out! Everyone get out. Let me talk to him.”
Cameron was even more anxious than Chase. “But--House, he’s dangerous. He threw the nurse across the room and knocked out an orderly--while he was still shackled. He did it with his legs. ”
“What happened that triggered this personality?” House snapped briskly.
“Nothing,” said Chase. “A nurse was injecting the sedative into his IV and he went crazy. When he couldn’t get out of the shackles, he brought the bed with ’im.” Sure enough, the wheeled bed laid beside Sam on the floor askew, still attached to one of his wrists, the other wrist unshackled now somehow, rubbed raw. Sam seemed to be using the bed as a fortification between him and everyone trying to get at him.
This reinforced House’s developing theories. He took on his most sharply authoritative tone. “Get out of the room now or you’re all fired.”
“House--” said Cameron, unwilling to leave even him in there, when he was likely to get hurt.
“You especially,” he snapped. Realizing he might have just let slip a hint of the protectiveness he felt for her, he added, “I’ve been looking for reasons to fire you for months, and this is a good one.”
She saw through some of it, hopefully not all of it; maybe just enough to realize he wanted above all, at any cost, to be alone with the patient, and reluctantly, she too left. Chase didn’t stay behind, worried for House, that cowardly self-interested little bastard. “On second thought, send Chase back in here; I’ll use him as my human shield,” House shouted back at the crowd, but no one moved, only watching through the glass walls. House turned to Sam and saw the terror in his eyes, which darted between all the people, the door, and House. House promptly shut the blinds so at least he couldn’t see the people anymore, and closed the door. Dangerous for House, for the staff not to be able to see whatever Sam might do to him? Sure. Necessary to get what he was after? Absolutely.
Moving slowly, House pulled over a rolling chair and sat down on it. He held up his cane. Sam looked wildly at it, breathing hard, looking for an escape, but there was only one door and he was as far as he could get from it, with House right between him and the door. If House’s theories were right, Sam wouldn’t try to make a break for it, but not because he was so afraid of House; the kid had courage. It was something else, something he couldn’t put his finger on, until he saw that hopelessness come over him again: Sam wouldn’t try because he believed escape was impossible. In this personality’s mind, he was still in hell ... and always would be.
“Can’t walk without this,” House informed him, then tossed the cane across the room. Sam flinched violently when it clattered against the floor ... but made no move toward House or the cane. Everything, exactly as House had anticipated. “I’m actually glad this happened,” House said, settling back lazily into the chair so as to look as patently nonthreatening as possible. This was his theory: that this version of Sam never instigated, only acting in self-defense. “I’ve been wanting to talk to you.” He peered closer at Sam, who was still on high alert, eyes combing every corner of the room, hallucinating dangers that weren’t there. “No one here is going to hurt you, Sam. Wherever you were, you aren’t there anymore. I won’t hurt you,” he said, then with a sudden intuition, he added, “and I won’t let anyone else here hurt you, either.”
House didn’t even know why he had the feeling he should say that, but it worked. Sam relaxed ever so slightly and said suspiciously, “For how long?”
House could promise him forever ... but that would be a lie. Someone in the outside world certainly might hurt the kid. Heck, even someone in the hospital might have to run a test that would be at least a little painful. House shrugged. “An hour.”
This paltry offering seemed more believable to Sam than some grander promise would; he relaxed slightly and slumped against the wall. “What do you want?” he asked skeptically.
“Just to talk.”
Sam snorted and rolled his eyes, but looked at him expectantly with those haunted, horrified eyes. House knew from personal experience that no one could channel this much fear unless they had reason to believe it was warranted, and what on earth could make someone that afraid? House had seen thousands of patients over the course of his career, most near death, many in terrible pain, quite a few with significant mental health issues, and he’d never seen fear like this. Maybe he really had been to hell. “Well?” said Sam.
“Do you remember your life? Your family, where you came from?”
Sam looked down slightly. “A lot has happened since then. You tried to make me forget. But yeah,” he said defiantly, lifting his chin. “I remember.”
“Who did this to you?” House asked.
“You did,” Sam said without hesitation.
“And who am I?”
“Lucifer.”
House chewed on this, spinning a little in his chair until he realized the movement was agitating Sam. He stopped. “Was it your dad?”
Sam lunged forward--only a step, but enough to make House’s pulse spike. “What about my dad? He’s in heaven now, isn’t he? He’s still in heaven, right? He is! He has to be!”
Okay, not the dad. “Of course he’s still in heaven. So, then ... was it your brother?”
“Dean,” Sam breathed, and sagged heavily against the wall, his face going slack, as if the name alone was heavier than anything else he’d ever had to bear. “Dean’s okay,” he said to himself like a mantra, like he’d said these words to himself countless times to get him through. “Dean’s still all right. He’s still out there, still alive. He’s okay, him and Bobby and Cas, they’re still all right. Everyone else is dead, but ... Dean’s okay. And the world. Humanity is okay. It’s okay. It was worth it.”
While Sam chanted compulsively, House considered what he’d learned. Sam must have made a sacrifice to save his brother and some other people. He must have had to believe he was saving the whole world for the sacrifice to seem worth it. Delusions of grandeur were common, especially in people who’d been horrifically victimized; if they descended into madness, it frequently had religious overtones, but that was usually associated with a religious upbringing. “Did a priest dip into your cookie jar?” House mused. “Was it a priest or minister, rabbi maybe ...?”
“Pastor Jim,” Sam said suddenly. House thought he’d finally hit on it, until Sam burst into sobs that wracked his whole body, burying his face in his hands. “He’s dead. Oh, God, Dad, I’m sorry, he’s dead! They’re all dead. We tried, but we couldn’t save them!: Pastor Jim, and Jo, and Ellen, so many of your hunter friends, oh God ....”
Someone burst through the door, and for the first time, House was terrified. This kind of interruption could easily tip this delicate balance and send Sam over the edge into brutal, possibly lethal violence. “Sam?!” the person cried.
“Dean!” Sam shouted. House looked up. Sure enough, there was the brother. He had found Sam more efficiently than House had expected. These Winchester boys knew what they were doing. “No, he’s right there, Lucifer’s right there!” Sam yelled frantically, pointing at House. “Get away from him!”
House knew that to make any move toward Dean or Sam--maybe any move at all--would trigger Sam’s formidable violent impulses, so he stayed perfectly still, arms folded. Dean glanced down at House, bewildered. House smirked up at him. “It’s not actually my first time being called by that name,” he informed him.
Dean turned his eyes back to Sam. House could tell from his posture that he, too, knew Sam might lose it any second, but it wasn’t a posture of flight; he was prepared to engage with his brother if necessary--to defend House. That got House’s attention. People were inherently selfish. How many people would risk their own safety for a stranger? Sam and Dean Winchester, apparently. “Wh--no, Sam, that’s not Lucifer; that’s a doctor. You aren’t there anymore, you aren’t in hell anymore, Sammy. We got you out.”
Sam looked around the room wildly, losing it, like his reality was crumbling. House edged slightly toward the door. Dean seemed perceptive enough to sense what House was doing. He took a slow step forward, shielding House from Sam’s sight so he could head for the door more purposefully. Maybe Dean wasn’t quite the meathead he looked. As Dean continued moving slowly toward Sam, trying to talk him down, House wheeled to the door, opened it a crack, and ordered a syringe full of antipsychotic medication and prepped the orderlies on how they were going to have to approach Sam. Then Dean was at Sam’s side, Dean was hugging him real tight, murmuring reassurances ... and Sam suddenly collapsed in his arms, unconscious.
Chase walked beside House as he headed toward his much-anticipated meeting with the brother, filling House in on the latest tests on the patient. “It was mainly an overload to his system,” he said, as House mentally ridiculed the way Australians said ‘load,’ which kind of sounded like ‘laid.’
“Heh-heh, you said ‘load,’” said House.
Chase frowned a little, thrown off, then plunged ahead with his report. “He still had plenty of sedative in his bloodstream, adrenaline was through the roof, he’d been on high alert for days .... I guess when he saw his brother, he finally felt like it was safe to let go. He’s been out ever since.”
“You got him a better bed, right? One he can’t throw across the room one-handed?”
“Yeh.”
“Good. Be ready for another meeting once I’m done talking to his brother. I get the feeling it’ll be a game-changer.”
Chase nodded and took off down another hallway, as House hurried the rest of the way to his office, where Dean was waiting. House could see through the glass walls that Dean was surreptitiously perusing the arrest warrants and other biographical information House had left on his desk. As House burst through the door, Dean even tried to slip some of them inside his jacket. House paused at Dean’s side to yank them back out of his jacket, then proceeded around his desk and sat down. “Actually, these are mine,” he told Dean, flapping the papers at him. Dean looked annoyed, foiled. “Interesting reading, too. Did you know your brother’s died twice?” he asked ingenuously. He cocked his head. “Something tells me you have, too.”
Dean seemed immune to b.s. “What’s wrong with him?” he asked brusquely.
“That’s what I was hoping you could tell me. Who’s Pastor Jim?”
Dean squinted, but not with the guarded expression House had expected; rather as if he thought it was a strange name for House to be trotting out, from the distant past. “Family friend,” he said carefully.
“And did you happen to know someone named ‘Lucifer’?”
Dean’s expression lightened, as did House’s, as he realized he could read Dean like a book, unlike his brother. Dean had just settled on a tactic he was sure would work, and House would always be one step ahead of him. “Yep, sure did.”
“Safe to assume he lived up to his name?” House suggested pseudo-conspiratorially.
“A hundred percent,” Dean agreed casually.
“You got out,” House said, “leaving Sam in there to suffer for you.”
Dean’s expression grew fixed. Not cold, though; the opposite: House had hit a nerve, a big one, maybe the biggest one he had. House could read the thoughts play across his features with delightful ease: Dean knew he should keep his mouth shut, but he couldn’t, any more than House could. “He volunteered!”
“And you just ... let him?”
“It wasn’t--it’s complicated--you-- What did he tell you?” Dean suddenly demanded. “He told you everything?”
It was like shooting fish in a barrel; this guy left himself wide open. “Everything,” House lied.
“And you ... believe him?”
House didn’t know what he was supposed to be believing, except maybe the hell garbage, but this was probably the quickest path to the revelations he sought: “What other explanation could there be?”
“Well then you know, he did it to save the world! He ... oh, God, Sam.” Dean covered his eyes with one hand. “I never should have let him, but when you’re facing the apocalypse, when you know it’s gonna happen ... what else do you do?”
House made mental notes: codependency between the brothers, probably instigated by their mother’s death and exacerbated by their father’s. They’d been through a lot of traumatic events together, but there was one--a big one--that Sam had had to shoulder alone, over which Dean suffered terrible guilt, but they seemed to have agreed ahead of time that it would be so. Maybe their torturer, whoever it was, only demanded one victim, and the brothers had agreed it would be better for only one of them to be thus broken. The question was, why Sam? Shared delusions, a shared mythology with heavy Christian symbolism, but what parts were they each playing? “Well, sure,” House said generously, “but ... why him?”
“Well, because he was Lucifer’s vessel!” Dean said, frustrated, “so he was the only one who could throw him back in the pit.”
House shuddered to think what ‘vessel’ meant in this context. “Ah, of course,” said House, smiling approvingly, which belied his next words. “So Sam was cast as the evil one, which naturally makes you ... the good one. What a good deal for you.”
Dean looked baffled. “Huh?”
“If Sam was the devil, what does that make you? God?”
Dean made a face, as if recoiling from the thought. “No, of course not! I was ... I was Michael’s vessel. Well, supposed to be.” House quirked his head, unfamiliar with most mythology, Christianity included. “You know, the most powerful archangel, cast Lucifer out of heaven ....”
“Ah,” House said, nodding with understanding. “So ... you stayed just this side of calling yourself God. Instead you were just his representative, but Sam had to be the devil himself. Interesting.” House spun in his chair a little more, now that he could. “So was it your dad who put you in these roles? Your mom? Maybe this ‘Bobby’?”
“What? No!”
“Who, then?”
“Well ....” Even Dean didn’t seem to like answering this question. “Uh ... destiny, I guess.”
“Sure, of course, destiny,” House said, wondering if Dean would pick up on the barest hint of sarcasm in his voice. “But who TOLD you this was your destiny?”
“The angels.”
House took out a piece of paper. Their tormentors cast themselves as angels. Ironic. Had the brothers ended up in some twisted Christian orphanage somewhere when they were young, where all kinds of horrors went on? That would help explain all the criminal behavior they’d descended into as adults, and all their weird crimes involving digging up and setting fire to corpses, and stealing relics and holy water from churches. Dean was the elder. Maybe he’d graduated and gone on with his life, taking this ‘Bobby’ with him, leaving Sam there alone with no one to spread around some of the suffering or talk it through with. Maybe then they mutually invented grand tales in which they decided what Sam went through was necessary to save the world, so that they might be able to find a way to forgive Dean for abandoning Sam to his ‘destiny’ and heal the inevitable rift that abandonment would cause between them. But that couldn’t be it--there were school records for both of them through their teen years, and Sam had even graduated from Stanford--hardly the accomplishments of boys who were so damaged one of their personalities split. Besides, Dean seemed pretty functional. Everything suggested Sam’s trauma was more recent than that. “And their names were ...?”
“Uriel, Zachariah, Cas .... Look, what difference does this make? I want to know how to help my brother!”
“I’m trying to help your brother,” House murmured, but something about the list of names was niggling at him. Something had passed beneath his notice, a name that had come up over and over that seemed somehow to be at the heart of all this. “Cas,” he said suddenly. “Cas, Cas ... Cas is ... is Cas the one who did this to him?” House asked suddenly, his intuition flaring brightly. He knew even before the words were out of his mouth that he was right. Dean nodded, the pain of betrayal darkening his features. “But Sam said he’d ‘saved’ Cas, that Cas was okay because he’d made his sacrifice,” he said eagerly. The picture was all coming together. Dean didn’t respond, eyes cast downward. “And is Cas the person one of Sam’s personalities was trying to get to, to help you with? You’re still involved with him?” Dean sighed helplessly; an obvious assent. Plainly Cas was responsible for the state in which House had found Sam. “What’s Cas’s full name?”
“Why; what difference does it make?”
“Because I’m going to put out an arrest warrant.”
This didn’t get quite the dramatic response House had hoped for. Dean only shrugged. “Get in line.”
Now it was House’s turn to be baffled. “Huh?”
Dean turned House’s little t.v., which Dean had evidently been watching while he awaited his arrival, to face House. “Because that’s Cas,” he said, pointing to a news report in which a trench-coated man smiled at a security camera before murdering a church full of people for what he deemed their blasphemy.
“So you know,” House breathed. “You know what he’s capable of. How he’s manipulated you. How he tortured Sam.”
“Sure,” Dean said, “but how do YOU know? I didn’t think Sam was even able to remember any of that right now.”
“I’m just that good,” House said smugly, wondering how selfish it made him that he was deeply offended that someone else had figured out the mystery before he did and had the nerve to act like his brilliant sleuthing was no big deal. Dean could have saved him the trouble and just told him what Cas had done, but no, another moment of genius passed by, unrecognized. It was hard, being a god among men.
Dean pushed Sam along carefully in a wheelchair as Sam dozed, heavily sedated. “Nope, I’m sure,” Dean was saying firmly. “I can take care of him. Better than you, anyway.”
Dean did handle Sam well when he had his psychotic episode. Legally, House should have committed Sam, or failing that, called the cops, but no one here would be able to fix him, and he couldn’t let a smart, decent, courageous kid like that languish, locked up. House thought again of Sam’s sociopathic personality, how even that one was a caretaker of sorts, of the family inside his head, methodically planning to clean up whatever mess Cas made after he opened this fantasy gate to purgatory ... which, come to think of it, was probably a metaphor for cleaning up the mess Cas had made in Sam’s mind. If they had all decided Cas had moved on to purgatory from hell, hey, that was a good sign, right? Maybe the next step in their mental journey would be to open the gates to heaven. Maybe then they would finally feel like they were healed.
The sociopathic part of him was the only part that seemed to have any sense of self-preservation, the only part that valued his own life above others’; it was the only part of him that was as selfish as most people were every day. The worst it had done was try to get in Cameron’s pants, but he must have been a real gentleman about it, since Cameron gave him such a warm goodbye this morning. He hadn’t gotten in her pants, though; it wasn’t THAT warm. If these boys were ever finally able to sort fact from fantasy in their heads, they might actually be able to do some real good in this world someday. “You need to help him come to terms with what’s happened and get him to merge his personalities again.”
“Sure, I’ll get right on that,” Dean said sarcastically, and House could not help smirking. He liked these Winchesters.
“And Cas ... you know you can never let him near your brother again, don’t you? The man is a menace.”
“You think I don’t know that?” Dean snorted. “That’s what I’ll be doing with all my free time, is hunting him down and trying to stop him.” He glanced at Sam. “Not that I’ll have any.”
They stopped at the doors out into the parking lot, where a black Chevy was waiting in the loading zone. House turned to face Dean. “You know, Dean ... I’m not the guy who’s in a position to lecture other people about facing their demons, but I can tell you, it doesn’t always have to be black and white, good and evil, right and wrong. You can both be good, you know. You have to let Sam be good. Life is hard enough without making someone have to be the bad guy.”
Dean seemed confused by his little speech. “Sam IS good,” he said, shaking his head quizzically. “We know. Team Free Will all the way, that’s us.”
House felt a frown that had come over his face the day he met Sam lift and disappear. Whatever these guys had been through, whatever some religious zealot had tortured them into believing, however they had suffered, they could keep going, keep fighting the good fight. House watched them as Dean wheeled Sam to the car and gently maneuvered him inside, lifting his brother’s long legs one by one and setting them on the floorboards. If Sam Winchester could keep on going after everything he’d been through ... maybe Gregory House could, too.
~ The End ~
Author: brightly_lit
Fandoms: Supernatural, House
Rating: PG -- no language, but Sam's memories of hell, and House's interpretation of them, range into dark territory
Genre: gen, outsider POV (House's POV of the Winchesters), h/c, House casefic, meta
Characters: House, soulless!Sam, hallucinating!Sam, amnesia!Sam, Dean, Cameron, Foreman, Chase
Word Count: ~9,500
Spoilers: None for House, up through part of 7.01 for Supernatural
Warnings: No on-page violence or torture, but mentions of torture and any/all kinds of abuse
Summary: Sam wakes up with amnesia after Cas takes down his mental wall, so he goes to a local hospital clinic for help where he gets treated by Dr. Gregory House, who gives him a new diagnosis: multiple personality disorder.
"Damnit, if he’d killed another patient ... he always knew one day someone would drop dead just from what came out of his mouth."
Dr. Gregory House went into the clinic room, reading the clinic patient’s chart with great interest. Usually he used his considerable intelligence to figure out a way to get out of clinic duty. Dr. Cuddy had talked him into it using her special combination of charm, wit, and dire threats, and now he was rather glad: the paperwork that requested basic information such as name, address, and age was blank except for a few question marks and the “M” circled where it asked “M/F.”
“Didja have a feel before circling the ‘M’?” House asked the remarkably tall young man sitting innocently on a chair. “We want to be sure. I mean, this is good stuff,” House said, waving the chart at him. “Thorough work. I told Cuddy I didn’t even have to look at you to be able to diagnose you, just based on the information you’ve given here--”
He shifted in his seat, the very picture of an earnest young man anxious to do a good job. House pegged him instantly for the kid who sat at the front of the class, raising his hand every time the teacher asked a question. “Sorry,” he said sincerely. “I’m really sorry. That’s ... actually what I’m here about. I, uh ....” He laughed as if ... embarrassed? “I kinda have ... amnesia.”
House couldn’t entirely suppress his grin as he leaned casually against the counter. “Amnesia. Don’t see that one every day. Well, actually, I do. Big fan of the soap operas.” He nodded seriously at the patient, who didn’t seem to know what to do with the information. “But here ... not so much. So was it your evil twin?”
First, there was a strange flinch, as if House had hit uncomfortably close to the truth. Then the young man looked down, and House read something in his posture that changed things: hopelessness, as if he’d come here for help, doubting he’d get any, and now he was sure he wouldn’t. “You aren’t serious, are you?” House said then. Amnesia? For real?
The young man nodded, plainly none too happy at having to admit it.
House set down the chart and had a look, peering intently at the patient’s head and neck, prodding as he looked for signs of bruising through his copious dark hair. “Is that tender?”
The young man shook his head.
“How long?”
“I think since yesterday.”
“’You think’?”
“I, uh ... I remember waking up on a bench, and running, just running, feeling like there’s somewhere I need to be, and then some stuff happened, and then ... I dunno, I blacked out.”
House couldn’t hide his delight as he wrote “black-outs” and “amnesia” on his chart; this case just kept getting better. “And this ‘stuff’ would involve ...?”
“Uh ... running from the cops?” The patient huffed a disbelieving laugh at himself. “I didn’t know why; I just knew I had to. I thought they were catching up to me, but then I blacked out.”
“Guess you got away.”
“Guess so.”
House’s gaze traveled down to the patient’s bloody knuckles, which he was self-consciously kneading. “Well ... we need to admit you,” House said, knowing the patient wouldn’t like hearing it.
Sure enough, he frowned. “I can’t--”
“If it was just the amnesia, I might be able to release you into the care of your family, if we’re able to find them, but with the black-outs ....”
“Can’t you just ... I dunno ... give me something?”
House feigned suddenly remembering something. “Oh, right! I’m so glad you reminded me. I’ll just write you up a prescription for Amnesia-B-Gone--here, the generic is much cheaper.” He scribbled on a prescription pad, tore off the paper, and tried to hand it to him.
The kid was smart; he didn’t reach for it or look hopeful for even a second like some of these idiots would have. He knew House was teasing him ... and for some odd reason, he didn’t seem surprised or even particularly troubled by that, as if ... as if he was thoroughly accustomed to dealing with someone who was a lot like House on a daily basis. “I can take care of myself; I just ... hoped you could help me somehow. I guess that was stupid. Sorry.” He stood up, grabbing his jacket.
There were stories in this kid. House wished he could justify admitting this patient under his own care--it would guarantee himself an interesting week--but there was no point in admitting him to diagnostics when the patient had already accurately diagnosed himself. Still, if he was here in the hospital, House could come around and glean what amusement could be got from the case ... and what medical learning might also be had. “The thing is, amnesia cases aren’t very interesting,” House told the kid, since he seemed smart enough to actually understand what House was saying; House didn’t even bother talking to most people, except to troll them. “Mostly we just wait until your memory comes back, which, as I said, can be done anywhere. But if you’re having black-outs, that indicates trauma, even if I wasn’t able to find it. You might have a concussion, even bleeding--I could order you an MRI--”
“No, I’ll be fine. I probably couldn’t afford it, anyway. Thanks.” That hopeless demeanor. This kid had really been through something. Somethings, maybe. House watched him head for the door, regretting that he would never get a crack at this case. The kid’s eyes met House’s, and his expression abruptly changed--to one of horror. “No!” he cried in a strangled voice. “No! Get away from me! Stay away from me!” He scrambled away from House so violently that he knocked the rolling bed against the far wall with a bang, then he threw himself against the door, pounding at the glass desperately, screaming for help. He scrabbled at the handle, further bloodying his hands.
House didn’t even have to call somebody; all the screaming and lunging at the door attracted several staff members, who burst into the room and immediately grabbed the patient. Usually even the biggest, most violent patients required only four people to subdue them, but this guy took seven, with House’s underling Dr. Chase (also on clinic duty that morning) straddling his back on the floor to hold him still long enough to administer the sedative ... which had no effect. Chase looked up at House, bewildered.
“Twenty more c.c.’s,” House said. He saw Chase’s hesitation, his doubt--the amount he would be giving the patient was enough to kill--but Chase was a follower, or maybe he just trusted House’s judgment that much, and he did it. The patient went down enough to strap to a gurney, though not enough to put him completely under; he was still muttering and struggling as much as he was able. “Take him to diagnostics,” House instructed the staff, who obeyed instantly. House grinned at the shaken Chase. “... And I just got us a case.”
House wrote “amnesia” in large letters at the top of the write-and-wipe board for the differential diagnosis, and turned expectantly to the doctors who worked under his supervision: Dr. Chase, Dr. Cameron, and Dr. Foreman. “Have you read his chart yet?” House said smugly, tossing it to the nearest doctor. “It’s a good one.” He filled in the symptoms on the board as they read the chart: “black-outs,” he added, along with “violence” and “psychotic episodes.”
“Don’t forget superhuman strength,” Chase added in his annoying Australian accent--annoying mainly because it made the chicks fall for him despite his milquetoast personality and lack of charisma ... although his insanely good looks might also have had something to do with that. “I gave him enough sedative to kill a bear and he still wasn’t completely out.”
House added that to the board, along with “no visible trauma,” and then he turned to stare at Foreman, who was reading the chart. Foreman finally looked up when he became aware of the silence, to find every eye on him. “What?” he said.
“Oh, I dunno,” said House. “Maybe I’m interested in what the neurologist thinks of the case.”
Foreman set down the chart with a shrug. “I don’t know,” he said honestly. “We need more information.”
“Initial impression?”
“Amnesia. With trauma,” Foreman said pointedly. He wasn’t much better at being diplomatic than House, but he did know enough not to say directly to his boss that he must have missed something.
“... And the black-outs?”
“Psychotic episodes, either caused by trauma or maybe he hit his head during one and that caused the amnesia. Frankly, it sounds like cascading cerebral hemmorhage; that could account for everything. We need to get an MRI.”
“That’s what I said!” House declared eagerly. His underlings were not impressed. “Fine, don’t be supportive,” he pouted. Still nothing. “You guys are no fun at all,” he complained. “All right, Chase, since you’re now the expert on his sedation requirements, you’d better be there in case he has another case of the crazies while he’s in there. Foreman, obviously you’re there. I wanna be there.” House looked at Cameron, hoping for some dismay at being left out, but she was good at covering it if she felt it. “Oh, what the hell, let’s all go! Party in the MRI lab! You bring the chips; I’ll bring the booze.”
The patient was distressingly aware again already as they prepped him for his MRI; the sedative had mostly worn off in less than three hours. He was calm again, though, the same smart, observant kid he’d been at first. Now hooked up to an IV and shackled firmly to the gurney, he was a far cry from the young man who just this morning had convincingly insisted he could take care of himself. He seemed bewildered to find himself in this position, as if he essentially never had before, which seemed impossible, given the copious numbers of scars they’d discovered when they changed him into a hospital gown. House paused over one, and smirked, meeting the kid’s eye. “Does dental floss ring a bell?” he said. The kid shook his head blankly. “Whoever stitched you up really knew what they were doing,” was all House said. The patient glanced down at himself in confusion, but then Cameron was instructing him to stay as still as he could and sending him into the MRI machine.
House and Cameron joined Chase and Foreman in the adjacent room, where the readings from the MRI scan displayed on a monitor. Foreman looked bored, as if he already was sure of what he would find. The readings refreshed every second, a new slice of the patient’s brain flashing on the screen, until they were down to the brain stem, and still, no sign of trauma. Now Foreman was paying attention. “But that’s not possible,” he said, clicking on the screen to get different displays, scanning them anxiously.
House, of course, wasn’t surprised. “So no trauma, and no bleeding,” he said. “What DO you see?”
Foreman had a hard time letting go, still searching for trauma, which House didn’t interrupt--if Foreman was looking this hard, he would find it, even if it was almost invisible. He must not have found anything, because he finally gave up and did as House asked. “Uh ... well,” he said, flipping through more slices at different angles. “Well ... look at his pain center.” Foreman seemed disturbed as he pointed at a section in the more primitive part of his brain that glowed a dim red. “It’s ... the whole thing is lit up, but dim, like ... maybe he isn’t even aware he’s in constant pain.”
“Looks like this isn’t going to be just a brain scan after all,” Cameron said.
House nodded. “I want a full-body CT scan, too; it might show something that doesn’t show up on the MRI,” he said, but his attention was caught by Foreman’s expression. “What else?” he prompted him.
“I don’t know,” Foreman said, then he said it again, still flipping through the scans as though he didn’t believe what he was seeing. “I’ve never seen a brain like this before--not ever. It’s ... parts of it are completely dark.” He sat back for a second, contemplating. “It’s ... sometimes a traumatic event can cause amnesia, but only surrounding the traumatic events, and there’s usually physical trauma involved. But that’s all I can think of. He must have been through something so ... so bad ....”
“Maybe his whole life was that traumatic,” Cameron said, subdued. “Looking at his scars ... I could believe it.”
“Maybe he’s better off if we don’t find his family,” said Chase. Cameron looked even sadder, so he spoke brightly then. “So, the dark parts--it’s his memory, right?”
“Not just that. And other parts are so bright ... parts most other people barely use. I’m seeing ... the closest thing I’ve ever seen to this is brain injury, when other parts of the brain are trying to learn how to take over the function of the damaged parts.”
“Let’s see if it really was his evil twin, or if Victor’s feckless step-son put him up to it.” House turned on the microphone. “Okay, Patient X, why don’t you try to tell us your name,” he suggested, knowing the patient was smart enough to know they knew he couldn’t remember, they just wanted to see what his attempt to remember looked like on the MRI. They watched with interest as a new area lit up. “You told me this morning you were trying to get somewhere--where were you going?”
More flares in the new area as he attempted to remember, no response in the memory centers. “I ... don’t know. It just feels like it’s really important.”
“Okay,” said House. “Tell me about this evil twin of yours.”
“What the hell?” Foreman said as another part entirely lit up--one of the previously dark parts.
“I--I don’t think I have a twin,” said the patient over the intercom. “Pretty sure.”
“Well, he’s not faking,” Chase noted.
He definitely wasn’t faking. House realized this was the first time he actually believed this kid had amnesia. It was an uncommon event. Even cases deemed legitimate were usually, in House’s opinion, to some degree willful, the patient unwilling to face some aspect of their lives. Faking--or exaggerating--amnesia gave them another option, an excuse to leave the life they knew behind and start completely fresh. It was a scary diagnosis, fraught with uncertainty, but for some people, it was worth it. If House didn’t have so much contempt for fakers, he might try it himself. He could stand to leave this life behind. Still, the proof that this kid had real, honest-to-god amnesia was right there on the screen, as the part that struggles to remember lit up, and the memory center remained stubbornly dark.
“The MRI tells us you DO have a twin,” House said, watching the screen with interest.
Okay, maybe he shouldn’t have said it. Right? The kid had suffered some kind of traumatic event--traumatic enough to cause amnesia. Another doctor would tread carefully, but House would never be that doctor. “What did you do?!” Chase gasped as parts that were lit up a second before went dark, and vice versa, the patient dead silent in the MRI machine--and suddenly, dead still.
House flipped on the microphone. “You okay in there?” he asked uncertainly. Damnit, if he’d killed another patient ... he always knew one day someone would drop dead just from what came out of his mouth.
“Uh ... yeah. Yeah,” said Patient X, and they saw something else new on the monitor: the creativity part of his brain lighting up. He was lying.
Finally, something predictable, if disappointing. House thought he might have finally met that most elusive of things: a patient who didn’t lie. “Great, glad to hear it. So, tell me about this evil twin,” House could not resist saying again, withstanding Chase and Cameron’s glares of disbelief. Foreman was too fascinated with the readings to be upset, and soon, Chase and Cameron were, too, as they all watched flares ripple across the creativity and observation segments of his brain.
“Look at this,” Chase whispered, and pointed to another, smaller section, usually used for things like math problems: he was calculating, and judging by how bright that section was lit up, calculating hard.
“Uh ... what do you want to know?” the patient said finally, carefully.
“His name, for starters,” House said quickly.
“His name’s Sam,” replied the patient instantly, the creativity section blooming brightly. “Yeah, he’s ... he’s done some pretty bad stuff.”
“Why does he suddenly remember?” Foreman hissed, and House flipped the microphone off.
“He doesn’t; he’s making it up,” Cameron corrected.
“It’s neither,” House corrected them both. “I think ....” Suddenly, House felt like he could read that brain like sheet music. He switched the microphone on again. “He’s the one who took out those cops, right?” he said shrewdly into the microphone as his underlings looked on, baffled.
“Yeah. Really did a number on ’em. I hear,” he said.
“First name ‘Sam,’” said House, writing it down. “Last name?”
More bright flares of creativity and calculation ... and now the memory section was getting some action, too. “Winchester,” he said.
House wrote that down, too. “Happen to remember his address? Off the top of your head?”
“He never stays in one place too long,” Patient X said easily.
“Birthdate?”
“May second, 1983.”
House wrote that down and handed the piece of paper to Chase and Cameron. He flipped off the microphone so the patient couldn’t hear him. “Skip trace. Get every bit of information on this guy you can,” he told them. “If you get an address, go to the house and get everything you think might be even slightly relevant.” They took the piece of paper and left. House got up and leaned over Foreman’s shoulder, both of them staring at the screen intently.
Foreman pointed out another area of the brain, previously bright, like a normal brain, now mostly dark: the emotional center, that housed empathy, among other things. House suddenly realized why the absence of activity in this part of the brain looked so familiar: this was what the brains of sociopaths looked like. House flipped on the microphone again. “Even though he’s done those terrible things, I bet you still love your brother, don’t you?” House suggested.
“Oh, yeah,” the patient said, voice gentle and compelling. “You just can’t help but love your brother.” Emotional center still dark, as if family and love and humanity meant nothing to him, as if they never had.
House flipped off the microphone. “What do you make of it?” House asked Foreman.
“It’s like ....” Foreman shook his head, at a complete loss. “It’s like he suddenly turned into a different person.”
“No, his pain center was still lit up, just the same,” Foreman was saying as Chase and Cameron joined them back in front of the write-and-wipe board. “Some of the parts that were dark before lit up, but others stayed dark.”
“What did we get on the CT?” asked House.
Foreman handed him the results. “Lots. But nothing recent.”
“So if there was some kind of physical trauma that led to this, it happened a while ago,” said Chase, stating the obvious, like usual. Sometimes Wilson asked him why House kept him around if he annoyed him so much, but Chase truly was a good doctor ... when he had the courage to say what he really thought about a case.
House gestured grandly to Chase and Cameron. “And what did we get on Sam Winchester’s ‘evil twin’?”
“Well ... he’s not a twin,” Cameron said, shuffling through some pieces of paper, consulting a print-out.
“A shocking development!” House declared. “It was him all along!”
“So you knew,” Chase said, eying House speculatively.
“Of course,” House said dismissively, turning back to the board and adding ‘liar’ to the list.
“He has a brother, ‘Dean,’” Cameron went on. “Both parents deceased, the mom when Sam was an infant--oh, exactly six months after he was born--grew up on the road, and ... oh, also, he’s dead,” she said, knowing better than to look pleased with herself as she handed House a death certificate for Sam Winchester, since House loved to take down cockiness better than anything else--except in himself, of course. “Twice,” she said, and she did smirk just a little as she handed him a second death certificate.
“Hm,” House said, delightedly examining both certificates. “Dying. Twice. That could count as traumatic.” Cameron handed him another collection of print-outs: copious warrants for his arrest. “The resemblance is astonishing,” House said, holding one up with a picture showing that it was indeed their patient.
“That explains the violence,” Foreman muttered.
“Good reason to keep him sedated and shackled, too,” Chase added.
“Maybe,” said House, reading the list of crimes over and over. It wasn’t adding up. The person who did these things was certainly not the earnest young overachiever he had met that morning. It wasn’t even the lying sociopath in the MRI machine. And ... it wasn’t the hallucinating victim who tore up his own hands trying to get away from House, either. House turned abruptly to the board, drew a vertical line beside the previous list of symptoms, and started a whole new column on the other side. In large letters like he’d written “amnesia,” he wrote a new potential diagnosis: “MPD.”
Chase and Cameron glanced at each other. Foreman rolled his eyes. “’Multiple personality’?” he said. “You’re kidding, right?”
“Sam Winchester could make me a believer,” House declared, quickly listing symptoms beneath it.
“There’s no such thing,” Foreman said crossly.
“You’re the one who said he became a different person,” House said unapologetically, and turned to face him when he was done writing symptoms. “I wonder what parts of his brain would light up if our hallucinating bear-man took over while he was in there.” House drew in a slow breath as he remembered the terror, the horror on his face. “Bet his pain center would light up nice and bright then.”
Foreman had a hard time letting go of treasured beliefs ... but ultimately, he was a scientist. House watched him considering the evidence and finding himself unable to come up with anything more plausible. Foreman could read those MRI images better than House could. He knew it was the best explanation they had yet.
“Right,” Cameron said, her eyes widening. House knew he’d have an ally in the MPD diagnosis in her, if in no one else; that was exactly her brand of touchy-feely crap. “He couldn’t remember his own name--we saw it on the monitor, there was no doubt--but when he shifted personalities, suddenly he could.”
“But what’s the treatment?” Chase asked pragmatically, sounding kind of depressed. “Years of therapy, which may or may not work. Drugs barely help, if at all.”
“He doesn’t even have any functional personalities, unless there’s one we haven’t seen,” Foreman said, grudgingly indulging their diagnosis. “A violent schizophrenic, a sociopath, and an amnesiac? He’s screwed.”
“But,” House said, waving the arrest warrants at them triumphantly, “he is innocent. Well, most of him.”
House sat down next to Sam Winchester, whose eyes opened instantly as he did, though he’d hardly made a sound. It was late at night after a day full of upsetting experiences, Sam had to be exhausted ... but you would never know it from the cool, calculating look on his face. House glanced down and was relieved to see Sam’s shackles still in place, since he now knew which personality he was dealing with. “I’m glad it’s you,” House said honestly, “because you’re the only one who knows anything.” House easily read Sam’s quickly darting eyes: Sam was trying to figure out what he meant so he would know how best to answer. Not how honestly--he didn’t care about that--just whatever answer would benefit him the most.
“So here’s the deal,” House went on. “If you tell me the complete truth, I’ll let you out of here. If not ... I’ll have to have you committed, since at least one of your personalities is a danger to himself and others.” Sam made a slight squint of displeasure at this announcement, but not as if it was horrible news; rather as if House was threatening to inflict him with a minor inconvenience. “Deal?”
“Sure,” Sam said easily. So easy for him to lie.
“Do you remember the event that led to the fracturing of your personalities?”
Sam contemplated--not the question, but whether he should answer honestly. When his face relaxed perceptibly, House knew he’d decided he may as well tell the truth. “Not ... personally,” he hedged. “It’s the part that’s ‘dangerous to me and others’ that remembers. But yeah, I know what happened.”
“Well?”
“You wouldn’t believe me. You’d lock me up for sure.”
“Try me.”
“There’s no point. I may as well not tell you anything.”
House shuffled the arrest warrants, then held them up for Sam to see. “Dead ringer, your brother.”
“I don’t have a twin. It was me.”
So he HAD decided to tell the truth. House smiled. “I kinda figured. But you have to tell me. I swear it won’t affect what I decide to do with you. I just have to know.”
Sam looked at him, and looked very slightly amused at what he saw. “You’re curious!” he said, surprised.
“I have to know what kind of event leads to this. So I can recognize this same thing in the future, and see if I can figure out how to treat it.”
Sam had the audacity to laugh, a creepy, cold laugh. “You’ll never see it again,” he said with certainty.
“Why? What was it?”
“I--I mean, he--was in hell, being tortured by Lucifer, for over a century. That’s a Winchester thing, not a normal-person thing. You’ll never see it again. God willing. Unless my half-brother ever gets out of there.” The smirk on his face indicating his complete indifference to the idea of his half-brother being tortured gave even House--who’d a thousand times been called cold, cruel and evil--a shiver right down the base of his spine.
House sat back and regarded this Sam Winchester. His first real case of MPD, who clearly truly believed he had been to hell. Well, House could relate to that. “You’re the only one who can function, you know,” he said matter-of-factly.
“I know!” Sam said, showing a tiny bit of emotion--frustration, as if he was trying his best to take care of the whole gang in his mind and his other personalities kept making it hard, like unruly kids. “And I’ll be going along fine, getting us somewhere we need to go, and then I wake up and find out one of them landed me in something like this.” He lifted his shackled arm as far as he could to make his point. House saw that it was outrage at the injustice that troubled this part of Sam, whereas it was the indignity that bothered the innocent part of him that didn’t remember squat.
“Yeah, that’s the problem,” said House. “They’ll always be getting you into trouble until you figure out a way to merge all of you together again.”
Sam shook his head quickly. “I would be nonfunctional,” he said without hesitation. “Why do you think this happened in the first place? No one can live with memories like that.”
House stared at Sam coolly for a long moment. “People can live with all kinds of memories,” he finally said quietly.
“Not that.”
“Well, I don’t know what to tell you. You’ll always be broken unless you do.”
Sam shrugged. “I’ve always been broken, except this part of me. In some ways, I’m actually better off now ... at least, when this me is in charge.”
“What about your brother Dean? The report of his death was an exaggeration, too, right?”
Sam shook his head slightly. “Yeah ... he doesn’t like me. Well, this me. It’s better if he doesn’t know where I am. He just gets in my way, anyway. And it’s his fault I ended up like this! If he just hadn’t given me back my soul ....”
House quirked his head. This guy. He had no idea how lucky he was it was House here, listening to this mad rambling; anyone else would be locking him up and throwing away the key. But House had had plenty of moments worthy of throwing away the key himself, and anyway, he perversely liked to flaunt the medical establishment’s rules. Sam would be going free. “Just try not to kill anyone, all right?”
Sam’s eyes registered surprise. “You’re really letting me go?”
“Saw the police report. You didn’t kill any of those cops; you just neutralized the threat. Pretty trustworthy for a sociopath. Not to mention there’s an awful lot of reports of things you’ve done that look like good deeds done on the wrong side of the law.”
“I’m not a sociopath,” Sam hissed irritably. Oh, so something did get to the guy after all. “I just ... don’t have a soul,” he finished at a mumble.
House couldn’t hide his grin of delight. “You’re right; that’s much better. I feel great about letting you go now.”
House reached for the shackles and was startled to hear Sam say, “Actually, don’t.”
House drew back. “What?”
“I’m, um ... good, here ... for now. Real good. One of my personalities is trying to get somewhere, and ... if you keep me shackled up here, he won’t be able to go anywhere.”
House remembered him saying this morning that he was trying to get somewhere, he just couldn’t remember where ... but he was willing to bet this part of him knew. “Where’s he going?”
“Somewhere that’ll only get us killed. Back to the guy who did this to us in the first place.”
“Why?”
“Because Dean will be there, and that part of me thinks it’s his ‘duty’ to help him or something,” he said contemptuously. “I dunno. Doesn’t matter. We can just wait it out here; it’ll be over tonight. You can let me go tomorrow. Every time we try to avert something disastrous, it usually ends up happening anyway,” he said, annoyed. “There’s no way we can stop Cas, and we sure as hell can’t help him. After I’ve survived his opening the gate to purgatory, I can assess the damage and see what I can do. Plus ....” He was finally getting sleepy, and he seemed to have decided he was safe enough here; his words were slurring as his eyes closed. “Doctor Cameron’s single, right? Think she’s into ... shackles?”
House snorted. “Maybe if you use ’em on her; her guilt would kill it for her if it was you.”
Sam shrugged, settling down into the pillow unconcernedly, as if the shackles didn’t really get to him at all, almost like ... he didn’t consider them a real impediment to anything he might want to do. “Either way.”
House shook his head, amused. “Okay. Use protection; I don’t want to be treating my own staff for cooties. I get the feeling you get around.”
“Got that right.”
House shook his head, unable to help liking this guy, and finally headed home, eager for what tomorrow would bring. Clinic duty wasn’t so bad. In fact, if it was always like this, he’d sign up for double the hours.
The following morning, House couldn’t be happier--at least, by House’s standards. There was a spring in his step--well, in half of his steps, anyway, he thought wryly--as he crossed the parking lot into the building. He’d thought of dozens of questions for Sam about this hell stuff, and the answers were sure to be highly entertaining; he might even YouTube them, with ads so he could make some money off it. Most of the crazies he’d dealt with didn’t have a whole detailed backstory to their wacky beliefs, but Sam Winchester was the gift that kept on giving ... especially when he walked through the front doors and the first thing he heard was someone saying Sam’s name in a tone of desperation.
“... But they said he was here! I called like three hours ago and you said you had him here! I’m his brother; I have to see him!”
After noting what the slightly shorter, blonder brother looked like so he’d be able to identify him later (useful whether he might want to play a prank or plan an escape, or ... actually, you never knew what information might come in handy later on or for what), House turned abruptly and headed the opposite direction. House knew exactly why they could no longer find his brother; the front desk probably had not been updated with Sam Winchester’s real name. He was still listed as Patient X. If Dean kept at it, he’d eventually find someone who knew Sam’s name and where he was, but in the meantime, House could ask Sam those questions.
Things got even better when the elevator doors opened on his floor and he saw hospital staff swarming around the door to Sam’s room. House hurried his step as much as he was able. As he got closer, it was plain what the ruckus was: crazy ol’ hallucinatin’ Sammy Winchester had popped out again. From the sound of things, he was tearing up the place.
House pushed his way through the crowd. “Out of my way! Let me talk to him!”
For he’d come up with a theory about that, too, sometime in the night, and he was desperate to test it out ... potentially at the cost of his own life and limb. Eh, well, if that happened, no big loss, to him or the world. House managed to push to the front, where orderlies were trying to corner Sam so they could subdue him again. House turned to a frantic Chase. “Good thing you didn’t go into anesthesiology, ’cos you suck at it.” House turned to the crowd at large. “Out! Everyone get out. Let me talk to him.”
Cameron was even more anxious than Chase. “But--House, he’s dangerous. He threw the nurse across the room and knocked out an orderly--while he was still shackled. He did it with his legs. ”
“What happened that triggered this personality?” House snapped briskly.
“Nothing,” said Chase. “A nurse was injecting the sedative into his IV and he went crazy. When he couldn’t get out of the shackles, he brought the bed with ’im.” Sure enough, the wheeled bed laid beside Sam on the floor askew, still attached to one of his wrists, the other wrist unshackled now somehow, rubbed raw. Sam seemed to be using the bed as a fortification between him and everyone trying to get at him.
This reinforced House’s developing theories. He took on his most sharply authoritative tone. “Get out of the room now or you’re all fired.”
“House--” said Cameron, unwilling to leave even him in there, when he was likely to get hurt.
“You especially,” he snapped. Realizing he might have just let slip a hint of the protectiveness he felt for her, he added, “I’ve been looking for reasons to fire you for months, and this is a good one.”
She saw through some of it, hopefully not all of it; maybe just enough to realize he wanted above all, at any cost, to be alone with the patient, and reluctantly, she too left. Chase didn’t stay behind, worried for House, that cowardly self-interested little bastard. “On second thought, send Chase back in here; I’ll use him as my human shield,” House shouted back at the crowd, but no one moved, only watching through the glass walls. House turned to Sam and saw the terror in his eyes, which darted between all the people, the door, and House. House promptly shut the blinds so at least he couldn’t see the people anymore, and closed the door. Dangerous for House, for the staff not to be able to see whatever Sam might do to him? Sure. Necessary to get what he was after? Absolutely.
Moving slowly, House pulled over a rolling chair and sat down on it. He held up his cane. Sam looked wildly at it, breathing hard, looking for an escape, but there was only one door and he was as far as he could get from it, with House right between him and the door. If House’s theories were right, Sam wouldn’t try to make a break for it, but not because he was so afraid of House; the kid had courage. It was something else, something he couldn’t put his finger on, until he saw that hopelessness come over him again: Sam wouldn’t try because he believed escape was impossible. In this personality’s mind, he was still in hell ... and always would be.
“Can’t walk without this,” House informed him, then tossed the cane across the room. Sam flinched violently when it clattered against the floor ... but made no move toward House or the cane. Everything, exactly as House had anticipated. “I’m actually glad this happened,” House said, settling back lazily into the chair so as to look as patently nonthreatening as possible. This was his theory: that this version of Sam never instigated, only acting in self-defense. “I’ve been wanting to talk to you.” He peered closer at Sam, who was still on high alert, eyes combing every corner of the room, hallucinating dangers that weren’t there. “No one here is going to hurt you, Sam. Wherever you were, you aren’t there anymore. I won’t hurt you,” he said, then with a sudden intuition, he added, “and I won’t let anyone else here hurt you, either.”
House didn’t even know why he had the feeling he should say that, but it worked. Sam relaxed ever so slightly and said suspiciously, “For how long?”
House could promise him forever ... but that would be a lie. Someone in the outside world certainly might hurt the kid. Heck, even someone in the hospital might have to run a test that would be at least a little painful. House shrugged. “An hour.”
This paltry offering seemed more believable to Sam than some grander promise would; he relaxed slightly and slumped against the wall. “What do you want?” he asked skeptically.
“Just to talk.”
Sam snorted and rolled his eyes, but looked at him expectantly with those haunted, horrified eyes. House knew from personal experience that no one could channel this much fear unless they had reason to believe it was warranted, and what on earth could make someone that afraid? House had seen thousands of patients over the course of his career, most near death, many in terrible pain, quite a few with significant mental health issues, and he’d never seen fear like this. Maybe he really had been to hell. “Well?” said Sam.
“Do you remember your life? Your family, where you came from?”
Sam looked down slightly. “A lot has happened since then. You tried to make me forget. But yeah,” he said defiantly, lifting his chin. “I remember.”
“Who did this to you?” House asked.
“You did,” Sam said without hesitation.
“And who am I?”
“Lucifer.”
House chewed on this, spinning a little in his chair until he realized the movement was agitating Sam. He stopped. “Was it your dad?”
Sam lunged forward--only a step, but enough to make House’s pulse spike. “What about my dad? He’s in heaven now, isn’t he? He’s still in heaven, right? He is! He has to be!”
Okay, not the dad. “Of course he’s still in heaven. So, then ... was it your brother?”
“Dean,” Sam breathed, and sagged heavily against the wall, his face going slack, as if the name alone was heavier than anything else he’d ever had to bear. “Dean’s okay,” he said to himself like a mantra, like he’d said these words to himself countless times to get him through. “Dean’s still all right. He’s still out there, still alive. He’s okay, him and Bobby and Cas, they’re still all right. Everyone else is dead, but ... Dean’s okay. And the world. Humanity is okay. It’s okay. It was worth it.”
While Sam chanted compulsively, House considered what he’d learned. Sam must have made a sacrifice to save his brother and some other people. He must have had to believe he was saving the whole world for the sacrifice to seem worth it. Delusions of grandeur were common, especially in people who’d been horrifically victimized; if they descended into madness, it frequently had religious overtones, but that was usually associated with a religious upbringing. “Did a priest dip into your cookie jar?” House mused. “Was it a priest or minister, rabbi maybe ...?”
“Pastor Jim,” Sam said suddenly. House thought he’d finally hit on it, until Sam burst into sobs that wracked his whole body, burying his face in his hands. “He’s dead. Oh, God, Dad, I’m sorry, he’s dead! They’re all dead. We tried, but we couldn’t save them!: Pastor Jim, and Jo, and Ellen, so many of your hunter friends, oh God ....”
Someone burst through the door, and for the first time, House was terrified. This kind of interruption could easily tip this delicate balance and send Sam over the edge into brutal, possibly lethal violence. “Sam?!” the person cried.
“Dean!” Sam shouted. House looked up. Sure enough, there was the brother. He had found Sam more efficiently than House had expected. These Winchester boys knew what they were doing. “No, he’s right there, Lucifer’s right there!” Sam yelled frantically, pointing at House. “Get away from him!”
House knew that to make any move toward Dean or Sam--maybe any move at all--would trigger Sam’s formidable violent impulses, so he stayed perfectly still, arms folded. Dean glanced down at House, bewildered. House smirked up at him. “It’s not actually my first time being called by that name,” he informed him.
Dean turned his eyes back to Sam. House could tell from his posture that he, too, knew Sam might lose it any second, but it wasn’t a posture of flight; he was prepared to engage with his brother if necessary--to defend House. That got House’s attention. People were inherently selfish. How many people would risk their own safety for a stranger? Sam and Dean Winchester, apparently. “Wh--no, Sam, that’s not Lucifer; that’s a doctor. You aren’t there anymore, you aren’t in hell anymore, Sammy. We got you out.”
Sam looked around the room wildly, losing it, like his reality was crumbling. House edged slightly toward the door. Dean seemed perceptive enough to sense what House was doing. He took a slow step forward, shielding House from Sam’s sight so he could head for the door more purposefully. Maybe Dean wasn’t quite the meathead he looked. As Dean continued moving slowly toward Sam, trying to talk him down, House wheeled to the door, opened it a crack, and ordered a syringe full of antipsychotic medication and prepped the orderlies on how they were going to have to approach Sam. Then Dean was at Sam’s side, Dean was hugging him real tight, murmuring reassurances ... and Sam suddenly collapsed in his arms, unconscious.
Chase walked beside House as he headed toward his much-anticipated meeting with the brother, filling House in on the latest tests on the patient. “It was mainly an overload to his system,” he said, as House mentally ridiculed the way Australians said ‘load,’ which kind of sounded like ‘laid.’
“Heh-heh, you said ‘load,’” said House.
Chase frowned a little, thrown off, then plunged ahead with his report. “He still had plenty of sedative in his bloodstream, adrenaline was through the roof, he’d been on high alert for days .... I guess when he saw his brother, he finally felt like it was safe to let go. He’s been out ever since.”
“You got him a better bed, right? One he can’t throw across the room one-handed?”
“Yeh.”
“Good. Be ready for another meeting once I’m done talking to his brother. I get the feeling it’ll be a game-changer.”
Chase nodded and took off down another hallway, as House hurried the rest of the way to his office, where Dean was waiting. House could see through the glass walls that Dean was surreptitiously perusing the arrest warrants and other biographical information House had left on his desk. As House burst through the door, Dean even tried to slip some of them inside his jacket. House paused at Dean’s side to yank them back out of his jacket, then proceeded around his desk and sat down. “Actually, these are mine,” he told Dean, flapping the papers at him. Dean looked annoyed, foiled. “Interesting reading, too. Did you know your brother’s died twice?” he asked ingenuously. He cocked his head. “Something tells me you have, too.”
Dean seemed immune to b.s. “What’s wrong with him?” he asked brusquely.
“That’s what I was hoping you could tell me. Who’s Pastor Jim?”
Dean squinted, but not with the guarded expression House had expected; rather as if he thought it was a strange name for House to be trotting out, from the distant past. “Family friend,” he said carefully.
“And did you happen to know someone named ‘Lucifer’?”
Dean’s expression lightened, as did House’s, as he realized he could read Dean like a book, unlike his brother. Dean had just settled on a tactic he was sure would work, and House would always be one step ahead of him. “Yep, sure did.”
“Safe to assume he lived up to his name?” House suggested pseudo-conspiratorially.
“A hundred percent,” Dean agreed casually.
“You got out,” House said, “leaving Sam in there to suffer for you.”
Dean’s expression grew fixed. Not cold, though; the opposite: House had hit a nerve, a big one, maybe the biggest one he had. House could read the thoughts play across his features with delightful ease: Dean knew he should keep his mouth shut, but he couldn’t, any more than House could. “He volunteered!”
“And you just ... let him?”
“It wasn’t--it’s complicated--you-- What did he tell you?” Dean suddenly demanded. “He told you everything?”
It was like shooting fish in a barrel; this guy left himself wide open. “Everything,” House lied.
“And you ... believe him?”
House didn’t know what he was supposed to be believing, except maybe the hell garbage, but this was probably the quickest path to the revelations he sought: “What other explanation could there be?”
“Well then you know, he did it to save the world! He ... oh, God, Sam.” Dean covered his eyes with one hand. “I never should have let him, but when you’re facing the apocalypse, when you know it’s gonna happen ... what else do you do?”
House made mental notes: codependency between the brothers, probably instigated by their mother’s death and exacerbated by their father’s. They’d been through a lot of traumatic events together, but there was one--a big one--that Sam had had to shoulder alone, over which Dean suffered terrible guilt, but they seemed to have agreed ahead of time that it would be so. Maybe their torturer, whoever it was, only demanded one victim, and the brothers had agreed it would be better for only one of them to be thus broken. The question was, why Sam? Shared delusions, a shared mythology with heavy Christian symbolism, but what parts were they each playing? “Well, sure,” House said generously, “but ... why him?”
“Well, because he was Lucifer’s vessel!” Dean said, frustrated, “so he was the only one who could throw him back in the pit.”
House shuddered to think what ‘vessel’ meant in this context. “Ah, of course,” said House, smiling approvingly, which belied his next words. “So Sam was cast as the evil one, which naturally makes you ... the good one. What a good deal for you.”
Dean looked baffled. “Huh?”
“If Sam was the devil, what does that make you? God?”
Dean made a face, as if recoiling from the thought. “No, of course not! I was ... I was Michael’s vessel. Well, supposed to be.” House quirked his head, unfamiliar with most mythology, Christianity included. “You know, the most powerful archangel, cast Lucifer out of heaven ....”
“Ah,” House said, nodding with understanding. “So ... you stayed just this side of calling yourself God. Instead you were just his representative, but Sam had to be the devil himself. Interesting.” House spun in his chair a little more, now that he could. “So was it your dad who put you in these roles? Your mom? Maybe this ‘Bobby’?”
“What? No!”
“Who, then?”
“Well ....” Even Dean didn’t seem to like answering this question. “Uh ... destiny, I guess.”
“Sure, of course, destiny,” House said, wondering if Dean would pick up on the barest hint of sarcasm in his voice. “But who TOLD you this was your destiny?”
“The angels.”
House took out a piece of paper. Their tormentors cast themselves as angels. Ironic. Had the brothers ended up in some twisted Christian orphanage somewhere when they were young, where all kinds of horrors went on? That would help explain all the criminal behavior they’d descended into as adults, and all their weird crimes involving digging up and setting fire to corpses, and stealing relics and holy water from churches. Dean was the elder. Maybe he’d graduated and gone on with his life, taking this ‘Bobby’ with him, leaving Sam there alone with no one to spread around some of the suffering or talk it through with. Maybe then they mutually invented grand tales in which they decided what Sam went through was necessary to save the world, so that they might be able to find a way to forgive Dean for abandoning Sam to his ‘destiny’ and heal the inevitable rift that abandonment would cause between them. But that couldn’t be it--there were school records for both of them through their teen years, and Sam had even graduated from Stanford--hardly the accomplishments of boys who were so damaged one of their personalities split. Besides, Dean seemed pretty functional. Everything suggested Sam’s trauma was more recent than that. “And their names were ...?”
“Uriel, Zachariah, Cas .... Look, what difference does this make? I want to know how to help my brother!”
“I’m trying to help your brother,” House murmured, but something about the list of names was niggling at him. Something had passed beneath his notice, a name that had come up over and over that seemed somehow to be at the heart of all this. “Cas,” he said suddenly. “Cas, Cas ... Cas is ... is Cas the one who did this to him?” House asked suddenly, his intuition flaring brightly. He knew even before the words were out of his mouth that he was right. Dean nodded, the pain of betrayal darkening his features. “But Sam said he’d ‘saved’ Cas, that Cas was okay because he’d made his sacrifice,” he said eagerly. The picture was all coming together. Dean didn’t respond, eyes cast downward. “And is Cas the person one of Sam’s personalities was trying to get to, to help you with? You’re still involved with him?” Dean sighed helplessly; an obvious assent. Plainly Cas was responsible for the state in which House had found Sam. “What’s Cas’s full name?”
“Why; what difference does it make?”
“Because I’m going to put out an arrest warrant.”
This didn’t get quite the dramatic response House had hoped for. Dean only shrugged. “Get in line.”
Now it was House’s turn to be baffled. “Huh?”
Dean turned House’s little t.v., which Dean had evidently been watching while he awaited his arrival, to face House. “Because that’s Cas,” he said, pointing to a news report in which a trench-coated man smiled at a security camera before murdering a church full of people for what he deemed their blasphemy.
“So you know,” House breathed. “You know what he’s capable of. How he’s manipulated you. How he tortured Sam.”
“Sure,” Dean said, “but how do YOU know? I didn’t think Sam was even able to remember any of that right now.”
“I’m just that good,” House said smugly, wondering how selfish it made him that he was deeply offended that someone else had figured out the mystery before he did and had the nerve to act like his brilliant sleuthing was no big deal. Dean could have saved him the trouble and just told him what Cas had done, but no, another moment of genius passed by, unrecognized. It was hard, being a god among men.
Dean pushed Sam along carefully in a wheelchair as Sam dozed, heavily sedated. “Nope, I’m sure,” Dean was saying firmly. “I can take care of him. Better than you, anyway.”
Dean did handle Sam well when he had his psychotic episode. Legally, House should have committed Sam, or failing that, called the cops, but no one here would be able to fix him, and he couldn’t let a smart, decent, courageous kid like that languish, locked up. House thought again of Sam’s sociopathic personality, how even that one was a caretaker of sorts, of the family inside his head, methodically planning to clean up whatever mess Cas made after he opened this fantasy gate to purgatory ... which, come to think of it, was probably a metaphor for cleaning up the mess Cas had made in Sam’s mind. If they had all decided Cas had moved on to purgatory from hell, hey, that was a good sign, right? Maybe the next step in their mental journey would be to open the gates to heaven. Maybe then they would finally feel like they were healed.
The sociopathic part of him was the only part that seemed to have any sense of self-preservation, the only part that valued his own life above others’; it was the only part of him that was as selfish as most people were every day. The worst it had done was try to get in Cameron’s pants, but he must have been a real gentleman about it, since Cameron gave him such a warm goodbye this morning. He hadn’t gotten in her pants, though; it wasn’t THAT warm. If these boys were ever finally able to sort fact from fantasy in their heads, they might actually be able to do some real good in this world someday. “You need to help him come to terms with what’s happened and get him to merge his personalities again.”
“Sure, I’ll get right on that,” Dean said sarcastically, and House could not help smirking. He liked these Winchesters.
“And Cas ... you know you can never let him near your brother again, don’t you? The man is a menace.”
“You think I don’t know that?” Dean snorted. “That’s what I’ll be doing with all my free time, is hunting him down and trying to stop him.” He glanced at Sam. “Not that I’ll have any.”
They stopped at the doors out into the parking lot, where a black Chevy was waiting in the loading zone. House turned to face Dean. “You know, Dean ... I’m not the guy who’s in a position to lecture other people about facing their demons, but I can tell you, it doesn’t always have to be black and white, good and evil, right and wrong. You can both be good, you know. You have to let Sam be good. Life is hard enough without making someone have to be the bad guy.”
Dean seemed confused by his little speech. “Sam IS good,” he said, shaking his head quizzically. “We know. Team Free Will all the way, that’s us.”
House felt a frown that had come over his face the day he met Sam lift and disappear. Whatever these guys had been through, whatever some religious zealot had tortured them into believing, however they had suffered, they could keep going, keep fighting the good fight. House watched them as Dean wheeled Sam to the car and gently maneuvered him inside, lifting his brother’s long legs one by one and setting them on the floorboards. If Sam Winchester could keep on going after everything he’d been through ... maybe Gregory House could, too.
~ The End ~