(no subject)
Title: For Every Closed Door (8/?)
Fandom: House MD/Dead Like Me crossover
Author: Starling
Rating: R overall, for swearing and graphic description
Characters/pairings: House, original characters, eventual House/Wilson.
Warnings: Afterlife!Fic. Thus, by necessity, also a death!fic, but not depressing. Also, this chapter features some serious suicide ideation.
Summary: "We've got a pool going as to how exactly you've been torturing yourself. I've got twenty bucks saying you've joined an S&M club."
Obligatory Disclaimer: I don't own, write for, or produce either of these fabulous shows. I'm just a geek with too much time on her hands.
A/N: I've got no real explanation for this chapter. I fought it, but this is what the muse demanded.
Unbeta'd. All mistakes are mine.
Concrit feedback gives me warm fuzzies.
x-posted to housefic and house_wilson.
Previous Chapters
Humans beings are simple, predictable clichés. Broken hearts, betrayal, it's all been done a billion times before. The problem is, every time still hurts like the first. And if you're lucky enough to recover, you can be sure that just as you finish filling in all the cracks in your life, the next one is starting to open.
Two days after his revelation about Wilson, Kay was still trailing after House like some concerned mother hen. She'd offered to buy him lunch after his afternoon reap, and though he had reservations, he agreed. A broke, unemployed Reaper couldn't afford to turn down free lunches, after all, no matter how much insufferable pitying from his boss he had to sit through to get it. It was the principle of the thing.
"You want me to come up with you?" she asked. They were in front of an expensive hotel in downtown Princeton, in which approximately ten minutes, somebody named J.B. Summers would die.
"I think I can handle it on my own, Mom," he said disdainfully.
She shrugged, parked herself on the bench in front of the hotel, and lit up a cigarette.
House went inside, stole a vase full of flowers from the lobby, took the elevator to the sixth floor, and knocked on room 614.
The door opened, revealing a middle-aged man with thinning brown hair. The man looked nervous, and was fiddling with something in the pocket of his robe. "Yes? What is it?"
"I have some flowers for a Mister..." House looked at his Post-It, given to him that morning in Hennry's. "...J.B. Summers?"
"That's me. Who are they from?" The man said suspiciously. House congratulated himself on his cleverness.
"I'm just the delivery guy. They don't tell me these things."
The guy looked at him suspiciously, then leaned out of the door and looked both ways down the hallway.
"Okay," he said finally. "Bring them inside and put them on the desk."
House felt something was off about the man's twitchy stance, but came inside anyway. The guy would be dead in a matter of minutes, so what's the worst that could happen?
When House turned around J.B. Summers was holding a gun on him. And the smell of ash was in the air; out of the corner of his eye, he could see a Graveling standing on the bed sniggering at him, before disappearing in a puff of acrid smoke.
Great. Well, fuck you too, Universe.
"Who sent you?" House's reap asked, his voice high and nervous.
"My boss?" House answered honestly, then cursed himself. Stupid answer. He blamed being held at gunpoint. Knowing academically that a gunshot couldn't kill him didn't alleviate the anxiety of being on the business end of the barrel.
"Who are you working for? Was it Martin? That bastard, I should have known, he's always had it in for me-"
"Look -" House began, putting his hands up. Whatever he'd been about to say was interrupted by the gun going off.
The force of the bullet tearing into his chest knocked House off his feet. He fell against the plush carpet, blood already pouring out of the wound .
Damn it. He'd liked this shirt.
"Oh shit," J.B. Summers said. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean-"
"Fuck off," House spat. "Asshole," he added, for good measure. House had already diagnosed Summers as paranoid and probably delusional, but that didn't mean he deserved any of his sympathy.
"Should I-" Summers gestured to the telephone with the hand still holding the gun. That small movement was enough for the gun fire again. House heard the bullet ricochet twice off the walls before lodging in J.B. Summers frontal lobe. The man fell over a foot away from where House crouched on the floor.
"Douchebag," House said roughly, still in pain. "It would serve you right if I left you in there." J.B. Summers had only served to cement House's stance on gun-control laws. Guns didn't kill people; their idiot owners did. There should be an intelligence test along with a background check.
Just then, there was a knock on the door. Fuck. House wondered how far the Powers That Be would go to keep him off the radar. Would they, say, make him invisible to hotel security when they bust down the door?
"House?" It was Kay's voice. Damn her and her telepathy.
"Slightly indisposed," he grunted. "Give me a minute."
He hauled himself up, groaning loudly as he did so. He took a towel off a rack in the bathroom and stuffed it against the wound in his shoulder, then opened the door.
She took in his bloodied appearance with a raised eyebrow, then looked at the body of J.B. Summers. "Brilliant work as usual," she said, stepping into the room and shutting the door behind her. "Go cop a feel off the stiff before his soul spoils."
House glared at her. "I've been shot, and you're worried about that idiot?"
"It's just a flesh wound," she said dismissively. "You'll be fine by tonight. Stoned from all the endorphins, even." She began going through the desk drawers, looking for anything of value. She found a bottle of pills, and read the label.
"Fine? I've been shot in the..." House trailed off as he realized, peeling off the towel, that the wound was already starting to close. The bleeding had slowed to a slow and sluggish leak.
Huh. Interesting.
"Here," Kay said, opening the bottle and knocking two into her hand. "Valium. It'll take the edge off till it's healed."
He took the two pills and dry-swallowed them, feeling a momentary nostalgic pang, then went over to J.B. Summers' corpse and extracted his soul. Sometime in between seeing the dead man off to his heaven (in this case, a Japanese bathhouse), and rifling through his belongings (there'd been an impressive amount of cash in his wallet, along with enough tranquilizers stocked up to knock out a small hippo), the innate scientist (and equally innate masochist) in House's mind started thinking about the physical limits of a Reaper, and how one might test them.
By the time the gunshot wound had healed, House was pleasantly stoned on a post-pain endorphin high and Valium, and he had already started to form an abstract of his experiment.
On the Extreme Physical Limits of the Undead Population, he'd decided to title it. By Mika Thaddeus Tesla, or the doctor formerly known as Gregory House.
*****
Day one: he tried hanging himself. He used some rock climbing ropes the previous tenant had left behind, tied a knot around a rafter, and let himself fall. He'd been unable to breathe for ten minutes, but he didn't even lose consciousness. That had been extremely unpleasant and disconcerting.
Lasting Effects: Slightly stiff neck, bruising, both of which faded by the next day.
Day two: House injected himself with an air bubble, then sat in front of the television, watching a Golden Girls marathon and waiting for the inevitable stroke. He sat through four hours of post-menopausal wit, romance, and cheesecake eating before he finally gave up and went to bed.
Lasting Effects: Slight headache when he awoke, but that could be attributed to the television. Or a hangover. Impossible to tell which.
By the third day of the grand experiment, they knew him by his assumed name at the liquor store. The cashier eyed him uneasily as he bought his daily purchase of whiskey. The instinct for self-preservation was dulled after about ten shots, he'd discovered.
"My parents are in town," House said to the kid at the register. "Only way we can all stand to be in the same room together."
The kid nodded in understanding, then bagged up his purchase.
Day three, House drank the Scotch with a chaser of floor cleaner. When he awoke the next morning, he was lying on his living room floor, next to a small puddle of green puke that had partially burned through the rug.
Lasting Effects: His mouth tasted like several small animals had died in it. There was some indigestion, but it cleared up after breakfast.
*****
"You look worse than most of the corpses I've seen," Colby said to him at Hennry's that morning. House didn't bother to answer, just tipped more of the black tar that passed for coffee down his throat.
It was just the two of them. Ada had left without eating, citing an appointment to get her hair done, and Kay had a Reap due in about half an hour.
"Do you smell Pine-Sol?" Colby asked, sniffing the air.
House swallowed back another belch and shook his head.
"So..." Colby said, swallowing some coffee before he went on. "You going to tell me what's up?"
House blinked, then glared at the younger man. "Why, hello Kay. I didn't hear you come back in. That's a remarkable puppet you've made. Maybe we can find a fairy to turn him into a real boy."
Colby rolled his eyes. "Kay didn't tell me to ask you."
"You're doing a great impression of her. You've got the patronizing nosiness down pat."
Colby shrugged and drained the last of his coffee. "We've got a pool going as to how exactly you've been torturing yourself. I've got twenty bucks saying you've joined an S&M club. Where else would you have gotten that rope burn?" he said, gesturing to House's neck.
House snorted. Now there was an idea. "I'm testing my physical limits," House corrected. "It's all in the name of science."
"Are you serious? The endurance of a Reaper body?" To his credit, Colby actually sounded kind of interested. "What have you tried?"
House quirked an eyebrow, then started explaining the experiment.
*****
"Ready?" Colby asked.
House looked into the well-lit depths of the pool outside his apartment building, feeling slightly nervous. "Tell me again how it felt to drown," he said.
Colby rolled his eyes. "I was drunk. I don't really remember, I told you."
"I heard it's peaceful."
"I wouldn't really know. Drunk and unconscious, remember?"
"Don't ask me if I remember. I wasn't there to witness your embarrassing and untimely demise." House stripped off his T-shirt and stepped out of his sneakers, then bent over to tie the weights around his ankle. Altogether, the metal discs added up to about a hundred and fifty pounds. "Do you have the stopwatch ready, lowly assistant?"
Colby waved his wristwatch, then took another sip of House's whiskey. "Do you have any last words?" he asked as House stepped up to the edge of the deep end, carrying the barbell weights, the cords in his arms standing out under the strain.
"I'm already dead. The time of epithets has passed."
Colby cocked his head to one side, mulling the words over. "Lame," he finally pronounced. "Poetic, but lame."
"Oh, shut up," House growled, then stepped into the pool, sinking quickly to the bottom.
****
The first thing House was aware of when he regained consciousness was warmth. Somebody had brought him inside and wrapped him in a blanket on his couch.
The second was a burning in his chest and throat. He was confused until he remembered what he'd done. Whoever it was that said drowning was a pleasant way to die was full of more shit than the average Irritated Bowel Syndrome patient.
The third thing he was aware of was Kay standing over him. Oh god, she even had her hands on her hips. This was going to be terrible. House wondered if it was too late to pretend to still be unconscious.
"I have to say that I'm impressed," she said philosophically.
He started to groan, sensing an oncoming lecture, but started coughing instead.
"Although I guess I should thank you. Colby and Ada both owe me twenty bucks now. I bet that you were torturing yourself through simulated suicide. Good thing I decided to come by. Colby would have totally welched." Kay moved a bucket next to his head, then moved back, still frowning at him.
House spat some chlorine-flavored bile into the bucket, then choked out, "I'm testing my limits. In the name of science."
"You're testing my patience. And it's in the name of self-pity. Don't kid yourself."
House had a response to that, but it got lost in another coughing fit.
"Quit projecting," he managed finally. "You think this is because I found out my best friend was in love with me? And because I can never see him again?"
Kay quirked an eyebrow. "Considering that I didn't even say anything about him, I wouldn't exactly call it projecting."
House frowned, then turned into the pillow when he realized she was right. "Shit," he said. He'd successfully distracted himself from thoughts of Wilson for the last five days. Now he just felt pathetic; being rolled up in a fuzzy blanket on his couch, with a bucket partially filled with regurgitated pool water didn't help.
"By the way, you were underwater for twenty one minutes. I made Colby drag you up when I saw what was going on." She lit a cigarette in his apartment. "You should come with a warning label."
"That's what you get for not reading the small print."
"I can picture it now. 'Warning: Extremely volatile and destructive. Irritating in large doses. Also in small ones.'"
"'Do not allow near open flames. Call poison control if accidentally ingested,'" House added.
Kay smiled briefly, then her expression turned serious again. "House, did you feel-"
"No! Of course not!" Fuck. He'd done it again.
Kay took a drag on her cigarette. "Methinks the lady doth protest too much. Considering I didn't even finish asking you if you were interested in Wilson too."
House snorted, hoping to cover his egregious slip with sarcasm. "Yeah, well, methinks the lady pries too much. And is annoying the crap out of me." He shifted in the blanket, drawing it closer around him. "Not like it matters anyway," he muttered. "Weren't you the one saying I had to let it all go anyway? I can never see him again, so it doesn't matter what I felt." He caught her look. "Not that I felt anything like you're thinking anyway. Quit projecting your unrequited love for Delia onto me."
"Course," she agreed noncommittally. For some reason, her bland tone annoyed him more than if she'd flat out disagreed with him. He rolled over and concentrated on going back to sleep.
*****
"Pay up, dipshit," Kay said to Colby at Hennry's the next morning, flicking him in the ear as she and House walked up to the table.
The younger man flinched and rubbed at his ear. "I paid you last night. And why am I the dipshit? It was his idea," Colby whined, pointing at House.
"You did not pay me last night. You left me there to take care of him. And you're a dipshit because you encouraged him. And for trying to welch on the deal. He's an ass for... well, the list is too long to go into."
"The ass is sitting right next to you," House growled. "And would like to not be talked about as if he weren't in the room."
"Who's an ass?" Ada said as she sat down next to Colby.
"House. I'm a dipshit, apparently," Colby said, passing a wrinkled twenty across the table.
"I could see that," Ada said agreeably.
"You owe me twenty bucks, by the way," Kay said.
"Darn it. That's what I get for being an optimist," Ada said, digging in her hand bag. "I was going for the psychological angle. Internal pain and loss expressing itself through subconscious accidents, resulting in physical trauma," she said to House. "I had this cousin-"
"Nope," Kay said, cutting her off. "He's just a straight-up masochist." Kay pocketed her winnings as the waitress brought their coffees. "Thanks, Edna." She brought out the familiar pad of Post-Its and started writing down the names and time of deaths for those decreed to die that day.
House stood up after receiving his. "I'm leaving. It'll be easier for you all to discuss my masochistic tendencies if I'm not here."
"Oh, don't be such a poopypants," Ada said.
House cringed. "If nothing else, that would have convinced me that my morning could be better spent elsewhere."
Colby snorted and Ada rolled her eyes. "Call me if you're planning on trying to kill yourself some more," Kay said. "I'll get a camera and we can record it for posterity."
"Save it for the next orgy. You'll make better money selling it on the internet."
House walked out of the diner.
And directly into James Wilson.
Fandom: House MD/Dead Like Me crossover
Author: Starling
Rating: R overall, for swearing and graphic description
Characters/pairings: House, original characters, eventual House/Wilson.
Warnings: Afterlife!Fic. Thus, by necessity, also a death!fic, but not depressing. Also, this chapter features some serious suicide ideation.
Summary: "We've got a pool going as to how exactly you've been torturing yourself. I've got twenty bucks saying you've joined an S&M club."
Obligatory Disclaimer: I don't own, write for, or produce either of these fabulous shows. I'm just a geek with too much time on her hands.
A/N: I've got no real explanation for this chapter. I fought it, but this is what the muse demanded.
Unbeta'd. All mistakes are mine.
Concrit feedback gives me warm fuzzies.
x-posted to housefic and house_wilson.
Previous Chapters
Humans beings are simple, predictable clichés. Broken hearts, betrayal, it's all been done a billion times before. The problem is, every time still hurts like the first. And if you're lucky enough to recover, you can be sure that just as you finish filling in all the cracks in your life, the next one is starting to open.
Two days after his revelation about Wilson, Kay was still trailing after House like some concerned mother hen. She'd offered to buy him lunch after his afternoon reap, and though he had reservations, he agreed. A broke, unemployed Reaper couldn't afford to turn down free lunches, after all, no matter how much insufferable pitying from his boss he had to sit through to get it. It was the principle of the thing.
"You want me to come up with you?" she asked. They were in front of an expensive hotel in downtown Princeton, in which approximately ten minutes, somebody named J.B. Summers would die.
"I think I can handle it on my own, Mom," he said disdainfully.
She shrugged, parked herself on the bench in front of the hotel, and lit up a cigarette.
House went inside, stole a vase full of flowers from the lobby, took the elevator to the sixth floor, and knocked on room 614.
The door opened, revealing a middle-aged man with thinning brown hair. The man looked nervous, and was fiddling with something in the pocket of his robe. "Yes? What is it?"
"I have some flowers for a Mister..." House looked at his Post-It, given to him that morning in Hennry's. "...J.B. Summers?"
"That's me. Who are they from?" The man said suspiciously. House congratulated himself on his cleverness.
"I'm just the delivery guy. They don't tell me these things."
The guy looked at him suspiciously, then leaned out of the door and looked both ways down the hallway.
"Okay," he said finally. "Bring them inside and put them on the desk."
House felt something was off about the man's twitchy stance, but came inside anyway. The guy would be dead in a matter of minutes, so what's the worst that could happen?
When House turned around J.B. Summers was holding a gun on him. And the smell of ash was in the air; out of the corner of his eye, he could see a Graveling standing on the bed sniggering at him, before disappearing in a puff of acrid smoke.
Great. Well, fuck you too, Universe.
"Who sent you?" House's reap asked, his voice high and nervous.
"My boss?" House answered honestly, then cursed himself. Stupid answer. He blamed being held at gunpoint. Knowing academically that a gunshot couldn't kill him didn't alleviate the anxiety of being on the business end of the barrel.
"Who are you working for? Was it Martin? That bastard, I should have known, he's always had it in for me-"
"Look -" House began, putting his hands up. Whatever he'd been about to say was interrupted by the gun going off.
The force of the bullet tearing into his chest knocked House off his feet. He fell against the plush carpet, blood already pouring out of the wound .
Damn it. He'd liked this shirt.
"Oh shit," J.B. Summers said. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean-"
"Fuck off," House spat. "Asshole," he added, for good measure. House had already diagnosed Summers as paranoid and probably delusional, but that didn't mean he deserved any of his sympathy.
"Should I-" Summers gestured to the telephone with the hand still holding the gun. That small movement was enough for the gun fire again. House heard the bullet ricochet twice off the walls before lodging in J.B. Summers frontal lobe. The man fell over a foot away from where House crouched on the floor.
"Douchebag," House said roughly, still in pain. "It would serve you right if I left you in there." J.B. Summers had only served to cement House's stance on gun-control laws. Guns didn't kill people; their idiot owners did. There should be an intelligence test along with a background check.
Just then, there was a knock on the door. Fuck. House wondered how far the Powers That Be would go to keep him off the radar. Would they, say, make him invisible to hotel security when they bust down the door?
"House?" It was Kay's voice. Damn her and her telepathy.
"Slightly indisposed," he grunted. "Give me a minute."
He hauled himself up, groaning loudly as he did so. He took a towel off a rack in the bathroom and stuffed it against the wound in his shoulder, then opened the door.
She took in his bloodied appearance with a raised eyebrow, then looked at the body of J.B. Summers. "Brilliant work as usual," she said, stepping into the room and shutting the door behind her. "Go cop a feel off the stiff before his soul spoils."
House glared at her. "I've been shot, and you're worried about that idiot?"
"It's just a flesh wound," she said dismissively. "You'll be fine by tonight. Stoned from all the endorphins, even." She began going through the desk drawers, looking for anything of value. She found a bottle of pills, and read the label.
"Fine? I've been shot in the..." House trailed off as he realized, peeling off the towel, that the wound was already starting to close. The bleeding had slowed to a slow and sluggish leak.
Huh. Interesting.
"Here," Kay said, opening the bottle and knocking two into her hand. "Valium. It'll take the edge off till it's healed."
He took the two pills and dry-swallowed them, feeling a momentary nostalgic pang, then went over to J.B. Summers' corpse and extracted his soul. Sometime in between seeing the dead man off to his heaven (in this case, a Japanese bathhouse), and rifling through his belongings (there'd been an impressive amount of cash in his wallet, along with enough tranquilizers stocked up to knock out a small hippo), the innate scientist (and equally innate masochist) in House's mind started thinking about the physical limits of a Reaper, and how one might test them.
By the time the gunshot wound had healed, House was pleasantly stoned on a post-pain endorphin high and Valium, and he had already started to form an abstract of his experiment.
On the Extreme Physical Limits of the Undead Population, he'd decided to title it. By Mika Thaddeus Tesla, or the doctor formerly known as Gregory House.
*****
Day one: he tried hanging himself. He used some rock climbing ropes the previous tenant had left behind, tied a knot around a rafter, and let himself fall. He'd been unable to breathe for ten minutes, but he didn't even lose consciousness. That had been extremely unpleasant and disconcerting.
Lasting Effects: Slightly stiff neck, bruising, both of which faded by the next day.
Day two: House injected himself with an air bubble, then sat in front of the television, watching a Golden Girls marathon and waiting for the inevitable stroke. He sat through four hours of post-menopausal wit, romance, and cheesecake eating before he finally gave up and went to bed.
Lasting Effects: Slight headache when he awoke, but that could be attributed to the television. Or a hangover. Impossible to tell which.
By the third day of the grand experiment, they knew him by his assumed name at the liquor store. The cashier eyed him uneasily as he bought his daily purchase of whiskey. The instinct for self-preservation was dulled after about ten shots, he'd discovered.
"My parents are in town," House said to the kid at the register. "Only way we can all stand to be in the same room together."
The kid nodded in understanding, then bagged up his purchase.
Day three, House drank the Scotch with a chaser of floor cleaner. When he awoke the next morning, he was lying on his living room floor, next to a small puddle of green puke that had partially burned through the rug.
Lasting Effects: His mouth tasted like several small animals had died in it. There was some indigestion, but it cleared up after breakfast.
*****
"You look worse than most of the corpses I've seen," Colby said to him at Hennry's that morning. House didn't bother to answer, just tipped more of the black tar that passed for coffee down his throat.
It was just the two of them. Ada had left without eating, citing an appointment to get her hair done, and Kay had a Reap due in about half an hour.
"Do you smell Pine-Sol?" Colby asked, sniffing the air.
House swallowed back another belch and shook his head.
"So..." Colby said, swallowing some coffee before he went on. "You going to tell me what's up?"
House blinked, then glared at the younger man. "Why, hello Kay. I didn't hear you come back in. That's a remarkable puppet you've made. Maybe we can find a fairy to turn him into a real boy."
Colby rolled his eyes. "Kay didn't tell me to ask you."
"You're doing a great impression of her. You've got the patronizing nosiness down pat."
Colby shrugged and drained the last of his coffee. "We've got a pool going as to how exactly you've been torturing yourself. I've got twenty bucks saying you've joined an S&M club. Where else would you have gotten that rope burn?" he said, gesturing to House's neck.
House snorted. Now there was an idea. "I'm testing my physical limits," House corrected. "It's all in the name of science."
"Are you serious? The endurance of a Reaper body?" To his credit, Colby actually sounded kind of interested. "What have you tried?"
House quirked an eyebrow, then started explaining the experiment.
*****
"Ready?" Colby asked.
House looked into the well-lit depths of the pool outside his apartment building, feeling slightly nervous. "Tell me again how it felt to drown," he said.
Colby rolled his eyes. "I was drunk. I don't really remember, I told you."
"I heard it's peaceful."
"I wouldn't really know. Drunk and unconscious, remember?"
"Don't ask me if I remember. I wasn't there to witness your embarrassing and untimely demise." House stripped off his T-shirt and stepped out of his sneakers, then bent over to tie the weights around his ankle. Altogether, the metal discs added up to about a hundred and fifty pounds. "Do you have the stopwatch ready, lowly assistant?"
Colby waved his wristwatch, then took another sip of House's whiskey. "Do you have any last words?" he asked as House stepped up to the edge of the deep end, carrying the barbell weights, the cords in his arms standing out under the strain.
"I'm already dead. The time of epithets has passed."
Colby cocked his head to one side, mulling the words over. "Lame," he finally pronounced. "Poetic, but lame."
"Oh, shut up," House growled, then stepped into the pool, sinking quickly to the bottom.
****
The first thing House was aware of when he regained consciousness was warmth. Somebody had brought him inside and wrapped him in a blanket on his couch.
The second was a burning in his chest and throat. He was confused until he remembered what he'd done. Whoever it was that said drowning was a pleasant way to die was full of more shit than the average Irritated Bowel Syndrome patient.
The third thing he was aware of was Kay standing over him. Oh god, she even had her hands on her hips. This was going to be terrible. House wondered if it was too late to pretend to still be unconscious.
"I have to say that I'm impressed," she said philosophically.
He started to groan, sensing an oncoming lecture, but started coughing instead.
"Although I guess I should thank you. Colby and Ada both owe me twenty bucks now. I bet that you were torturing yourself through simulated suicide. Good thing I decided to come by. Colby would have totally welched." Kay moved a bucket next to his head, then moved back, still frowning at him.
House spat some chlorine-flavored bile into the bucket, then choked out, "I'm testing my limits. In the name of science."
"You're testing my patience. And it's in the name of self-pity. Don't kid yourself."
House had a response to that, but it got lost in another coughing fit.
"Quit projecting," he managed finally. "You think this is because I found out my best friend was in love with me? And because I can never see him again?"
Kay quirked an eyebrow. "Considering that I didn't even say anything about him, I wouldn't exactly call it projecting."
House frowned, then turned into the pillow when he realized she was right. "Shit," he said. He'd successfully distracted himself from thoughts of Wilson for the last five days. Now he just felt pathetic; being rolled up in a fuzzy blanket on his couch, with a bucket partially filled with regurgitated pool water didn't help.
"By the way, you were underwater for twenty one minutes. I made Colby drag you up when I saw what was going on." She lit a cigarette in his apartment. "You should come with a warning label."
"That's what you get for not reading the small print."
"I can picture it now. 'Warning: Extremely volatile and destructive. Irritating in large doses. Also in small ones.'"
"'Do not allow near open flames. Call poison control if accidentally ingested,'" House added.
Kay smiled briefly, then her expression turned serious again. "House, did you feel-"
"No! Of course not!" Fuck. He'd done it again.
Kay took a drag on her cigarette. "Methinks the lady doth protest too much. Considering I didn't even finish asking you if you were interested in Wilson too."
House snorted, hoping to cover his egregious slip with sarcasm. "Yeah, well, methinks the lady pries too much. And is annoying the crap out of me." He shifted in the blanket, drawing it closer around him. "Not like it matters anyway," he muttered. "Weren't you the one saying I had to let it all go anyway? I can never see him again, so it doesn't matter what I felt." He caught her look. "Not that I felt anything like you're thinking anyway. Quit projecting your unrequited love for Delia onto me."
"Course," she agreed noncommittally. For some reason, her bland tone annoyed him more than if she'd flat out disagreed with him. He rolled over and concentrated on going back to sleep.
*****
"Pay up, dipshit," Kay said to Colby at Hennry's the next morning, flicking him in the ear as she and House walked up to the table.
The younger man flinched and rubbed at his ear. "I paid you last night. And why am I the dipshit? It was his idea," Colby whined, pointing at House.
"You did not pay me last night. You left me there to take care of him. And you're a dipshit because you encouraged him. And for trying to welch on the deal. He's an ass for... well, the list is too long to go into."
"The ass is sitting right next to you," House growled. "And would like to not be talked about as if he weren't in the room."
"Who's an ass?" Ada said as she sat down next to Colby.
"House. I'm a dipshit, apparently," Colby said, passing a wrinkled twenty across the table.
"I could see that," Ada said agreeably.
"You owe me twenty bucks, by the way," Kay said.
"Darn it. That's what I get for being an optimist," Ada said, digging in her hand bag. "I was going for the psychological angle. Internal pain and loss expressing itself through subconscious accidents, resulting in physical trauma," she said to House. "I had this cousin-"
"Nope," Kay said, cutting her off. "He's just a straight-up masochist." Kay pocketed her winnings as the waitress brought their coffees. "Thanks, Edna." She brought out the familiar pad of Post-Its and started writing down the names and time of deaths for those decreed to die that day.
House stood up after receiving his. "I'm leaving. It'll be easier for you all to discuss my masochistic tendencies if I'm not here."
"Oh, don't be such a poopypants," Ada said.
House cringed. "If nothing else, that would have convinced me that my morning could be better spent elsewhere."
Colby snorted and Ada rolled her eyes. "Call me if you're planning on trying to kill yourself some more," Kay said. "I'll get a camera and we can record it for posterity."
"Save it for the next orgy. You'll make better money selling it on the internet."
House walked out of the diner.
And directly into James Wilson.