Meta CollarVerse
The story switches off. House sighs with relief, gets up from his knees, and pulls a beer out of the hotel room fridge.
"Do you know how much those beers cost?" Wilson yelped. With relief, he realised that he was no longer thinking in present tense: there was always an overlap between the story switching off and the effect the story had on the tense of their thoughts and actions, but it usually didn't last longer than a paragraph.
"You're a department head, you can afford it." House drank straight from the bottle. "Anyway, I'm the most expensive item in this hotel room and you're getting me for free."
"You could get me a beer," Wilson suggested wearily. He sat down on the bed - he'd been standing by it for what felt like days, looking down at House with the same expression of exasperated sympathy and lust. What he actually wanted was a couple of aspirin and orange juice, but he knew better than to expect to find anything like that in the hotel room's fridge. It never seemed to occur to the author that cheap non-prescription painkillers existed, he thought rebelliously.
As usual when the story engine had switched off, House ignored him. He sat down in the chair and swung his feet up on to the coffee table. "The lousy fan writing this story's left me like this for days! Why can't they learn: when you walk away from the story, you turn it off!"
"Is this mainverse or AU?" Wilson wondered.
Greg glanced down at himself. "Mainverse. I've got both legs, you don't seem more than ordinarily clueless. What the hell is she doing to keep the story running like this but not moving it along?"
"I shudder to think." Wilson picked up the TV remote control. "Have you noticed anything particularly weird happening lately?"
"As compared to what?" House inquired.
Wilson rubbed the back of his neck. "Well, I do realise it's a little bit odd the US apparently having brought back slavery without anything else changing, and no mention of any political or social trends that would justify it..." He trailed off as he realized House was ignoring him again.
"I've been remembering things..." House's face took on that distant, fragile, enslaved look it wore so often when the story was running. Wilson checked himself mentally: he didn't seem to have any urge to start a sexual scene, so the story was almost definitely turned off.
"Or else," he said out loud, "it's something she wants K or T? Everything else in Collarverse always M."
House seemed to wake from his reverie. "Take a look at the title," he said. "We're in a meta story." He rolled his eyes at the author. "Now switch it off."
*click* end
Er, yes... this is just a silly little bit I wrote so the CollarVerse community would have at least ONE story in it rated below M.
All the other stories are very very definitely adult, deal with slavery, explicit sexual situations, dubcon, noncon, don't read if that's not your thing, etc.
The other stories currently available in the CollarVerse are the "mainverse": CollarRedux and CollarRedux Season 2 and CollarRedux Intervals; and several spin-offs, additional scenes, and one ongoing AU called "Pain Control" which manages to be *even darker* than the CollarVerse. The basic theme is: there are slaves, Greg House is one, and he's owned by PPTH. Oh and Wilson is... interested in him.
