Collateral
Author: Storm
Characters: Wilson, Cuddy, House.
Rating: PG
Summary: What happens after you've just brought the H/house down?
A/N: Just a little overnight stop at the campground ;) Playing with the prompts from this drabble challenge: 1) bear, night; 2) belt, storm, bug; 3) bat, red, echo; 4) speed, tent, soft; 5) roar.
Set post-Moving On again. I seem to be trying to work out my issues with the end of last season.
It's a bear of a night. Grizzly black clouds snarl overhead, send the stars into hiding. There will be rain later, clawing at the buildings, gouging bright slashes onto the windowpanes. Wilson stands alone on the Diagnostics balcony, takes grimacing pulls from one of House's despicable cigarettes, and ignores both the dark office and incoming storm. He was given Tylenol to take for his fractured wrist, but he hurts inside as well as out so he wrote himself a false script instead. He's taken six Vicodin, dry, in the last half an hour. He needs to be able to understand.
The speed at which it happened was incredible. She was laughing at a joke she doesn't remember, clearing cutlery and sticky plates. Then, boom, the walls tore apart like a tent in a high wind. The cacophonic crash of her home being reduced to so much spite and timber echoes relentlessly in her head. Huddled on her sister's couch, she listens to her siblings and in-laws ranting, raving and calling her mother in the kitchen next door. In her lap Rachel sleeps, blissfully oblivious. Her hair smells of pear shampoo and her soft white pyjamas have red ladybugs on them.
When the police asked, Lisa swore she'd press charges. Her mother will order it. Her sisters will insist. Common sense demands it. But Cuddy, doctor, medical dean, disputes it. Prison doesn't cure pain, mental illness and addiction. Once, she wanted the sheer talent and giddy energy of this man to infect her. Sometimes, she wants to punish him. What he needs is help. She bats around the wild hope that Wilson will splint his broken arm with sticks, use his belt as a sling, and smuggle House off to a forest cabin, where no more harm can be done.
The ocean roars, spits salt water and swears at the cliffs. Waves green as envy hurtle toward shore like a 1978 Dodge with the gas jammed down. They collide with the rocks and reel back. Once upon a time, he shared their rage and futility. Lounging beneath the fairy lights of a beachside bar, House doesn't care any more. The great sea's struggles against the shackles of the tide are as unimportant to him as the wreckage of his life. He's drunk on indifference, floating on a raft of numbness. He took the last of his Vicodin on the way here.
He doesn't notice that the sand he thinks he's lying on is white only in lines, whilst the rest is grit-grey. That the lights of the bar do not twinkle but revolve, red and blue. That he's not floating, but being lifted. That the raft is a stretcher. That the shackles are not moonlight and hours but metal Smith and Wesson. That the spray is falling from a blackening sky. That the roar is not sound but sensation, not green but red. It runs from the gash on his head and steadily from the reopened surgical wounds in his thigh.
[End].