Speculation fic I've had in my mind for a while, for all of us who miss Kutner~. He lives on in this story! This story will be slashy later on. There will be some Cameron/Thirteen hinting, but I'm not sure if it will go in that direction entirely. Kutner/Taub will eventually evolve, and of course, we have the classic House/Wilson guaranteed.
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"Kutner!" Thirteen called, pressing her ear to the door and rapping her knuckles against the dark wood. "Kutner, it's Foreman and Thirteen," Foreman tried, knocking a little louder and raising his voice to a yell. The apartment was still silent. Thirteen sighed and rolled her eyes, withdrawing a key from her pocket and dangling it before Foreman's eyes. "House gave me these. Let's just let ourselves in." She easily opened the door and swung it open. The inside of Kutner's apartment was dark, but through the afternoon light coming through the draped windows they could clearly see the neatly stacked shelves of comic books and action figures. Thirteen couldn't help but walk in and grin widely.
"A man-boy paradise," she exclaimed, running a finger along a glass display case. Everything was perfect in the apartment; it looked recently cleaned, even. Odd. Thirteen slipped off into thought, while Foreman shuffled off to see if Kutner was in the kitchen without a word. A shape out of place caught Thirteen's eye. She could see it in the corner of her vision; as she turned around to further inspect it, she could feel her heart stop and drop a few inches. "Oh god," she gasped, "Kutner!" She shot off towards the bedroom, and felt her shoes squelch into a pool of blood as soon as she crossed the threshhold. Kutner was sprawled on his back in the congealing blood, a small circle-shaped wound on his temple. Thirteen fell to her knees beside him, barely hearing Foreman drop everything in the kitchen and come into the room. She took two seconds to coach herself to stay calm and check the vitals, took a breath, and pressed her ear to Kutner's chest. Hearing nothing, she pressed two shaking fingers against his throat, grappling desperately to find a sign.
It was there. Extremely faint, but it was there. Her heart jumped again. "Eric! He has a pulse, call for an ambulance-" Foreman was already calling for one before she finished talking.
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When the ambulance arrived at Princeton-Plainsboro emergency bay, they'd managed to get Kutner's heart beating a little faster with drugs, three defibrillator shocks, and at least 10 minutes of Thirteen and Foreman's initial CPR. Sure, he was breathing and pumping his own blood for now, but his head was still bleeding everywhere. The EMS attendant in the ambulance kept an ice pack and gauze pressed to his head until it soaked through, and she had to change it. The ambulance screeched to a stop, Foreman and Thirteen chasing after the emergency room workers pushing the stretcher. Cameron had been reviewing her files (actually quite bored, there weren't many emergency room patients at the moment) when she noticed the two rush in, flushed and bloodied. She dropped the file immediately, coming up to Thirteen.
"What happened?" She asked, but the other woman just put her hands over her face and stopped in her tracks before Kutner's bed. Her shoulders started to shake; obviously she had managed to hold it all in until now. Always the stonger man, Foreman was assisting the doctors in asessing his friend's vitals without giving into shock.
"I don't know," Thirteen croaked, wiping her eyes, but still unmoving. Makeup smeared at the corners of her eyes as she did so. She felt rooted to the spot, unable to do anything. Cameron's easy-access heart was already touched, and she put her hand on Thirteen's shoulder gently. "Come, sit down. He's got enough doctors attending, just relax." She led Thirteen away and gently sat her down in one of the plastic waiting room chairs, handing her a cup of water from the cooler nearby. Thirteen brushed her hair out of her face, calming herself down and taking the water offered, but not drinking it.
"I think he shot himself. The gun was in his hand and there was... blood everywhere." She glanced down at the dark stains on her pants, taking a gulp of water. "Right temple. Bullet wound. We don't know how far he shot himself from or the bullet's trajectory. Only... only something like five to ten percent of these injuries are survived, and even if he survives, he could be impaired..." She pressed her lips together and looked down, reluctant to cry again.
"It's not the end." Cameron said softly, sitting down beside her and putting a hand on her shoulder again. "There is that five-ten percent who survive, and there's also a percent that walk away from it and continue thei lives. We all know Kutner's exceptional. We're going to do everything." She squeezed Thirteen's shoulder gently, and the woman smiled weakly and nodded.
"Yeah..." was all she could add.
"Ready to go back? I paged House, he should be there already." Thirteen nodded again, and followed Cameron back into the emergency room.
Sure enough, House, followed by Taub, had just entered when the two girls re-entered. Taub's face was sickly pale, and his jaw dropped a little as soon as he saw the group of nurses huddled around Kutner's bed and the other two blood-spattered members of the team. House's face was blank, as his face always was when faced with the most terrible of situations, but he limped to the group as fast as he could.
"Bring me up to speed," he barked. Foreman stepped in immediately.
"Gunshot wound to the right temple. The wound is fairly small, the gun was small calibre. He had a faint pulse and wasn't breathing when we found him, but even that is lucky for a head injury victim; his heartbeat's back, and he's on a respirator. We need a CT soon, find out where the bullet is-"
"The bleeding?"
"It's being controlled for now."
"Mmmmhm." House rocked back and forth on his heels, pursing his lips and staring at Kutner's still body. "Shots across the brain have bleaker chances. They hit both hemispheres of the brain instead of one and cut up a lot of really good stuff."
"We don't know if it hit he other side of the brain until we get a CT!" Foreman insisted.
Miraculously, House nodded. "Keep him stable. Get him up to radiology for a CT. Cameron moved away from Thirteen to assist the nurses in beginning to move the bed; Thirteen followed Foreman as he ran ahead to radiology. Taub was still standing in the same spot, swallowing thickly. There was a lump in his throat he refused to acknowledge. House was still standing there, so he didn't exactly rush to his best friend's bedside, but his thoughts rushed around his head restlessly - the respirator mask stretched over Kutner's face, the bloodied gauze wrapped around his head, obscuring his eyes, it was... too much. He turned away abruptly and left to follow Thirteen and Foreman.
House raised an eyebrow, tapped his cane on the floor, made a face, and followed Cameron calmly.
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"We have bleeding in the brain that should be drained," Foreman kindly stated the obvious for them in the CT room, watching images come up on the screen. A white fleck and a few smaller white flecks appeared around the entry wound.
Taub pressed his finger to the screen, like that would help anything. "The.. bullet. And the smaller shards must be shrapnel."
"Oh god." Thirteen put her hand over her mouth, turning her eyes away again. She felt like she might be sick.
"No, no, it's only entered the right hemisphere of the the brain." Foreman said incredulously, leaning in to see if he might be wrong.
"Are you serious?" Taub added, sounding equally surprised. "Those must have been some old, tiny bullets, or maybe Kutner just doesn't know how to shoot a gun right... anyway, this is a good sign, as good as it could be; damage to one side of the brain only-"
"Could still leave him a vegetable for the rest of his life, however long that'll be!" House barged in with his rude sing-song voice. "Frontal lobe. Lots of good stuff going on in there that would be a shame to lose. Like motor function, speech, sensory loss-"
"House! Shut the hell up!" Taub snapped, turning to him, features furious, but the look was mitigated by the glistening of his eyes that he was keeping well under control. Well, not under control enough for House not to notice.
"No I will not shut the hell up-" House raised his voice over Taub's, "-get him into surgery now, drain the blood, and carve up some skull to lessen intercranial pressure before-" Before House even finished talking, bleeping erupted from monitors as the deathly still body in the CT machine came alive with convulsions. "-that happens." The rest of the team shot up to their feet to stop the seizure; one wrong move and he could go into arrest again, or start bleeding more.
"Angels, do what I say and take him to Chase, now." House told them over the intercom, very serious now, and limped towards the exit.
"Where are you going?" Thirteen cried, both hands holding down Kutner's convulsing body as Taub struggled to inject anti-convulsants (a bit difficult when both his hands and the other man's whole body were shaking).
"Wilson." House answered simply, and he was gone.
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