The fellows were sipping coffee of various conformations, creamed and sugared, black and bitter, scalding hot, growing cold. Cameron had interrupted House's early morning pace between the coffee maker, the whiteboard and his office door. All eyes were on her now, excepting House, of course, who seemed intent on seeing how long he could keep his cane spinning between both palms.
"Patient presented into the ER early this morning with a nosebleed that couldn't be controlled at home. Cauterized, sent home in care of his brother. Returned seventy minutes later, bleeding copiously again. Patient admitted, now being watched."
House looked up at her, shook his head and dramatically rubbed his temples. "Admitted and being watched because he's easy on the eyes, or because he's Cuddy's gardener? You're bringing me nosebleeds now?"
Cameron smiled without opening her lips. "He iis/i easy on the eyes, inot/i Doctor Cuddy's gardener, and the nosebleeds are a direct result of," she closed her eyes, turned her head and looked out into the hallway, then turned back, "divination."
House stilled, his shoulders rigid. He closed one skeptical eye. "Divination? And you divined this how, exactly?"
She tilted her head, long suffering, and sighed. "I haven't divined it myself. I thought I'd leave the fun poking and prodding and imaging parts to you." She handed him the file. "Don't say I never gave you anything."
"Well, other than that nasty bout of..." He widened his eyes and covered his mouth with the file. "Oops. Little pitchers have big ears." He motioned with a flick of his head to his team.
Foreman rolled his eyes, Taub grimaced, Thirteen shook her head and Kutner's mouth had fallen open in surprise so he closed it with a snapping sound.
"Let's go consult our fortune teller." House stumped out of the conference room, the file open in one hand, reading as he walked.
--
Sitting vigil. Not a pastime he was inclined towards, not something he was good at doing. He was plenty good at all sorts of things, but not this. The waiting, the sitting, the pacing, and the holding oneself so very, very still at the center point, while all the rest of it trembled away, in his hands, in his face, around the corners of his mouth and the outsides of his eyes in particular, in the thick, fleshy part of the back of his tongue, in the vertebrae that hinged him to the world, right between his shoulder blades, in the backs of his knees, in the bottoms of both lungs, in the soles of his feet. Trembling uncontrollably, but the center was firm. Until Sammy had come back into his life, he didn't realize he had actually possessed a center point. Now he knew without question, that he did. His center point was family. His family. His love of family. His love for his family. His brother.
He was uncomfortable in the hospital room chair. His head tilted back, his eyes shut, his fingers gripping tight to his own biceps, arms crossed over his chest. Maybe he could sleep. But every single time he began to drift he would flash back to the fear and panic in Sam's eyes as he bled his lifeblood out his nose and into his cupped hands. An entire roll of toilet paper discarded, heavy with blood, the box of thin tissues wetly shredded, folded and torn, then the hotel towels became laden and soaked and he'd actually considered using the bed linens. But finally, finally, Sam had acquiesced and let himself be driven, frantically, to the Emergency Room. Again. For the second time in less than two hours.
Dean rubbed a shaking hand over his forehead, pushing the damp hair back from his hairline. Berating himself. He had to stop, he had to let the solidity of that center radiate out and he had to regain control. The control that was spinning away from him, from them. He closed his eyes and wondered for the five millionth time if perhaps in some way, somehow, his father had grabbed onto the tail end of Dean's control, the part of his existence that held everything together, and when his father went into the darkness of his pact, fell into the darkness of his dying, he hadn't been able to let go and was now unraveling his oldest child, his son. His life's cable spooling wildly off a broken axel.
"Let go, Dad. If you've got the other end of this thing, please, Dad, let it go." He whispered this aloud and a throat was cleared in the room.
He lifted his eyelids slowly, tilted his head further against the chair back, tensed the long muscles in his thighs, and looked up at a tall, masculine figure outlined in fluorescent light, his face in shadow. Without warning, his heart leapt up, his body tremored violently, uncontrollably, his limbs splayed out, and he uttered a cry and the man bent down towards him, reaching out to him, one handed.
House laid a firm hand on Dean's shoulder, his face closer now, his blue eyes filled with reassurance. "It's all right. It's all right now," he whispered.
And under the warm palm, beneath the wide spread fingers, sympathetic to the strength of the forearm bearing down, Dean's flesh and bones stilled and solidified. And something in his heart settled.
--
The whiteboard read simply "nosebleed" in House's jagged scrawl. He was standing beside the board, but with his back to the team, tapping the dry erase marker into his palm, staring out the windows of the conference room at the late spring morning. He could hear voices behind him, recognized the longer words, trusting them to sink into his subconscious where he knew his inner doctor would organize and classify, identify and diagnose. He didn't doubt that the patient was suffering from some form of malaise, but for reasons that had not a thing to do with clinical observation or medical knowledge, he didn't think it was going to prove to be physiological in origin. He grunted quietly at this thought and shook his head almost imperceptibly. Either he was completely exhausted, his Vicodin prescription had been mysteriously altered, or he was
dreaming. That was it, this was a dream brought on by a long sexual dry spell, diagnosing far too many common ailments, and a re-reading of "The Turn of The Screw" out of sheer boredom and relentless insomnia two nights before. He mentally shook himself and tried to thumb through his formidable mental medical library, L, M, N, nosebleeds...but the words blurred and danced across his mind.
He wasn't thinking of the patient, he was thinking about the patient's brother. And since the patient's brother was the furthest thing from a long-legged, raven-haired, big-breasted, olive-skinned beauty that was a bit disconcerting. Tap, tap, tap, he drummed the marker into his hand.
"Earth to House," Kutner's voice, prodding.
House turned and nodded, put pen to board and wrote -
Dengue hemorrhagic fever
Naspharynageal cancer – Epstein Barr
"I told you he was listening," said Kutner, smugly.
House raised an eyebrow at the murmured chuckles, then wrote, in large block letters –
DIVINATION
Followed by three question marks. He capped the pen and placed it in the board's trough.
--
"You don't touch your patients and you definitely don't touch the relatives of your patients. Your entire team is on red alert." Wilson held his fork aloft while House reached for a penalty crouton.
House exhaled. "He was having a bad dream, a nightmare. It was obvious to anyone in the room. Mumbling, sweating and twitching. I didn't want him to either embarrass himself or miss a few beats of his heart because we accidentally woke him up."
"You didn't want to see someone embarrass themselves? Pardon me if I struggle with that picture for a while."
"Struggle all you like, James, and I do think you enjoy the struggling. But, you see, I'm a doctor and it was all about paroxysmal supraventricular tachycardia for me. It was either ground him by touching him, or perform a vagal maneuver and my carotid sinus massage moves are rusty. Admittedly, an oversight of my own, I do need to brush up on technique."
Wilson looked at him for a long moment, and then wiped his mouth with the paper napkin. "I'm getting the not-so-subtle hint. I'll drop it. What's the diagnosis on the brother? The actual patient."
"He's not admitting to the," House paused and casually reached for a cherry tomato in Wilson's salad, flicking a lettuce leaf out of the way, "visions. Which have actually only been reported by the brother. The MRI was," he looked out across the cafeteria and Wilson watched a strange sort of unease flash across his face.
"Was what?"
House shrugged. "I don't know." He looked back into Wilson's eyes, his own gaze guarded. "Inconclusive?"
Wilson nearly choked on his salad; he put a quick hand and napkin over his mouth, his eyes wide. "Inconclusive? House? What are you not telling me?"
--
Sleep, you elusive bitch, he thought and gunned the bike harder, smirking at its guttural roar. The hospital was the next freeway exit and if he didn't peel off now it would make the third time he'd lapped it. He was burning gasoline and tire rubber and not getting any further away from work or any closer to bed. He let up on the throttle, and pushed at the indicator lever, although the freeway was a silent, dark stretch at this hour of the morning. He shot a quick glance over his right shoulder and the black car came screaming off the cloverleaf and past him, close enough to whip the wind around his foot and up his pant leg. His quick reflexes had him sitting back in the saddle and leaning away, into the other lane. Ahead of him, brake lights flicked once, twice, again and the taunt was obvious. He thumbed off the indicator, tightened his knees around the gas tank, opened the bike up and answered the challenge of the muscle car and its driver.
He maneuvered back into the passing lane and caught up quickly with the four-door sedan. He slowed enough to marvel at the restoration job on the vintage vehicle, the black gloss throwing glints of freeway light off its surface, the chrome of the mag rims mesmerizing as they spun. He released the throttle in a defiant pause, not moving his head an inch to look at the driver, then cranked on the handle so hard the bike jumped out under him and he sailed ahead of the car. But like his own shadow cast in moonlight, it streaked past him again, slowing for a moment before it leapt forward, the driver window wide open, a snatch of music whip cracking past him.
Side by side, they sped; speedometer needles whirring, intent on the ribbon of road, slowing for the occasional car, then back to the heady rush of speed. Miles of air-sucking speed. Minutes of held breaths and hard exhales. The dance of metal and man, fused flesh and steel. A release of conscious thought, a body dependency upon skill and reflex, air and ground equally at odds for and against the engines.
Finally, a doubling back. House wasn't sure who was leading who, but the bike was wide open and he hadn't felt so completely free of the gravity pull of his patients, his staff, his leg, his life since the summer after he'd been shot. He felt light-headed, his blood singing through his veins, his heart thrumming against his ribs.
Simultaneously, he and the car's driver took the off ramp leading to the hospital. At each intersection, the lights tripped green and there was no slowing, no stopping, he hadn't had a foot on the ground for hours. The low-throated rumble of the dual exhaust filling his ears as they crawled through the surface streets. The hospital loomed off to the left and House pulled the bike into the staff lot, his peripheral vision making him aware of the car as the driver entered the visitor's lot and parked.
As he keyed off the bike and swung his leg over, he felt a momentary vertigo spin through him. He had just spent the better part of an hour racing a fellow night rider, a sleepless enthusiast of speed, up and down a New Jersey turnpike at just past three in the morning and now that driver was parking in the same place he was parked. Should he be worried? He glanced over at the car, windows tinted and dark, watched as the headlights went off and the door opened. He reached slowly for his cane, pausing and waiting.
Short, cropped hair, the denim jacket, the blue jeans and an engineer-booted swagger. House smiled to himself. It was the brother of the patient he hadn't been able to stop thinking about. Of course it was. The young man approached him, a sly and crooked grin on his face, a small movement of his hand signaling, what? A shared experience? Good race? Let me take your bike out for a spin?
House stepped up onto the sidewalk and waited.
The other man was grinning, openly now and House found himself unable to resist answering with his own smile.
"Buy you a cup of coffee, Doc?" Dean asked.
And much to his own surprise, House nodded yes.
--
Another 2 am. He wondered where he'd heard that phrase. Was it a song lyric? A commercial jingle, a product slogan? He squinted both eyes and let his mind go lax, the simple sentence sweeping through it, tumbling the words over and over. Nothing. The obvious connection was that it was closing time, in this time zone. But not inside Princeton Plainsboro. There was no closing time here unless one considered the basement morgue and even that place probably had staff sitting around sipping lukewarm cans of soda, playing just one more hand of Vegas-style computer solitaire.
On every other floor they were watching lights blink and blip, listening to the whoosh whoosh of a dozen different machines. The keepers of the sleeping, the watchers of the writhing No wonder they were called Angels of Mercy, Dean mused. But even the staunchest of Angels could be found, after grueling hours administering to the weak and the injured, the sick and the dying, sitting at stations, massaging out fluorescent-lit headaches with one hand, first on this temple, then cross over to the other and finally a brief lying down of the head on the Formica countertop
and digging in with all ten fingers at the base of the skull where most headaches eventually seemed to descend.
He sat up in the chair and rubbed at his own neck. Sammy was asleep in the hospital bed, the long shape of him outlined beneath a thin cotton sheet and an even thinner cotton blanket. Dean shivered and imagined himself in Sam's place, he'd been right there so the imagining wasn't much of a stretch. He knew those same narrow confines, same cotton weave bed clothes, same steel railings and the blipping and blinking and whooshing machines. He shuddered violently as the memory of his own dying shot through him. Maybe Sam had been right to want to avoid the hospital, maybe Sammy understood things explicitly and saw things clearly when to Dean it was all just smoke and mirrors. The suffocating blue flame smoke of sulphur and broken sharp shards of mercury glass.
He stood quickly and walked over to Sam's sleeping form. The tilt of his head, the slightly opened mouth, all familiar, achingly so. "Aw, c'mon, Sammy, you gotta beat this thing. Don't let that bastard inside your head like this." He wanted, desperately, to reach out and brush the damp curls back off Sam's forehead, but he also, more, wanted him to sleep. "Come on, Sam," he whispered then turned to begin his nightly pacing of the hallways.
Doctor House was standing in the doorway.
"Cup of joe?"
Dean nodded.
--
The heavy steel door swung open and out on silent, oiled hinges, Dean looked down, insuring that he didn't dislodge the patient file being used as a make-shift stop as he stepped out of the stairwell and onto the roof of the hospital. He could see House, his back to the door, one hand spread wide on the cement concourse, looking out over the late morning and down at the city below.
House bent his head at the sound of the door closing, turned slowly, and leaned back, settling against the cement, long legs stretching out in front of him, the powder blue sky spreading out behind him like a mantle. Dean sucked his breath and curled his lips in to hold it there.
"How'd you find me?" he asked.
One shoulder shrugging. "You look like a rooftop-escape kind of guy."
"That's so stupid it almost makes sense." House answered with his own single-shoulder shrug. "Did you knock the door stop out? We'll have to call security if you did or starve to death slowly. Or one of us resorts to cannibalism."
"And the things I say sound stupid?" Dean smiled, so disarmingly that House felt his good leg go weak in the knee. "No, I haven't trapped us here. Kinda funny to think of being trapped in a place you went to escape."
"The price of paradise, I suppose."
He had casually approached the older man, turned and sat beside him.
"You're missing the view."
Dean looked over his shoulder. "Yeah?" He turned back. "No, I'm not."
House turned on his hip, facing him, hands crossed loosely atop one another, on the cane handle. "What do you want, Dean? It is Dean, isn't it?"
"Right. You don't know my name. That's funny, I guess." Dean held his gaze, time stretching out between them as vast velvet darkness. He closed one eye, squinting, not at House, but at the universe he occupied, the world spinning around him, and he moved closer, leaned into his own orbit of the man, closed his eyes and held his breath. He opened his eyes and sat back, House watching him under hooded lids. "What do I want? In the grander scheme? World peace? No more starving children? Or what is it I want for Sammy? An end to this crazy life, to wake up and find it was all a screwed up nightmare? To see him happy, no more visions?" He looked down at his hands, palms flattened over his hip bones. "Or what do I want right now from you?"
House answered with a small tilting of his head forward. "World peace is good, not too plausible, but noble. Nobody wants to see a child starve. Your brother seems to deserve a respite from whatever it is that's dogging him. But, no, it's not what do you want from me, Dean, but what do you want for you?"
"I know better than to want anything for me."
House nodded, looking at a spot over Dean's head. "You and me both."
"That mean you don't want anything?"
House looked back at him, his gaze not wavering, but softening. "There was a time. It didn't last too long, a brief, indescribable time, when everything seemed to be exactly the way it was supposed to be. And I think about that time more than I should. When I was quite young, before school, still very much in my mother's skirt, up on my father's shoulders, everything was in its place and I trusted that. Trust. Not of another person, you can never trust people," House waved a dismissive hand, "but of the universe itself. It's trusting that you're right where you need to be, doing exactly what you're supposed to be doing, you don't even know you are trusting, it's just part of what it is. I want that back. That's what I want."
Dean covered his eyes with a shaking hand and laughed bitterly. "That's about the only thing I have; this trust that I'm right where I'm supposed to be, doing exactly what I'm supposed to be doing. And there's not a damned thing about it that's comforting. Funny, huh?" He covered both eyes with both hands and breathed out loudly. He lowered his hands, exhaling again. "Yeah, anyway. I'm here to say goodbye and to say thanks. For everything. Whether you believe me or not. About Sam. It don't matter. You helped him. You helped us."
"You know I don't believe it. And you don't have to thank me." House hesitated, eyes flicking away then back. "But you're welcome."
Dean smiled. He put out his right hand.
House looked down at the proffered gesture, then very slowly reached out with his left hand and laced his fingers through Dean's, lifting them palm to palm. He raised his eyes and looked down into the vulnerable and open gaze of the other man.
Dean took a step towards him and House reached for him, still holding fast to his hand, trapping it behind the younger man's back, the cane clattering as he brought his other hand up to Dean's face. With a hand cupping the strong jaw, fingertips brushing an earlobe, House tilted Dean's face up and lowered his mouth to his lips.
Dean shook his hand free and both men moved into a fierce embrace, arms and hands, mouths and tongues. House kept his eyes slitted open, watching the younger man's face, Dean's eyes were closed, lids fluttering, moaning into his mouth. House was warming beneath Dean's hands that had somehow found their way inside his t-shirt, flat palmed against his back. House wanted to feel the thick sliding of the muscles over Dean's ribs, down the sides of his spine, but he wanted more to hold Dean's face fast, between his hands, mouth hard against mouth. Then Dean suddenly had him backed against the lip of the roof, his hips grinding, a plaintive and furious pressing of the hard length of both their erections, and House had to grab for his hips, pulling him against him, breaking the kiss, burying his face down into Dean's neck, gasping.
"Dean."
Dean murmured something, deep in his throat and brought his mouth back to House's lips.
"What did you say?" House groaned, still kissing him.
Dean nipped at his lips, brushed his tongue across House's front teeth, kissed him deeper, then gently pressed his mouth against the corner of House's lips. "I thought you didn't know my name."
"I know your name."
"Yeah," he whispered. "I know you do."
"I don't think I'm ever going to forget it," House said, simply, and reaching up he held Dean's face between his hands, thumbs ghosting the corners of his mouth. Looking at the masculine and
beautiful bone structure, the perfect bow of the top lip, wet and glistening. He narrowed his gaze and breathed in deeply.
Dean opened his eyes, looking at him for a long moment. "Even if you can't trust your life, you can trust me," he said softly.
A tremor pulsed through him, into House, who wrapped his arms around his shoulders and pulled him into his chest, under his chin. "I have no idea why that feels like a true thing, but it does. I believe you."
"I wish I could stay."
"I wish I could go."
--
House turned back to the cement railing, looking out across the cityscape spread beneath him like a body, beckoning. After a quarter of an hour, he heard the Impala and with a brief closing of his eyes could follow its progress out of the visitor's lot and onto the frontage street. He knew he wasn't imagining it slowing just there, down in the street, in front of the hospital. He opened his eyes and forced himself to look down. The car was crawling past and as he watched, Dean's hand came to rest on the window frame and then there was a quick motion, a wave, a gesture, a sign, a signal, a secret. And then gone. With a dry gaze, House tracked the car down the street, around the corner and when he knew they would have reached the far distant freeway, he raised his own hand in answer. Goodbye.