Selective Amnesia.
Author: Storm
Cast: House & Wilson (established relationship), Cuddy, Cameron, Foreman, Chase, Thirteen, Taub, Kutner, Stacy, Mark and others.
Rating: Adult.
Disclaimer: Everything belongs to Greg House. And everyone. Probably including his creators. And theirs.
Summary: When two related oncology patients die after a series of medical screw-ups, the family hold Dr. Wilson accountable – in more ways than one. While the medical malpractice machinery whirs into action, some of the relations mete out a rougher kind of justice that results in the doctor becoming the patient. But who really gets hurt in the assault and exactly how much is Wilson at fault? As the law and the hospital go head to head, Dr. House turns his notorious diagnostic skills on the crime scene and the culprits. The more he proves his own theory – that everybody lies – the more it becomes critical that he make his own brand of medical malpractice count as admissible evidence in court. Otherwise, PPTH's Boy Wonder Oncologist is going to wind up not only in a hospital bed, but in a jail cell. The trouble is, whilst House plays private eye, Wilson begins to wonder if it might not be better for the physician to tend to himself.
Warnings: I don't like warnings; they give the game away. *However.* Includes a serious assault, discussions of rape and a patient suicide. Also – by necessity – includes some original characters.
Notes: 1) This is set around season five. Amber is dead; Kutner isn't (yet) and House is as sane as he ever gets. 2) If anyone can oblige, I'm looking for a beta who can manage a reasonably fast turn-around and ideally someone who would be willing/able to have their brain picked for medical and/or legal knowledge.
Part One:
It wasn't quite that scene from Psycho, but it got nearer with every replay. His weight braced on his good hand – his left, fortunately – Wilson dug his fingers into the strip of sanitary paper covering the examining table and tried not to see it over a fifth time. He couldn't help it if he closed his eyes. The dark silhouettes of exam room three, trapped on his retinas, contracted and paled into the half-screen cubicles of the fourth floor staff locker room, its broken door listing on its hinges and water spewing out onto the grip mats. But even with his eyes open, the mottled blue linoleum of the clinic floor was trying to screen repeats. The whispering roar of his too rapid pulse echoed in his ears and made for a disquieting soundtrack. It merged with the near constant hum of his tinnitus and the remembered throbbing of water, fleshy thumps and gargling yells. Intermittently, the internal din was accompanied by the external crackling of swab packets, the snaps of the SART's camera and their tactful requests for him to remove this piece of clothing or tuck that section of hair out of the way.
The beady black eye of the lens seemed to be everywhere. It got up in his bruised face and cracked there like knuckles striking bone. The soft whoosh-clap of instant prints scrolling out reminded him of Odin's wings, keeping time with the persistent circling of the investigating doctor. The dark-skinned, sombre-eyed Montrose of Princeton General was not dissimilar to a raven: the horror movie kind that haunted all the victims. He snapped up every little detail of this moment and fastidiously tucked them into envelopes, pending circulation for review. There would be records of this on data disks, paper and celluloid for the foreseeable future. All Wilson wanted was to forget it had ever happened.
Shying his head to one side as the camera popped again, he looked around for something else to focus on. But his vision too seemed only able to take snapshots of the bland exam room surfaces. According to Foreman, his eyes were tracking properly; but the concussion of his brain colliding with the inside of his skull as it hit the shower wall had disrupted his neurologic function. His attention stuttered off the pale lilac scrubs Chase had found for him before he'd consent to be transported to the E.R. It moved to the plaster cast encasing his right arm from fingertips to elbow. Finally, it settled on the little knob of cotton taped over the inside of his left arm, where the nurse had taken the blood for the HIV and STI tests.
There'd been quite a lot of blood. Most of it had gone now, only the remains were cluttering the steel tray on the wheeled cart to his left. It wasn't moving in that dragging, viscous eddy that proved it was just chocolate sauce, a relic of the old black and white movies, though. It sat there in drying, rusty blotches on cotton balls or distorting into bright herringbone patterns through the sterile white squares of the dressings taped to his chest and right side. Everything looked and felt like a horror movie, but since when did they screen in real time and why couldn't he change the channel?
Montrose set down the camera. The snick of the plastic casing connecting with the countertop made Wilson shift his weight to his elbow and grip his temples with the spread thumb and forefinger of his left hand. The ache inside his head had reached such a peak that everything was insufferably loud. Commonplace actions that he performed unconsciously millions of times every day had somehow acquired volume: the wet click of repeatedly swallowing saliva, the sloughing rasp of air passing in and out of his lungs, even the too frequent swish of his eyelashes, were deafening. As if scrambling to get out of the cacophony, his brain reran its percussive crash against the inside of his skull. It sent his throat into spasm, his stomach heaved and watery bile splattered, obscenely loud, into the third cardboard basin.
"Dr. Wilson?"
The low murmur of the SANE speaking at his elbow was something to focus on. It forced his bruised brain, busy repairing itself, not to neglect the ability to filter sounds. He wiped his mouth gratefully with the proffered cloth and took a sip of cool water from the Dixie cup she passed him. He swilled his mouth out and spat acrid vomit-tinged saliva into the basin, before the nurse whisked it away. He wrapped his fingers around the cup and finished the contents to rehydrate himself.
The woman in Psycho had been lucky. She'd died. No one to make questions of her name, followed by stupid statements or "we need tos." Of course, they needed to. It was procedure. Though if they picked an MRI over the CT scan he was going to find a knife from somewhere and finish the job. He was not, absolutely not, going to lie on a board while magnets slammed into one another inches from his pounding head.
"Dr. Wilson?" The nurse was back.
"Fine. I'm fine."
He spoke too sharply, too swiftly, but he'd said what she wanted, hadn't he? Even though she knew that it wasn't…that it was an abbreviation. He would be fine. Eventually. When he could get House to write him a script for a painkiller stronger than ibuprofen. The irony of it made his mouth twitch, sting, made him swallow a laugh.
"Dr. Wilson?"
Her voice was even gentler, now, as if she'd mistaken the choked sound for a sob. He realised that she was trying to tell him Montrose had returned and was waiting patiently with a set of nail cutters and a scrapings stick in his right hand. They were being oh so careful not to touch him without warning.
Bang. Ker-wallop. Bang. Wilson flinched, the empty cup tumbling to the floor as he grabbed the table to steady himself. The bright hall lights skewered the tactful gloam of the examining room. He screwed up his eyes, peering narrowly at the clomping, lopsided silhouette that barged in, shoving the ricocheting door aside with a thwack of his cane into the panels.
"Aren't you done yet?"
"Dr. House—!"
The nurse's voice broke on the brink of an indignant squeak. House ignored her, clunk-stomping his way across to the other side of the examining table. He jammed his cane into a dip in the floor and scowled across the rumpled ridge of sanitary paper, as if he'd interrupted nothing more than one of Wilson's clinic hours.
"Seriously, I need a consult. New patient with severe stick-up-his-arse psychosis about his wife and daughter trying out the latest fashion in pine boxes and violent tendencies towards oncologists. I'm prescribing a bullet to the back of the skull, what do you think?"
Wilson raised his cast as far as he could and ducked his head behind it, trying futilely to shield his eyes from the storm of rainbow polka dots set off internally by the abrupt change in lighting. His voice sounding distorted by the water still lodged in his ears, he murmured,
"House, shut th'door."
The closed window blinds had partitioned the room off from the rest of the hospital, but with the door open it was apparent that the lobby had developed a thousand eyes in the last half an hour. Cuddy was marshalling rubber necking patients to various floors of the hospital or the exit doors, like a stationmaster conducting recalcitrant traffic in a jam at Clapham Junction. Her efforts were hampered by a number of her staff, who had decided it was now essential to visit to the front desk to ask for messages or to collect a file they hadn't forgotten. The head nurse, Brenda, was fielding those with her usual hard-nosed intimidation. But her stern brown eyes kept twitching toward exam room three and her mouth was bent out of shape with consternation.
Over by one of the enormous poinsettias that had arrived with a donor's quarterly cheque, Chase stood with one hand on his hip and the other towelling distractedly at his damp blond hair. He was speaking to a broad-shouldered police officer, who scribbled busily in a pocket-sized notebook. Cameron, her white lab coat buttoned over her pink E.R. scrubs to hide the stains of Wilson's blood, was talking to another. She was tight-lipped and practically levitating with the urge to rush to the exam room and put another band-aid on Wilson herself. Plunked down with the immovability of an obsidian statue in one of the waiting room chairs, Foreman ignored every one of Cuddy's attempts to get him to leave until he'd wedged Wilson under a scanner somewhere.
One of his own staff, Monica Lucas, a new fellow so fresh out of med school she still spoke as though she'd swallowed a textbook, was bent over her knees crying into her hands. Thirteen was petting the finger-clawed tangle of her long brown hair and trying to persuade her to drink something out of a cardboard vending machine carton. Monica had stepped out to grab everyone a round of coffee a few moments after Wilson had called time of death on Tania Walker, mother of Alicia, at 14.17. He was glad Monica hadn't come with him to the showers, though he was betting that she regretted it.
House's remaining fellows, Taub and Kutner, were busy behind the glass windows of exam rooms one and two. Kutner was studying a blue patient file, while an overweight mother toyed with the reins attached to her plump son. Taub was holding down a goth's tongue with a wooden depressor, his bored expression indicative of a staph infection. Neither had closed the blinds and neither were scheduled for clinic duty. They were transparently useless at standing around, though clearly determined not to be hounded off. Whether they were there for his sake or to restrain House when the police wrested his assailants down in the elevators, Wilson wasn't certain.
He caught sight of the head of psych, intervening on Cuddy's behalf as she looked fit to bawl out an obliviously intolerant clinic patient. Then the head of cardiology – who had managed to get a month's ban from the clinic – appeared via the E.R. doors. Had every single member of staff at Princeton Plainsboro made a beeline for the clinic to gawp at him? Didn't anyone have any patients? Wilson blinked away another zigzag of interference in his vision and looked up to a closed door. House was leaning against it, his hands behind his back and wearing his favourite whoops-look-what-I-did expression.
"Sir, you need to wait outside.…"
The nurse tailed off uncertainly as the arrhythmic thuds of House's cane looped around her to Wilson's side of the table. Calloused fingers jerked his half-raised arm down, ignored his sharp inhale, and tapped the cast's wrap.
"This is why your ringtone is 'Dancing Queen," House informed him.
"It was all there was left."
Wilson didn't especially care for neon pink either, but he didn't care about much right now. He bowed his head as House's narrowed stare searched him from top to toe, catalogued the split in his lip, the bruises on his jaw, cheekbone and brow, the proximity of the swelling to his temple, checked for blood in his ears, noted the rawness where Cameron had wiped it away from his nose and mouth. He stared uncooperatively at the absorbent paper he was balling in his fist while House tried to peer into his eyes, as if he could see a damn thing without a penlight, and hoped his bruises hid his regenerating blush.
The heat of it made him giddy, made his skin pull taught across his forehead and shoulders. His mouth dried out and his stomach squeezed threateningly. He gulped tensely at little chunks of puke caught in his oesophagus, wanting to avoid doubling over another basin in front of House. He was already embarrassed enough for it to be physically uncomfortable: that hot, stuffy sensation of being claustrophobic in his own skin. His involuntary squirm tweaked at his injuries, triggering a feedback loop of niggling pains, which left him more light-headed than the blush. He hadn't thought he could hurt much more than he already did. No, more than he knew he would. His broken bones and wrenched ligaments hurt already, but in a fuzzy, hot-cold fashion that was not yet part of him. The jangling of adrenaline and the repressive rushes of endorphins were holding the worst of it at bay. When they wore off, he was going to keel over in nine kinds of agony. He was mildly surprised he hadn't in anticipation.
House propped his cane against the edge of the examining table and stalked around him. His nostrils were flared at the scent of pain, sweat, soured breath and the pheromones the body automatically produced, as if it were unfamiliar now that it belonged to someone other than him. With the jerky motions of a puppeteer, he manoeuvred Wilson around so that he could palpate the three cracked ribs beneath his bruised side, wedge his cast back into the flimsy cheesecloth sling to salve his dislocated shoulder and lift his shirt to prod at the bruises blooming near his kidneys. He didn't ask, didn't apologise, didn't give a damn that his former staff had run almost every physical check under the sun and patched him up before they would consent to release him to the Sexual Assault Response Team. Second-hand information was useless as far as House was concerned. He had to maul Wilson himself to be satisfied. He put his fingers where he liked and mentally charted every wince or twitch. Wilson hung his head and bore it, the paper in his fist tearing with his tightening grip.
He resisted only when House tried to unthread the ties to his scrub pants.
"Ho no, House. Not that."
Not again. Once, for the SART, had been quite enough. He'd not been on the receiving end of many of the procedures he carried out on a regular or even occasional basis. He'd been startled by how abrasive and insidious these were. The feel of the dry little cotton swabs probing around his private parts seemed to have got stuck in his head and set off intermittent twitches of sense memory that made him jump. He eyed the plastic boxes of the Sexual Offence Evidence Collection kit uneasily. It looked innocuous, sat on the counter, like something an escapee child from the hospital's crèche might have gathered up from overlooked items scattered around. It was a plastic case with a series of small evidence containers in it, some envelopes, a plastic sample bag for clothing, a paper modesty sheet, a reel of labels, unwaxed dental floss, urine and blood sample jars, a few wooden sticks, glass slides and other assorted medical paraphernalia. It was only two thirds complete.
"Sir." The nurse tried to shoo House off by getting in his way, but ended up prancing to keep her toes out of cane-squashing range. "You can't interfere with the investigation…."
The vigour of her flapping suggested she'd have manhandled him if it weren't for his handicap. The tightening of House's fingers around the waistband of Wilson's borrowed trousers meant he'd noticed and was annoyed by it. It didn't stop him taking advantage.
"You've got what you need," he informed her. "Wilson—"
"House."
It came out sounding less forceful and more plaintive than he'd intended. He immediately wondered why he was bothering. House chose never to understand 'no', except when he said it himself. His insistent tugging at the scrub ties continued, one handed. The other shifted and swept a gentle circle over the small of Wilson's back, a brief reassuring pressure. When House reached around him again, Wilson gave in and took his hand off the ties, letting him unfasten his trousers.
"Dr. House!"
Objecting on legal principle, no doubt, but some vestige of concern for his patient putting his voice up an outraged octave, Montrose started forward. He stopped short as a rubber cane tip slammed into his chest, barring his way.
"S'okay." Wilson spoke before House could say something belligerent that might have security invading the room. The guards had seen enough for one night. "Let him get it over with. It's his…process."
The nurse gave him a baffled look, though he was sure it made sense. They needed to find things, so that they could prosecute someone. House needed to find things, so that he could fix someone. He tried to elaborate.
"You have a procedure. He has a process." He gestured vaguely with the fingers pinned inside his cast, wondering if they understood…if he understood… He didn't know what he was saying. He focused on the crucial part and said it again. "It's fine."
It wasn't. It wasn't even close. Because he'd been injured, and because he'd been soaked, the SART had been forced to run their tests all out of order. The departure from routine was disorientating. He couldn't remember what was next, whether the worst was over, or if there was more to come. He hadn't expected to have any of it repeated. But if not now, House would accost him later and in a foul temper in case the delay mucked up his results. Wilson slumped lower over the table and let him get on with it. He was already at the pinnacle of humiliation; there was no more to get. He buried his head in his hand and rubbed at the sore place on his scalp where Montrose had plucked a sample of hairs for DNA comparison, while House dug implements out of his jacket pocket and repeated the most essential swabs for another SOEC kit. It was on the tip of Wilson's tongue to tell him it was futile; he'd come round breathing water, with most of the mess and blood washed away down the plughole. But he couldn't be bothered. Let the lab tell him instead.
House pocketed the vials and, with surprising tenderness, refastened his clothing for him. His body hiding it from the other doctors, he skimmed his hand gently down Wilson's aching spine. He tensed because he couldn't help himself, but the casual intrusion was easier to stomach than the SART's cautious invasions. Their quiet, clear, moderated voices and efficient, visible manoeuvres should have been reassuring, but Wilson knew too well the practice that went into cultivating the appearance of calm. Either they'd been dulled to indifference long ago or there was a storm of indignation, involuntary sympathy, and irrepressible intrigue being curbed behind their soothing masks.
Hovering somewhere outside his sore, stiffening body, the doctor part of Wilson felt the same: pissed off, wincing and reflexively curious about the experience of what he'd seen intermittently in his years of medical practice. The rest of him was too exhausted to give a damn. Whichever one of his attackers had given him concussion deserved less of a jail term than the other. He couldn't disintegrate the way the SART obviously feared. He wondered if they were more used to dealing with sobbing women.
It wasn't pride or stoicism or bravery that had kept him from curling up in a ball and quivering until his teeth rattled, though; he was simply too stunned. Reality felt as though it had absconded on an unwarranted vacation and he'd stepped through the locker room door into an alternate universe. That detached, doctor part of him was mentally shaking his head, well aware that the fact this was reality was going to break over him in stages. Then he would be sniffing back snot in his therapist's office and double dosing on whatever new anti-depressants she had lined up, like every other poor sod who'd ever been through this. But he couldn't quite make himself believe that yet. It probably helped that he didn't want to. This stupefied, deflated numbness wasn't pleasant; it was the lesser of two evils.
He was vaguely aware of House's hand on his arm, probably monitoring his pulse rate, and recognised in his scrunched brow that he didn't like Wilson's quietus one bit. Equally abstractly, he thought he ought to be a bit ticked by that. House wouldn't've liked him bawling like a baby either.
"You've got everything," House repeated, brusquely addressing the SART. It sounded like a warning.
"No." Dr. Montrose swiped at the blue ink stain migrating down his white coat from a pen cracked by House's arresting cane. "We have a few more things to do. There are fingernail scrapings to collect, then there are a series of precautionary medications that should be administered, and lastly the pelvic exam."
Shit. There was worse to come. Wilson started as House's hand closed over his in a firm, preventative grip. He realised he'd yanked the sanitary paper off the reel. It was spinning, sticky mechanisms screaming, at the end of the examining table. He let go and the excess paper slumped around him like fragile chains. House released him slowly and went back to badgering Montrose.
"What medications?"
"A shot of ceftriaxone—"
"No. Check his file, you damn fool! He's allergic."
He was? Yes. He was. Good thing House had remembered.
Unphased by the insult, Montrose continued, "Then we can use an oral dose of azithromycin as a precaution against Chlamydia and Gonorrhea." He reached pointedly for Wilson's medical file and scanned it. "He's vaccinated against Hep B, we're testing for C, and I'm going to recommend putting him on a four-week HIV preventative regime."
He set down the file and Wilson felt serious dark blue eyes shift over him, waiting for a reaction. What was he supposed to do, argue? Given what they thought had happened, it sounded perfectly sensible.
With a slight shake of his head, Montrose went on, "Once all of that is finished, your Dr. Foreman is waiting outside. The CT has been booked to make absolutely certain that Dr. Wilson has no haematomas, haemorrhages or contusions. With an assault of this severity, certainly physical and possibly sexual, a full body scan wouldn't be too cautious."
"He's walking, he's talking, he's fine," House retorted.
Montrose gave him a look that implied he was the damn fool. "It took him five tries to remember his name."
"That's because it was a stupid question. He knows his name. He's wearing a badge with it on."
Actually, it was Chase's name.
"He was repeating himself."
"Because you weren't answering his questions."
And he was the cat's grandfather now?
"House," Wilson interrupted wearily. "Arguing is only going to prolong this."
"Listen to the man with the concussion," Montrose suggested, annoyance sheathed behind fixed civility. "Or I may recommend a sharp blow to your head as essential to this investigation."
House looked over at Wilson, his head tilted questioningly.
"Go." He waggled his fingers within the cast.
"The police want a statement."
"I know. Go."
House didn't. Short of physically removing the man armed with a metre of wood topped with a metal serpent, the Princeton General SART couldn't do much but carry on around him or have him arrested. Out of deference, Wilson suspected, to himself, House kept his provocations to the minimum. He prowled around the room, demanding the specifics of the medication regime and snatched up the paper bag full of bottles when the SANE brought them over from the pharmacy. He got up in Montrose's face when he tried to remind him that he wasn't the one who needed to take control of them, but Wilson's involuntary laugh startled the glares off their faces.
"Assault one-oh-one," he explained hoarsely, wondering why it wasn't blindingly obvious to both of them that House was wrestling to get some sort of grip on the situation. "He can take charge of the meds."
Montrose glanced between them, his forehead crinkling in obvious concern that Wilson didn't want to handle his own medication. House went the other way. The skin whitened around his flaring nostrils, as he reached for the pill bottle in his pocket and threw back two Vicodin. He made a sound part way between a snort and a snarl, chomped on the tablets to stop himself erupting and set off pacing again like something cornered. When he didn't hurl the bag onto the table and thunder out with a slam of the door, Wilson settled himself on the edge of the examining bench to wait out the rest of the procedure with a shivery kind of triumph. Wherever House had been whilst Cameron was staging a coup and making the police department wait in line for their results, he wasn't able to disappear off to hide in a lab somewhere for the rest of this damnable evening.
Both House and the triumph stopped when the paper sheet came out and the nurse took Wilson's scrubs away from him. She pulled off all the ruined sanitary paper, spread fresh over the examining bench, and helped Wilson steady himself, bent over it. House parked himself stubbornly on the visitor's chair with his legs in the way and started up his Gameboy. Wilson tried to concentrate on the little yips it made and not on Montrose's slicked, rubber-gloved fingers, but he couldn't. The scene was replaying itself again. He tucked his head down against his good shoulder, gritted his teeth and tried not to recognise the screams.