Refuge
The suddenness and shear volume of the alarm suggested this was no drill. As if any doubt remained, the onset of the sprinklers drummed it home. There was a fire raging somewhere in the very belly of Princeton Plainsborough Hospital.
Taub, Foreman and 13 immediately stopped their inane argument over whether or not nachos counted as a food group to gather back-packs and coats. Kutner having lost the Battle of Nacho had won the dubious honour of interrupting his boss on a less than good day for a sign-off. He came to an abrupt halt half way there as the alarm rang out. Clamping one hand over his ears in an attempt to drown out the throbbing siren he pushed open the glass door.
House seemed blissfully unaware of the chaos breaking out across the hospital as he slumbered and sprawled on his recliner. A very slightly open mouth, the pair of expensive headphones straddling his head and the bottle of Vicodin resting lazily in his hand revealed the reason for this seemingly incongruous image.
'Hey, House!' Kutner shouted as he shook a somnolent elbow. Having no success, he removed the headphones and tried once more.
'HEY HOUSE!'
Bingo.
'Huhh?! Ow… What the..?' House mumbled as he struggled to rise up from the chair.
'Fire alarm. Come on! Not a drill! We gotta evacuate!' With that, Kutner bounded out of the office once more trying to protect his ears from the shrieking he could feel in his bones.
Hearing the alarm and feeling the drops from the sprinklers, House repositioned himself on the edge of his chair. Disorientated barely defined what he was feeling; one minute he was dozing and pain-free, the next plunged straight into the kind of emergency that usually only happened on General Hospital.
He furiously scrubbed at his eyes to rid himself of the last vestiges of his nap whilst he tried to remember what it was he had to do. All those years back when Cuddy had first gone over the handicapped evacuation procedures, House had grimly thought that it all applied to someone else; someone handicapped. Now, after the day that had begun with an impressive thud on some black ice, there was no way he was bounding down the four flights of stairs between here and safety. In fact he was reluctant to even try.
So, what to do… he grabbed his cane and using it to hoist himself up, lurched as quickly as he could for the door.
As he headed toward the stairs, he began to detect the first few molecules of smoke permeating the corridor. Doctors, nurses and assorted 'others' raced past him all fluttering lab coats and desperation. Definitely not a drill then. Limping faster, he followed the glowing signs pointing the way to safety trying to ignore the sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach. He pushed the final door to the staircase and looked around for the disabled refuge point. The smoke here was much thicker and House began to doubt the rationality of the very definition of the word 'refuge'. If he was being honest, he was almost glad of the utter soaking from the sprinklers and the disorientation caused by the alarm. He knew he was starting to panic.
There was no way down. If he tried to descend the stairs himself, he would sooner than not end up on his ass, unable to get up.
He tried not to imagine what it must be like to feel your skin bubble and hear it crackle as it started to melt.
He tried not to imagine how that reflex to pull your hand away from heat would fare against your whole body being engulfed in flames.
He tried not to imagine how it would feel to burn to death.
He was supposed to wait for some poor bastards in reflective vests to come and carry him down the stairs in one of those fold-up chairs like some retard. This didn't seem like an appealing option given that the air was starting to thicken despite the persistent drenching of water. House was beginning to struggle to catch his breath but he wasn't truthfully sure whether this was because of the acrid smoke starting to waft up the stairs or because he was on the verge of a panic attack.
There wasn't a day that went by when House didn't wish his life had turned out differently. Stupidly, almost every morning, there came a moment before full consciousness when he just didn't feel the pain that accompanied all other waking moments. This was his weakness. As soon as he shifted even a centimetre, his damn leg forced him, burned at him to remember. This was the point in the day when he could feel the injustice of life prickling in the back of his throat. Daily, he cursed this breach in the hard exterior he managed to maintain in front of colleagues, friend and himself.
Now, trapped up here vulnerable and helpless, he could feel an internal battle between fear, anger and panic rage as surely as the fires beneath him.
Focusing on the direction of the smoke served only to heighten the building panic. What if nobody could get to him? What if he were the last person in the building? What if he wasn't on the stupid list that told the rescue workers where to find him? Had he even filled out all that cripple-in-the-workplace paperwork?
And still the sprinklers continued to drench him. The dark humour of those in the medical game kicked in as he wondered drolly if there was a point at which you were too wet to burn. At this point, he realised that he hadn't seen anyone else running past him for at least a few minutes. A sudden lurching in his stomach tallied with the awareness that he could very well be the last person up here.
He let his head fall gently back to the wall and closed his eyes in a silent plea to anyone who believed in such things. He really didn't know what to do. Did he take a chance on this whole refuge idea and the unlikely fact that he had filled in the correct paperwork? Or did he take the greater gamble of trying to make his way down the four flights of stairs. To put it another way, did he wait for the flames to reach him up here or did he meet them head on and go down fighting?
One more silent plea, a muttered expletive and a restorative breath that resulted in a huge inhalation of burning smoke, and House had planted his cane surely in from of him. Go down fighting it was then; or at least, go down coughing and in pain such that the burns wouldn't register past the first ten or twenty percent.
Funny really, how he devoted so much time trying to convince himself and those around him that he wasn't so much disabled as a grumpy old man with a fierce personal force-field. He wondered if anyone would wonder where he was or give a second thought to the idea that he may not be able to actually make it out. He imagined his new team and the rest of the staff hanging around outside and watching as he walls of the hospital crumbled in the flames along with him and his personal force-field for what it was worth at this point in his life. Or what was left of it.
'One foot in front of the other, just one foot in front of the other' he thought as he hobbled to the head of the stairs. Grasping the banister in one hand and his cane tightly in the other he hesitantly tried for the top step. His thigh had other ideas however as his mangled leg buckled beneath him and he gave out an involuntary yelp. His breaths came quicker as still more smoke wafted before him. He had to get a handle on his panic before it got a handle on him.
Try again, one foot in front of the other, another yelp, another attempt.
It was no good, this wasn't going to work. The smoke was thickening up and it was getting much harder to take in any air. Water rained down persistently, he was drenched and the stairs too were slick. He had to think of another way to get down. He tried to recall the 'going-down stairs' class from PT to dredge for potential methods but he had to confess he hadn't really paid attention, he was a doctor for crying out-loud. He wracked his mind further and managed to conjure a hazy memory of bumping down the stairs as a boy.
He lowered himself gingerly onto his ass and stuck his bum leg straight out in front. He threw his cane down ahead of him almost regretting it as soon as he'd done it. There was no choice now, he'd have to go through with the bumping plan. With one hand planted on his right-hand side and the other cradling his leg, he hoisted himself up and readied himself to swing down onto the next step using the other leg as leverage and counter-point. He made slow progress due to the unpleasant jolt every time he landed, but progress he made nonetheless. After a few minutes and much exertion, he was reunited with his cane and allowed himself a brief grin in triumph.
Then he realised that he'd only made it half way down the first flight.
Stealing himself and drawing on every ounce of reserve he could muster, House shuffled himself along the intermediary landing to the next half flight. If he took it in halves then the task didn't seem so monumental; until he counted them up that was.
'Just keep moving, don't think, just keep moving' reverberated furiously through his head.
Finally, groaning in agony, drenched, hacking up his lungs and too past humiliation to even worry about it, he began to register the muffled yet distinct melody of human voices. Despite the shouting and screaming, they rang beautifully in his ears but he would never confess to this shear joy.
The voices grew louder and House shuffled faster. He was laughing maniacally now and could almost taste the clear, clean air that awaited him. He bumped himself down the last few steps and cried with relief as he hit the bottom.
House didn't think that anything he had achieved in his life could come close to how proud of himself he was right now. He'd made it. He was alive. The fact that he was sitting in a heap at the foot of a staircase, dripping with snot, tears, and desperation didn't even register on his 'Gimp-dar'.
It was as he reached his personal zenith that the emergency doors facing him sprang open to reveal two men clad in dorky yellow jackets clutching some sort of list.
Rushing over to the man crumpled at the foot of the stairs, the rescue workers hauled House up off the floor by each grabbing him under an arm. He shakily rose to his full height and once more was grateful for the presence of the sprinklers; after all, tears of joy, pain and frustration are all camouflaged under an utter soaking. If truth be known, he also thanked his personal religion of logic and reason for listening to his pleas from the fourth floor, though he'd never reveal that little gem.
With a moment or two to regain his composure, House mentally checked himself over, no injuries, leg nothing a heat pad and a couple of Vicodin wouldn't cure and reputation mostly intact to outsiders aside from the two men holding him up and repeating an endless mantra.
'Sir, sir? Are you okay? Sir?' the first twittered in a self-important and strangely high-pitched whine.
'Sir? Can you tell us your name? Sir?' continued the second.
House managed to bark out a 'Go to hell!' before shrugging them off, smoothing down his shirt and realising the cane was somewhere in pieces further up the staircase, limping as best he could out of the doors.
As House stumbled slightly into the daylight, he concentrated on filling his lungs with pure, unfettered air. He sucked in a deep cleansing breath to shake out the last of the panic and to rebuild his defences. Calmed yet still a little shaky, he spotted Wilson, waiting with a wrinkled brow puffing his cheeks out with an understated sigh of relief. A quick furtive glance told him that indeed no one else had the slightest inkling as to what he'd just gone through; the new team were chatting happily with the old and Cuddy was busy shouting instructions into her phone.
'Need a ride?' Wilson said quietly into his ear.
'Yeah, yeah I do.' House managed to whisper in reply. The two men ambled toward the car park, Wilson just ever so slightly closer than he would ordinarily be.
'Wilson?' House croaked, 'Thanks'.