Title: A Ghost Story
Characters: House, Thirteen
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: spoilers for season 4, some swearing.
Summary: House talks about his past. Thirteen thinks about her future.
A/N: This was a little Halloween fic that got out of control. I only missed my deadline by two months, so that's not too bad for me. Takes place sometime after Wilson's Heart. Any and all mistakes re: India are totally my fault and are, hopefully, not egregious enough to cause an international incident.
***
Remy cautiously pushes the front door open. The inside of the house is quiet, a contrast to the wind and rain in the trees just beyond the porch, the darkness seeming to swallow up the sound from the outside. She hesitates on the threshold.
House makes an impatient noise behind her. "Is it safe to go in now? Or should we just wait out here until someone calls the cops?"
She shuts her eyes and breathes, arranges her face into a caricature of playful indulgence before turning around to face him. "Cripples first," she says sweetly and steps aside to let him pass.
House gives her a suspicious look as he disappears into the dark. She can hear his cane thumping slowly on the hardwood floor, and feels an inexplicable urge to turn around, run back down the steps, and lock herself in the car, maybe drive all the way back into the city and the safety of the hospital. She realizes that desire is the first real thing she's felt in a long time.
It's ridiculous, she thinks. There's nothing here but a big empty house. Their patient is in the ICU. No one else lives here.
She remembers that first day on the job at PPTH, feeling a shiver of superstitious dread when she'd turned over the racing bib and seen her number. Thirteen. Back then it had seemed strangely appropriate -- a good fit for a doomed young doctor. She'd embraced the bad omen, made it her name and taken its power for herself. Now that the thing she's feared the most has come true, it doesn't matter anymore. Her nickname is nothing more than a coincidence, completely meaningless. And this feeling is the same: just a visceral reaction to the dark and the wind.
She steps inside and feels around on the wall for the light switch.
"Don't touch that," House says. He looks like a long black shadow in his pea coat.
"Why not? Don't you want to see what--"
"Because nothing looks more suspicious than the lights suddenly turning on in a supposedly empty house. Plus, it's a well known fact that ghosts love the dark."
Remy sighs. Great. Stumbling around and banging her shins on the coffee table is exactly how she wanted to spend her evening. And she wants the light. She needs the light. "I don't see why this couldn't have waited until morning."
"Crazy lady said her ghost only appears at night, right?"
"Yeah..."
House stops in front of the mirror hanging over the fireplace, faces her in its reflection. "So if we're going to figure out what's causing her to see ghosts and ghoulies, we're going to have to do it at night." He turns and sits down carefully on the couch.
"Don't you want to... snoop around or something? Maybe there's an attic we can check out. I hear ghosts love attics." She doesn't want to stay here in the dark.
"In a minute." The manic energy House had earlier in the day seems to have dissipated. This quieter somber version of her boss feels like a stranger. She's noticed that a lot lately: the mood swings. Since Wilson left.
She fidgets with her scarf for a few more moments, twirling and twirling the yarn until it's tight around her finger, before perching on the edge of the couch. Fuck this place. And fuck House for dragging her here.
"So we're just sitting here because...?"
"Studies have suggested that strong electro-magnetic fields can produce feelings of paranoia, and induce hallucinations. Or make people see ghosts," House says quietly.
"So if we see a ghost, we can confirm an environmental cause." She nods, nonchalant, pushes down her fear. "Got it."
They sit in silence for few minutes. Remy glances around the room. The furniture makes somber, dark shapes against the wood paneling. There's a huge grandfather clock by the fireplace. She stares at the pendulum swinging slowly back and forth, wonders if it will strike the half hour. She's vaguely disappointed when it doesn't -- the silence in the room seems almost artificial. God, she wants to get out of here.
It reminds her of a room in the house she grew up in. She remembers how the sunlight would stream in through the windows, warming the old wood until it glowed golden and flowed like honey on the walls. At night, the same room was transformed into a vast dark cave of creaking floors and shadows. Her mother would come and lift her up, carry her through to the safety of the brightly lit kitchen.
That was before her mother went away, back when the world was safe. Way back when, before a strange woman who screamed and twitched took her mother's place. Before everything went bad.
House's voice jolts her out of the memory. "Tell me more about this ghost."
"Um," she hesitates, trying to shake off the past, remember the details that hadn't seemed relevant at the time, "the patient says she's been seeing it for about a month. She only sees it at night--"
"Yeah, yeah, I got all that. What does it look like? Anyone she knows?"
"Actually... She says it looks like her."
"Like the patient?"
"Yeah."
"So she's seeing a doppelganger."
"You mean like an evil twin?"
"Not necessarily." He shifts uncomfortably on the couch. "A doppelganger is supposed to be an omen of impending doom or death, which," he tilts his head, considering, "some people might see as a bad thing. It's a common theme around the world. Different cultures have different names for the same idea: fetch, double."
It's an odd bit of trivia coming from someone so focused on the rational. "You seem to know a lot about ghosts."
House shrugs. "Myths, stories," he says, as if that's an explanation. He reaches into his pocket, and she can hear the familiar rattle of pills, just make out the shape of the bottle in the dim light.
She wonders if Foreman's prescribing for him now that Wilson's gone. There's so much she doesn't know about the people she works with, their lives. There's so much that just doesn't matter anymore. "You don't believe in ghosts, do you?"
House takes the pill. Remy imagines she can see his hand trembling like an old man's. His eyes are fever-bright in the darkness.
"No," he says simply. "But I met a ghost once."
****
He sits on the single back stair of the old clinic -- knees practically up around his ears to keep his feet out of the mud -- and smokes. The street outside is empty tonight -- more so than the usual lack of traffic caused by superstitious avoidance of death and disease, no sounds but the rattle and tap of unending rain against the rusted awning over the stoop. He can just make out the soft glow of multi-colored lights from the temple in the village center.
He's been in India for just over three months, and has gotten to the point where he doesn't care anymore about the dirt on his clothes, doesn't bother lifting a hand to brush flies from his face, can almost sleep through the sound of constant monsoon rain in the night. He's picked up a fair bit of Tamil since his arrival -- mostly medical phrases and questions -- enough that he can converse comfortably with patients in the more remote villages where English speakers are rare. But the intimate conversation of two lovers overheard in the shop, the staccato haggling of the merchant and customer in the market are still incomprehensible to him. House can tell it's a language that will slip easily from his mind once he's left this place. He'll be glad when it goes.
The research he'd been promised turned out to be nothing more than sample gathering -- an excuse to send young doctors, fresh out of their fellowships, into the third world to do good. He's been traveling from clinic to clinic, trying to track down the source of a new strain that seems to be resistant to their best antibiotics. This remote village surrounded by flooded rice paddies is his last stop in this miserable country.
He takes a long, slow drag on his hand-rolled cigarette, tries and fails to blow a smoke ring.
Correction: He's not actually tracking down anything. Those lucky assholes back in the lab are doing all of the exciting work. He's been stuck out here, where he's really been nothing but a glorified errand boy. And House has discovered that outside of the laboratory, every strain of cholera looks exactly the same, smells exactly the same -- like watery shit and death. He's spent almost every waking minute since his arrival tending to patients. And it's just as boring as he'd imagined. There's no mystery in these tiny clinics. The treatment for cholera is always the same: oral or IV fluids, depending on how sick someone is, how well stocked their supply cabinet is. If you add water faster than the patient loses it, the patient will live. Act too slowly, and the patient dies.
Eventually the damp wind and rain extinguish the tiny ember at the tip of his cigarette. House doesn't bother lighting it again. He flicks the remainder out into the mud. The endless mud -- mud in the streets, mud on his boots, in his boots. Even the fucking houses are made of mud. He's sick to death of mud.
When he stands there's a momentary dizziness, and he feels like the world is spinning away from him, slipping down into the mud. He clutches the side of the doorframe for balance, a sudden heat rushing up on him. What the hell? He tries to remember what he ate for dinner earlier, whether or not he boiled the water he drank. He's been careful -- he shouldn't be sick. House stands, panting, for a few minutes and eventually the feeling passes.
He's the only doctor working in the clinic tonight. House prefers it that way, prefers letting his natural insomnia and disdain for his fellow doctors -- self-righteous pricks, all of them -- work to his advantage for a change.
He steps inside the ward. Rows of empty cholera cots stretch into the darkness. Two kerosene lamps hang on each wall, blue flames burning low. They have a generator outside that provides some electricity – mostly for fans and medical equipment and sometimes for emergency lighting – but it's not running tonight because there are no patients on the ward. However, there's always paperwork that needs to be done, so House lights a candle in a holder on the desk and sits down to work.
An hour or so later, he's managed to get through only three entries and the type is starting to blur and jump on the paper. He rubs his eyes and tries to focus. The sound of the rain seems distant now, like the storm has finally moved on. He pauses, lost for a moment in this new silence, trying to remember what it was like to live somewhere with running water and air conditioning.
A cold breeze blows through the ward, pushing gently against the mosquito nets hanging over the cots, making them sway. House stares as his little candle flame gutters blue for a few moments before going out. The darkness on the ward presses in a little closer. "Great," he mutters, and reaches for the lighter in his coat pocket.
"Doctor…"
"Shit!" He jumps up. The lighter skitters off into the dark. The ward is so badly lit it takes House a few moments to identify a woman on the corner cot as the speaker. He remembers seeing her being carried in the previous day, screaming and crying out in Hindi, delirious with fever and dehydration. And yet… he could have sworn that the clinic had no patients tonight.
After recovering from his shock, he grabs a lantern from the far wall, gets close enough to examine her. She's young -- no more than thirty -- but she has the old skin of a cholera patient, stretched and thin and dry as parchment.
"Do you speak English?" he asks in Hindi. It's one of only a few phrases he knows beyond 'hello' and 'goodbye', 'I'm a doctor', and some choice words to shout at idiots on bikes and cab drivers. House looks around for one of the nurses, anyone who can help translate, but aside from himself and the patient the ward is empty.
"Yes, I speak English." Her voice is so faint that House has to lean down to hear her. "I studied at Oxford University in England for four years." The accent is unmistakable to him now -- well-cultured British with just a hint of the exotic.
House doesn't feel much like talking tonight -- actually, he never feels like talking to patients -- but he supposes he can make an effort to at least act like a good doctor should. He pulls up a wobbly wooden chair and sits. The rank smell coming from the patient doesn't bother him -- he's learned to ignore such things. "How are you feeling tonight?"
"Much better." She smiles up at him, her bright teeth flashing in the dark. "Still weak, but I feel much better than yesterday."
"You'll probably need fluids for a few more days, then you should be fine and we can release you."
She gives him the same gentle smile. "I am afraid that will not be the case, doctor. Tonight is the night that I will die."
House has never been inclined to believe in the irrational hopes and fears of his patients, but at the same time he recognizes how a sense of impending doom can indicate a problem that's not yet visible -- the body's way of sending up smoke signals. He lifts her thin wrist and takes her pulse, listens to the sounds of her lungs. She's sick and very dehydrated, but she seems stable.
He checks her bag of IV fluids and sits back down. "Why do you think you're going to die?"
"I just know," she says, mysteriously.
House rubs his eyes. He can feel the beginnings of a killer headache coming on, probably the result of too little sleep, maybe some bug he picked up. He doesn't need this right now. "You seem remarkably calm for someone on the brink of death."
"There is nothing I can do to change my fate. And even if it was possible, I'm not sure I would want to try."
He nods. "Great. Well, I'll leave you to it."
He's halfway out of the chair when a cold hand seizes his wrist.
"Doctor, please. I need you to do something for me."
"Let go of me." He says it as calmly as he can manage. He feels oddly dizzy -- that same sick, sinking feeling he'd felt outside -- and sweat is running down his back.
"I have a letter for my mother. Please take it to her." She doesn't let go and her grip actually tightens. House didn't think it was possible for a cholera patient to be so fucking strong. "There are things I need to tell her."
He twists his arm to get away, but her fingers are like stone.
"Please, doctor." Her eyes are black pools, her dry lips skim back from bone-white teeth. House can't look away."For my mother. Please…"
He can feel his vision narrowing. There's nothing left but her eyes and a dead smell. He's shaking and he wonders in a detached part of his mind how he suddenly got so cold. He's sweating, but he's so cold.
"Please, doctor. Please…"
He sinks to the ground, and she doesn't let go.
***
When he wakes up he hears soft voices talking in Tamil, too quickly for him to understand. He carefully opens his eyes to blurry whiteness that is painfully bright. He rubs his eyes to clear them, but the whiteness remains. Reaches out to brush it away and encounters soft fabric. Mosquito net, he thinks. What the fuck happened?
A dark shape looms over the bed and the net is pulled back to reveal Stevens, one of the other doctors stationed at the clinic and House's current least favorite.
"How you feelin'?" He reaches for House's wrist.
House is still too disoriented -- she grabbed my wrist -- to give in to his first impulse to slap Steven's hand away. Instead, he asks, "What happened?"
"Couple of the locals found you passed out on the floor this morning." He glances up from his watch, gives House one of his trademark insincere grins. "You had a hell of a fever this morning. It finally broke around noon. Looks like malaria." He shakes his head, makes a ridiculous clucking sound. "You know, House, they give us those pills for a reason."
Smarmy asshole. "Malaria infection is still possible even with prophylaxis." He doesn't know why he's arguing -- it's probably just reflex at this point. He glances around the room. There are two emaciated men laid out on cots a few feet away, two nurses gossiping quietly at the desk, but no female patients in sight.
"What happened to…" He suddenly realizes he doesn't even know her name. "My patient. The one from last night. What happened to her?"
"What patient? You had an easy shift, remember? We were empty last night."
"You're wrong. She was here." He struggles to sit up a little higher in the bed, if only to give Stevens less of an opportunity to loom over him. "Mid-twenties, spoke good English with a British accent. She wasn't local."
Stevens smiles again. That shiny Princeton frat boy smile. God, he wants to punch him.
"What?"
"House, you're confused. She died before you even came on shift. And she was never your patient." He pats House on the leg and stands up. "Look. Just get some rest and I'm sure you'll be back on your feet in no time."
What the fuck happened last night? He rubs his eyes again, hoping for a little clarity, but nothing comes. He's tired and his head hurts too badly. He knows what he saw last night. Did he imagine the whole thing?
"Oh, almost forgot." Stevens searches around in the pocket of his lab coat, retrieves a battered white envelope. "You had this in your hand when they found you. Wouldn't want you to lose it."
"Please, doctor." Her fingers are like ice on his arm. He's so cold. How is he so cold? "For my mother. Please…"
Stevens holds out the letter and House takes it warily. His breathing speeds up and he has to wipe away the sweat that has suddenly formed on his head. It wasn't real. None of it was real. The front of the envelope is blank except for a single word written in Sanskrit. Too short to be a person's name, maybe a village.
He closes his eyes and leans back into the pillows, crumples the envelope in his fist. Maybe when he wakes up this will make sense.
"Please, doctor. Please…"
***
"Did you deliver the letter?" Remy asks.
House stares hard at her for a few seconds, like he's trying to remember exactly who she is. "No," he says finally, and looks away.
"Why not?" It comes out sounding like an accusation, and more than a little desperate. She's surprised at how much she wants to know the answer.
"Because it didn't matter." He looks tired now.
"But… how could you just--" She takes a breath and starts over. "Didn't you want to know?"
"Know what?" he snaps.
"Know if it was true," she whispers.
"It wouldn't have proven anything, except that she did have parents somewhere in India." He rubs a hand over his face. "Everything that I experienced has a rational explanation: I heard the patient talking when she'd been brought in the day before, filed it away in my subconscious. Found the letter she'd left. I was sick -- probably delirious out of my mind -- I hallucinated the whole thing." He shrugs, taps his cane gently on the floor. "There are no ghosts. There's no afterlife. Death is the end."
She's confused now. "Then why bother telling me that story?"
"Just wanted to set the mood," House says. "You know, for the ghost hunting."
Remy eyes him suspiciously. She knows it's never that simple.
***
The stairs up to the second floor are huge and dark, light pouring in from a single stained glass window shifts in inky pools on the wood steps. She pauses at the top. Great, she thinks. If House's intention was just to freak her out, he's done a good job. She takes a cautious step forward and wishes for the hundredth time that she'd brought a flashlight.
The landing leads to a long hallway lined with mirrors on both sides. Large and small, oval and square -- every possible combination of shapes and sizes. Strange.
She stops in front of a huge mirror in an ornate gilded frame. The dim light makes it impossible to tell whether it is gold or silver -- everything up here is in shades of gray. Her reflection bounces back and forth between this mirror and those on the wall behind her - a thousand Remys fading into nothingness. She reaches for her phone and so do her many doubles.
House picks up after two rings. "What?" She can hear him faintly from downstairs, and the echo is unsettling.
"The patient's got, like, five hundred mirrors up here. What if that's the cause of the hallucinations?"
"Hmmm…Can't think of too many studies linking brain problems and bad taste in home décor."
"No. I mean, what if the hallucinations aren't actually hallucinations?" She waves her arm experimentally. A hundred Remys wave back. "What if the patient is just seeing herself in the mirror?"
She can tell by the silence on the other end that House isn't satisfied -- that answer is just too mundane to be interesting.
Remy doesn't give a shit about interesting. "Look. She lives all alone in this big scary house. She sees things at night, gets spooked. It makes sense. It even explains why she thinks the 'ghost' looks like her."
A few more seconds of silence, then House says, "maybe," and hangs up.
Remy shakes her head at the phone, puts it back in her pocket. She walks slowly down the hallway, stopping every so often to examine the knickknacks spread out along a low table. In the mirrors, a pale shape follows along.
After a few minutes, she realizes she doesn't like that explanation either. If you take away the neurological problem, the other symptoms don't make sense. There's got to be a lesion, some kind of abnormality in the brain. Maybe something too small to see on an MRI or CT scan, but still big enough to cause problems. She's sure there's something here. Maybe the mirrors are a clue, just not the one she thinks.
She stops in front of a little hall table. There's an oval mirror with what looks like polished metal instead of glass in the frame. The distorted reflection makes her face look almost obscene: empty holes for eyes in a white mask. The face of a dead woman -- her own evil twin. Doppelganger.
She imagines trying to spell it -- the little umlaut over the 'a'-- and something about picturing the word in her mind makes her remember an article she'd read a few years ago. Suddenly, it all comes rushing back.
She hits House's number on speed-dial and he picks up right away, as if he's been expecting her call. She doesn't give him a chance to say anything. "The lesion we're looking for has to be in the left temporoparietal junction."
"Did you just pull that out of your ass? I mean, it's a nice ass and all, but--"
"No, listen." She takes a breath. "Your stupid story reminded me of a study I read. Some Swedish researchers were using electrical stimulation to try to cure epilepsy or something. Anyway, they were just messing around in the brain, playing mad scientist, and they managed to make a patient hallucinate her own double by zapping the left temporoparietal junction." She pauses, waiting for a response, for House to shoot her down and call her an idiot. When nothing happens, she goes on. "It fits. And, more importantly, it gives us a place to start looking."
There's a pause, and then, "Nice. I like it. Get down here and we'll go test out your crazy idea." He hangs up. The case is suddenly interesting again.
Remy tucks the phone back into her pocket. She glances up at the mirror, catches the smile on her dead, white face. She bites at her bottom lip. One happy moment and then everything comes rushing back over her like a cold wave. Don't, she thinks. Don't you dare feel good about this. Being right is meaningless. She's dying. Nothing else matters.
She stares into the distorted reflection in the mirror, tears pricking her eyes and making everything blur and swell. This is stupid, too. Get a grip, for fuck's sake. She shakes her head and straightens up, wipes her eyes quickly. She leans in to check her reflection in the mirror. And stops, hand frozen at her temple, heart suddenly pounding in her chest.
As the face in the mirror winks and smiles.
***
It takes him four days to reach his destination by train. Four days spent in a cramped, smoky train car, surrounded by screaming babies and laughing children, people talking in five different languages. The train breaks down twice, and he's sure the second time will be the end of the journey but the men bang and beat on the old engine until it sputters to life once again. By the third day, all of his tobacco is gone. He barters away his best pair of shoes for more. The old man he buys it from laughs and calls him naśēṛī.
The house is at the very edge of the village, past fields that are thick with bright green stalks -- a parting gift from the rains of the monsoon season. A young boy driving a long-horned steer stops and stares as he makes his way slowly down the road.
In the shade-dappled courtyard, a woman in a red sari, gray threaded liberally through her black hair, sweeps up leaves that have fallen from a large fig tree. She watches as he approaches, her hands gripping the handle of her broom, and he knows he's come to the right place. When he's about five feet away, he stops and waits. She looks searchingly at him for a moment, then shuts her eyes tightly and clasps her hands to her forehead. The broom falls to the ground. It's always the same, he thinks, they always know.
"I have a letter," he says carefully in Hindi. He's been practicing on the long train ride. "From your daughter."