By popular demand, SA - with sincere apologies for the ridiculously long wait! I'll try posting chapters in parts, as I'm mostly doing over at LJ to try to speed up the process - at the moment its hard to get time to write in and around RL, but I promise I'm not giving up on this story. Thanks to everyone who has offered encouragement and nagged me to post! This is for you guys.
Recap: In Part Seven Wilson is reassessed at New York Mercy. House is banned from supervising the procedures by the twins he nicknames TweedleDumb and TweedleBitch. He and Cooper square off over Wilson's medical file when she insists she needs to know what happened to him. House finds that he can't quite face up to Wilson's attack. During their conversation, House realizes Cooper has seen Wilson injured and in trouble before…
Somnolent in the snare of the sedative and lulled by the constant pad of rubber-soled steps along the corridors, nurses trekking, doctors hurrying, cleaners slogging and patients shuffling, Wilson slept soon after he'd been settled into bed. The well-known rhythms of passing feet were more soporific than counting sheep.
But he didn't slumber for long. Hospitals, by night, were not quiet places and, while his private room afforded something more of a sanctuary than a curtained bed on the nearby wards, the level of observation required by his head injury did not.
House woke him first, all badgering belligerence and fit to diagnose a fatality from a prat-fall. Short-fused with shock and the alien gleam of fear in his eyes, he was argumentative and resistant to placation. Exhausted by the effort of disproving the mortuary scenarios concocted by his partner's overactive imagination, Wilson dozed again before House had left his bedside.
Hananda woke him soon after to hold scans of his battered brain waveringly up to the useless glow of a bedside lamp. Wilson squinted with bleary eyes and throbbing temples, more because he knew he should than because he could make sense of them. His slowing blinks smeared the scans into a pale haze that blended with the cyanic blue of the room as Hananda retreated, shutting off the lights. Wilson snoozed again, fitfully. His world became snatches of lucid dreams and fluctuating rags of reality.
Tacked up against the blaring white rectangles of his light-board, Alicia's scans were incomprehensible. He studied them until the blue-black shapes remained affixed to his retinas when he rested his eyes and racked his brain. Concluding nothing, he stared again until his vision was mist, his head was thunder and the light of the board became—
—a blazing aurora that burst against the slat blinds. A nurse had intruded on the occupant of the room opposite. Voices chattered between the thresholds, became worried murmurs. The light faded—
—to the focused spotlights of the lab at Princeton Plainsboro. His most-trusted technician fidgeted before the flow cytometer, one hand fervently looping her royal blue bangs behind ears pierced into shell-shaped sieves.
"There're no cancer markers, Dr. Wilson. I've done the tests three times now."
Wilson rubbed at his frown lines, frustrated. "Run them once again—"
"—for me," Hananda requested, his penlight weaving and bobbing in front of Wilson's eyes.
Over the kerfuffle of an urgent transfer being jog-trotted down the neurology corridor from the emergency ward, Wilson stumbled his way through the standard orientation test for his own head injury, giving his name, the date and his location. Prompted again, he named presidents, prime numbers, recalled strings of simple objects, answered questions so normal they seemed surreal, property of the strange twilight zone that had subsumed his waking world. The dreams felt saner in comparison; he sunk deeper into their thrall, retreating from the labours of the old man in the room next door heaving himself out of bed to plod in his rustling gown with his clop-clopping cane to pee and flush and—
—Wilson let himself out of the disabled bathroom on the third floor and returned to the head of department's office to patiently peruse the photographs he studied without seeing on what had become a monthly basis. On the wall to the left of the desk, between the coat stand and the bonsai tree, a chestnut horse sailed over a water jump as if its next leap would be right out of the photo-frame.
Its rider, thirteen years out of the saddle, was perched on the edge of her desk, the silver fingers of a futuristic prosthetic muting her line to the conference call he'd interrupted.
Dr. Wood closed the file he'd brought to her and shook her head.
"There's nothing to indicate that this is a psych case, Jim. If you've come full circle to brain again, you need a neurologist."
New York Mercy's finest clattered through the blinds on cue, stifling a yawn with his fist.
"Sorry for the rigmarole, Jimmy," Hananda apologised, extracting his penlight from the breast pocket of the scrub top he'd slung on over his jeans in place of pyjamas. "Again from the top. Name?"
"Wilson, for God's sake." Emily Maus shoved Alicia's scans back at him, insulted in front of a gaggle of residents. "This is the second time I've seen these! If you're not happy with Foreman's, Mevinsky's or my answer, then call up those friends of yours at New York Mercy. They've kicked our asses in every national review for the last five years!"
He thanked her and took the scans, hitting speed-dial on his cell as he turned away.
A phone shrilled and shrilled at the reception desk, unanswered. It rang off.
"You're through to Drs. Hananda-Cooper. We're unavailable at the moment. Please leave your name, number and message after the pip."
"Meg, Kit, it's Jim Wilson—"
"Date of birth?"
"August fourteenth—huh?"
"Jim, it's Kit." A penlight jiggled anxiously in front of his eyes. "Are you with me? D'you know where you are?"
Next door, the old man laboured up to pee again.
Orientated, Wilson realised: "New York Mercy?"
"Yeah," Kit affirmed reassuringly. "Well done. Try to sleep again, you need—"
"—some rest, Dr. Wilson. You should go home." The night technician in the Princeton lab hovered concernedly at his elbow. "We can do this for you."
"I've got it, thanks Sara."
Ignoring the perplexed overnight staff realigning the noses his presence had put firmly out of joint, Wilson bent over the microscope, checking and rechecking blood panels and biopsy slides in that state of hyper-focus known to sleep-starved medical professionals worldwide. He stared at the shapes and colours forming beneath the lens until they swam together into a meaningless murk.
What the hell was wrong with this kid? What was he missing?
Abandoning the labs for someone else to clear away his equipment, Wilson paced the Oncology corridors, habitually checking patients and exchanging polite nothings with his staff, whilst he waited for the twins to return his phone call. He'd left two messages and spoken to their secretary, but they were wrist deep in plotting and preparing a standstill operation, they'd call back.
He returned to his office and stood at his desk, palms pressed to the wood, pouring over Alicia's file until his head pounded. He shifted his weight and reached to turn a page, but a shock of pain jolted down his right arm and he knocked the file to the floor with a clap-clatter. Startled, he stared at the spread-eagled pages—
"Sorry."
Hananda crouched to pick up the clipboard he'd fumbled and retrieve his penlight from under the Ottoman. His tawny skin was bruised with tiredness, his scrub top crumpled with the restive motions of a light sleep anticipating the hourly summons of an alarm. He circled the bed, checking machines, scribbling notes to himself on the chart—
—Wilson reviewed his own annotations to his case file, reflexively twirling his pen on the edge of the nearest surface. His thoughts revolved in time to the cylindrical case circling between his fingers. Night after night he'd been sat like this, going over and over and over Alicia's file in his office, exhaustion and concentration narrowing his focus down to the pale rectangles of the pages and the logic versus luck championship snap game of matching symptoms, diagnosis and treatment plans going on in his mind. Beyond that everything had become a cyclorama of irrelevant fog, the hospital, his colleagues, his office…
He wasn't in his office. The hard wood beneath his palm wasn't wood at all. It was stiff and rubbery…an orthopaedic mattress, its fluid-resistant cover crinkling audibly beneath starched sheets. The light was wrong too. It didn't fall in those reaching rectangles of early sun through his balcony windows; it buzzed from strips beyond a glass sliding door, forging through slat blinds to land in hard narrow bars across the floor. The hum of his overheated computer, grumbling on standby, became the chug of infusion pumps and the bleeps of a multifunction monitor, picking up as it measured waking respiration, blood pressure and heart rate.
Alicia. Damnit. He must've fallen asleep in her room.
Automatically, he tried to check her stats; but the nearby LCD monitor was blurry. He pushed his pen aside to his sleep-sticky eyes. The pen followed. Tap-tap against his knuckles, it hovered in mid-air. Confused, he batted at it and something tugged in the back of his left hand, angular and sharp. He winced and splayed his fingers to peer down at them. The faint shadows in the dimness were nondescript. An unexpected weight drooped his forefinger toward his palm. He curled his fist and felt the blocky outline of an oximeter, the slow twine of a plastic tube around his wrist. Not a pen. An IV wire. Wilson blinked and came further awake, stared at the chirping monitor to which he was hitched. He was a patient?
"Jim?"
Of course, he was the patient. Recoiling from a looming wave of memories, Wilson murmured some sort of reply to Hananda.
"Once more and I'll let you sleep for a few hours," his friend promised gently.
The questions came in place of the consult that never had. Satisfied, Hananda closed his file and—
Alicia's mocked Wilson from the muzzy miasma of his sedated consciousness. What was he missing? What symptom? What treatment regime that would stall the disease until he could pin it down? It was cancer. It had to be. But what cancer?
He'd asked everyone in his department. Run laps of the hospital requesting consults. Called up state to New York and down to Trenton again. Were it not for a stinging sacrilegious rebuke about Christological complexes compensating for crappy, second-rate doctoring, he'd've hammered on the wall and gate crashed House with his case instead of the other way around for once. But he'd be damned if he'd go and grovel to a glorified GP…
Which House wasn't. And Wilson knew he wasn't. And it didn't make a damn bit easier to take it on the chin when he'd been jibed all of yesterday about going freelance as a hippy quack if he thought he could heal with love instead of medicine. To needle his pride all the more, Wilson couldn't even remember what had started that bickering match or whether House had just been taking his snark out for its evening walk. Probably it had been something innocuous, like a way to avoid doing dishes.
Sighing, Wilson let his awareness condense upon that wad of pages, which lay spread open on a shelf of mist. He reached for it for the umpteenth time – and startled back, his fist closing on empty air.
It wasn't a file at all. It was a tiny body. The sternum was peeled apart like open pages. The skin was white and blank, bloodless. He was in the mogure, surrounded by the scattered and useless tools of his trade, scalpels, scopes, jars, tags and charts. There was nothing that he could do with them. There were no organs. From the body cavity arose a faint mist.
Shit. She was dead.
Wilson gaped at the rigid, glassy-eyed girl in bewilderment.
How in the hell was he going to tell her...?
Mother.
Tania powered in, trailing IV wires like something Frankenstein had awoken. Caught unawares, Wilson nonetheless realised at once that she was dead. Foggy tears streaked her cheeks. The hems, cuffs and collar of her backless hospital gown oozed white smoke. She was disintegrating in front of his eyes.
Even so, he tried to shield her from the sight on the table. Whether mom or mist-swaddled mummy, she shouldn't see her little girl this way: laid out on a slab her body bent back like a broken butterfly's wings, staring sightlessly at the ceiling with cyanotic lips lax over gappy teeth.
Tania's face creased with a soul-wrenching distress. Her voice billowed out in soundless pallid clouds that became skywriting scribbled in the chill air.
"You told me you'd do everything you could!"
Wilson tried to speak, but the bespoke words he could always conjure at a moment like this caught in the back of his throat. His voice came out hoarse, an unpalatable croak.
"I did. I'm so sorry. There was nothing I could do."
"Liar!"
Her fist sent him reeling. He staggered into the autopsy table and struck his head on a jar. It overturned, slopping preserving fluid across his face.
"You lied to me!"
Another blow. Another and another. He tried to grasp her wrists, but she contorted like an acrobat and a kick sent him crashing to his knees. She was inhumanly strong.
She hit him again and again, one corpse beating him over another, hell bent upon making him a third. Mist rained down from her, tinged pink with his spraying blood.
"You killed her!"
I didn't. Damnit. I didn't…mean to?
"Mrs. Walker, please listen to me. There was nothing that I could—"
"Shut up."
This voice came from behind. Wilson flung a startled glance over his shoulder. On either side the mist took shape, clumped wetly together into Lindsey and Keith. They circled the autopsy table, seized his arms and twisted, trapped him on his knees.
Tania came closer, close enough that more wet mist moulted off her to spatter on Wilson's face, sizzling like sweat. Lindsey leaned over his shoulder and breathed words into her ear. He saw them materialise in Tania's glassy eyes.
"I've got an idea."
Her grin was a rictus mask.
Kneeling, Tania touched fuliginous fingertips to Wilson's swelling cheek. Her thumb smoothed over his lips, down the vulnerable line of his hiccupping carotid and on, over his torso, lightly exploring her marbling handiwork. A sensory murmur snaked through him, aroused by this sudden soothing delicacy after the blows. His mind blanked out in shock and disbelief.
She smiled and her hand slunk between the folds of the labcoat he was somehow no longer wearing. It lay on the floor, just visible inside his peripheries: a pale splatter of white. Lindsey's hold tightened on his arm as Keith shifted, pressed his hot, hard body claustrophobically along Wilson's back. No. Oh please, no.
No.
Not yet waking, Wilson became aware of himself in the dream. Aware of where it was wrong, impossible, right. He was helpless to change any of it. At the time, he'd vowed that he wouldn't struggle. In the dream, he could not. Held down on all sides, he was also bound within a body that was entirely indifferent to his will. He was at once paralysed and reactive in ways that rocked him to his core. The feeling terrified him with its new familiarity.
"I died," Tania announced, petting him with sweltering effectiveness. "But you killed her."
"And now," Lindsey murmured from his left. "Doctor Wilson, you're going to make it all better."
Keith pressed in closer, hooked his chin over Wilson's shoulder, an oppressive, invasive parody of an embrace. Wilson collected cries in his throat and choked them down. He opened his mouth to speak, to reason, bargain, beg; but all that spewed out was mist. Tania laughed at him, worked harder. He shut up, breathing fast, and twitched in her grip, fighting the untimely rise of a smaller death.
It rose anyway. Behind him, the table rattled tinnily. Flesh squeaked on steel. Fusty breath puffed into his ear as Alicia scrambled off the table and dropped soundlessly onto bare feet, padding around in front of him to stand with the flaps of her Y-incision waggling open like a ruined hospital gown. She peered curiously at what her mother was doing, with all the innocent inquisitiveness of one investigating a worm meandering in the dirt of her back yard. Wilson went light-headed with revulsion. But his body didn't – couldn't – care.
"You're a liar," Alicia agreed, contemplating him with child-like solemnity. Her words whistled through the gap where a milk tooth had come out. "You said you were going to look after me. But you didn't. You killed me."
From between the obscenely parted strips of papery flesh where her ribs should be, she produced a syringe and, with extra-specially methodical care, siphoned out a measure of the mist inside her. It swelled in the syringe, bulging from plunger to tip. Alicia held it erect, pointed up toward the light. Her bluish tongue poking out of one corner of her mouth, she depressed the plunger a little to push out the excess air. Mist bulged at the needle's tip, like a speech bubble.
Her soft voice seemed to emerge from it, juvenile and cruelly gentle.
"Your turn."
Wilson's breath sped; his pulse began to boil frenetically. His head was thumped so hard he thought it would explode.
"Or," a deep, amused voice interrupted from nearby. "You could do it the easy way."
The morgue table rattled once more and an unmistakable plonk-step circumnavigated Wilson's captors to bring an all too familiar figure to stand, fatherly, at Alicia's side. Cane in one hand, cafeteria coffee cup in the other, House exchanged his stick for the child's syringe and folded his own fingers around the plunger.
Heart, body and brain racing, Wilson watched in disbelief as the syringe was slowly emptied into the coffee cup. Mist steamed from the rim and disappeared seamless into the swirling black contents. House handed the cup off to Tania, nodded once to Wilson, and retrieved his cane, limping away into the mist.
Wilson had a split second to realise what he'd done and what else was in the cup.
It wasn't coffee.
It was words.
His words.
Then Tania crammed them down his throat.
He came awake vomiting, amidst a crowd. Lights were on everywhere, yellow-white and loud. Hands were holding him down. He thrashed frantically and someone shrieked for more sedative. No! He couldn't speak for the convulsions that bent him double and heaved his guts into his throat. Someone else shouted it for him and he stopped trying to holler bile. Most of the hands relented and, for several minutes after, he was so engulfed in sickness and pain that he no longer cared what else happened. A ludicrous thought erupted with the next round of puking: so much for the anti-emetic.
Only once the worst had subsided, could Wilson raise his head to wish the cluster of nurses away and realise that they had already gone. There was only Hananda, holding an emesis basin in one hand, the other supporting him with a gentle grasp on his left shoulder. Wilson glanced at him, but dared not say a word in case too many came up all at once. He concentrated on the acidic taste of vomit, so strong that it made him drool. Instead of speaking, he sought to rid himself of the taste of puke and futility. He expectorated with ever increasing disgust.
When he was finally done, Hananda took away the basin with the tight smile of one who struggles not to retch when other people do. While his back was turned, Wilson sequestered himself amidst a huddle of covers, feeling anxiously around beneath them for any tangible evidence of his dream. His clothes were soaked in sweat, but that was all. He sagged against the pillows, weak with relief.
Hananda handed the brimming cardboard basin off to a nurse at the door, returning with a cup of mouthwash and an empty one into which to cough up. Wilson rinsed his mouth repeatedly, thankful. Tossing those into the trash too, Hananda poured him a drink of water from the jug on the nightstand and stood quietly beside the bed, helping Wilson sip from it. His good hand wouldn't co-operate; it trembled like a Parkinson's sufferer's. He lowered the cup to brace the base against his thigh and studied the breath patterns he'd made on the rim of the translucent plastic. The faint fog was fading away.
"How you doing?" Hananda asked, after a few moments, his voice normal enough for Wilson not to feel too foolish.
He didn't want to answer, all the same. Didn't want to sully his mouth with the bitter, abrasive burn of more useless words. But Hananda was waiting, worrying. Wilson closed his eyes and, almost without moving his lips, muttered:
"Better now."
He'd carried a lot of lies in his lifetime. Every time he thought he couldn't stomach any more, he was wrong.
Hananda said nothing. The hand that had been resting on Wilson's shoulder tightened briefly. Hananda's fingers were bony, the skin papery from bouts of self-inflicted malnutrition. The silent squeeze felt akin to a secret handshake. An invite from the survivors' club. Wilson didn't know if he belonged. But he was glad that Hananda didn't let go.
"I need to check you over," his friend said at length, shifting around to stand not at Wilson's shoulder but in his sightline.
Wilson bit the inside of his lips and inched his head from side to side, flinching at the oppressive ache.
"It's not—that wasn't—" he got out between his teeth, stopped as he wondered what the point was of talking. This would happen anyway. He had no power in this hospital, not even the illusion he'd had at home. He took a breath and tried again, persistent as an addict. "It wasn't the head injury, not that time."
"I know." Hananda did. Of course he did. He had more nightmares than Wilson and he worked in the profession that had caused them. Gently, neutrally, he asked: "Do you want to talk about it?"
The nightmare was far too vivid. Not to mention half-nonsensical. Among the half a hundred other details that were simply unreal in the phantasmagoria his subconscious had cooked up, Tania had never said a cruel world to him. By the time she'd reached Princeton, she'd been completely spent.
"A world of no."
Not knowing where he'd start – or how he would stop – Wilson shook his head. The room immediately fell apart into fulgent fragments. Fulgurate aches blossomed in his ears, brow, eyes, and nose, even his teeth throbbed as sharp corners and blocks of the agony inside his skull dug in everywhere. The rasp of his hair fluttering against his scalp was so loud he didn't hear himself groan.
Hananda moved away and shut off the overhead lights, restoring the room to a tolerable dusk. He returned to the bed and said firmly:
"Then I must check you over. It's almost time again."
The last line had an echo to it that made Hananda frown. If Wilson had been aware of anything but the fishbowl distortions of the room resettling its scuttling architecture, he'd have realised that it was the same line that had always heralded the next childhood field trip to the research lab in Josiah Cooper's basement. He wasn't aware. He tipped his chin slowly down toward his chest in mute concession and let Hananda get on with it.
Still frowning, the neurologist made quick work with the penlight. Then, almost casually, he sat down on the edge of Wilson's bed to rattle through the questions. The ritual served as a salt circle; their succinct back and forth warded off the renewed summons of the sandman. Wilson knew now that that was where the vaporous space had come from. It was one of the sandman's desert-like domains; he'd been a guest of the sedative still cycling through his veins. He still couldn't discern the meaning of the miasma. If it had one. He shivered and pulled the blankets up higher, gave Hanada's questions more focus than they required.
"Full name?"
"James Evan Wilson."
"Date?"
"September 13th 2008. Saturday."
"Do you know where you are?"
"New York Mercy."
"Good. Now." Hananda leaned closer, his narrow, prominent features smudging as a pale glaze veiled Wilson's eyes despite his efforts to stay awake. "Which criminally soppy pop song request did you succumb to on your first wedding's playlist?"
Wilson blinked and his vision cleared; he sought refuge in momentary confusion. Sluggishly comprehending the question as one intended to test long-term memory, he felt his lips search for a semblance of a smile.
"Was there only one?"
Hananda's soft chuckle vibrated against his leg; it held the uneasy timbre of relief.
"Okay. Pick one."
He hardly had to think.
"Do I get points for irony for allowing Lay All Your Love on Me?"
Hananda marked his chart and nodded.
"Good call. Of course, if I thought you had taken life lessons from ABBA I'd be scheduling you immediately for surgery."
Wilson snuffed drowsily. There should be a joke, somewhere, he thought. Divorces. Pink Casts. Ringtones. It would be at his own expense, of course. His eyes sought the Ottoman, House. But, except for a folded hospital-issue brown blanket and unused pillow, the chair was empty. House wasn't there.
Of course he wasn't, Wilson thought, irritated with himself. Prying, investigating, doctoring and deconstructing House could do. Bedside vigils and handholding were not his forte. He'd maxed himself out on whatever compassion he'd borrowed last night and he hadn't fit too well anyway. If he'd been there, he'd've been commandeering the penlight and question time and…Wilson would feel better.
Or worse.
Abruptly, he shunted the water cup back into Hananda's hands, knowing as he did so that, of all his friends, Hananda would never, ever, be one to spike his drink. He rubbed the hip House had injected, nonetheless, searching for new sore spots.
Hananda glanced behind him to set the cup down on the cabinet, then eyed him pensively for a few seconds.
"Jimmy," he said, closing the chart and laying it beside the glass. "I'm finished for now." He gestured to the Ottoman. "D'you want me to stay with you?"
A dozen sensible, reassuring, refusals reared in Wilson's throat. But they disintegrated into so much mist on the tip of his tongue. In the end, he simply nodded.
TBC…
