Untouchable
Chapter 10
(Fast Car)

His name had scarcely left Chase's lips when House felt his body being slammed forward, heard something awful and terrifyingly loud, and he saw sheer white. He was reeling forward, something was screaming—or was it someone—and lights were flashing and buildings were careening around him, like he was on a rollercoaster. Things were spinning, he heard something snap, sparks were flying before his eyes...

And then it was over.

His face was pressed against something white and rubbery. Blindly, he pushed against it—miraculously, it went away. The first thing House saw was a blinding light. He shut his eyes and looked away, and he opened them to a spiderweb of glass. The windshield was cracked through, sections fallen through, and past it, House could see stopped cars and streetlight-lit roads. The car was in the side of the intersection, rammed against a pole. Car horns blared. He could smell burnt rubber.

He looked up to glance at the rearview mirror, but the glass was too splintered to see anything.

Next to him, he heard someone groan, and House abruptly remembered that he was driving with Chase.

They'd rammed into a pole, and not in dead center—it was off to the driver's side, which meant that Chase had probably received the worst of the blow. The deflated air bag was flopped out of the steering wheel, and judging by the red marks on Chase's face, his face had slammed into it. Shards of glass had rained down on both of them, and Chase's hair glittered with broken glass. As he stirred, pieces fell out.

"Don't move," House said as Chase began to wake up. "You've got glass around you—you're going to get one through your jugular."

"Huh?" Chase mumbled, lifting his head slightly.

"Stop moving!" House snapped, not daring to put his hand on Chase's head to emphasize the point. "You're going to kill yourself."

Chase stopped moving his head, and House could tell from some light that was flooding the car that Chase had his eyes open, and was blinking them heavily. "House?"

"Oh Exalted One will suffice," House told him, but the endorphins were beginning to wear off. The shock that he had been in a car accident was disappearing, and a wave of dizzied pain began to creep up on him.

"Mm... kay," Chase said, and House noticed that his voice was slightly slurred. "What—what's going on?"

"Car wreck," House said. "Some idiot rear-ended us, we launched through the intersection and into this here pole. Hope you've got insurance."

"Uh-huh..." Chase frowned, and he seemed to suddenly become more aware of his surroundings. "House!" he said, his head snapping up and turning to stare. Then he winced.

"I told you not to move," House said, his tone glib only after no spurts of blood came erupting out of Chase's neck. He swallowed a wave of nausea.

Chase's eyes were wide. "Are you okay?"

"Fine," House said, lying through his teeth. He could feel at least a sprained wrist and his leg was beginning to cramp up—he was going to get out of here soon. Only Wilson and Stacy had seen him riding out the agony of his leg cramping, and he planned on keeping it that way. "I'm not the one with the concussion."

"You're bleeding," Chase said, sounding amazed by this fact. "You—you're bleeding. Your head."

House reached up to touch his temple, reflexively, but he stopped and stared at his fingers, which were bloody and looked burnt. He bit his tongue as the sight of it suddenly brought searing, throbbing pain to his hand. He felt dizzy.

"House?" Chase said cautiously.

"Can you tell if it's superficial?" House asked, finally lowering his hand and making an effort to shove the image out of his mind.

Chase squinted. "Uh..."

"Where's it at?" House prompted, impatient to know where else he was injured.

"Um, lower zygomatic bone, left side, more medial," Chase said. "It's long. And it's bleeding."

"Of course it's bleeding," House said. "Do you feel dizzy?"

Chase raised his head, like he was going to nod, but he stopped and swallowed. "Yeah. Lightheaded, my vision's a little blurry, and I..." Chase grimaced. "Can you tell if it's bad, down below?"

"You can't feel your body?" House asked, his heart skipping a beat the possibility despite himself.

Chase drew in a shaky breath. "I don't know. It's probably just adrenaline, but it doesn't feel like there's anything there. I can sort of feel... my fingers. They feel really cold."

House went to lean over to look, but the sound of sirens piercing the air made him stop. The feeling of relief temporarily swamped him, overriding his pain and nausea. He opened his eyes (although he wasn't sure when he'd shut them in the first place), and looked at Chase, who was staring at him with terrified eyes.

"I guess this means no sex for a few days," House offered weakly.

Chase laughed.

Flashing red lights ran through the car, and House realized that there was practically half the Princeton fire department there. He counted four ambulances, three fire trucks and six police cars. "Hey, if the other guy dies, we could make tomorrow's headlines."

That sobered Chase up. "You think he's dead? Oh, god. Oh god, oh god..."

"Relax. You're going to give yourself an aneurysm, and how's that going to look after you just survived a car accident?" House heard voices, radioed calls for backup, and people talking. Footsteps, maybe.

"Shut up," Chase said, taking another tremulous breath.

"Sir?"

House's head whirled around, which turned out to be a mistake. He shut his eyes and clutched something hard in the palm of his hand, waiting for the waves of vertigo to stop spinning him round and round.

"My name is Lawrence; I'm a police officer for the city of Princeton. You were just part of an accident—our firefighters and paramedics are going to do their best to get you out of this car and to a hospital. Is there anything immediate that I should know?" Lawrence asked, finishing just as House finally opened his eyes.

The bright lights around him swam for a moment. "We work at Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital," House said. He wondered if his voice actually sounded strange, or if it was just his ears. "Doctors."

"Do you want to be transported there?" Lawrence asked. "Princeton General is closer."

"Princeton-Plainsboro," House said.

"Can you tell if either of you is seriously injured?" Lawrence asked, using a flashlight to peer inside the wrecked car.

"I hit my head—probably grade two concussion," Chase said.

Lawrence looked to House, who stared back. "I'm good," he said with false jubilance. "Never better!"

"Is there anything else?" Lawrence asked, unfazed by House's antics.

House was silent.

"He's got a bad leg," Chase said, sounding exasperated. "Going to need a cane or something. Honestly, House..."

OoO

In the end, they were both lucky that things hadn't been worse. House got put on morphine. Chase got put on a twelve-hour bed rest. Cuddy came up and visited them, not questioning why they'd been in the same car, but only when they were going to be up to working again, and if there was anything she could do. House, who hadn't had injuries worthy of a bed and was therefore annoying Chase from a chair, suggested that he might need further injections of morphine, or perhaps a blowjob to tide him over. Cuddy was not amused.

"You," she said sternly, "are not to have any form of sexual activity for the next week. None."

"None?" House repeated.

"None. Die Fuhrerin has spoken," Cuddy said, crossing her arms over her chest. She looked over to Chase. "Same for you, Dr. Chase. No sex."

"Uh-huh," Chase mumbled from his bed, looking mortified.

Cuddy looked over to House. "I just got a phone call from Princeton General—the girl who hit you is pretty banged up. She's going to—"

"Don't care," House cut her off.

"House," Cuddy admonished with a frown. "She—"

"Is alive, and therefore, Chase can sue her ass. All that matters," House said, speaking up before Chase could get a word in. "Anything else?"

Cuddy stared at him, looking unsure of whether to persist in her report or to just give up. "Fine," she said, throwing up her hands. "I'm going home—you go to sleep."

House watched her leave silently, aware that Chase was sitting two feet away from him, stewing and glaring at him. He really wasn't in the mood to have an argument right now—what he was in the mood for was sleep—but he couldn't seem to get out of his chair to walk up to his office. It was ridiculously comfy. He promptly decided that he must have be pretty high on morphine to think that these hospital chairs were not comparable to sitting in a urinal.

"I wanted to know how she was doing!" Chase protested.

House shrugged. "It doesn't matter. She's alive, and you can find out later when you call up her lawyer."

Chase sighed and pushed his head back into the pillow.

"I'm going to sleep," House said suddenly, standing up. The world rocked, but he leaned on the (hospital-issued) cane he was holding, and things went right again after a minute. He blinked twice, and then glanced to Chase.

"I need..." Chase trailed off, and then shook his head. "Never mind. Thanks for staying with me for a while."

House was curious, but not curious enough to ask Chase what it was that he needed. Obviously, he either didn't need it or could get someone else to do it, or else he would have said something. So he nodded in response, turned around and shut off the lights on the way out.

He hadn't even realized that he'd done it until after he'd left the room. House had half a mind to go back in there and turn them back on, leaving Chase to wait until a nurse came by to ask for the lights to be turned off or try to sleep through the night with the lights on. But by the time he'd weighed his options and decided that flicking the lights back on would be far more fun than leaving them off, he was already in front of the elevators. And his leg was blissfully pain free, and he wanted to fall asleep before that went away.

The elevator doors opened and no one stepped off. He limped in and punched the 4, hoping that he had something resembling a blanket in his office. He was still clad in only the hospital gown he'd been issued, and as his clothes were probably somewhere in the ER, he was going to have to find something to wrap himself up in. The hospital was cold.

He wished that he had his bottle of Vicodin. He didn't need any at the moment, but he still wanted it. Waking up was going to be another level of hell in itself. House had been in car accidents before—though this had probably been the worst one to date—and he knew that the mornings afterwards were horrible.

He got off the elevator, a lone nurse in blue scrubs brushing past him as she walked on. House could see his office from here, and he stared at the door gratefully. Sleep was only a few minutes away. And he really wanted to sleep.

His tired brain suggested that perhaps he wanted to sleep, not to ride out the morphine high and not have toss and turn for a night, but to allow himself to escape the thoughts of what had happened only a few hours ago. The fact that he could have died. The fact that Chase could have died. The fact that the thought of Chase dying conjured an image of him unconscious and slumped in his seat, his head lolling forward uselessly, only his seatbelt keeping him upright. The glass in his hair. The airbag deflated before him.

House almost shook his head to clear his mind of that image, but then he remembered that it would probably result in another vertigo episode. So instead, he just exhaled and told himself that he was tired. And that everyone thought of strange things at one o'clock in the morning after surviving a harrowing car wreck. He'd just been closer to Chase in the past six days than he'd ever been in the year that Chase had been working for him—having sex with people was bound to make you think about them more.

And damn, no sex for a week.

Like he was going to listen to that.

House pushed open the door to his office and made his way inside. The chessboard was still sitting on his desk, the pieces scattered about the board, and House glanced at it before heading into the conference room. There had to be something—something somewhere—that would serve as a blanket.

He was going to go home tomorrow and sleep all day long. Actually, he was going to bitch one of his ducklings into writing him a prescription for a new bottle of Vicodin, and then he was going to go home and sleep. Maybe he could call up Wilson and regale him with a blow-by-blow account of the car wreck that would have Wilson on the next flight to Princeton, homemade chicken noodle soup and sympathy ready. That wouldn't be so bad. At least, the chicken noodle soup part of it; House wasn't too keen on Wilson fawning over him.

He dug into the change of clothes that kept near his desk for vomiting patients, but only found a t-shirt, jeans and socks. He was about to shut the drawer and head into Wilson's office for the night when he caught sight of an old coat sitting at the bottom of the drawer. It was old and flimsy, but it would do. So with that settled, he flopped down on his armchair with the jacket over him and promptly fell asleep.

OoO

House felt someone poke him.

Pain shot through his body at the touch, and he stifled a groan. His body was positively throbbing. His leg was in agony, his head was pounding, his fingers felt like if he moved them, they would snap off at the joints, and his wrist had a stake being driven through it. God, why was he awake? He just wanted to go back to sleep, to wait until the pain was gone.

"House?"

It was a distinctly Cameron-like voice.

"G'way," he muttered, but speaking abruptly brought a rise of bile to the back of his throat. Every cell in his was turning inside out, dying with painful little explosions. The thought of moving was unimaginable. And out of the question.

"House, we need you for a differential," the Cameron-like voice said again.

"Bucket," House croaked, his stomach flipping and squeezing unpleasantly. He was going to vomit, and probably a lot.

"Bucket?" the voice asked. "You want a bucket?"

House forced himself to open his eyes, the light stabbing his eyes the moment his lids cracked open. "Gonna puke," he said, his eyes watering in the blinding light. He shut them.

"Oh—oh, right. Bucket. Foreman, can you hand me that?" There was shuffling.

Gritting his teeth, House reached out with his hand—the one not sprained—and he felt something cool and plastic being held out to him. Opening his eyes a little, he found that it was his garbage can, and before the fact could register he was leaning over and puking up his guts.

He remembered the wreck last night, remembered flashing lights and broken glass and the sight of his bloody hand. Chase, knocked unconscious from the blow, the smell of burnt rubber and gasoline, the sirens blaring, cars honking...

It seemed like ages before he finally finished.

"Are you all right?"

House shoved the garbage can at Cameron, not feeling that the question deserved an answer. "Where's Chase?"

"He's not coming in this morning," Cameron said, taking the can and quickly handing it off to Foreman. "ER discharged him early this morning and I gave him a ride home."

"I'm going home," House informed them, sitting back into the armchair and closing his eyes. "So one of you had better get down to the pharmacy and get me a new bottle of Vicodin."

"House, we were wrong," Foreman said. "They couldn't find the aneurysm in surgery, and Harvey's had two more strokes post-op."

House cracked open his eyes. "Did I stutter?"

"We were thinking that we should go back to blood thinners, and up the dosage," Cameron said. "Do you need a ride home?"

"That's not the only ride you'd like to give me," House muttered, swallowing another swell of nausea. He wondered whether Chase had any good drugs from the ER. "Get another angiogram and another echo. And a full-body scan. And a bottle of Vicodin."

Cameron and Foreman exchanged a glance. "House, you just got a refill two days ago."

"And the ER kindly disposed of it for me," House said, with more sarcasm than he really felt. "I need Vicodin. Now."

OoO

Two hours later, he was back in his apartment with a new bottle of Vicodin. House hadn't managed to get as far as the bed—just walking from Cameron's car to his couch had nearly made him get down his stash of morphine from his bookcase. But there was no way he had enough stamina to climb up there. So he was laying on the couch, television on but silent, and half-dozing. He drifted in and out of sleep, car alarms and yowling cats waking him up for seconds at a time before his eyelids drooped downward, and he was back to sleeping. The pain was muted, both by the Vicodin and sheer exhaustion, and he tried not to glance at the television screen because the bright lights and moving colors made him feel sick.

When the phone rang for the eighth time, House gave up trying to sleep through it. He flopped his hand around the coffee table for a minute, and then finally found it and flipped it open.

"What?" he asked, his voice coming garbled.

"Everything came back normal," Cameron said. "Harvey just had another stroke."

Despite himself, House felt the cogs and gears in his mind began to turn. "Okay," he said. "So it's not clotting. Let's go back to infections."

"We already ruled that out," Foreman said, sounding just as loud as Cameron. They must have put him on speakerphone. "Blood tests didn't show any elevated white count."

"Do 'em again," House said, leaning back into the couch as he continued to think it over. "Check out his jaw—metal plate would hide an infection."

"Okay," Cameron said. "We'll let you know how it goes."

House opened his mouth to say something to the effect of, "I'll be on the edge of my seat," but Cameron had hung up by the time the words were ready to leave his mouth. Slightly dejected, he ended the call and was about to shut the phone so that he could go back to sleep, when he considered calling Wilson. Just to annoy him during his conference. With any luck, he'd call right during the middle of Wilson's speech—and Wilson might have his phone on vibrate. That would be fun.

So he punched in Wilson's number and brought the phone up to his ear.

Unfortunately, Wilson had his phone off and House was transferred directly to his answering machine.

"Got into a car accident," House said flippantly. "Nothing real bad—minor concussion, sprained wrist, burned my fingers, got stitches... And morphine. Good times. Thought you might want to know."

He hung up and felt decidedly like he'd accomplished nothing. Leaving a message that was sure to freak out Wilson was all right, but he'd have to wait. And, he'd just realized, there was the added minus of not getting to see Wilson's face when he found out the mess House had gotten himself in now. He thought about calling Wilson again and again to leave fifty or so messages, but decided against it. It would be too time consuming.

The idea of calling Chase to inform him that, whatever Cuddy had said, they were most certainly not going to wait a week to have sex, flickered in his mind. But he'd had enough of Chase for a while. He could have sworn that his dreams last night had included him—and, if he cared to admit it, they had been ranging more towards nightmares, not dreams.

But who cared? Dreams were dreams. A product of the human psyche interacting with neurological chemicals.

OoO

House could have died.

The horror of this had him sitting on the couch, staring at the blank wall before him for a long time. It hadn't been his fault, he knew that. It was that girl's fault for texting, it was her boyfriend's fault for replying, it was her parents' faults for not teaching her better, it was the car's fault for having slow brakes... Only God knew whose fault it was. But House could have died yesterday, could have snapped his neck or been crushed by the car parts that had crunched together at the pole, could have gotten a piece of glass through his neck, could have...

If House had been here right now, hearing Chase's inner monologue, he would have said that he was being stupid. That it didn't matter, because what had happened was done, and Chase should just be grateful for the fact that everyone had come out alive (and he knew it, he did, he just couldn't bring himself to get off that stupid couch).

Fate had played with House's life yesterday, almost snatched him away, and Chase hated the thought of it. He was playing with House's heart, and that meant House was his.

What right did anyone else have to him?