Thanks again to my reviewers: you are all awesome. Sorry for the delay, had a week in bed with the flu, but here is the next part:
Without even raising her eyes from her paperwork, Cuddy's forehead creased into the automatic grimace that only House's distinctive step could induce. It was the facial equivalent of donning battle armour, and her voice was like steel when she spoke.
"Whatever it is, I don't want to know. Jameson wants your head on a platter for your little stethoscope prank on Thursday, somebody smashed up eight hundred dollars worth of equipment in a private room this weekend, and Legal want to know how an apparently comatose patient managed to sign herself out of here A.M.A. in the middle of the night without a single member of staff noticing."
"That is admirably stealthy," agreed House. Cuddy snapped her head up when she heard Wilson clear his throat, and add tentatively: "Er, we might actually be able to help you with that."
Her frown was replaced with a look of puzzlement, and a fatal sinking feeling, as she saw the two doctors. They were standing side by side, Wilson staring at the carpet with an expression of genuine interest, and House gazing at the ceiling in studied innocence. Wilson, though impeccable as always, had nonetheless failed to disguise the nasty cut tracing his hairline and the suggestions of bruising she could glimpse on his neck. House's predictable state of dishevelment was only emphasised by a similar injury. She suddenly felt like a Headmistress who had gone for a pleasant walk in the playground, only to be confronted by two boys standing next to a smashed window, wearing baseball mitts.
"Did one of your foosball games get out of hand?" she asked dryly. In a bold, if foolish, tactical move, House attempted to look wounded.
"Typical. Wilson and I bravely unite against the enemies of this hospital - which is as close as we'll ever come to defending your honour, by the way, - and you accuse us of being mindless thugs. I'm hurt. All over again."
Cuddy's expression was nearing terminal intensity. "House - "
House relented and rolled his eyes. "Do we usually squabble with our fists?" Contempt sounded in his voice: not aimed at Cuddy, but at the very idea of him and Wilson coming to blows. Cuddy nodded and buried her face in her hands.
"The room. The smashing of the room. You were involved, weren't you?" She filled the silence with a groan. "Ok. Tell me." As they sat down, Cuddy's demeanour shifted from "Dean" to "colleague", concern fighting with trepidation as she braced herself for the damage report.
Wilson opened his mouth to explain, but was cut off by House's account of events, where he was surprised to learn that House had apparently taken over Miss. Willow Rosenberg's care and discharged her; how he had then forgotten to report it on account of the tussle with the angry family members who had arrived fifteen minutes too late for a visit having flown in from Wisconsin; of how Wilson's futile efforts to break up the fight had led to mutual concussions and eight hundred dollars worth of damage to nearby machinery. Wilson watched the slump of Cuddy's shoulders grow progressively more exaggerated, and she finally turned to him for confirmation. "This is the story you bring me?"
Wilson shrugged. "He tells it so well, doesn't he?"
"She wasn't your patient! You waited over twenty-four hours to tell me this because . . . ?"
"Recovery period," House declared. "Bathed as we are in the warm glow of your concern, I'm sure you won't have a problem with Wilson needing some time away from the hospital to recuperate. Glass jaw," he whispered. Wilson, who's thoughts had long ago strayed to the coffee maker in his office, managed to produce a flustered glare and quickly waved away Cuddy's concern.
"We're both fine."
"But you might want to have a word with security," added House. "Two guys, the cousins - they were pretty pissed. Don't want them coming back for a second round." He ignored Wilson's look of surprise and reeled off scathing descriptions of Spike and Michael. Cuddy nodded and sighed.
"I'll let them know. Please tell me that's everything?"
"For now, sure. But the day is young." House hovered for a moment after Wilson nodded to Cuddy and made for the door. "I mean it about security," he murmured, catching her eye. "Make sure they're on the look-out." And with a cryptic look at Wilson's back, he was stumping off after him, leaving Cuddy to sink back in her chair and feel the sharp dig of her nails in her palms. "Nine fifteen a.m.," she muttered bitterly under her breath. After a morning like this, surely things could only get better?
Wilson leant on the foyer desk and watched the guards manning the entrance uneasily. "You think that was necessary?"
"The elaborate web of lies, or warning security?" House lolled next to him, swiping a red lollipop with childish glee as a nurse turned her back. "No point taking risks."
Wilson snorted disbelievingly. "Am I still talking to Gregory House? How hard did you hit your head?" House sucked the lolly and glowered.
"Go do your clinic duty and shut up."
"What about you?"
House grinned and tapped his pocket. "I have a case. Time to test the green goo."
"So now you don't even need patients as an excuse to avoid work? That's clever. Running random substances through the lab - swabbing the cafeteria alone will give you a week off."
"If Cuddy asks, I still have that patient."
"Wait . . . you don't still have that patient?"
"Cameron paged me during the great snooze. Apparently - and you'll never believe this - he was lying. Tests showed he was positive for steroid use, which explained everything else. Normal, boring case all the time." He grinned and tapped the file in Wilson's hand. "Enjoy the crotch-swabbing."
Wilson rolled his eyes and walked into the exam room, eyes scanning the file as he opened the door. Headache? Haven't people heard of aspirin?
"Good morning, how can I help you - " He caught the name, and felt something flip in his stomach. He looked up very slowly, feeling a headache of his own pulse into life. " . . . Mr. Giles?"
It was against normal protocol to visit the cafeteria without either Wilson or his wallet, but House wasn't willing to risk getting stuck in the clinic for the rest of the morning. He'd left the lab monkeys to do their thing with the mysterious cure. Grabbing a sandwich and sinking into a chair, he suddenly noticed a familiar blonde figure sitting opposite him, nonchalantly drinking a milkshake and flicking through a magazine. He narrowed his eyes.
"What are the odds of you being here on a visit to a second comatose friend?"
Buffy smiled and slurped the milkshake. "Would you believe me if I said I just loved hospital food? Nutritious and delicious."
"Go away. Fun as the last forty-eight hours have been, I have no desire to see you or your friends again, unless you have a particularly interesting strain of the bubonic plague."
Buffy shrugged and started looking over the horoscopes. "Much as that gives me the warm fuzzies, I think I'll stick around a little longer. The lunch menu looks really interesting."
"Why are you here?" he demanded.
"The blueberry muffins aren't enough?" She waved a dismissive hand and leaned back in her chair. "Don't let me keep you from that important doctorly stuff. Don't you have lives to save?"
"And shouldn't you be skipping around a gym waving pom-poms?"
"Actually, my school is in California and right now I'm missing math. Gives me an extra incentive to stay." She frowned as she thumbed through a celebrity interview. "Seriously, no sick people today? 'Cause I'm kinda' busy here." She heard the squeal of a chair being pushed back as the doctor angrily walked out of the cafeteria and smiled grimly at the full page spread of Celebrity Confessions.
"Just you do your job," she murmured, reaching for the walkie-talkie in her pocket, "and let me do mine."
Wilson replaced the penlight in his pocket and started scribbling his illegible scrawl on the patient's chart. "It's not that I don't approve of you having a check-up after a period of serious illness. And I don't mean to imply that Mr. Giles' headache wasn't genuine, or Mr. Harris' . . . "
"Allergy?" supplied Willow.
"Yes. His suspected potential allergic reaction to Gatorade, had he possessed any symptoms, would also have been a good reason for him to come to the clinic. But you don't think that having all three of you as patients within two hours of each other could qualify as, I don't know - stalking?" Wilson crossed his arms and raised his shields against Willow's innocent stare.
"I guess it is kind of a coincidence."
"A coincidence? That you're all here together and all needed to come to this exam room?" He gestured to the blinds impatiently. "I can see them both waiting for you! Actually," he leaned towards the window and sighed, "I'm pretty sure that Mr. Harris is drinking another Gatorade. Good to know I calmed his fears." Willow hopped off the table and gave him a sheepish smile.
"Wouldn't we have to be more subtle to classify as stalkers? Or at least be, you know, remotely menacing?" She shrugged off his exasperated look. "Just act like we aren't here. And before you know it, we won't be."
"Is there any particular reason . . ?"
"It's really nothing to worry about," said Willow unconvincingly. "And I feel fine now."
Wilson pinched the bridge of his nose and gestured at the door. "Avoid the Dean's office when you leave. It's to the left, at the back. And security have been alerted about Spike and Michael. If that's what this is about, it's unnecessary. I don't need looking after. My patients do, so I'd appreciate it if - "
"I'm gone," said Willow quickly. Once again, Wilson felt entirely unconvinced.
On the way to and from his office, Wilson noticed Giles sitting in the waiting area on his floor, nose buried in a leather book and utterly unperturbed by his disbelieving glare. Xander appeared in frequent flashes in the corner of his eyes as he made his rounds. Willow was in the cafeteria at lunch, giving him an little wave over her salad. Mr. Rachid (lung cancer, stage three) was wearing an expression that suggested Christmas had come early when Buffy sat in a chair by his bedside with a sunny smile and started reading him the sports pages. Wilson felt his patience unravelling, and his urge to alert security grow with every sighting. He marched onto the balcony where House was waiting, and waved his arms in vexation.
"They're everywhere!"
"Just be grateful your office doesn't have glass walls. I've had to watch them trying to avoid you all day."
"House, what the hell is going on? Do you know why they're here?"
"Would you calm down? You know why they're here. Obviously they take their Spike duty very seriously. You should be flattered."
"This wouldn't bother you? I don't need looking after!" House watched in amusement as Wilson ran his hands through his hair and turned an interesting shade of pink.
"So you aren't worried?" Wilson laughed in a way that showed no humour. "I'm serious. You don't think this is a big deal?"
Wilson blinked at him. Back at the hospital, back in control, the surreal horror of his situation two nights ago felt very distant.
"You haven't talked about it, and if it was me you wouldn't have shut up. Should we talk? Are you repressing?" Wilson ignored the vengeful little gleam in House's eyes and growled.
"I don't need this. It's ridiculous. It's distracting. Telling Security was over the top, but this . . .".
"Yeah, Security are always on the ball. I mean, sure, it was too much to expect them to stop the gunman coming in to the hospital, but look how well they pounced on him after he'd shot me. Can't sneak anything past those guys." Wilson made the involuntary little flinch that always accompanied any mention of House's near-assassination and looked at him earnestly.
"Do you think there's anything to worry about?" House paused. It was Wilson, and miraculously he'd come back after he'd been taken, and he really didn't feel like taking any risks with his friend's life. But on the other hand, Wilson looked stressed to the point of having an aneurysm right here at his feet, and he had no wish to fuel the little spark of fear Wilson wasn't quite able to mask with his accusing question.
"Of course you don't need them," he relented. He's got me, House reasoned. I'm marginally less likely to cause him to stroke out if I keep an eye on him. "Just don't take candy from any strange men." Wilson looked slightly more mellow, before sliding back into suspicion.
"I don't need you watching me either," he added. House snorted.
"I only watch things that are entertaining. You and your bald band of chemo kids don't qualify. Anyway, I'm going out. Got to avoid Cuddy until I get the results back."
"Jogging park?"
"It's Monday. That means the Lycra brunette." And if I go out now, he won't be paranoid later when I make him get take-out with me. House couldn't visualise Spike rampaging through the busy and well-lit oncology lounge, but after work was a different story. He'd have to tempt Wilson back to his apartment with fictional promises of Hitchcock movies.
Above their heads, sprawled lazily on the parapet, Angel heard the doctors turn back to their respective offices and reached for his transmitter. "Hey, 'Nighthawk'," he murmured, grinning maliciously into the mouthpiece. "Doctor Wilson's gone back into his office. All clear."
House marched from the balcony back through his office, ignoring the unimpressed looks his fellows were aiming at him from their enforced inactivity in the next room. Unsurprisingly, they had been less than thrilled to learn that House was devoting an entire day's work to waiting for lab tests on a substance they had never heard of.
His head was starting to buzz again like it had the other night, and he felt his own well of irritation bubble up inside him as he nearly bumped into Xander in the hallway, who was putting what looked like an over-sized mobile phone into his pocket with an annoyed expression. At the end of the corridor, a figure saw House pause in conversation, and stepped quietly back around the corner.
"What are you doing here?" barked House, and he was gratified to notice that the fuzzy ache in his head died away even as he said the words. Wait 'til I tell Cuddy that yelling actually is therapeutic.
"Looking for a vending machine," said Xander, and from his peeved tone of voice House realised there was a note of truth in his answer.
"Stop following Wilson," he snapped angrily, forcing himself to bury any strange semblance of gratitude he held towards people looking out for his friend. He wanted to gag you and drug you, his memory recalled, and suddenly it was remarkably easy to fix the boy with a look that made him step backwards. "I can have a team of staff and a set of four-point restraints here in thirty seconds, so I suggest you get the message and leave." He stomped past the stunned boy towards the elevator. "And don't even think about following me," he shouted back over his shoulder. Xander grimaced and turned back to where he could see Doctor Wilson's doorway from his position in the hall.
"Don't worry about that," he muttered. "Jerk." He didn't even look up when two figures moved past him in tandem and headed for the staircase, following the downwards path of the elevator.
It was cold and quiet outside the hospital, the weather too chilly to tempt people away from their homes for anything other than the necessity of turning up to work. Wet leaves clumped in damp blotches over the concrete as he walked through the parking lot, and puddles welled up on the streets. He turned off the main road and into a sheltered side street, tired of hunching against the wind. His headache was coming back with a vengeance, and he found himself taking deliberately slow steps, half-afraid of collapsing to the ground again in a flurry of autumn leaves. He was so preoccupied with trying to diagnose the cause of his own headache and sidestepping the slippery leaf-clods, that he barely noticed the man standing in front of him until he was less than two feet away. House stepped aside to let him pass, but he merely took a step closer, and stood silently in front of him.
House looked up in surprise. The man was dark-haired, unnervingly well-built and plain-looking somehow. It hurt his eyes trying to focus on him, which he attributed to his headache, but the total lack of expression on the man's face was harder to fathom. High, a mugger, or both. Great. "Can I help you?" he asked warily.
He might have spoken to a wall. The guy wasn't even blinking, and that was just weird. House stifled a growl of irritation and moved to step around him, but the man neatly mirrored his movement so that they remained almost face to face in the silent alley. The guy was emoting about as much human warmth as a plank.
"Thanks, but I don't need a dance partner. Move it." House's hand tightened on his cane, grateful for it's reassuring weight. Muggers never realise that cripples come armed, he mused. Let's see if this guy is quick to learn. At the same moment that the man moved towards House in a jerky lunge, House swung the cane with a deft flick of his wrist and hit the man squarely in the groin. He had absolutely no intention of playing fair in this sort of situation.
House stepped back to admire his handiwork as the man crumpled to the floor in a ball. His face fell when, less than two seconds later, the man unfurled with dogged determination, and stood up again, still silent, still expressionless. He felt something cold snake down his spine and the buzz in his head intensified. Perfect. I get mugged by the only eunuch in New Jersey. He stepped back, and turned to do his best impression of a run, when he noticed two more men standing like sentinels at the far end of the alleyway. He swallowed. Oh shit.
Moving fast, he managed to dart past the man, who didn't move a finger to stop him, and he turned, swinging his cane like a bat. The stranger was undeterred, stepping forward into in a blow that should have broken his arm. Instead, the man merely paused for a second, and then snatched the cane out of the astonished doctor's hand and threw it behind him, where it landed on the concrete with a forlorn clatter.
House knew from years of building up the muscles in his right arm that he could floor a normal man with his punch, and from the day he had woken up in that hospital bed he had known and resented the fact that he couldn't run. But never until that moment had he felt his disability so strongly, pinned in the dead-eyed stare of his assailant: now, for the first time, he felt the heavy and horrible truth of that fact that he couldn't run away. He gripped the wall and took a lurching, painful step backwards as the men began to walk slowly towards him like automatons.
"What do you want?" The men pulled up beside the other to form a wall of disinterested muscle, and why the hell did they look like that, what was wrong with them?! "I don't have any cash. Seriously, I don't even buy my own lunch." A fist came smashing towards his face, and he twisted just in time to avoid the blow, sending it straight into the brick wall. Holy crap. The guy didn't even wince.
House took another hop back, gasping as his leg protested. It still hadn't forgiven him for his fall the other night. "Shit," he managed. "Hey, help!" He dodged another blow that came towards him like a pile-driver. They were moving with absolutely no sense of urgency, and that somehow made it worse.
"Help!" He looked longingly for someone to appear at the end of the alley; where the hell was freakishly strong girl? This had to be something to do with her, it had all the tell-tale signs: it was both weird and horrific. They couldn't even stalk the right doctor? Or - it had something to do with Spike.
House threw all bravado aside as the men stepped towards him. "Hey, cripple-bashing here, would somebody like to HELP!" He turned and made a desperate bid for freedom, his leg crumpling as he felt a punch smash into the side of his head, knocking him to his knees. A pair of hands grabbed his shoulders, and suddenly his head was on fire, and he fought savagely against the touch, hitting out.
He writhed away from the hands for a moment and the burning pain receded, but he could only use the brief second of clarity to wonder what the hell was going on before there were more hands grabbing at him - and then his skull was going to explode; someone was screaming too loudly, and white darts were scoring lines across his retinas. The fingers tightened, clinging to his body and pulling him under like weeds, and he was too far gone to think or fight back. He was being lifted, and he couldn't do anything but be burned by the shrieking hot wires short-circuiting his brain. The taut line of fire arched and tightened through his body; it peaked; it snapped; it catapulted him forward into oblivion. The screaming doctor fell limp in the blaze of three minds and the grip of three bodies, and not a soul was there to witness him being carried away.
It started to rain gently as the men reached the end of the street. Raindrops landed on House's upturned face before he was loaded into the back of a dark car, and ran in rivulets down the little lines of his face. For a moment, the water seemed to smooth out the creases of pain around his eyes and on his forehead, before the lid of the trunk came down and sealed him away from the sky, locking him in darkness.
