This is a crack!AU inspired by DreamsofSpike's "Dark Redux". The first season is "CollarRedux": and there's going to be one chapter per episode, based on the episode. Current plans include 3rd season and maybe 4th season, so it's just going to get more interesting...
2.14 Sex Kills
Cuddy crooked a finger, and pointed at the floor in front of her desk. Wilson had sat down in the visitor's chair by the desk: Greg's eyes followed the tip of her finger and he knelt. Wilson took his cane and sat back, looking mildly interested.
"Take your shirt off, Greg," Cuddy told him.
Greg looked well, though he had been beaten six days ago. He had been walking quite easily, he had knelt in good form, he didn't appear to have lost any weight. The clinic would open its doors in ten minutes, and Greg could evidently do a full shift. He took his shirt off promptly: the cloth wasn't sticking to his back, and his chest looked a good color.
Cuddy gestured with her hand at the couch. "Position yourself over there."
She saw Greg hesitate. She hadn't told him to get up. After that moment's hesitation - that in a different mood might have become outright rebellion - he crawled on hands and knees to the couch, and reached up to put his hands on the back, stretching himself out, belly supported against the couch.
Cuddy nodded. "Stay just there, Greg," she said, and turned to Wilson. He had a faintly smug expression.
"I shall have his blood and urine tested," she said.
WIlson didn't lose his smug expression. Cuddy noted that mentally.
"He hasn't done clinic duty now in six full days: he's about 26 hours behind. I think I'll round that up to 30, and of course the clinic is due 28 hours this week." It was the week before Christmas: there were a lot of doctors taking time off. "Let's call that 60 hours. He'll begin in a few minutes and work from 8am until the clinic closes every day. We ordinarily close the clinic on the 25th and the ER department have the use of him. Do you wish to take him for a day or two over that period?"
"Yes," Wilson said. "The 24th and 25th." His smug look did not change.
"Then that will be 68 hours," Cuddy said, smoothly. She glanced over at Greg again. He was holding himself stil, but his arms were quivering with the strain. "In fact, it had better be 72 hours. I'll instruct Doctor Foreman that except for real emergencies in Diagnostics, Greg will be working in the clinic for twelve hours each day until the 24th. I'm afraid I have to deny you access to him for that time."
Wilson nodded. He didn't look as smug, Cuddy was pleased to see.
Cuddy stood up. She nodded to Wilson, who got to his feet and followed her across the room. Greg was almost shaking now: his arms were taking a lot of the strain of supporting his weight. His bad leg was quivering.
Cuddy ran her hand down his back. The scabs felt dry: she got the edge of her nail under one of them and flicked it off. Greg made a noise. The small wound bled a little, not much. Wilson coughed: Cuddy glanced at him. Wilson coughed again, looked down, and rubbed the back of his neck with one hand.
"Nicely healed," Cuddy said approvingly. "The balance of the sentence will still have to be carried out at some point. Next time Greg does something that deserves a beating. Of course if you manage to keep Greg from misbehaving for long enough, I may forget that he's due another fifty lashes."
The tiny line of blood from the scab was drying. Cuddy looked at Wilson with interest: he was looking down at Greg with an odd mixture of possessiveness, compassion, and outright lust.
"If you'd go now, please," she said to Wilson: "I have another appointment in a few minutes."
"I'll take Greg to the clinic," Wilson said.
"No, just leave him here," Cuddy said, and went back to her desk. Wilson stood over Greg, and looked at her: she sat down behind her desk and picked up the little spray of hand-cleanser: she had a tiny blotch of Greg's blood on one finger. "If there was something else you needed to talk to me about, perhaps you could make another appointment with my assistant?" she said, with polite dismissal.
"No," Wilson said, after a long moment. The door clicked shut behind him.
Almost immediately - Cuddy had asked him to come to her office for 8am - the door opened again, and Foreman walked in. He didn't see Greg at first: he was halfway across the room before he registered a half-naked slave was stretched out over Cuddy's couch, and Cuddy was fairly sure that he did not realize who that was until she said "We have a few things to talk about, and then I want you to deliver Greg to the clinic, Doctor Foreman."
*House*MD*House*MD*House*MD*House*
Foreman would have liked to clip a leash to Greg's collar and make him crawl. He would have liked to thrash that insolent look off his face. He had no authority to do either of those things, and Greg knew it.
The month during which Foreman was to supervise House's practice would expire before Christmas. Greg would be working in the clinic full-time until Christmas Eve.
The things Cuddy had said about his tenure in Diagnostics still made Foreman's ears burn. He shouldn't have been reviewed like that in front of Greg. Not in front of anyone, but especially not a slave.
Cuddy made a point of saying that Foreman's supervision had been something of a failure: he hadn't succeeded in preventing Greg from doing anything insane, and left to himself, working on a case with the other diagnostics fellows, he had triggered a complaint against himself.
Foreman delivered him to the clinic's front desk, and told Nurse Previn that Greg would be working there full time up until Christmas Eve.
"Not on the 24th?" Previn said, looking annoyed. "That's a busy day for us."
"Ask Doctor Wilson," Foreman suggested, gently malicious, and turned away. The month during which he was supposed to be supervising Greg's practice would expire tomorrow: the glow he'd got from solving the case of the intersex supermodel was fading. But at least, he thought, he could hope to have the makings of a good paper: he should publish something by the end of the first year of his fellowship.
*House*MD*House*MD*House*MD*House*
On Greg's second full day in the clinic, Wilson got there at two - he'd learned by experience that the staff generally preferred not to let Greg take a lunch break until after the midday rush - and told Nurse Previn that he was taking Greg for half an hour to make sure he ate something.
"I guess," Previn said, glancing at the clock. "Bring him back in 30 minutes, no later, OK?"
Wilson was feeling cheerful enough that he ignored her grumpy tone. He walked Greg out of the clinic, hand on his arm, into a unused consultation room, and locked the door.
Greg tensed up the moment he heard the lock click home: Wilson could literally see it happen.
"Calm down," Wilson told him. "Sit down. Lunch, remember?" He waited for Greg to sit down in the patient's chair and set a brown bag lunch in his lap: sandwich, piece of fruit, and a bag of chips. He sat down in the consultant's chair.
"Aren't you eating?"
Wilson stole a handful of chips to nibble on. "I already did."
"Oh, when the real people get their lunch." But Greg was already biting into his sandwich. He ate fast: he was through with his lunch and glancing at the clock well before Wilson had to take him back. With a little flourish, Wilson produced the other item: a box of chocolates from the hospital gift shop. "Here. You can take these into the clinic, if you're careful with them."
Greg looked at the box of chocolates as if they constituted a trap. "And these are..."
"Chocolates," Wilson said. "You like chocolate."
"Norwegian chocolate. Frankly, you buy that stuff the terrorists win."
Wilson grinned.
Greg looked up at him, and he wasn't smiling at all. "Gifts express guilt. The more expensive the expression, the deeper the guilt. That's a twelve-dollar box, so I guess you don't feel that badly about whatever it is you think you've done. But I'd kind of like to know what it is you think you've done."
Wilson was more amused than irritated. "Some people bottle up their feelings, have them come out as physical pain. Healthy human beings express feelings such as affection by giving gifts." He stood up and quite deliberately ruffled Greg's hair and then petted it smooth again. "Let's get you back to the clinic. Enjoy the chocolates. I'll bring you lunch when I can."
"So this is about your affections," Greg said, very quietly, as he followed Wilson out of the consultancy room. Wilson gave him a sharp look, but they were crossing a crowded foyer and there was no time to respond.
*House*MD*House*MD*House*MD*House*
Whenever Doctor Cuddy assigned House full-time clinic duty, his fellows were left doing admin work, following up e-mails, and looking for cases. Since the IT staff had come and removed House's computer from his office, they had also been dealing with all of his consults.
"How long are we going to have to do this?" Chase asked.
"Till Cuddy decides to let it go," Foreman said.
Cameron was silent. She'd done her two hours clinic duty for the week the first day, and whatever she'd seen, it hadn't cheered her up.
"This guy is stupid," Chase said. He read out an e-mail from a hospital in Nevada, who didn't seem to recognise advanced syphilis.
Cameron looked up. "Doctor House usually doesn't answer those. The ones he doesn't bother to answer for a week, I do."
"Great, you answer this," Chase said.
"It doesn't take much," Cameron said. "Just tell him in your view it's probably syphilis and you don't think Doctor House will be interested."
Foreman finished the last of the e-mails he had assigned himself, and stood up. Today, without any particular ceremony or announcement, he had ceased to be responsible for supervising Doctor House's practice: he was just another of the Diagnostics fellows. He wondered if anyone but himself had noticed.
He had been responsible for a month for supervising the practice of a man who was a much better doctor than he was. Supervising an insolent slave who couldn't even be whipped into obedience. And what he'd got out of it had been a scolding from his boss ... and the satisfaction of solving a case. Just once.
He went downstairs and signed himself in for two hours of clinic duty. Greg was in exam room one. One of the last patients Foreman saw was an elderly white man who'd come in with his young daughter - he was in his sixties, she was in her early twenties, mom didn't seem to be in the picture at all. At first seeming simple, when Foreman ran the first tests, he realised that the concatenation of symptoms was a genuine stripy zebra.
Foreman waited for the patient Greg was seeing to leave - he knew how long Cameron would take to get downstairs, though Chase might take a bit longer - before he nodded to Nurse Previn and walked into exam room one.
"Got a patient." Foreman handed House the sheaf of MRI images to hold while he switched on the light box along the wall.
"Congratulations," House said. "I got a waiting room full of them." He sat down on a stool beside the shelf, leaned on his cane, and looked at Foreman as if he were expecting something more.
Foreman took the images back and started putting them up on the light box. The door opened and Cameron and Chase came in. "His right testicle is almost twice as big as his left," Foreman told them.
"Cool," House said.
"It's probably testicular cancer," Chase said.
"No. That's impossible." House hadn't moved from the stool, nor - Foreman could have sworn - looked at the MRI images, but he sounded quite certain.
"The symptoms all indicate - " Cameron started. Foreman folded his arms and looked at both of them.
"The shoes aren't right," House interrupted. Chase and Cameron both looked confused. "Here's how testicular cancer would manifest itself," House told them. "First the patient would get the exact symptoms that he's got, then Foreman would examine him, then he'd suspect testicular cancer on account of the symptoms being so perfect, then he'd stick a needle in it, then he'd call a surgeon. And while that guy operates, the rest of you would be out bowling. And since you're not wearing bowling shoes, the disease obviously did not progress in that fashion."
Foreman nodded. He tried not to display impatience. He didn't want to give House the satisfaction. "LP showed some white cells, but his MRI is clean."
"Sure, if you call a micro-abscess in his brain 'clean'." House pointed. Foreman took a step to look more closely at the image House was indicating - he'd seen a shadow in one of the temporal lobes at one point in the MRI - but suddenly House was on his feet, with his hand over that part of the image. "What, you don't trust me?"
Foreman had known Greg wasn't going to be grateful, or appreciative. He'd have settled for just less annoying. "Are you talking about the left temporal lobe?"
"Neat!" House grinned at him, showing most of his teeth. "You can see through my hand!"
"It's just a shadow."
"Or it's an infection," House said, far too cheerfully. "When guys have brain-crotch problems, it's usually the result of using one too much and the other too little."
Foreman had the feeling that Chase's mind had also gone directly to Wilson. Cameron's eyes, wide and serious, remained focused on Doctor House: it was impossible to tell what she was thinking.
Foreman said, crisply, "Blood and urine were negative for syphilis, gonorrhea and chlamydia." He had of course thought of infections, and tested for infections, and a normal person would have asked instead of pointing at a shadow -
"So treat him for all three," House said, just as crisply. He stood up, apparently dismissing them. "Stat."
"Umm..." Cameron sounded awkward. "Negative means he doesn't have it."
"No, negative means he probably doesn't have it, which means he probably has cancer." House jerked his head at the door. "Stat's the word you doctors use for right away, isn't it?"
"I thought we were wearing the wrong shoes for cancer." Cameron sounded as if she were taking the stupid entirely too seriously.
"You're wearing the wrong shoes for testicular cancer. They're perfect for lymphoma." House actually looked down at the three fellows' feet, as if he were really checking out their shoes. "Except Chase's, they're just goofy."
Foreman managed to keep his eyes on House, but he saw Chase glance down as if trying to work out what was goofy about his shoes.
"Lymphoma could cause infiltrates in his reproductive organs and his brain. If it does advance he's dead no matter what we do." House made a sweeping gesture at the door. "So give him the STD meds, and hope the tests were wrong."
Foreman found himself walking out the door. Outside in the clinic, Nurse Previn called to one of the waiting patients, "Exam room one!" and a coughing, red-eyed young woman got up and headed towards them. All three of them headed for the door into the main part of the hospital.
"Well," Chase said. "So we've got a Diagnostics patient?"
"Looks that way," Foreman said.
Cameron gave him a large-eyed look. "That was a really nice thing for you to do," she said.
Foreman agreed with her. He gestured impatiently at the elevator. "Let's go," he suggested. Before someone reports us to Cuddy - though what can she do, we haven't been told Diagnostics is closed down - or word gets back to Wilson.
*House*MD*House*MD*House*MD*House*
Henry had been forty-two when he married Cecile, and forty-four when Amy was born, and as he'd freely admit, right up until he and Cecile got divorced, those two women were the loves of his life. After the divorce he couldn't say that any more because Amy got mad about how Cecile had hurt him, and he was still hoping that Amy would start talking to Cecile again. A girl needed her mom.
He couldn't tell Amy he didn't want her around. But he could send her off for lunch as soon as decently possible, because it was just possible ... Cecile really didn't have the best sense when it came to men...
The doctor who appeared in response to the page wasn't Doctor Foreman, but an older white man, wearing a drab rolltop under his white coat. He looked tired, but he glanced Henry over with a gleam in his eyes and introduced himself as "Hi, I'm Doctor House. I hear you'd rather die than admit you had sex."
"I'm sorry," Henry apologized. Doctor House was frank, at least, and that was certainly a refreshing approach from the careful line Doctor Foreman took, never quite admitting that he was sure Henry had had an affair since the divorce. "I... couldn't tell my daughter," he admitted.
"Right, because she's what? Twenty-two?"
"I slept with her mom," Henry admitted.
Doctor House looked as if he wanted to laugh out loud. "She probably knows that's happened already. Roll over."
Henry guessed the doctor had a right to think it was funny. He began trying to shift from his back to his front. He was surprised the doctor wasn't offering to help, until he saw that he was leaning on a cane. He explained, "My wife had an affair, I forgave her. She had another affair and I forgave her again and... Amy thinks I was an idiot."
"So smart," Doctor House said. He still sounded like he was trying not to laugh. "You must be very proud. Roll over."
"I assume that you've been in love," Henry pointed out. Yeah, he'd been an idiot, but Cecile... He managed to get on to his stomach, and the doctor leaned over him.
"Is that the one that makes your pants feel funny?" Doctor House asked dryly. "I'm starting you on a cocktail of STD meds."
"Amy is just getting over it," Henry said. He didn't know why he was telling the doctor, except there was no one else he could tell, and it wasn't as if the doctor was going to tell anyone, right? "She barely spoke to her mom for months and if she thought that it was happening again and that's why I got sick..." The needle jabbing into his butt felt huge. "We... we just happened to be at the same Italian cheese-tasting thing." Which he had gone along to because he had known Cecile had renewed her membership in their old block's Food Club and they would have have got tickets. Cecile liked weird stinky cheeses. She would be there. He'd known. She'd known he'd known.
"Cheese is the devil's plaything," the doctor intoned: it sounded like he knew, too.
"It was just the one night," Henry protested.
"Well," the doctor said, "you're obviously completely over her."
"Amy thinks love leads you to make stupid choices."
The doctor finished his injection. "You're certainly setting a good example for her," he said.
"She just doesn't get it. If you're not prepared to look stupid then nothing great is ever going to happen, right?"
The door opened, and someone else came in: medical staff, since the doctor said only, neutrally, "Nearly finished here." The doctor flipped the gown back down and the covers up. Henry finished silently, On the other hand, I guess your testicles aren't gonna explode either.
When the door opened again, Amy's footsteps were recognizable. She said, sounding worried, "Dad? Is everything OK?"
The new doctor was no one Henry had seen before: he was a quiet young-looking fellow.
"I'm Doctor House," the doctor introduced himself, "this is Doctor Wilson, he's the head of oncology."
"Cancer?" Amy went white.
"No, I'm - " The new doctor was actually stammering, "I wanted Doctor House for a consult - Your dad doesn't have cancer."
What the hell there was to be embarrassed about wanting a consult, Henry didn't know, but Amy was still looking shaky. Henry felt like he could deal. He had a tickle in the back of his throat, he felt like a coughing spell was coming on, but Amy could get him a drink of water. The new doctor was saying reassuring things to Amy, heading towards the door: Doctor House gave a shrug and followed him out, turning to glance back at Henry with a half grin.
*House*MD*House*MD*House*MD*House*
Doctor Wilson had found out Diagnostics had a patient. Greg really shouldn't have tried to treat him: his absence from the clinic could be covered for five minutes, but not for half an hour, and anyway Wilson had come to feed him cookies or something medical. They could have conferences in Exam Room One: right after Wilson had collected Greg to redeliver him to the clinic, the patient had spewed liquid from his lungs.
"It was flash pulmonary edema," Chase told House. "We took a litre of fluid off but the problem wasn't with his lungs. It's his heart. There are vegetations obstructing his mitral valve."
"It's not an STD," Foreman pointed out. "And lymphoma wouldn't erupt that suddenly." He'd wanted House to have a patient, but he didn't in the least mind pointing out that both of House's theories so far had been wrong.
"So what is it?" House was staring at a list of symptoms on an improvised whiteboard. "A disease that attacks his brain, heart and testicles. I think Byron wrote about that."
"Could be psittacosis," Cameron suggested.
"Chlamydia cultures would have come back positive," Chase contradicted.
"Strep viridans can hit the heart," Foreman said thoughtfully.
"Wouldn't mess with the reproductive system," Cameron retorted. "Maybe things aren't so nicely connected. He's sixty-five. We could be looking at multiple systems just starting to break down independently."
House got up from the stool and walked across to the notebook pages with the symptoms. "Way to a man's heart is through his stomach." He circled the words "Acid Reflux" with Cameron's pen.
"He's had acid reflux for years," Chase said, "It can't be relevant."
House tossed the pen back to Cameron. "Seems there are other ways to kill people besides having sex with them. He's got brucellosis."
"Where the hell did you pull that idea from?" Foreman said.
House grinned, showing most of his teeth. "He went to an Italian cheese tasting party, and if they served unpasteurised sheep's cheese from the Alps, it would be covered with brucellosis bacteria. While most people have enough acid in their guts to kill off an army of evil bacteria, he's been munching antacids for years. Go ask him if he ate runny, bitter cheese with a boring woman. Then start him on rifampin and doxycycline."
"You were talking to a patient about his social life?" Chase sounded disbelieving.
House sat down on the stool and looked up at the three of them. "Technically, he was talking to me about his social life. Real chatty. I was just there to taunt him about his sex life. Paid off, though. Run along. Go make him well. Have a happy, happy Christmas. And send in my next patient."
Foreman was the last to leave. He glanced back at House, caught him staring at the paper notes they'd stuck up along the wall. He looked grim. He hadn't thanked Foreman for the case.
*House*MD*House*MD*House*MD*House*
At 8am on December 24th, Wilson found all three fellows in the Diagnostics conference room: none of them even looked in his direction, they were talking to Greg. Greg looked exhausted.
" - sinus rhythm," Chase said. "Has a lot of damage though."
"It was brucellosis," Cameron said, "but we got to it too late. Vegetation broke off into his main coronary artery and caused an infarction."
"His heart muscle's half-dead. He'll be lucky to last a week," Foreman said,
"So he needs a transplant," Greg said. He looked over their heads at Wilson. "Take it to the transplant committee. My ride's here."
All three of them turned back and looked at Wilson: all three of them with sudden, wide-eyed, visible dislike, even from Foreman.
"Whose patient is he?" Wilson inquired.
"Technically, mine," Foreman said. "But he was admitted by the Diagnostics department, and the department head of Diagnostics should present his case to the transplant committee."
"If the transplant committee want to take evidence from Greg, they'll doubtless make their wishes clear," Wilson said. "Meantime..." He nodded to Greg. "Let's go." He glanced round at the three fellows. Foreman's face had gone impassive: Chase looked blank: Cameron still had a look of wide-eyed dislike, but Wilson had known she was jealous.
Greg limped down the hall at Wilson's side. Wilson was smiling to himself. He had two days of Greg all to himself, and then after that long stint in the clinic, Greg had cleared his backlog of hours due: he would only be putting in four hours a day.
"We're going to be staying at the hotel for a few more days," Wilson said cheerfully.
"We are?" Greg asked. Wilson locked his car doors. He turned to Greg with a grin.
"My lawyer got me a last minute court date. My wife's lawyer accepted. My ex-wife. I'm divorced. I can look for an apartment. We won't be at that hotel for much longer."
Greg stared, wide-eyed. He jerked his head round to look out of the car window, away from Wilson, at the snow-logged streets and the store windows with the tinsel decoration. They were almost at the hotel when Wilson realised Greg was looking at him again.
"Foreman got me a patient," Greg said.
"What?"
"Foreman found me a patient," Greg repeated. "His idea of a Christmas present. He hates me."
"I'm sure - " Wilson began, meaning to say that he was sure Foreman didn't hate Greg, but Greg ignored him. Wilson was maneuvering into the car park .
"Foreman's hated me pretty much since he realized he was going to be taking orders from a slave if he wanted to learn anything. He bought a riding-crop to keep me in line. He wouldn't buy me a coffee, let alone a tasty nutritious lunch. He hates me, but he thinks of me as a doctor. A better one than he is." Greg wasn't looking at Wilson now. He swallowed, and his voice was very small and flat. "If you want to celebrate getting your divorce, if you want to hurt me, can't you ... can't you just do that, and let me..." His voice was cracked and broken now, his head was twitching. "Let me go back to the hospital, take this tag off..." His hand was jerking upwards, each time halted, as if Greg was fighting the impulse to touch the tag himself.
Wilson parked the car and took hold of Greg's forearm firmly with his left hand. "Greg," he said. "Calm down."
Greg looked at him. "You know I'm better at being a doctor than I am at doing this," he said finally, his voice dry and grey. "You know it."
"I like you just the way you are," Wilson said, and lifted his left hand to run his finger along the flesh just above Greg's collar. Greg flinched back. "I want to take care of you."
*TBC*
Well, I guess you know what distracted me from posting at the weekend... but I meant this to be a Christmas story. Even had in mind a Christmas party for Wilson to take Greg to, but it just didn't work out. Happy Christmas anyway even if it's a few days late!