Title: Hex

Rating: T

Genre: Angst/Drama

Pairings: No specific pairings - Friendship

Summary: After "treating" a patient for a serious condition, Dr. House starts to exhibit the exact same symptoms himself. But it's nothing he can medically cure with a perscription - It's demonic possession.

A/N: Woohoo, okay I think this is long enough for another chapter. I hope you guys likey :) Thanks for reading everyone!

milady dragon: You never know right:) I really enjoyed your review because that's exactly what I'm going for. Thank you!

Hex - Chapter 5 Leave Me Alone

"Fear is the dark room where the Devil develops his negatives."

- Gary Busey

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Following the night before House was almost pissed off when he awoke the next morning. He hated being sick. Although he tried his best to ignore all of the annoying symptoms, sometimes they seemed to overtake him a little bit and he was slowly breaking down piece by piece. That was why it was best that he just avoid everyone he could and just sit locked away in his office for as long as possible. There was not one person in the world he wanted to talk to, not even Wilson, which said a lot. Usually he didn't mind Wilson around. Who he definitely did not want to see was Allison Cameron. One look into his eyes and she would be freaking out and bringing him hot beverages and drugs. She would also be looking at him with that "pity face" she sometimes had on around him. No thanks. Not today. Not ever, actually.

House sat at the desk facing the window with his shirt sleeves rolled up to his elbows and stared through the half open blinds. The light from the eight o'clock morning stung his eyes but he was tired of people-watching into the hallway. He didn't want to see anyone and he was quite serious about that statement.

The white blinds in front of him seemed to flutter soundlessly from some sort of hidden draft and he watched each blind move in relation to the other one. Moving slowly, touching eachother in almost some small pattern. The make up of life. Each blind had it's own distinct shadow, yet as a whole, it was all perfect. He could even see the micro texture of the blinds.. His eyes were beginning to blur and he blinked once and hard. That was not going to help the annoying little gremlin headache chewing through his brain wires on the side of his head. He wanted to sleep but knew that there's no way he would be able to, and he almost didn't want to. The nightmares were still fresh, even though he wasn't quite sure why he would call them 'nightmares'.. Nightmares usually involved some sort of one-eyed monster popping out of a closet and coming to eat you, not just weird textured images that morphed themselves beneath his eyelids. Some about what he remembered left him feeling very uneasy, however, and that is what why he filed these into the nightmare category.

He sat in the chair, arms slumped over his legs, cane ditched somewhere.. and he was staring again. The room was growing dimmer, closing in around his vision as his eyes focused on nothing in particular but shapes. The noise from outside his office was gone. The shadows were growing, the light and dark contrast making itself known like an abstract painting. He was no longer even looking at something physical, but something made up of space instead. Something non-existent, yet.. there. His chest stopped going up and down and his breathing died. His heart beat thumped as fuel to his headache and then slowed dramatically. He almost felt dead.

He felt so dead that he didn't even hear Cameron enter his office, clear her throat, and stand there for a bit looking awkwardly at him. He looked like a crash test dummy sitting there, just waiting to hit the wall.

"Dr. House?" she finally asked, shifting her weight to her left foot, gripping the file folder in her hands tensely. The last time they had spoken was when he had barked at her the day before. Maybe he was coming down with something; this new staring thing he was doing was making her nervous.

No response. He wasn't seeing colors anymore, just greys. Not even black and white. Every shade of grey in the spectrum. And they were blending in together..

"Dr. House," she tried again and quite louder this time. Cameron rubbed her forehead and then glanced at the ceiling. She looked back at House and almost jumped ten feet when she saw his stare had shifted to her. His position was almost the same, but the chair had swiveled a few degrees. He let out a sigh and took a deep breath. When had he stopped breathing? He wondered.

Cameron stood in front of him looking quite frankly, freaked out. Big surprise.

"Dr. House are you okay?" she asked with genuine concern and forgot all about the case she was going to ask him about.

"Fine, why do you ask? Did I scare you?" he answered shortly and pulled his chair around to the desk that was facing Cameron.

That scared her, him asking that. Her face went blank for a few seconds as she absorbed his question, but then she remembered the file.

"That patient I was telling you about yesterday? We started him on fluids because he was dehydrated, but Chase noticed a change in the PH of his blood, and his BP is way down," she played with the file in her hands and looked down for a second.

House sat with his hands at his head, thumbs resting on his cheekbones, index and middle fingers massaging his forehead.

"Give me the file," he said and took his hands away, squinting.

Cameron handed him the file without word and watched him open it, and adjust his eyes to reading. She bit her lip as his eyes wandered around the page.

He couldn't read. He couldn't read. The blurring was ridiculous and he felt like an eighty year old trying to read a perscription that screamed in capitals YOU NEED GLASSES. House took a minute as he tried to refocus his eyes and concentrate.

"So what do you think?" the doctor in front of him asked in a small voice. So he had scared her.

He could see the words, but they were arranging themselves, like he had some sort of learning disability. Everything was going backwards. Nothing made sense. He immediately slammed the file shut and whipped it with frustration to the edge of his desk near Cameron's hands.

"You're a doctor, that's why you're here right? To fix sick people? Well this guy is obvously sick, so fix him," House turned his chair away from his desk so he wouldn't have to look at her. She was almost stuttering in response as she took the file again. Usually House would have been all over this case, hauling his team to the whiteboard and shooting down their theories one by one.

"What-"

"Why is it that I have to say everything twice? I said I didn't. Want. The case. Get it?" his eyes were burning on her again, just like when she had tried to pick up his cane for him and she felt eerie. She was taken aback by the strength of his voice and backed away slowly.

House watched her scurry away and once she was out of sight, he dropped his head into his hands and almost made a moaning sound. How was it that he couldn't read? Must be the headache. (Or the leg, the grand excuse.)

He raised his head again and rubbed his face, when he noticed something.

He slowly lowered his hands and turned his left arm around, looking at it. There was a rash on the inside of his forearm and wrist, red and staring up at him with it's skin disease. He brought his arm closer to his eyes and squinted as he looked at it. That hadn't been there this morning, he was sure of it. House rolled back in front of his desk and took off his watch. It was a tiny bit itchy, but not itchy enough for him to actually dig his nails into his flesh for relief. He ran his right fingertips over the bumps and studied it. It looked like contact dermatitis, but he wasn't allergic to any metals.. The most logical explanation was the watch had given it to him. But that fast?

He stuck his arm under a lamp and looked at it again, when his left wrist twitched.

"Shit-" The swear got caught in his throat as he moved his head back and watched his arm as if it had a life of it's own. He wasn't used to have his bodyparts flail without his knowledge. He turned his arm around and rolled his wrist around in circles searching for any type of pain or anything that would had explained the twitch. Felt absolutely fine.

The kid with the brain tumor. His wrist had twitched. The kid with the brain tumor.

House rested his elbows on his desk and grabbed at his hair. No way did he have a stinking brain tumor. Brain tumors did not 'jump' from patient to patient.

But Greg, the tumor did disappear didn't it? Maybe you did "catch" cancer after all, his mind taunted him.

House turned his chair around again to the side and leaned his head back so he was looking at the ceiling. Red rimmed eyes and sweat beads lingering at his hairline, he laughed uncontrollably.

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Cameron sat in the lab, eyes glued to a microscope as she looked at the ten year old's blood for anything abnormal. She knew it was normal for House to be almost rude with some of his comments, but the thing that weirded her out was the fact that he had blown off the case like it didn't interest him what-so-ever. It was so.. unHouse-like. He was sick, probably had the flu. He had been in the clinic the day before. House didn't like to get sick and would never admit that he needed any help.

She took her eyes away from the scope and wrote down a few figures on the pad that sat on the right side. She looked up just in time to see Wilson open the door.

"How's it going?" Wilson asked and stood by her and he looked down at her pad. Cameron was about to basically read back all of her findings, but stopped and simply said, "we need House."

Wilson slowly nodded, looked towards the door and then at Cameron again.

"Has he been acting weird to you at all lately? I know you two are chummy," he asked looking for any evidence of.. well anything.

"I thought you two were the chummy ones." Cameron smiled at the word. "But yes, he seems even more," (scary) "annoyed than usual. If that's possible."

"I thought so too. He didn't even seem happy when I wrote him the script for his refill. That's what was most shocking. He's usually flashing the pills all over the place as if they make him God or something." Wilson smirked to himself remembering the time House had been extra happy for some reason and had tried to make Wilson bow to his "highness".

"Maybe he's just mad about Jason Adler," Cameron tried to reason, not fully believing her theory herself.

Wilson rubbed one hand around the back of his neck.

"Yeah.. Yeah that's probably it." He lingered around for a few more seconds and then left the lab. Yes House would probably jump down his throat if he found out that he was worried about him, but that was nothing he could help. He was a doctor, it was programmed in him to worry. He took the next elevator up to House's office.

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With full intention of barging into House's office with one liners and an invitation for a bucket of chicken later, Wilson walked towards the diagnostician's office but then stopped short when he saw his friend inside.

Sleeping.

Only House would be snoring in the middle of the afternoon, one leg up on his desk, his chair tilted so far back that it looked like it was going to flip backwards. One thing he did notice though, was his jacket was off and his shirt sleeves were rolled up. That usually only meant two things: Either he had been frustrated with the last case and had spent hours staring at scans and test results trying to figure out where he went wrong, or he was sick and didn't feel like having long sleeves at that point in time. Wilson went with the first option and also figured it was best to save the bucket of chicken bit for later. Maybe the answer would come to him in his dreams.

Wilson walked on.

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It was late and House didn't even know how long he had slept. It was almost laughable how much he could get away with at work. Get a massage, have a party, snore in his office with his limps hanging all out. No one had even disturbed him, and he was grateful for that. Surprisingly, he actually felt a tad better. Before he had passed out at his desk, he was just feeling so .. weird. House had been drunk many times, and it had felt like he had drunk himself stupid, but he hadn't even had a drop of alcohol.

He leg had fallen asleep and he eased it off the desk with the use of his hands. The blood flowed back down and the pins and needles started poking at his skin. He looked at his watch and noticed it was time to go home. Had he really slept that long? How was it possible that he had actually slept the entire afternoon with no interupptions? Strange.

Okay, buddy, time to go home and sit in front of the tv. Maybe get some Chinese or something.

Except he didn't want to stand. It was one of those situations where in his mind he was already standing and walking across the room, but in reality his legs simply didn't want to move. His cane was leaning up against his desk beside him and he took it in his hands, gripping the smooth handle under his grip.

One.. two.. three.

He didn't stand, or make any attempt to either. Finally he grunted and stood, trying to keep all of the weight off of his right leg just in case. It didn't exactly hurt, but it felt odd. Tingly. As if there was an itch inside his muscle that he couldn't scratch. It wasn't quite a charley horse - but it would probably turn into one if he tried to run around in circles in his office.

He took about three slow steps towards the door, but instead of opening it, he flipped his blinds shut and turned off the light. He sat back in his chair and ran his fingers over the little grooves in the cane, when a fly buzzed past his face. His head snapped to the left as he tried to see the fly in the dark, flying in loops and circles and coming back at his head.

He swatted with his right hand at the bug, missed and it coasted on the right side, doing the same thing. House gripped his cane in both hands like he was holding a lead pipe and waited for the sucker to come back again. It buzzed in front of him and he swatted the cane directly in front of him, hoping to hear the sickening 'thud' of the wood hitting the bug. He missed and it swirled back into the shadows in the left corner of his office. House stared into the corner waiting for it to come out, or to see any evidence of anything moving in there. It came up seconds later and his cane was swung like a baseball bat. Missed again. No wonder he had chosen a career with intelligence rather than athletic ability.

The fly disappeared for good, and House dropped his cane beside his chair on the right side. Who cared anymore about a stupid fly.

House sighed and he went to touch his wrist again. The rash had spread. Now it was from wrist to elbow, and still looked like contact dermatits. He looked at his ceiling and scratched softly, feeling the ruddyness of his skin beneath his fingertips. He didn't even care if he had a brain tumor, twitches coming out of his ears, and a flesh eating disease, he just wanted to lie down. He eased himself onto the floor beside his desk and laid on his back, staring at the ceiling. More shadows and light, interacting with eachother. Light from the window, dark from the blinds, giving him tiger stripes on the ceiling. He raised his hands off the floor and looked at them.

They were shaking. Barely shaking, but they were shaking. Little itty bitty tremors shivering from his wrist to fingertips. Vibrating. He clasped his hands together above his chest, trying to make it stop, but both hands connected and shook together. He made a 'Gah' sound, tore his hands apart and stuck them underneath his head. If he couldn't see them, then there was nothing wrong.

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