A/N: Ok, here is chapter three. For the disclaimer and other pedantic information, see chapter one.
By the way, the address of the House Fans board actually has an underscore between the House and the Fans. Fanfiction has a tendency to eat these things.
Thank you to all readers, reviewers and C2ers, for my other stories as well. Is it good form to reply to these sort of things, or what?
I assure you that all feedback is greatfully appreciated and enjoyed. Thanks guys.
Anyway: onward, onward.
THREE.
…that when I waked
I cried to dream again.
House came out the other side.
He was still lying on his side staring at the floor when sleep claimed him.
The nurse brought him his lunchtime pills. He'd even become used to relying on someone else to decide when he had his pills, the clock routine and flat-tasting water making it seem as if he had only broken out of Rehab yesterday.
They came in a little plastic cup, the pill cups that were the exact right size to draw a face on with a Sharpie and slip over your big toe when the doctor came to visit, little clear plastic cups with heat-rolled edges and VISYPAK on the bottom. When you slammed them down they made a peculiar thokk noise, and he wondered again what it would be like to tip over a box of little medication cups. To swim in a swimming pool of medication cups. Waiting for your meds to be doled out made you think of these things.
When the nurse brought him his lunchtime dose he was hanging out for a Vicodin, but trying really hard to keep it away from the front of his mind, keeping the pain and the need at the back of his consciousness as much as he could, at a breathing and itch-scratching level. He took his pills, trying not to look like he actually needed them, because that would be a bad thing somehow.
He picked at his lasagne. The bolognaise tasted exactly like the stuff they had at Pizza Hut, but this particular offering was truly despicable. He wasn't exactly in the mood for a hearty meal, either, otherwise he'd be shovelling it down and not just moving it around with his plastic fork.
He still felt a little bit numb, really. He was tired, stupidly tired, absurdly tired, so he pushed the lunch tray to one side and rolled over onto his side, where there was still a warm patch on the pillow there. He moved his legs up awkwardly, and even though he knew he'd regret it (who cared if he was stiff? It wasn't like he was going to be turning somersaults any time soon anyway), he fell asleep curled. He crossed his arms loosely at the front, probably looking like a random scattering of loose limbs, completely awkward.
One elbow fell against the cold bedrail but he kept it there, concentrating on the line of cold against the soft skin of his forearm, feeling it recede.
He had a dream. To say it like that makes it sound like he was having some kind of deep vision, that his disturbed sleep was more than the product of his sickness, his overactive mind and underactive body, the depth of his tiredness, mentally and physically.
House dreamed. He always dreamed. He didn't think much of it.
House slept light. He always slept light, at least as long as he could remember, waking at night to ridiculous things like the fridge motor turning over, or a car horn three streets away carrying on the night air, the far-away scream of the siren at the base carrying far.
So he slept light, but at this time he also slept softly, if that was the word, in that he almost wasn't sure if he was sleeping, in that this sleep was so fine, so fragile, that he felt that if he moved or twitched or coughed he'd be back in his hospital bed. Awake. He wanted the sleep, so he lay there and tried not to offend the sleeping gods, clinging, grasping at the faint illusion of rest.
He had one last coherent thought before he actually fell asleep, and it was like falling. Slipping.
Jeez. He was messed up.
House was walking down the hospital corridor, which was nice, because he could smell toast cooking somewhere, and he had identical dips in the heels of his comfortably worn shoes. He was savouring the strong, straight, matching feeling to his legs when he felt something warm on the front of his shirt. That was funny. How odd. He was bleeding. He wasn't alarmed at first, but then all of a sudden he was standing against the wall in the bathroom and perfectly spherical drops were falling there on the floor and his shoes and the cuffs of his trousers and his coat, and he'd never get that out with pre-wash, and there was still that heavy, hot, stiffening feeling to the front of his shirt. His senses were assaulted even though it was a dream, perhaps because of it, and he could smell everything, the disinfectant of the bathroom strong enough to burn his nose, the blood in ten different adjectives at once.
He took off his shirt, his shirts, all of his clothing suddenly complicated and awkward, twisting and reversing upon itself, to find the bleeding, but still the blood flowed, he couldn't find where it was coming from. He couldn't stop it. He wondered how many people, doctors, had died thinking I've got to stop the bleeding I can't stop the bleeding. How many had known exactly what was happening as they faded away? Dying was dying, it didn't matter what you knew about it. He thought he might be bleeding to death and he couldn't find it, had nowhere to put his hands to apply the right pressure. He went outside and dripped blood on people, saying, can't you see I'm bleeding here and it won't stop and I can taste it. I can't stop it and I'm just walking around here bleeding to death.
The dream didn't end, it just stopped.
He was suddenly aware of the room, aware that the door was there and that his chest was dry, that there was no dark blood ingrained under his fingernails. That he wasn't walking around wearing a shirt that had stiffened in front, that he hadn't made pee pee in his pants.
He did notice that he was holding his breath, and he exhaled gently, listening for the faint TV noise from the rest of the room, the rustle of a newspaper. Right. He hadn't said anything, or if he had, they hadn't noticed. He hadn't yelled, he hadn't called out. He turned his head again so he was looking at the ceiling, rolled over slowly, lay on his back with his arms stretched out, doing nothing, not questioning the inertia of sleep. He could still smell lunch.
He thought about dreams. He'd always been the sort of person who dreamed in colour and remembered it, but his dreams were always weird, indescribably so, only vaguely recountable. Odd. Strange. Beyond anything but a bare-bones description of sights and senses.
He never thought of them as anything other than memory and chemicals, he was a little too cynical and not nearly human enough for that. He still remembered a lot of dreams, though.
He didn't just have bad dreams, of course, although they were the ones that he remembered the most clearly. He had running dreams, beautiful running dreams.
And Oh, God, the hockey dreams, thuds and that sweet crack as the ball made contact, dried grass flying and the feel of the mouthguard in his mouth, the coach yelling for them to take it wide! And Use Your Height House, what are you, a munchkin!
Not to mention dreams about people. Yes. He had a lot of pleasurable dreams. And the detail. More than once he'd told himself something in a dream, something that was infenetismal and important. He still dreamed about Stacy. They were good dreams.
His running dream. He remembered that one. This was the college running dream, the one where he knew that it was early in the morning and that he'd driven himself to this empty oval just to run, he even knew that he'd had to throw a cup of hot water on the windshield of his shitbox duct-taped car as he had run out the door. He knew all these things, and he loved to revel in this dream, the hollow earthy thrum of his footfalls, the crunch of the grass, the pain in his teeth from the cold and the damp at his eyeballs. Even if this dream was so rudely puncuated by the arrival of a nosebleed, the first sensation of something warm, the drop on his shirt, the thought of his mother and Napisan and his nose… It was so good, his breath still rushing out of his mouth in a cloud of vapour as he grunted and looked down, brought the back of one hand to his nose, the beat of his footfalls always present, always strong. The running always continuing.
Yes. Even if House didn't believe in the power of positive thinking or auras or all that mumbo-jumbo, he did believe in dreams as what they are: in the brain. Was it supernatural? No. Was it chemicals in the brain? Yes, he hoped so, and if they made him gasp awake at night, so what? If he woke up with a stiffie and someone's name on his lips, so much the better.
He felt better now. Sometimes it was good to review old thought processes, to remember where he was at, to reposition himself, to firmly place himself on the grid.
He liked daydreaming, too. It was good to drift off thinking about something, but to have to go a thousand miles away, in a different time or situation, well, that could suffice. Archimedes' last words had been 'Don't touch my circles', hadn't they?
He lay there and dozed intermittently. He didn't sleep deeply again that day, and in that way he came out the other side. That was the only way to describe it, that he had emerged, that he was back at the other end of something.
He had had that one last bad dream. When he woke from it he saw that it was over, some missing piece of his cognitive function had fallen back into place. He was over the thick of it. Something had clicked. He knew it had clicked because it had happened before.
He dozed a bit more, thought, read his book as long as he could handle it, (the light in the room was all wrong for reading in bed) and then it was time to watch soap operas. They were pleasantly numbing this morning.
Wilson came before dinner, and they didn't talk much, but House didn't feel that they had to, always. Wilson did, more, because he did a whole lot more throat-clearing than House did. Dinner was the shnitzel. Yummy.
Towards the end of dinner, while House was eating his Jello (Wilson had brought him some cups) and Wilson was scoffing some of House's fries, the tension broke just like that for no reason. House sniggered and they talked a bit more, not too much, perhaps not yet enough for Wilson, but they were both content, no longer on edge. Cuddy poked her head in too, just checking, but by this time House's eyelids were nodding, and this was just bone-tired after-dinner mechanical eating. House was out like a light, neglecting to scrape out the last remnants of green from the cup, and he only just stirred as Wilson rattled the tray and the curtain rings rang on the track.
His sleep was uneventful.
As Wilson strode toward House's room first thing in the morning, he saw Dr Curtis coming out, looking somewhat harried (probably due to the fact that he had just been in the same room as House, and he was in no way used to him yet, Cuddy had called him in for the explicit reason that the only thing he knew about House was that he had once knocked over one of those hideous indoor plants outside the Respiratory Med offices, he had a reputation for being a misanthropic jerk and he was once in the position to litigate against the hospital for an untold large sum of money), but with that automatic, slightly smug look that meant that House was probably on the mend. On the other hand, maybe he was just glad to be out of the room.
Wilson talked to him for a couple of minutes, looking for an opinion that wouldn't be interspersed with 'I can go home now'. House was 'bringing up some nice yellow sputum' (these Lung people really had an odd turn of phrase. Since when was coughing up yellow snot nice?). Basically, House was past the worse of it, and with a couple more days, crucial ones, (but to these Pulmonary people the only function of the body seemed to be breathing), he could go home and hope to not slide back before he got his feet back on the ground (that wasn't what Curtis said, though. He just said that Dr House 'seemed to be on the mend'). They talked doctor stuff for a couple more minutes, the stuff House would have called the boring details, and then he entered the room.
He was thinking of saying something along the lines of 'You're on the mend, I hear', or 'feeling better, champ?', but since none of these things didn't sound patronising or like something that you'd spoon-feed to someone who was terminally ill, Wilson just said hello and threw a paper bag with a muffin (the plain English kind, not the sweet choc-chip kind), a little container of butter and one of peanut butter, tantalising grease spots on the sides, onto the table next to the bed.
House was sitting up, his eyes slightly bloodshot and his breathing still murky, but other than that looking as if he just had a bad cold. He reached for the muffin without a word and ripped into the paper bag, spreading it over his lap and taking a huge bite, first hurriedly spreading it with butter and peanut butter, huge lumps of both.
Wilson told him to watch out he didn't choke, and glanced over to where the breakfast tray sat, mostly untouched. Ah. Today's special was watery, plastic tasting scrambled eggs or rubbery overcooked scrambled eggs. Yummy.
House was still working on his huge first mouthful, cheeks bulging. He chewed, then swallowed, coughing a little as if the swallowing hurt his throat. He reached for the plastic cup of orange juice on the table, took the straw out then took a huge gulp, cursing as he splashed a whole lot down his front. Wilson laughed. House smirked at him and flicked a drop of that awful watered-down juice at his tie.
House made quick work of the rest of the muffin. He was watching TV, some talk-show that Wilson wasn't interested in, although when he laughed (at something which wasn't accompanied by much canned audience laughter), he made a choking sound and dissolved into a series of wheezy, short coughs, before groaning contentedly and lying back. So, he was coughing, but he was either used to it, or it was just moderate enough to be an annoyance now. The bags under his eyes had lost a couple of pounds, too.
"That was a good muffin."
Wilson mumbled in reply, his head buried in the News section of the New York Times. No, he didn't have any more food hidden in the lining of his coat. House continued gazing at the TV, one hand absently brushing most of the crumbs off his front. (And into his lap).
"Do you think they use the same photo for the backdrop on all these shows?"
"Uh huh." Wilson gave a non-committal noise. House hadn't yet grasped that it wasn't possible to do two things at once, and he was concentrating on this article. Apparently, there was a new article publishing in the next issue of CA-
"Don't you have work to do?"
"Oh, didn't you hear? They've found the cure for cancer."
Wilson folded up the newspaper. House promptly grabbed it and pulled out the Features section, then started reading the first page.
Wilson sighed.
House let Wilson sigh, and started scanning the news. That was good, he wasn't too out of touch… His head spun a bit though, and he felt some thought tug at his mind, so he wandered off for a while. One hand crept out to tap the useless plastic knife from the breakfast tray against the edge of the table, producing a satisfying hollow stacatto. Tap-tap. Tap. Tap-tap-tap. Tap.
The TV channel changed.
Floor cleaner ad. Wilson said something, and he felt his mind snap
back effortlessly, like a rubber band, from something about the
colour of the face of Wilson's clinic badge. Was that Oxford Blue?
Or maybe Prussian Blue? Cobalt?
It
was a good feeling, the wander, the sudden clear focus. Like a camera
lens.
Wilson had stood up, but he didn't look like he was spoiling to leave, otherwise he'd be fidgeting more. He was just looking at House's chart, walking around to the end of the bed and leaning on it, one hand momentarily checking his tie knot, a reflex gesture that reminded House of nervous men at weddings and uniformed children at assembly. House thought that it was hard to not look on edge when you were wearing a tie… no wonder, he didn't know how people could walk around all day with something like that dangling at your neck and not feel like you were at a perpetual job interview.
"How's your chest feel?"
House wrinkled his face slightly, levelled one hand out in front of him and oscillated it back and forwards. Shorthand for: Comme ci, comme ca. OK. Average. Hurts, doesn't cane.
"No odd purple rashes? Extra toes? People talking to you that aren't there? Levitation?'
House shook his head on all those counts, and when Wilson said that it would only be a couple more days, he continued the dumb-show, raised his arms towards the ceiling, mimed a little victory dance. Asthma guy looked up from his National Geographic. It was an old issue, anyway, with the back cover missing. A waiting-room harvest, salvaged from among the women's and handyman magazines.
Well. About time. He knew it would only be a couple more days, but it was good to hear. He didn't want to stick around here too long. They didn't get the good TV channels.
Wilson said that he had a patient's test results coming through soon. He turned his head slightly to the side. Oh.
House still didn't say anything, and there was companiable silence. House switched the TV channels around, and was just considering makings some trite comment about Donald Trump's hair, but he realised that his bladder was getting towards the point of being uncomfortably full. He really had to pee, and you could only take procrastination so far when important bodily functions were concerned.
He pulled back the bed covers reluctantly, feeling the sudden cold. Damn cold. Damn cold floor. Damn leg. Damn orange juice.
Wilson gave him a slightly quizzical glance, and he said he had to pee.
Jeez, it was so cold after being in bed that he had goosebumps on the back of his knees. He awkwardly positioned himself on the edge of the bed, stiff, stretching his right leg out straight with a half-painful, half-pleasurable groan, like the groan someone makes when they stretch after sitting in a movie theatre for a long time, then slowly slipped off the bed, awkwardly balancing on one leg before trying out both. Wilson had handed him his cane like a flash almost as soon as he thought of it. Thanks Jeeves.
House unsteadily weaved his way towards the bathroom, and as Wilson followed him he felt House's younger roommate's eyes on his back, looking him up and down. Didn't these people have a magazine to read or something?
Then again, Wilson was kind of glad that House wasn't in a private room… not so glad for the people who had to live with him, perhaps, but they seemed to be getting on fine. They hadn't had anything thrown at them yet.
House had reached the bathroom door, and after almost falling over yanking the door open he gave Wilson a sardonic look and stepped into the bathroom. Wilson was just standing looking out the door of the room, looking to see who was on duty at the Nurse's station, when House poked his head out of the bathroom and asked the older guy, the one with the asthma, if he could have at least burnt a match or something, and slammed the door.
Wilson just bit down on his snort on time, trod on his laughter over to House's bed, and stared at his chart until he no longer had the urge to laugh. Jeez. It was like being in the Fourth Grade.
House gobbled down his sandwich at lunch indifferently and sneered at Oprah. Wilson was busy, people to save, and Cuddy had 'checked in on him' this morning. He wasn't that tired now, he had just taken a Vicodin… he felt… active. He ran his fingers down the bars of the rail next to his hand, listening to the noise it made. Active. How was that so bad?
It was about 12:30. Wilson would still be with the patient. Cuddy had some sort of meeting today at lunch, as far as he knew, probably the networking-with-people over bad instant coffee in a conference room sort of meeting. He felt like going somewhere. Why not?
House sat up and put an eye towards the Nurse's station. Magazine Nurse was reading, but Officious Nurse was talking on the phone, and her eyes could easily flick across this doorway.
House got up slowly. His cane was against the chair. Wilson. He sat on the edge of the bed for a minute, stretching his hands above his head, feeling his spine crack. When he was used to being in an upright position he carefully slipped his feet to the floor, feeling how cold it was, and stretched to snag his cane. Got it. So far, so good.
Rule one for escaping from a hospital room was Don't Fall Over As Soon As You Get Out Of Bed. As for Rule Two: His sports bag was sitting against the cupboard. He quickly leaned across and sat in the chair, unzipped the bag quietly and retrieved a change of clothes, the first thing his hands fell upon, an old sleep-t-shirt that Wilson had thrown in, a ratty old pair of sweatpants. The holy grail, a pair of loose boxer shorts.
He glanced towards the Nurses Station quickly. No change. Here was the crucial point. He ignored the other patients, limped stiffly towards the bathroom without looking at the nurses, the clothes clasped casually on the non-visible side of his body. He clicked the door closed lightly, tried not to cough.
He dressed as quickly as he could in the bathroom, wondering about it for a minute before simply hanging his hospital gown on the back of the door. When he was comfortable (and warm), he ran the water for a second and peeked out. Almost there.
Perfect. Officious Nurse was perusing a chart. He made sure he wasn't all that visible, gritted his teeth and walked as normally and flexibly as possible out the doorway, flitting (if that was possible) around the corner.
Escape successful.
He felt ridiculous. He tried not to grin, because it might not be wise to draw any more attention to himself, and concentrated on walking to somewhere a little less public where he could catch his breath.
Let's clarify a little, thought House. I'm wearing a pair of sweatpants that keep slipping down my hips and a t-shirt with a ring of holes around the neck. I'm leaning against the bare concrete wall just inside the fire stair well, staring at the spots of gum on the concrete, which are, by the way, right next to my bare, bony feet.
House rested. He thought. He was tired, but this was fun. How could he even think of going back now? How did he get this far?
He was too good.
He was an escapee.
Ladies and Gentlemen, Greg House, man-about-town and hospital escape artist.
He got moving because it was getting cold.
House was still fairly sick, tired and weak, his legs shaking from walking.
His bare feet slapped slightly against the floor and he was very obviously a patient, and by the look of his clothes, cane and general appearance (and the sympathetic stare one of the volunteers gave him as he exited the stairwell surreptitiously) probably a chronic and terminal one.
He was, however, an employee at the hospital, the type who considered it good form to know all the little escape routes and shortcuts. He crossed quickly to the lifts and wore what he hoped was his I'm-going-somewhere-I-should-perhaps-radiology-or-somewhere-equally-important face while he waited, facing the wall and leaning on the cane in front so no one could recognise him casually. He took the lift, and thought the game was up when an orderly gave him an odd look, but it wasn't.
On the ground floor he stepped down a ramp at the back of emergency, near the side entrance, one that was meant for rattling big goods trolleys along, and walked along a small dank corridor with a gritty (he could feel it) concrete floor with access to air conditioning ducts and bunched electrical leads, therefore bypassing most of emergency and the clinic entrance. He emerged behind one of the conference rooms near all the foundation big-wig type offices, in the newer, less hospital-like part of the building, on the other side of a short plush corridor and a bank of payphones to Cuddy's office.
Perfect. There was a nice little couch here, a vending machine, and hardly anyone ever came here, as it is with some perfectly well designed spots in buildings that just never see much traffic, the nook was too close to the clinic to see office use, and too far away for anyone to use over the more obvious seating area.
Naa. Why come all this way if he didn't steal a quiet nap in style? Besides, he could still hear the hubbub coming from the clinic, and he was too close, too exposed here where he could hear announcements and anyone could pass by. Any busybody who would recognise him.
He entered Cuddy's outer office after first peeking through the glass and testing the doorknob, and lay down on the couch. Perfect.
That was all he remembered, other than that he slept the sleep of the innocent, which says absolutely nothing towards sleep metaphors, thought House.
Cuddy was just wrapping up her meeting when Wilson appeared at the door looking ruffled. He waited until she was out of the room, but only just. He blurted it out, looking a peculiar combination of exasperated, worried and annoyed.
"House is missing."
"What do you mean, missing?" Her tone withering. How could he be missing? This was-
"I mean, he's not in his room and they're looking for him. He couldn't have left the hospital, he's probably found a music room or fallen asleep in a waiting room or something-"
Cuddy was already on her way downstairs to organize this. God, he was an idiot. Seriously, she shouldn't be surprised. She and Wilson bitched momentarily about his inappropriate behaviour (and about how they felt half sheepish that they hadn't expected it), but then they channelled their anger into finding him. They were both worried. They were both pissed. Not a good combination.
Wilson checked the roof, even though he said that he didn't think House could get up there in the state that he was in (Cuddy personally thought a situation like this would just be the sort House would grab at to punish himself), and that he hadn't been up there for God knows how long anyway. She checked emergency and the clinic and his office (the latter looking very House-like, but not recently inhabited), and had all the department lounges checked for a sick-looking guy with a cane and a week-old growth of beard.
Wilson checked all through the ward, and she and a nurse systematically checked the pathology section, coming through to emergency and then the admin offices. Nothing. She hoped that House could see the storm clouds brewing, she really did. He was in Trouble.
House's ruse worked better than he imagined. He got to stretch his legs, a nice exhausting walk and a nap. He wasn't found until Cuddy clicked into her office to look at her diary after two hours of what looked like dirty, sweaty footslogging searching. Man, was she pissed. House couldn't get the goofy grin off his face.
