CHAPTER TWENTY THREE

House woke up with a massive cramp in his leg. He massaged the muscle a while before pulling himself off the couch. "Ahhh," he cried as the pain shot through his leg like lightning. He was getting too old to be falling asleep on the couch watching porn.

With a bit more force than was necessary he clicked off the staticy television and set off to make some coffee. He popped a few Vicodin before setting off on the long journey to the kitchen and rattled the few remaining pills around in the bottle making a mental note to refill his long standing prescription first thing.

An annoying hum filled the air again. It was the same sound that had woken him up and though he knew what was making it, he couldn't for the life of him remember where he'd put the damned thing.

He looked at the clock. It was almost eight. He wondered what she was doing. It was Saturday morning. It had been late when she left, well past midnight. Was she sleeping in perhaps? Dreaming about him? Or was she out taking a jog and trying to expend that sexual energy that must be pent up inside her. Sweat dripping down between her breasts, her heart pounding in her chest, her breath short and fast…he had to block the image and focus on the coffee before he had an accident.

He wanted to call her, invite her over for breakfast. That was lame. He wasn't the kind of guy who had a woman over for breakfast unless she'd spent the night and he was too cheap to tip.

The buzzing again. House banged his hand on the counter and cursed. Damn pager. Where the hell had he put it?

He wondered around the living room, searching for the sound. He finally found it, wedged between the sofa cushions he'd slept on. It died in his hand. "Damn." He tossed it back on the couch and returned to his coffee.

When the phone rang he spilled hot coffee on his shirt and swore loudly. "SHIT!"

"What?" he barked into the phone.

"I've been trying to reach you for an hour." Taub's voice rattled in his bosses head.

"This better be important." House wasn't in the mood for work. It was his day off.

"I…I don't know." Taub genuinely wasn't sure if what he had to say would be important, but it was interesting, and he knew House liked interesting.

"How can you not know?" House wanted to hang up but his curiosity prevented it. Sometimes he hated his curiosity.

"It's about Mr. Rose, your patient. Well, more accurately, about his wife."

"Does she have a growth too?" That would be interesting. It would mean whatever caused it was either environmental or was transmittable. It was more of a lead then they'd had so far.

"We'd need a court order to find out." Taub didn't wait for some berating comment from his boss. "She's been dead for twelve years."

House pondered that for a moment. "That is interesting." He hung up the phone and changed his clothes. In less than an hour he was at the hospital.

Henry Rose was lying in bed having a very animated conversation with his wife. There was no one else in the room. Taub and Kutner had been watching, waiting for their boss to come and advise them what to do. Now the three men were standing there watching.

"Poor man." Kutner's face showed a pain of understanding.

House turned and looked at him. "Do you ever talk to your dead parents?"

"House!" Taub was shocked.

"It's okay." Kutner appreciated Taub's defense, but he knew what he was getting into when he signed on to work for House and he was prepared to answer any of House's outlandish questions. "Yeah, I talk to them sometimes. Usually when I've had a bad day, or something really great happens and I want to share it with them." Kutner furrowed his brow. "But, I know they're not there." He looked through the glass at Henry Rose.

"Do you think it's a symptom?" Taub asked quickly, uncomfortable with the dead parents talk. His own parents were very much alive, and it made him feel like shit to think that he would trade places with Kutner in a heartbeat.

"It could be." House was unsure. It could be that old Henry Rose was just senile.

"Are you going to tell him she's not there?" Taub thought it would be cruel, but House was good at cruel.

"Not yet." House pushed his way into the room. He left Taub and Kutner to wonder what his plan was, their faces still reflected in the glass wall. "Hello Henry." House noticed that Henry had stopped talking to Jannie and wasn't showing any signs of her being in the room.

"Dr. House. Come to set me free?"

House watched his patient carefully, looking for signs of senility or anything else that might explain his talking to his dead wife. "Not yet."

"Look, tell me straight, am I dying or what?" He had leaned in, almost like he didn't want anyone to overhear them.

House leaned in too. "Too soon to tell."

"Then what are you doing here?" Henry was getting cranky.

"I wanted to talk to your wife. I was told she was here." House leaned in just a little, his eyes glued to his patient.

"I don't want you talking to her." Henry got defensive.

"Why not?" House's interest was rising.

"You'll fill her head with all this medical nonsense and she'll start worrying about me needlessly. I tell you doctor, I feel fine."

House braced himself for action. He waited. Usually as soon as a patient said they felt fine they went into cardio shock or some other such emergency. Nothing happened. "You might feel fine Mr. Rose, but you are most definitely not."

"Well, just stay away from her. That's all." He was every bit the grumpy old man his eighty plus years warranted.

"I don't think that will be a problem." House left his patient to his delusions.

Taub and Kutner were still waiting for him outside. "Well?" Taub needed answers.

"He thinks she's alive."

"And?" Kutner was getting antsy.

"And…we're not going to tell him otherwise." House cocked his head to the side. Unless he was mistaken, he knew the woman who had just darted around the corner. "Gotta go!" He took off after her, leaving his remaining Fellows stumped.

Cuddy could move quickly when she needed to. House just wasn't sure why she was avoiding him. It didn't matter. He knew she'd turn up in her office eventually so he headed directly there to wait for her.

Her office was empty when he arrived. Her coat was still there, so he knew she'd be coming back so he made himself at home. Her computer was still on and he sat at her desk and began to click around on her desktop, hoping to find something incriminating. He wasn't sure what he hoped to incriminate her about, but it was always good to have some blackmail info at an easy grasp.

A few legal documents were open. Those bored him so he ignored them. Her email was also open. Bingo! House began skimming through the folder titles, amazed at how anal her Outlook was. There was a folder for each department in the hospital. He found the one labeled DIAGNOSTICS and clicked it open.

He was now faced with a half dozen new files. One labeled PATIENTS, one for his team, one for the many complaints filed against him and, what was this one? He double clicked the one labeled PERSONAL.

A quick glance told him they were all emails from him. He clicked on one and started to read. It wasn't about anything in particular though at one point he had commented on her new hair cut. He shrugged and looked at the next one. In that one, which was a complaint he'd made about the cafeteria food selection, there was a reference to the dress she'd worn that day.

Looking through each of the emails in the folder he'd realized that the only common thread was that he'd complimented her in each one.

"What do you think you're doing?" Her voice ripped through him and he knew immediately that he was in big trouble.

"I was waiting for you." He quickly closed the email he was looking at and turned his attention to her.

"Why?" She didn't believe him and was walking around her desk to see what he'd been doing.

"I thought you'd want to know about a development in my case."

"How'd you even know I was here?" She leaned over him and activated the password on her computer.

"I saw you stalking me in the hallway." He let his hand slid along the length of her waist until it perfectly mapped the arc of her ass. She hadn't pushed him away, which was a good sign.

"I wasn't stalking you." She did finally right herself, and leaned against the desk for support. His touch had made her feel weak.

"Then what are you doing here? It's the weekend."

"I had to finish some paperwork. What are you doing here?" It was like her to come in on the weekend and do work, but it was not like House to do the same.

"I told you, there was a development with my patient." He was admiring her legs, long and lean and crossed at the ankle like a good little girl.

"Is everything alright?" She became worried. She didn't know much about Mr. Rose, only what she'd read in Dr. Taub's report, but she always felt for all the patients at her hospital and he was no exception.

"He sees dead people." House said ominously. "Well, only one dead person actually. His wife, but I think the dead part is more important than the number."

Cuddy shook her head, trying to make sense of this information. "What are you talking about?"

"I'm talking about a lonely old man who can't deal with the fact that the woman he loved is gone." His words held a deeper meaning she was afraid to probe into.

"That's so sad." She gulped back a tear. "Are you sure it's not a symptom."

"I'm not even sure what he has yet. It could be. Does it matter?" He was searching her face for an answer. He found that the answers to these kinds of questions said more about the person answering than they did about the subject matter itself.

"If it helps diagnose him then yes, it does matter." That was Cuddy in a nut shell, always working.

House thought about the question he was about to ask for a moment. He wondered how to word it, how much weight to put into each word. Finally he spoke. "If it were you, would you want someone to tell you the truth?"

"He doesn't know she's dead?" It was starting to make more sense to her now.

House shook his head.

She thought, and she thought. She held her hand over her mouth as she thought. She looked out the window. She tried to understand the depth of the dilemma. Was it better to know the truth about your own delusions, or live contentedly in them? "I'd want to know." She wasn't looking at him. She was lying.

House nodded thoughtfully. "That's what I thought you'd say."

She didn't like his gaze. It was like he was looking through her. "What's that mean?"

"You wouldn't want to know, but you think I would, so you lied. You don't want me to see you as weak or sentimental so you gave the doctors answer. But I'm not asking you as a doctor. I'm asking you as a person. If something you believed in with all your heart was a lie, would you want to know?"

"No." She didn't have to think about it. "House, he's a dying old man. Let him have his fantasy if it gives him a few more hours of happiness, or days or however long he's got left."

House looked at her calves. She had perfectly shaped calves, smooth and curved like the gentle slope of a violin. "I can't." He sighed heavily. He too wanted to let Henry Rose live out his days in a fantasy world with his late wife but he needed answers. "I've got to go."