House was not aware that he had been sleeping until he was aware of being woken by voices. Three particular voices; He tried to ignore them and go back to sleep.
"Did you get a full history?" Foreman said with a seemingly patronizing tone.
Crunch.
"I'm sure! I never forget things when I'm getting histories, you know that," Cameron replied, on the defensive.
"Then you'll just have to assume that the patient was lying," said Chase, adopting the misanthropic philosophy of his mentor.
Crunch.
"Shhh!"
"Getting an accurate history was your responsibility."
"It's not her fault if a patient lies."
"But it was her responsibility to make sure the patient told the truth."
"Stop it! Our patient is dying!"
It was the shrillness of Cameron's concern that finally got House to open his eyes.
Crunch.
There were his fellows, all sitting atop his bed, and all looking at House expectantly, wide-eyed and eager. Chase was eating from a bag of potato chips in his lap.
"House, your patient is vomiting blood," he said, struggling to talk around the mouthful. Chase always knew just the right words to say.
"Yeah?"
"And there's no internal bleed that we can find," Cameron added.
Foreman pursed his lips, glancing from fellow to fellow before coming back to House. "They got a bad history, and we need to re-evaluate."
"I did NOT get a bad history!" Cameron shouted out of sheer frustration. "I think I deserve just a little respect."
"Hey!" House snapped, sitting up against the headboard. "Don't wipe your greasy fingers on my blanket," House snapped, sitting up against the headboard.
Chase, who had just shoved another handful of chips into his mouth, had just closed his hand into a fist, clenching the blanket in his greasy fingers when House yelled at him. He froze, mouth dumbly stuck mid-chew, caught in the act, considering possible escape routes before just letting go of the blanket and wiping his hand on the leg of his jeans instead.
"So your patient is vomiting blood," Foreman said.
"Your patient had a dog, but had to put it down three weeks ago." said Cameron. "Patient presents with a series of lesions on their face and neck, and they've been playing soccer for seven years."
"What is this, a sequel to Spoon River Anthology?"
Chase, who had been staring silently at his lap, perked up a bit. "I hated that book, had to read it for school."
"Don't you care about your patients?"
"No."
"Don't you care about Wilson?"
"What?' That seemed to come right out of left field, completely random and unprovoked.
"He's worried about you, House," Cameron said, trying to make him feel bad, he could tell.
House tugged at his blanket, trying to get more coverage, but it wouldn't budge on account of it being sat on by his fellows. "Wilson worries about his lint trap," House snapped testily. "I'm not going to feel honored or anything."
"But really," Chase added, suddenly very serious, "he is worried about you."
"One of you, just come out and say it. Is it the leg? The bullet wounds? What?"
"You really don't see it?" Foreman asked incredulously. House shook his head, so he said, skeptical of House's oblivion, "did it ever occur to you that we're doing a differential diagnosis in your bedroom?"
House was alone in his room, alone in his bed and alone in his apartment. He had blinked and everything was gone, even the grease stain from Chase's potato chips, because that was the first thing House had looked for when everything first went away.
Rubbing a hand down the side of his face, House thought about Wilson worrying. But his worrying was obvious, expected, so it wasn't strange for House to have been thinking or dreaming about that. That train of thought was nothing to get worried over himself.
Where was Wilson? Better yet, where were his fellows? They were all sitting there with him, just a moment ago. Wilson must have let them in, so he would be sitting on the couch or waiting in the hall or by the door, or he was in the bathroom.
He was in none of those places when House got out of bed and looked for him, expecting him to be waiting on the other side of every wall, just around every corner. The only signs of life in the apartment were his own. And they had never solved the case; not even Foreman had stayed back to figure it out.
Though House acknowledged that he had been alone in his apartment all night and all day. His rationale knew it. The rest of his mind was just a little tricky to convince.
This was not a good sign.
---
House was halfway out the door when the phone rang. The only reason he jogged back into the kitchen to answer it was because he could, because he didn't need to worry much about10 seemingly innocent steps was going to cost him later. Five weeks into his recovery, and he was finally starting to get used to his newfound mobility.
The number that showed up on caller I.D. was one of the only numbers that ever did.
"I'm going running, don't come over," he said before hanging up the phone. With the events of the morning still fresh in his mind, he yearned for the heat, the tension, the pumping adrenaline of a good run. He breathed in beats of four and allowed himself to think only of the terrain beneath his feet and the tired looking students as he passes them with ease.
Wilson was waiting when he got back, over an hour later.
"You said not to come, but I decided to ignore you," he said, standing up from his seat on the front steps.
House was panting heavily, and pushed Wilson to unlock the door.
"I can see that."
Wilson wrinkled his nose and gratefully stepped out of House's way. "You smell…" he paused, searching for the perfect word, "putrid."
"I went for a run," House shrugged, letting the front door swing shut behind him, so Wilson had to scramble up the steps to catch it before it locked.
"I thought you went running with me," he said, following House into the apartment. "We've been running together."
"Well, papa bird was ready to fly solo," House quipped, unable to stop moving, pacing around the back of the couch and the coffee table on a track that was practically worn into the floorboards. But Wilson knew that this time, the pacing had nothing to do with the words 'leg' or 'thigh.'
Cooling down after a run was a much better habit than popping vicodin and shooting up on morphine, anyway.
"Is your leg hurting you at all?" Frustrated that he had not been running with House, Wilson felt helpless, having not been able to check for any favoring of the left leg or any signs of weight balance issues.
"You must be tired of saying that." House walked into the kitchen, taking strong and even steps. Wilson watched his Achilles tendons and rear calves clench and relax with every step.
"How much did you do?" Wilson decided that he was in no mood to fight for the navigation control of their conversation, so he let the subject be changed without incident.
"I think I pushed 4 miles toady," House answered proudly, filling a glass with water from the sink that Wilson secretly wished could have been filtered.
"That's good," he said. "Last week you were only doing three."
"Exactly," House smiled, licking at the glittering beads of sweat in the corners of his mouth. "And next week,"
"You'll be doing six."
Gulping down the water, House gave a shockingly uncharacteristic thumbs up. Wilson didn't join him in the kitchen, instead waiting beside the couch.
"So, who is she?" House seemed to be asking out of genuine concern, instead of just wanting to know everything about everyone for the mere sake of having choices for future blackmail material.
"I'm…" Unfortunately, Wilson had no idea what he was talking about; "rather curious myself."
"Oh, you are a smooth one," House teased.
"I have no idea what you're talking about." House was always trying to guess who Wilson was dating, mainly because (in Wilson's opinion), House never dated anyone and was jealous.
"Very 007."
"I'm in a hotel. There's no woman." And there honestly wasn't.
"You even have the same name. James." House gasped, condescendingly. "How cute!"
"You're comparing me to James Bond?"
"Nobody does it better," House sang.
Smiling, Wilson decided, "it could be worse." House seemed to have momentarily forgotten his curiosity, fishing the remote out from behind a couch cushion. He was docile now, so Wilson let it go.
"I'm in the mood for Goldfinger," he said, sitting down on the couch, House sitting down next to him, still wearing his sweaty running clothes and still smelling putrid. It was the first time in a long time that House got through an entire movie without reaching for a prescription.
TBC