"GUESSWORK"

- Chapter Thirty -

"Getting the Ducks in Line"

Sometimes it was easy to tell when House was upset. Sometimes not.

This time James Wilson was at a loss.

Early evening settled in at Paramar Clinic and the lengthening shadows morphed into stick figures that spread thin across the floor. Silence, which cast its pall over the room, seemed heavy and oppressive. What had just happened to Gregory House should never happen to anyone.

Wilson indicated in a polite but firm manner that everyone leave the room after Gregg lost it. This man should never be seen in such vulnerable condition. The wild and terrified look in House's eyes when the dog walked in gave Wilson a glimpse of what it might be like if one day House's sanity left him completely. It was a frightening thought, and the lump growing in Wilson's gut quickly turned to stone.

House quieted as soon as Tyree and Shaniqua called Bobby out into the corridor and the three of them beat a hasty retreat from the vicinity. The others filed out in subdued silence directly afterward, prompted only by the frown of alarm and apology on Wilson's face. The subtle lift of his chin toward the open doorway left no question about his state of mind.

An errant tendril of alarm dashed through Wilson's thoughts. What would the others take away from all this? They were probably asking themselves what the hell they'd gotten into with this unstable lunatic and his idiotic sidekick …

At this moment he sat still, a willing captive, sitting rigid in the chair beside House's bed. His only free hand mussed gently through House's sweat-damp hair.

Gregg held onto his other arm with both hands clamped near the elbow, and continued to stare at the same spot on the ceiling that he had stared at for almost half an hour. Earlier, his breathing had come in labored gasps … the frightened six-year-old again. His eyes had clenched tightly shut, head turned toward the wall and away from the center of the room. The others had gathered around in startled compassion when he'd cried out in panic with the nightmare's bold recurrence.

Now, however, things were calmed down. House was quiet, a little less tense, a little less traumatized. His features had relaxed from the rigid fright mask he'd presented earlier. His breathing was evening out slowly, and the trembling was gone from his limbs. But both hands were still clamped to Wilson's upper arm, and Wilson feared he would break his stitches.

Silently he waited it out.

Wilson's palm switched from House's hair to his shoulder, fingers lightly working the corded muscles beneath the soggy shirt. His lips were close to House's ear, and the words he found himself whispering were pure nonsense; much the same as the nonsense rhymes he'd so often murmured to desperately ill children on the pediatric cancer ward:

"Puppy dogs, bunnies, kittens. Think about 'em, House. Wolves at midnight, howling at the moon. Fields of flowers, pastel rainbows. Then picture the splashy paint scheme of 'Grave Digger'! Look there! Wild horses running through the tall grass … in your devious mind more like nude female bathers on a beach in France!

"A Merry-Go-Round in the park … ice cream and cake for your birthday party. Except you'd rather have pizza with everything and a bottomless keg of beer, wouldn't ya? Oh look! Here comes a fire engine …and an elephant …and … isn't that Santa Claus and Rudolph? Oh yeah, House … I'm reading your mind … and you'd see Carmen Electra on a Corvette Sting Ray … riding into town with JLo and the Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders!"

Not the words, exactly, but the flippancy of the whole monologue. He really doubted that House was hearing the words anyhow … but the low murmur of his voice was soothing and calming and as whimsical as he could possibly make it. Judging from the ghost of a smile that quirked the corner of House's mouth at the moment, the absurdity of the whole idea had penetrated that isolated mind somehow …

As time flowed slowly past and the evening grew older, Gregory House's large hands gradually relaxed and finally slid away from their death grip on Wilson's arm. He turned his head away from his stiff perusal of the wall and the ceiling, and let his center of attention refocus on the countenance of the man who sat glued and unmoving to his side.

Wilson smiled as the resumption of lucidity manifested itself in the depths of the expressive eyes. Joyfully, he witnessed the persona of his best friend as it returned once again to claim dominion.

"Hey, House …" Wilson said: the standard opening to so many of their conversations. Those words, and the manner in which they were spoken, usually indicated that there was no snark involved in what was to follow.

"Hey, W-Wilson …"

"Lost you for awhile there …"

"Yeah … I … I know. I think I got revisited …"

"You mean … the dream?"

"Uh huh. Christ! I hate that shit!"

"Wanna tell me?"

House hesitated for a lengthening interval. Then, at last:

"I was … walking down a long corridor … doors on both sides … all closed. I kept on walking. Wasn't sure what I was looking for. Just looking. I saw one of the doors was open … way down at the end … I slowed down and walked outside.

"I knew there was something out there that I wasn't gonna like, but I went out anyway. Jesus! It was like walking right into the middle of a busy street. In the street was this freakin' big red bus … coming at me like the hammers of hell. I froze. It was the same bus that hit the mutt … except the mutt wasn't there … and the bus was comin' after me! It had teeth … and its mouth was wide open. I couldn't move. My leg …"

"Damn, House …"

"Tell me about it! But the thing was so Goddamn real! …"

"What?" Wilson spoke softly, his face very near House's ear. He did not want to spook him now.

House resumed, his tone just as soft. A fearful sense of awe permeated his voice. "Kip told me …while they were hooking me to the stringers … the nanoprobe procedure they're going to perform on me … whenever … was used on the mutt first. It was used later on Kip too … and Earl and Bill … because all three of them were experiencing chronic pain. It worked for them. But Kip told me it doesn't always work. There were some failures too, but I didn't ask, and he didn't say. Maybe I should have …

"In my dream … I think the damn bus went after Bobby and killed him … all over again." The last words of that revelation were spoken in a tense and breathless manner.

Wilson stiffened slightly; hoping the involuntary tightening of his own hands hadn't translated itself to House's body. He knew it had, however, when the telltale vertical lines appeared between the intense blue eyes. "House … it was only a dream …"

"Then why did you flinch?"

Wilson searched for an answer that would work for both of them without broadcasting his own fear in a direct pipeline to his aching heart. It was no use. He lowered his eyes, and House plucked the truth from his actions as a child plucks a clover from the lawn.

From somewhere deep inside his ever-sarcastic soul, House diffused the heavy air of tension with a wisecrack. "Wilson, I know you're no match for me when it comes to all the brilliant and profound witticisms … but even this old cripple can't read minds! Not even your simple, non-convoluted neurological pathways crowded with puppies and bunnies and rainbows … and Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders. Could you please cut me some slack and bring me another drink of water? I'm so dry I think I could spit dust …"

"Sure, House," Wilson said with a grin and a roll of his eyes. "Let me go get it."

"Wilson?"

"Huh?"

"By the way … my pain … I think it's coming back. I'm getting the creepy-crawlies in my thigh. They were right … it's not going to pass me by. We don't get an outside threshold."

"Oh God!" Wilson stopped in his tracks and did an about-face to return to the bed.

"Wilson! It's okay. The pain … it was curious. Probably just missed having all those subtle little talks with me! It had to come back to see how I was doing without it … and got mad as hell when it found out I didn't even miss it …"

Gregg's words had turned dark and half bitter, his right hand back on the leg. Rubbing carefully … "My water?"

"Uh … yeah, okay …" Wilson paused a moment, studying House's face. ouse's face, makingHouse's Ho He'd heard the knife-edge grind in the shift of tone, but did not question him. Snark was the furthest thing from Gregg's mind at the moment. He was handling the pain's gradual resurgence in a familiar manner, however, and his response was neither unexpected nor unanticipated.

Wilson pulled another bottle of cold water from the fridge and returned to his friend with it. "Here," he said, settling himself gently on the edge of the bed and handing the bottle across. "Is there anything I can do?"

House took the water into his lame hand. The pain of movement it had caused a few hours before was beginning to run distant second to the returning misery in his thigh.

"No. I need to get past it. Right now it's just a trumpet and a trombone screwing around in there. Pretty soon the whole freakin' orchestra will be tuning up. I know Kip can't do the nanocites procedure until tomorrow at the earliest. This should be an interesting night. I suppose the Neurontin and the Ultram and the Advil are long gone in the manner of the Dinosaur and the Dodo Bird and the Passenger Pigeon …"

Wilson sat looking at his friend's face. The pinched look about Gregg's eyes was returning, along with the pain. For awhile he'd been relaxed, almost tranquil … at least until the monster in the dream had taken a stranglehold on him. Now his eyes were downcast again, losing their luster. His lips drooped open, breathing through his mouth, hunching his thin shoulders, endeavoring to conserve energy for the difficult hours ahead.

Wilson sighed, leaned backward and dug his hand into his jeans pocket. "I have something a lot better than Neurontin and Ultram." Reluctantly he drew out the amber vial of Vicodin he'd carried with him from Princeton. He thumbed off the cap in much the same fashion he'd seen House do it for years.

Wilson dumped two of the white pills into his open palm and offered his palm to a dumbfounded Gregory House.

"Here," he said. "This is for all the times I tried to tell you that your pain was in your head. It's for all the times I didn't take a moment to listen to you when you tried to tell me how bad it was. That'll never happen again, House, and there's no reason why you should spend the last hours before your surgery having to fight pain that should never have been allowed to get this far in the first place. Making you choose rehab was the biggest mistake I've ever made."

House reached out to take the pills, eyes suspicious and full of doubt, mingled with hope and endless possibilities. He leaned his head back and palmed them into his mouth. Took a long swig of the cold water. "Thanks, Wilson. Better than a Higher Power, even."

"You're welcome. I'm very sorry, House. Sorry for everything."

House continued to observe the gentle sincerity of Wilson's warm attention. "It's okay." He leaned back on his pillows and closed his eyes.

Wilson waited with his best friend. They both waited. Endured together the long, miserable minutes while the returning pain manifested itself further and caused Gregg to curl his hands into fists, purse his lips and wait for the Vicodin to take effect.

And then it did.

Moment by moment House's limbs relaxed again, his head deepened into the pillows, and he sighed with relief, finally, as the narcotics deadened the neural pathways to his brain. "Wilson, don't you want to go somewhere and lie down awhile? I'm fine now. Aren't you about ready to crash?"

Wilson frowned, eyeing the other man with forced skepticism. "There you go again," he said. "Making me wonder who the hell you are … and what you did with Gregory House."

The snort he got in return was more in character. "G'wan … go back to your room and play with yourself! Don't you have laundry to do and shirts and neckties to iron? Did you dry out my GameBoy and my iPod and charge my cell phone? Did you clean out my backpack and saddlebags? Did you drink my last Mountain Dew and eat my last candy bar?

"You didn't dump my red necktie, did you?"

Wilson sighed, happy to experience the welcome return of exasperation. "I did all of that," he grumbled, "except do your laundry and iron your shirts. If your shirts were ironed, nobody would know you.

"And no … I didn't throw away the damn red necktie. It hangs from the mirror on the dresser. Why'd you bring it along with you, anyway?"

"I thought you'd have that figured out by now, Wilson." House did not intend to give any concessions. Especially not here and not now.

"Actually," Wilson admitted, "I do need to get on my laptop and let Cuddy know where we are … and tell her about you too. She gave me three weeks off to see that you got home safe, wherever I found you, but from the looks of things, we'll probably need twice that. Okay if I tell her where we are? And what's about to happen with you?"

House turned his tired face back to look at Wilson again. He was beginning to zone out from the double Vicodin dose he was no longer accustomed to taking. "You can tell the freakin' President of the United States for all I care right now," he said slowly.

Wilson knew he was a little fuzzy around the edges, and probably would not remember this conversation in the morning. However, he really needed to let Cuddy know what was going on. It was three days without home base contact, and he had promised to let her know.

"Thanks, House."

"Negative perspiration …" Unwittingly quoting his military father. He was quickly sliding toward sleep.

Wilson called Bill and Bart to tell them they could come back now … House was sleeping. He warned them that his friend's pain had returned at 8:30 p.m., and that he was leaving a vial of Vicodin in the drawer of the bedside table. He asked also that they not withhold the drug from House when he asked for it. They were savvy enough to recognize that an ironclad request lay couched in the simple statement.

James Wilson touched Gregg's tousled hair gently, then stole out of the room and returned to his quarters.

Email Cuddy? Yes. Immediately.

Iron House's ratty shirts?

No.

Damn.

Way!

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