CHAPTER NINE: Demands

House and Wilson are talking. Well, it starts out as a talk, but House knows it's gonna degenerate quickly into the same old argument.

"You don't want a healthy leg," Wilson tells him.

Here we go again, House thinks. Wonder if I can divert him, or if I'm gonna have to listen to the whole speech again.

"If you've got a good life, you're healthy; you've got no reason to bitch, no reason to hate life," Wilson says. By now, House knows the lines by heart; he's amusing himself by repeating them in his mind along with Wilson.

Here comes the part where I get to piss him off…. House looks smugly at Wilson. "Well, here's the flaw in your argument: if I enjoy hating life, I don't hate life; I enjoy it." He watches Wilson's lips grow tight, and he smiles to himself.

"I didn't say it was rational," Wilson spits out. House wonders which analogy Wilson'll use this time to support his argument. This is the only part of the discussion which ever varies; that's a good thing—it keeps House from getting too bored and just tuning Wilson out.

"I had a patient last month who'd lived with cancer for three years. His prognosis was poor from the start, and he'd come to terms with dying. But there I was, telling him that his latest round of radiation had done the trick; we couldn't find any more cancer. And he wasn't happy about it, or even relieved. This unbelievable news depressed him. Not because he wanted to die, but because in all those years of illness, he'd defined himself by his disease. Suddenly, what made him 'him' wasn't real anymore. He was going to have to redefine who he was, and that frightened him."

Okay, my turn; we're back to the script again. "I don't define myself by my leg," House asserts. This lecture's getting old. And dull. Maybe next time, I'll say I do define myself by my leg; that should break his rhythm.

"No, you have taken it one step further. The only way you could come to terms with your disability was to somehow make it mean nothing. So you had to redefine everything. You've dismissed anything physical, anything not coldly, calculatingly intellectual."

Here comes the part where I get angry and go off the rails; this is really getting tiresome. "You don't know what you're talking about!" House shouts at Wilson. "You don't live with this every day; you don't lie in bed at night and pray the pain'll fade just long enough that you can fall asleep and escape it for a few hours!"

"I do live with it every day!" Wilson yells back. "In case it's slipped your mind, I'm the one you dump it all on, because everyone else was smart enough to walk away when it all started!"

As per the routine, House curls his right hand into a fist, and draws it back in preparation for the strike to Wilson's jaw, and—he awakens. Sweating and trembling, he repeats to himself, "A dream; just a dream." He forces his eyes to stay open, and—despite the sudden,sharp pain in his left leg—he whispers aloud, "No morphine." The drug would make him sleep, and if he avoids sleeping he can circumvent the nightmare.

But House is worried. This recurring nightmare has plagued him ever since the breakthrough pain had started several months ago. And since Sunday, when Wilson's treatment of the breakthroughs had proven successful, he's been having to live through the dream almost every time he sleeps. The first few days home, he'd tried to stop it by avoiding sleep, but his body had overruled that. So now he forces himself to awaken before he can carry out the threat to hit his best friend. He's getting closer to it each time, though.

House groans, and pulls his left leg up as the pain increases. It's not quite as sore from the EMG anymore; he's able to ease the spasm a little by massaging it. But the relief lasts only a few seconds, and he bites his lip to keep from crying out. If he makes any noise, Cuddy will hear him, and he suspects that she's planning to ignore his wishes on the morphine. He won't let that happen. He can't.

Cuddy is at her wit's end. She's frustrated and she's angry. House's behavior today is outside her frame of reference for the man; she's used to his circumventing the rules, ignoring the rules. She's even accepted that occasionally, he'll not only bend a rule, he'll break it beyond all recognition. But a sad, serious, reasonable House, well, that's just not someone she can handle. And if she's truthful with herself, she's gotta admit that 'frustrated' and 'angry' aren't nearly as foreign as her other two feelings—her fear and worry for House easily outweigh the first two emotions. It's time to bring in reinforcements.

Wilson's cellphone doesn't even finish the first full ring before he's on the line, asking in a voice fraught with anxiety, "What's the matter?"

Cuddy wishes she could laugh at his assumption, chide him for being such a pessimist. But she can't, so she dives right into what's been happening in his absence, starting with House's refusal to eat and continuing on through the locked door. When she reaches the part about the increased pain, coupled with House's anti-morphine speech, her rapid-fire words are brought to a sudden halt by an explosive expletive from Wilson. She's immediately glad she hadn't mentioned that House had tried to get himself admitted to the hospital; it's dawning on her that Wilson's exhausted, emotional, worried—and driving. Now, along with all the other problems, her outburst was possibly endangering Wilson. What was I thinking? It was selfish and stupid to call him! This could've waited another hour. So she tries to backtrack.

"Hey, listen. I was wrong to bother you with this nonsense right now. I was just… overreacting; it's been a long day, that's all. We can certainly hang in 'til you get here. Umm… how was your lunch?"

Wilson answers her in half-hearted monosyllables, but he seems calmer than he did a few moments ago, and she doesn't want to distract him any more than she's already done. And he says he's close to home, should be there quite soon, in fact. So she pretends that House is calling her to bring him a soda, and hangs up the phone. Then she sits, head in hands, and wishes she were the type of woman who could give in to tears. But she isn't. So she stands, takes a deep breath and a swallow of the cold coffee on the table next to her, and goes to check on House.

She hears it even before she's reached the door; it's the unmistakable sound of a human being in unutterable pain. But as she grabs for the doorknob, it ceases, and she hopes for a wild instant that she'd imagined it. When she sees House, that hope dies.

House is lying entangled in the sheets. He's soaked with sweat; his eyes are red rimmed as he stares at the ceiling, refusing to acknowledge her presence. But she knows he's aware of it, and somehow she also knows he'd heard her in the hall and had willed himself into silence.

She goes quickly to him. As she nears the bed, she notes that he's holding his left leg at an unnatural angle; it looks almost as if he'd fallen and broken it. Cuddy speaks softly to him. "I'm getting the morphine; I'll be right back." Before he can protest, she leaves.

When she returns, he's looking daggers at her, and when she begins to approach, he says in a choked whisper, "Stop. Now." And as vulnerable as he is, somehow his words, his demeanor, force her to freeze.

As Cuddy stands there, her eyes locked with his, she's angry with herself—and with him. That a man so sick, so weak, could still command such power, could make her, even momentarily, ignore her own physician's instincts to provide him relief from his pain, puzzles her. But still she can't ignore the demanding plea. So she simply stands there, holding the syringe, watching him begin to writhe again on the bed.

Cuddy has no idea how long she's stood there; time has stopped during this wordless battle. She's dimly aware of the sound of a door, but she doesn't remove her eyes from the suffering man. So she's startled when an angry voice breaks the eerie silence.

"What the hell is going on in here?" Wilson demands, as he takes in the awful tableau before him.

A/N: As you've probably figured out, House's dream in this chapter is taken from his hallucination in the episode 'No Reason.' As this trilogy takes place prior to that episode, I guess I've created my own backstory, as to why he'd have hallucinated that particular conversation with Wilson in 'No Reason.' mjf