A/N: Please be advised, the following chapter contains a description of child abuse.
14.
Shadows and mist flitted across the transom of House's mind, obscuring his vision and clouding his thoughts.
He hurt so badly. And he was so incredibly tired. All he wanted to do was rest. Why wouldn't they let him sleep?
House shuffled forward toward the darkness, much more familiar to him than the light. Too, it held for him the promise of pain-free slumbers. Just as he was about to become enveloped by the gloom, something or someone jerked him back.
Pain and memory, illusion and truth wrapped round each other, tangling together in a huge knotted cord of experience and dreams. His senses were garbled, like a movie projector running the film backward. His chest was hurting and he had the impression that someone was swearing at him.
But that was no surprise. He'd obviously screwed up . . . again.
"Actions have consequences," his father's voice cut through the din, echoing through his head. "When are you ever going to learn that Greg?"
He could see it. He could see it all.
His father was striding toward him, swinging a two-by-four in his large, calloused hands. Greg looked up into his father's glowering face, into the eyes that were black with rage. But it was a controlled rage that was all too familiar to the boy. His father prided himself on venting his anger upon his son yet never giving away his executions through any tell-tale signs on his Greg's young body.
It was at these times, more than any other, that Greg felt more keenly the isolation of his entire existence, his very surroundings mirroring his loneliness and fear. For as soon as the door leading down to the cellar was closed behind them, Greg was cut off from everything else, not only his mother or any other witnesses to his torture, but also to light, to hope.
Everything drew out slowly, Greg's experience was sharpened like the edge of a knife. For many years afterward, House could still remember exactly the color of the clothes he and his father were wearing, what time of day it had been, the expression on his mother's face as he was led down to the cellar, the look in his father's eyes as he began to lay into him, infinitesimal details surrounding each of these events, distinguishing one from another, standing stark and crystalline forever in his mind's eye.
There came to his ears a familiar humming sound, like an electrical current through high-tension wires. The wood sailed through the air, rotating almost leisurely as it arced toward him. The droning ended abruptly in a loud 'pop' as it made contact with the naked flesh on his back. With an effort, Greg held in the yell and subsequent groan as the accustomed pain shot through him, his flesh stinging at first and then beginning to ache as the capillaries opened and the bruises began to form.
His father always said the beatings were for his own good. But it was hard to think of anything in the world that was good when the welts started to raise all over his arms, legs and body.
After four strikes, Greg fell to his knees. The fifth one knocked him face down into the dirt of the cellar floor. His nose filled with the dank smell of dirt and mold as he tasted the warm metallic flavor of his own blood in his mouth.
He lay there helpless with nothing to do but wait for his father's wrath to eventually wane.
While patience had never been Greg's fortitude, he was a bright enough child to recognize when a situation was completely out of his hands. Full control lay instead in the hands of his outraged father who might go on beating him in the darkness of the cellar until Greg gasped his last shaking breath in this life.
He lay very still, quiet and still, so that his father would stop hitting him with his piece of wood. Greg was playing his own version of possum.
Just as it seemed he was tiring and he was about to let up, his father savagely kicked him, rolling Greg's body over in the dirt. The as yet unblemished front of Greg's body seemed to enrage his father even more, compelling him to take up the two-by-four with renewed vigor, laying it again and again across Greg's chest and ribs.
House's eyes had grown accustomed to the relative dark of the cellar with its single, overhead, unshaded light bulb. Yet his father seemed to be getting harder and harder to see, his outline becoming hazy as if Greg were looking down a long tunnel.
Surely his father hated him. And yet, sometimes his father would take him for a ride in the Jeep or to get ice cream. On those special occasions, he would tousle Greg's thick, almost auburn hair as he'd laugh at something his son said or did.
If only it was one way or the other, not both. The inconsistency of love and hate confused Greg making him tread more cautiously for he was never sure what would set his father off. One day something he did would make his father laugh right out loud and the next, he would be backhanded across the room.
All the while, his mother did nothing. She said she loved him, at times acted like she loved him but in Greg's young mind, when it really mattered, when he needed her most, she would go into another room, putting as much space between herself and the muffled sounds of leather or wood or metal hitting her son's body.
His mother would never interfere on his behalf, abandoning him to his miserable fate as if she never cared for him at all. "You're a lotta trouble. You know that?" she'd said or words to that effect on any number of occasions.
He was a burden, a tiresome, disconcerting element in the House household, forever asking questions, forever doing what he shouldn't, testing, probing, looking for answers, seeking the truth of what was beyond the restrictive family circle of three. Greg was smart and funny and active and clever and curious.
He was six.
Greg was already well versed in the familiarity and despondency of his enfeebled position. Why couldn't they love him, why couldn't anyone love him? What had he done that was so bad?
Perhaps it was nothing he'd said or did. Perhaps it was him, only him after all was said and done. He was bad. He was wrong. He was something less, something that deserved to be kicked and slapped and hit with belts and unyielding pieces of wood. He was a mistake, an accident. Even then he already knew it, felt the truth of it tugging at his chest and forming ice in the marrow of his bones.
That was it. That had to be it. Because even at such a young age, Gregory House had decided that there had to be a reason, a rational explanation for everything. There just had to be.
And him being wrong or somehow an error was just as good a reason as any; the reason he suffered. The reason he didn't, would never deserve love.
The cellar, alive with his father's satisfied grunting as he delivered each blow and the sounds of his mother's hesitant footsteps in the dining room overhead began to drift away, swallowed in the darkness of memory.
House began to come back to himself although the tears from a time long past plagued him in the present. And wherever he was did not seem, at first, to be much of an improvement.
His eyelids fluttered and opened to diffuse lighting and hazy shapes that refused to take form as he strained to focus his vision. He could hear voices and sounds but could make no sense of them.
Crashing pain and fear took hold of his heart and he began to writhe in agony, trying to escape. He closed his eyes again and groaned.
God he needed her, needed to see her even if it was only his drug and pain addled brain creating an illusion in his desperate need for love and reassurance.
He would call to her, lift her name up like a prayer. Even though he was an atheist, she remained the closest thing to heaven a hell bound man like him had ever known.
"Cuddy?" he tried to say but the name remained unsaid. There was something lodged in his throat. He was unable to call to her.
But he had seen her, before he closed his eyes, she had been there. And perhaps she was there still. Hoping against hope, he opened his eyes once more.
He felt a hand on his arm just as a face finally took shape.
But it was not the face he wanted, not the one he'd last seen before he closed his eyes. He only wanted her. Only she could calm him, tell him he would be all right. He would take no one else's word on that save hers.
Arlene looked into House's pain-filled, confused eyes and knew what he needed.
"Hold on Greg. Lisa's coming. She's coming back."
She began stroking his arm to help quiet him as he began to flail about.
"Ssshh," she said in an uncharacteristic attempt to soothe him. "She only just left this moment. She stayed by your side for hours. She never left you."
A nurse quickly entered the room and without delay stepped past Arlene and injected something into House's IV line before the older woman could protest. Almost immediately, House's eyes began to roll up into his head.
"What did you just give him?" Arlene asked her voice tinged with anger.
"Sedative."
"You couldn't have waited a few minutes? You couldn't have waited for my daughter? So he could see her? So she could talk to him? Tell him . . . "
"He was too agitated," the nurse replied, starting to fasten House's arms to the bed with restraints. "Dr. Henreid left strict orders that this patient lie quiet and still."
"MY daughter is this Henreid's boss and by pecking order, yours too. You should have waited!"
As Arlene continued to fume, the nurse, having performed her duties and having finished strapping House securely to the bed, left the room. She passed Cuddy in the doorway who walked in just as House gave one last sigh and closed his eyes again, succumbing to the full effect of the sedative.
Cuddy arrived a moment too late.