Gentle Knock - Part 28 by zeppomarx ()

Title: A Gentle Knock at the Door, Part 28
Author: zeppomarx
Characters: House, Wilson, Cuddy, Chase and Foreman, and new folks.
Warnings and So On: NC-17 for concepts. H/W friendship (perhaps slash if you wear those kind of goggles)
Summary: A sequel to Priority's Exigencies, which is a sequel to DIY Sheep's The Contract, which has now spawned an incredible number of offshoots. Short version: House is a physical and emotional mess, having been wrongly imprisoned and tortured and all sorts of nasty stuff. It's about what happens next, and how House deals with it.
Timeline: Set nearly a year after the beginning of Exigencies.
Earlier parts here: Part 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 , 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26,
Comments: Be gentle. Flamers begone. Thanks AW, GM and medical guru TD, who says the medicine is okay, but the procedure is messed up. Drama trumps procedure.
Oh, Yeah, the Disclaimer: I certainly don't own House or any of the characters therein, although it would be nice if I did. They belong to David Shore & company. It's just that they waltzed into my head and wouldn't leave until I told their story.

SUMMARY: Testing House's mental status and uncovering a secret.

TEASER: Something From Your Childhood...

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A Gentle Knock at the Door
Part 28

Orthopedist Karen Langley roused House, who was sleeping lightly. Rainie was moaning quietly as she slept next to him, more in her bed now than his, her body turned toward him. Langley would keep an eye on House’s physical condition while Jacey Liu administered the mental status test.

“Okay. Where are you? What’s the date?” Jacey asked the questions matter-of-factly.

House looked around with his good eye.

“PPTH. Room 304. Not sure about the date—should be somewhere around the 25th.”

“Good. Now, who’s this?” She jotted down some notes on a clipboard and pointed to Wilson, who was standing next to her.

“The Good Witch of the North,” he said.

Wilson smiled, pleased that House was verbal enough—and quick enough—to make jokes.

“What’s thirteen plus eight?”

“Math? You didn’t tell me math was involved.”

She looked at him without comment.

“Okay, be that way.” He paused. “Twenty-one.”

“Fine. Now, I’m going to give you a list of words and I want you to repeat them back to me. Try to remember them, because I’m going to ask you again later.”

/>“Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know the drill. Just give me the list.”

“Car. Man. Blue. Picture. Box. Sofa. Toes. Elephant. Flower.”

He took a breath and glared at her. He left side hurt just under his rib cage, where he’d fallen on his crutch. Must be some bruising there.

“Car. Man. Blue. Picture… uh… Box. Toes—no, that’s not right. Sofa. Toes. Elephant. Flower. Did you purposely choose words with letters I’m having trouble saying?”

“No, not really. Just worked out that way. Now, tell me about something that happened in the last two days.”

House had to think about this. He didn’t really want to go into the nightmare scenario or the breakdown with Rainie. And most of the rest of the time he’d been asleep.

“Anything?” she asked.

“I’m thinking,” he said crossly. “How about a visit from Roberts and Cuddy the Wonder Klutz?”

Wilson hadn’t heard about this, but from the description, he wished he’d been there.

“So what happened?”

House rolled his eyes. Did he have to tell them he’d flinched at her sudden movement and spilled Rainie’s eggs? Yep, guess so. It was preferable to describing his emotional fit.

“Grrrr… all right… Cuddy moved suddenly. I knocked Rainie’s breakfast off her tray. Eggs went all over.”

“How about something from your childhood?”

For some reason, the only thing he could think of was something he was quite sure he didn’t want to talk about.

/>“This is ridiculous,” he said instead.

Wilson raised an eyebrow, wondering what House was hiding.

“No, it isn’t, and you know it.”

“Aw, mom. Do I have to?” Maybe if he stalled enough, he could think of something else.

“Yes, Junior, you do.”

Something. Anything but that. But nothing was coming to him.

“If you must know…” He gave her one more chance to change the subject. She wasn’t biting.

“Yes, I must.”

He glanced at Wilson, who had never heard about this. Then he looked down at the blanket. Finally, bitterly, he spat it out.

“My mother was visiting my aunt Sarah in Trenton,” he mumbled. “My dad decided that what an incorrigible youth like me needed was strict discipline, more discipline than he would dare try around Mom. I guess I must have mouthed off to him.” And then, almost inaudibly: “He put me in an ice bath.”

Wilson winced. He’d always suspected something there.

Jacey Liu didn’t show her feelings. Most people remembered things like a birthday party, being in a play at school or getting a puppy. Might as well get in a little talk therapy while she was here.

“Was there more?”

“Yes,” he said quietly, looking down. After a pause, he continued. “While I was still wet, he locked me out of the house and made me spend the night outside. I slept in the yard. No blankets, no tent, no sleeping bag. It was a dark, cloudy, windy, moonless—and bitterly cold—night.”

Hiding her reaction to this story, Jacey continued. “How old were you?”

House looked down. “I’d just turned six,” he muttered.

Shit, thought Wilson. How often did this kind of thing happen to him? John House’s words on the phone came back to him. You know he did something to deserve it. He’s never been able to control himself. He’s always been a troublemaker. No wonder he hates his father.

Rainie lay still on the bed, but not asleep. She’d woken up when Jacey started questioning House. She’d considered letting them know she was awake, but not now. Now was not a good time.

She thought back to her own childhood, to her own father’s attempts at discipline. His abuse was more mental than physical, but she suspected the cause was similar—an attempt by both fathers to control something they didn’t—couldn’t—understand.

What’s the matter with you? Why can’t you just fit in? Do you have to be so weird? Why can’t you just… be normal? But she couldn’t. She couldn’t fit in and she couldn’t be “normal.” Insanely bored in school, she hung out with the artists and the hoods, alternating between fits of creativity and bouts of getting in trouble, sometimes fairly serious trouble, like the time she and a couple of friends were caught breaking into the high school science lab at 1 a.m. They spent the night in jail. The fact that they just wanted to know if you really could pick a lock with a hairpin didn’t seem to impress the night court judge.

Her insatiable curiosity and loathing of boredom got her into journalism. Why did people behave the way they did? What stories did they have to tell? What makes one person capable of great good, and another of great evil? What do people strive for? How do they make the most of their lives? And on a personal level, how do you give your own life meaning? Even more to the point, what happens when the child is infinitely more intelligent than the parents? Not as in an “I’m 18 and I know everything and old people are stupid” kind of way, but as in quantifiably, undisputedly more intelligent.

It had taken her years—decades—to figure out that she had value, that in actuality, she was smarter—a lot smarter—than either of her parents. Eventually she’d realized that her father felt threatened by her intelligence and creativity; he had no use for anything that wasn’t strictly proscribed by convention. He felt safe within the box of his own limited imagination, and he wanted everyone else to live in that box, too. If you didn’t think, look, behave as everyone else did, you were a freak. In his eyes, she was a freak. Nothing she ever did was right. And how could she find meaning in life if she was a freak?

As she got older and more self-assured, she’d felt a little bit sorry for her father. He was trapped in a limited world and he’d never break free of it. She couldn’t help the fact that she had been born with considerably better brains than he had, and on some level she empathized with his anger and frustration that she hadn’t turned out “normal,” like everyone else. Certainly her life would have been easier if she had.

So she made her own meaning, finding other freaks—like-minded bright, creative, interesting friends—and chiseled out a career for herself where she could use her brains and at least some of her talents. Even at the Times, she was often brighter than those around her, although her own insecurities led her to believe the opposite. The combination of her intelligence, talent and insecurity was off-putting, and as a result, she didn’t have that many close friends.

Eventually, after meeting Jeff in her 30s and giving birth to Evie, she found a measure of peace, both with herself and with her life.

Until she had become obsessed with the case of the world-famous doctor accused of murder. It was just her kind of story. What made someone that talented and well-known snap? How could someone whose profession was based on the idea of “First, do no harm” beat a woman to death for no apparent reason?

As she immersed herself in the story, anomalies began to show up. Rainie Adler didn’t like anomalies. They bugged her. She couldn’t let them go. And these were pretty major anomalies.

Dr. House’s personality, for example. Wildly eccentric and shockingly brilliant, he was, to some, an arrogant jerk who just happened to be good at solving medical puzzles but who had no interest in helping people. But a few of his former patients described a different man, one who gave them moments of intense compassion, illuminating insight and deep, almost overwhelming empathy. Although no one doubted his brilliance, many complained about his behavior, and a few talked about the demons that seemed to stalk him and the pain that consumed him.

The real incongruities came not from his basic personality but from the fact that he changed so dramatically during the year prior to his arrest. He became more and more withdrawn and jumpy, but somehow less irritable. He showed up to work less and less, and when he did, he often had injuries—a bruise here, a broken finger there, all blamed on accidents or fights. He lost a noticeable amount of weight. After a nasty public blowup, he stopped talking to his best friend. He became more quiet, more introverted. His intense blue eyes dulled, which was attributed by many to his drug use, and he seemed tired all the time. And then there was his behavior after the murder. He never actually admitted he’d killed her. He just didn’t deny it. Some said he seemed almost relieved to be going to prison.

She puzzled over the mystery of Greg House, couldn’t stop thinking about it. Was this someone who was slowly going insane, as had been suggested? Or was there something else?

Late one night, when she couldn’t let it go, she sat at her desk, the one right next to Evan Schuster’s, methodically building a rickety tower out of paperclips on a magnetic base, staring into space and teasing at the puzzle of Greg House. Behind her, she heard a couple of other reporters talking about that social services case, the one where the foster parents had killed the little girl.

“How could the teachers not notice?” Steve Lantz was saying. “She was losing weight. She kept showing up to school with bruises, and she became more and more withdrawn, but she started every time she heard a loud noise.”

Cynthia Alvarado agreed. “She seemed lethargic and her attendance became so irregular. How could they not figure it out?”

Rainie felt as if someone had jolted her brain with electricity. The anomalies suddenly made sense. In fact, they made so much sense she was stunned that she hadn’t seen it before. This wasn’t a man slowly going crazy. This was a man being systematically abused.

That inspirational, flashing, eureka moment—the moment she had her epiphany about Greg House—forever altered her. In fact, it all but destroyed her.

Not going there, she thought, and yanked herself back to the present.

While she had been wandering down this twisting lane of contemplation, the questions had continued.

“Name the last five presidents.”

“Bush Bush Carter Clinton Reagan.”

Jacey hesitated. Technically, he was correct. “Uh… yes. Could you give them to me in order?”

“I did give them to you in order. I gave them to you in alphabetical order. If you wanted chronological order, you should have said so. Would you like them in reverse order? Alphabetical, I mean. Reagan Clinton Carter Bush Bush.” This was getting annoying.

Wilson laughed. House looked at him and his one good eye seemed to gleam.

Jacey smiled. The fact that he was this quick was actually a very good sign.

“Give me the list again—not the presidents, the other one. Then we’ll do a couple more and quit for the day.”

House thought about it. He wasn’t sure he could do it. Damn.

“Umm… Car. Man. A color—blue. Box. Toes. Elephant. Flower. I missed some—not sure what.”

“Close. No cigar,” said Jacey, making some notes.

“Now let’s see how you process information. Close your eyes and put out your left hand.”

House started to do so, closing his eyes. That’s odd, he thought, suddenly not sure which was his left hand. Wait. It had to be the one on the side that wasn’t bandaged. Otherwise they wouldn’t have asked me to do it. He extended his left hand, palm up. His hand shook badly.

“I’m putting something in your hand. See if you can identify it.”

She gave him a tiny oblong item that wobbled unsteadily in his trembling hand.

He rolled it around for a moment, feeling with his fingers. “My bestest friend,” he said.

Wilson laughed aloud.

Jacey looked confused until Wilson explained.

“He got it. Not just that it was a pill, but that it was Vicodin.”

Without warning, House popped the pill into the left side of his mouth and swallowed. Karen Langley looked at him as if he were crazy.

“What’s the matter with you?!” she said. “You’re on a morphine drip. You can’t just take Vicodin whenever you feel like it!”

House smiled a crooked, wicked smile. “I can do whatever I want,” he said. “What are you going to do—make me sit in an ice bath and sleep outside?”

Wilson gasped. Clearly, despite everything, House had not lost either his evil sense of humor or his self-destructive streak. Was this is a direct reaction to opening up about his father, or just a typical (for the old days, anyway) House moment?

Langley reached for the drip and adjusted the dose so he’d get less morphine until the Vicodin had worked its way through his system.

“We’ll watch you for a while to see if you have any CNS or respiratory distress,” she said, clearly annoyed with him.

“Of course you will,” said House, gauging the mood in the room. “You all know perfectly well that if I’d wanted to off myself, I’d have palmed the pill—plus a few more—and waited till you were all gone. How stupid do you think I am? Setting myself up for a potentially dangerous drug interaction while in a hospital and in front of three physicians I handpicked myself. I’m not that dumb.”

Not by far you’re not, thought Jacey. “So why’d you do it?” she asked. “If you knew we’d be here to keep an eye on you, why did you take that pill?”

House peered at her out of his good eye. “Why not?” he answered.

“Not good enough,” said Jacey.

He attempted to shrug his shoulders, managing to raise only the left and wincing at the attempt to raise the right.

“I wanted to get high,” he offered. People generally believed that one.

“Try again.”

He glared at her. She was going to spoil all his fun. Interesting, he thought. Usually, people left it alone, buying the idea that he wanted to get stoned.

“I wanted to see what you’d do,” he said finally, partly because he was getting tired of this game, but also because it was true.

Jacey found this verbal sparring reassuring. For someone who’d had the life nearly beaten out of him more than once to make jokes about being punished and committing suicide—not to mention the fact that he was actively challenging them, which, given his experiences, should be exactly the kind of thing he’d avoid—showed an interesting level of emotional growth and perspective. More to the point, it meant that he really trusted everyone in the room. House wouldn’t have done this a month ago.

Beside him, Rainie smiled. What an interesting, provocative man, she thought. She decided this might be a good time to “wake up.” She stretched and opened her eyes, propping herself up into a sitting position.

“Hi, Rainie,” said Jacey, noticing that she seemed much less fearful now that House was present.

“Hi. What’s up?”

“We’re just checking Dr. House out to make sure his brain’s working all right,” replied Jacey, wording it simply because she wasn’t sure yet how much Rainie was capable of understanding.

“It sounds to me like his brain is working just fine,” said Rainie, unexpectedly. “At least until that Vicodin kicks in. His psychological stability, on the other hand, is a whole different matter.”

House jerked his head toward her in delight, the sudden movement making him grimace with pain. “Uhhh! Ohww!” he said, slowly turning his head back to a forward-facing position. He bit his lip.

Jacey stared at her. This was the most she’d heard Rainie speak so far. And it was the first time she’d gotten a sense of the personality underneath the fear.

Karen Langley shook her finger at House. “I told you to lie still!” she said.

Wilson watched the tableau with curiosity. This is going to be interesting, he thought. Rainie may actually be able to keep up with House mentally. No wonder they’re getting along so well.

“Let’s finish this up. You’re doing fine—as if you didn’t already know that.”

“Okay. What’s next? Numbers in my palm? The smell of Wilson’s aftershave?”

“Let’s try this one. I think we’ve figured out that your mind is working okay, at least for now. Let’s make sure the rest of you is, too. Put your left thumb on your right ear and stick out your tongue.”

This one wasn’t so easy.

Hmmm, thought House. Not sure I can do it. He thought about it a long time, working it out in his head before actually trying it. First, he had to figure out once more which was his left hand. He thought through the bandaged versus un-bandaged question, catching the glance that Karen Langley threw to Jacey Liu, the one that Wilson picked up on. Dammit, he thought. Now they’re going to put me under a microscope. Maybe, he hoped, it was just the combo of drugs dulling his ability to send messages from his brain to his body.

He didn’t notice that Rainie had also seen the glance among the other doctors.

Very slowly, after what seemed like minutes, he stuck out his left thumb and cautiously crossed his chest with it and then aimed upward toward his right ear. He missed and poked himself in his bandaged jaw. He eased the quivering hand upward until he found his ear. Then he stuck his tongue out at Wilson. He knew that wasn’t the way it was supposed to go—he was supposed to stick his tongue out while moving his hand to his ear, but he hoped they wouldn’t notice.

They noticed.

Possible neurological problems, thought Wilson, Langley and Liu.

Uh-oh, thought House, seeing the looks on their faces.

Not good, thought Rainie, watching closely. I bet it was supposed to be easier than that.

“That’ll be it for now,” said Langley, as if nothing had happened. “You try to get some rest. I’ll send in a nurse to keep an eye on you. Rainie, do you need something to eat? Should we send someone in with food for you?”

Yes, she realized, she was hungry. “Sure,” she replied, “as long as it isn’t scrambled eggs.”

NEXT: It Looks a Little Odd…

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