Title: Fight Down Height
Mar. 13th, 2011 04:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cosmic_tuesdaysTitle: Fight Down Height
Author: Hannah R. Orlove
Fandom: House, MD
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: House/Wilson.
Word count: 4410
Warnings: None.
Notes: Written forwtf27, prompt #10: Supernatural (powers), and betteronvicodin, AU #56 and Bad!Fic #131. Set in the latter half of the second season, after “Sleeping Dogs Lie.” Thanks to cryptictac, thedeadparrot, and catalase for discussions and deelaundry for beta-reading.
Wilson didn’t nap. It wasn’t that he disliked them – he did in theory, and knew a fair number of people who did in practice – but taking one tended to throw him off for the rest of the afternoon and left him groggier than before he’d taken one. So he just didn’t take any.
When he’d woken up enough to realize he’d been asleep, the most surprising thing was that he didn’t recall falling to sleep in the first place, and moreover, he wouldn’t do it in his office to begin with.
When he opened his eyes, the most surprising thing about the situation became the fact that he was looking down over his office. It overtook the fact that he’d been sleeping by a mile and then some. His back was to the ceiling, his tie dangling down and waving slightly in the breeze from the opened balcony door. Wilson himself wasn’t moving. He was just lying there, if that was the verb for the situation.
His eyes went wide and then clamped shut, all his limbs pulled in close and he wrapped his arms around his legs. Now he was moving a bit, trembling slightly. This didn’t feel anything like a dream. He didn’t have vivid dreams – like naps, he knew other people who had them but he didn’t partake in them himself. The most realistic his dreaming got was having color. He opened his eyes, took in the top of his desk, and shut them again.
There was no good explanation for this. The most realistic one he could think of was that it was a night terror of some kind, but that didn’t explain why the last thing he remembered was checking his e-mail to see if Brown had replied yet, or why he was just floating here, when he’d never had night terrors and hadn’t had a nightmare in years. Realistic, but not good.
He opened his eyes again, taking deep breaths in an attempt to avoid panicking. Getting down would be good, too, but he had no idea how to do that. None of the comic books and cartoons he’d seen as a kid that had people who could fly had ever bothered to explain how to do it. At the time, it hadn’t seemed like such a grievous oversight.
He’d gotten up here, so there had to be a way to get down. Obviously. He wasn’t sure how he was supposed to do that, though. He had a sudden gibbering train of thought that was saying gravity no longer had any hold on him and he’d float out past the atmosphere and suffocate in space. He grabbed for his bookcase and latched onto it to get some kind of anchor and maybe use it to pull himself down. Another part of his mind started yelling at the gibbering bit, saying that if he wasn’t pinned to the ceiling he wouldn’t float away. It was a small amount of comfort that he nonetheless latched onto.
He let go of the bookcase and didn’t move. Floating while staying still. He reached out for the bookcase and managed to pull himself closer to it, though it took more effort than he would have thought. Then again – he could tell from the calmness that this was the second part of his mind talking again, completely cutting off the first part – he was using his arms to pull himself along instead of pushing his body closer to his hand. It made a certain amount of sense.
Swinging his legs under himself, catching his feet on the underside of some of the lower shelves, he managed to get himself back into an upright position. Gripping the shelves tightly, he assessed his options and decided that climbing down would probably be best. It wasn’t like there wasn’t space for him to reach down with his foot or anything.
Jumping off didn’t seem like the wisest thing to do, from what he remembered about equal and opposite reactions combined with the floating from a few minutes ago. So he gingerly stepped off, and when he found he wasn’t floating back up to the ceiling, went off – through the hallway – to find House.
--
Chase couldn’t see anything. It wasn’t as though there was nothing for him to look at; while there were things for him to see – if he reached out he could touch the legs of the chair he’d been sitting in – he was unable to do so. Having fallen down in the middle of the DDX was somewhat less pressing. The rest of his senses were functioning normally, his body telling his mind that everything inside of it was feeling fine. As far as he could tell, there wasn’t anything wrong with his eyes in and of themselves, so it was either some kind of miraculous head trauma that had resulted from hitting his head on the carpet or some kind of drug in his system that caused both blackouts and blindness. He couldn’t think of any offhand, nor could he think of any reason someone would intentionally poison his tea. If House wanted to drug someone, it was either himself or Wilson, and neither Cameron nor Foreman was nasty enough to try something like this.
Closing his eyes didn’t make any difference, but it made him feel a bit calmer about the situation, so he kept them shut while he fumbled around for a chair. There wasn’t a point in staying on the floor any longer than he had to. He could hear Cameron frantically running on and on about her skin, and Foreman trying to calm her down, but not being able to see them, he couldn’t really orient himself to figure out where in the room they were.
“They’re on the far side of the table, where they were sitting before we all blacked out.” He felt the tip of House’s cane tap against his shoulder. “Okay, now that is really nifty.”
“House?”
“There’s this personal-space-shaped bubble of non-visibility around you. It’s an interesting effect. No wonder you’re blind. Are you aware you’re doing anything different? Everyone else in the room is, including yours truly.” This time the tap came from a hand. “Whoa, did you see that? You totally could not see my fingers.”
“This isn’t the time!” Cameron spoke up. “Shouldn’t we be figuring out –”
“Oh, by all means, I’d love to hear a diagnosis and cure for blackouts and mind-reading.”
“Did everyone else faint?” Chase asked, finally getting into the chair.
“Yes.”
“Then –” The low squeak of whiteboard markers started before he’d finished.
“Okay, good, we can rule out infections and environmental causes, so it’s got to be something from the hospital. Chase, if you’re so gung-ho about your skin, talk to Cameron, she won’t shut up about hers.”
“What about –”
Foreman was cut off mid-sentence too. “Good idea, but not a terribly brilliant one – I haven’t eaten anything from the cafeteria in weeks. Neither would you, if you had Wilson cooking for you.” More squeaking. “Ten points to the first person who comes up with a good reason as to why the same apparent stimulus produces such wildly different symptoms.” A sigh. “No, Cameron, I’m not having fun. I am doing this because it is my, and by extension, your job to figure out what’s happened to people. So please, keep your snide remarks to yourself unless you’re using them to couch useful information.” Chase heard her humph. “Okay. Not a bad idea, but Yersin would probably disagree.”
Breathing slowly, he began to tune them out. House had said there was a bubble around him; not that he could feel it. Still, it couldn’t hurt to ask. He reached out over the table and set his hand down. “Is the –”
“Where you touch it, yes.”
Chase nodded. Opening his eyes, he tried to focus in on his memories of the back of his hand. If he ever found whoever came up with that phrase, he’d kick them into next week.
He tried to think of a switch being on in his brain that wasn’t there before, in the same space he thought of when he tried to think of where mental images were. Then he thought of it being off.
At first, the world was flickering and faint, like an old light bulb being turned on, but it quickly snapped back into full illumination, to carry out the metaphor.
“I take what I said back. That is really nifty.”
It was then that Wilson walked in. “Do you have any idea about what’s going on?”
“As a matter of fact, I’ve got it on vinyl, but I can pull it up on iTunes if you’re really jonesing for Motown.” House’s grin faded when he looked down. His fellows followed his gaze to see that Wilson was standing perfectly normally, just elevated a few inches above the carpet.
“Divine intervention?” Chase suggested lightly.
House put that one up on the caveat there would be no ‘holier than thou’ jokes made, “Not unless they’re actually funny.”
--
“Everybody down!”
It was a cliché to say the least, but that phrase was one for a reason: sometimes, people did need to flatten themselves against the floor. This was one of those times. Cuddy didn’t take notice of the mass action, instead focusing on the figure now hunched on the floor in the middle of the clinic. Flames were flickering and dancing all over her body and her scrubs, the smell of burning hair pungent and rich like an old bog. Grabbing the fire extinguisher, Cuddy practically leapt over to Nurse Previn, pulling out the pin and spraying her head-to-toe with the white foam. Discarding the extinguisher, she crouched to check on her. “It’s okay. Relax.” Brenda nodded, her breath becoming more even as soon as Cuddy spoke. “Are you all right?”
“I think I will be…what happened?”
“I’m going to find out,” she promised. Brenda just had superficial burns, nothing requiring any sort of surgery. “Let’s get you to an exam room. Leonard, come and give us a hand.” He did so, moving with a somewhat dazed expression, as though he was perfectly aware of what he was doing but not quite sure why he was doing it. “Take Brenda to exam room one and help her with her burns.” In rapid succession, Matthews was told to contact the psych ward, the patrons were told to stay where they were and remain calm, and the remaining nurses were to help maintain order. Even the toddlers didn’t do anything to contradict her.
As soon as the clinic was stabilized, she went marching through the hallways, fairly pessimistic about what she would find after witnessing Brenda’s handiwork, dispensing orders to the people who came up to her and trying not to pay attention to the weird little buzz in her brain when she gave them out. “Nobody’s leaving until we figure out what’s happened.” She’d decided to check on the operating rooms first, and had found a second patient dead as a result of blacked-out surgeons when Cameron ran up to her, clearly out of breath. “Doctor Cuddy!”
“This had better be good.”
She nodded before delivering the news. “House thinks it’s some kind of pathogen. It probably was released in the hospital, judging by the way that nobody outside it seems to be affected – we made some calls and nobody’s –”
“Keep talking, and follow me.” Cameron nodded and kept going, not missing a beat, continuing on with the theories about what had caused everything. “We don’t have any evidence quite yet, but we drew some blood from a few people and sent it to the lab to see if they can find anything.”
A sudden stab of sympathy passed through her, thinking of all the tests that would have to be done to get to the bottom of this – House would figure it out eventually, she knew him well enough for that, but like normal, it’d be Hell getting there. It was bad enough when he had one patient; she didn’t want to think what he would be like when he had a whole hospital to diagnose. “Remind me to double their bonuses this year.”
“Of course.”
Another OR gave up the answers, prompting Cameron to literally run to deliver the information taken from that situation back to House rather than stay and look at the body.
The girl who turned out to be Patient Zero got the short end of the stick, as this sort of thing could be measured. She’d come in for a routine appendectomy and as soon as the surgeons had made the first incision, her blood had started to evaporate. It hadn’t taken too long, and she’d been under anesthesia, so at least it had been painless. Her newly gaseous blood had seeped out to cover the hospital quickly; judging from when the surgery had been scheduled and when most of the blackouts occurred it’d taken just under an hour to hit everyone.
Five people had died on the operating tables. At least seventeen people besides Brenda were injured as a result of a lack of control over their newly-discovered abilities. She didn’t even want to think about the maternity ward. And more news kept rolling in.
--
Everybody was dealing with the changes that had happened in different ways. Some were soaking up the attention they were getting, from the hospital’s staff and the press alike. Others were doing their best to stay as normal as they could, regardless of the circumstances life had found them in. Foreman was proudly in the latter category. He was doing his best not to dwell on the bizarre turn his life had taken recently and instead focused his attention on the problems at hand.
Thankfully, he’d acclimated quickly, much faster than either Cameron or Chase. He’d gotten the knack of his new skill set after a couple of days, while they were still working on mastering theirs. There didn’t seem to be any correlation between age and acclimation, which made it particularly interesting when it was time to do tests with the kids – there was this one little girl who put everyone else in the hospital to shame. Foreman enjoyed working with her.
It was pretty weird, though, for Foreman to ask House to read his mind from inside an MRI to try to get an accurate scan of his brain while his skills were in use. Nobody was safe from the tests, no matter how much they wanted to be. Even the people who couldn’t actively participate – babies, long-term coma patients – had blood drawn for cultures.
House was still behaving the same way he always had, from making inappropriate and potentially job-threatening comments to hiding from authority figures. Or their representatives.
Foreman felt the familiar flex from phantom muscles as he pushed the door to the morgue open before stepping through it, his hands warm and resting in the lab coat’s pockets. Simple things like opening doors didn’t tire him out anymore but he knew he still had a ways to go before thinking about attempting anything like a chair. Phantom muscles were still muscles and needed to be exercised like them, and could easily be overtaxed. Cameron and Chase had covered for him once before he’d figured that out. But he was learning.
He found House sitting on an autopsy table, reading a four-year-old People magazine with Jennifer Aniston on the cover. He didn’t look up as Foreman came in. “This isn’t the time for gloating.” He flipped a page as Foreman sighed. “Anything new?”
“I wasn’t –”
“You were, and it’s almost as much a pain as listening to people after Cuddy uses her voice on them.” As hard as it had been to talk to House beforehand, now it was verging on impossible – he had even less patience for listening to people, cutting them off or not bothering to listen to what was coming out of their mouths to begin with. While it was entertaining to see him tear a mutually annoying government representative a new one, when he turned his attention onto you all the fun was lost. “Congratulations on getting a handle on your completely voluntary power while those who can’t turn theirs off have to hide with the nice, quiet dead people to get a little peace. Now, is there anything new with the lab results?”
Foreman shook his head as House went back to the magazine. Nonverbal language wasn’t something he could silence by talking first, and helped reestablish a more typical flow of conversation. House nodded a couple of time as Foreman ran over the stats in his head about the lack of manifestations within the obstetrics ward and the general age of proliferation. Six was the earliest they’d found so far.
“And the search for the elusive red gold?”
Patient Zero had been Jackie Fiorello, who had gotten far more attention posthumously than would have been conceivable to her alive. House snorted. “You’ve got to be kidding me. Did they really say that about her?”
When on the receiving end, there wasn’t any way to tell House was listening or looking for anything, but he did get the same glint in his eye he usually got when fitting some more pieces of a case’s puzzle together. Invasion without permission bothered Foreman on general principle. “Get out of my temporal lobe, House.”
He made an amused sound in response. “All you had to do was ask.” He reached over to his bottle and shook out a pill as Foreman began to leave. “Keep at it with the cultures. And get Dawson on antidepressants.” Foreman turned to look at him from the doorway. “He tipped over into suicidal this morning and Psych’s already overclocked as it is. Shove some pills down his throat, that’ll calm him right down.”
Finally deciding to ask the question, “What’s it like, being psychic?”
He shrugged. “It’s just more information. Everybody lies, but now I know what they’re lying about.”
--
“And here we are,” Cameron pointed at the picture on the monitor after a moment of searching, “there’s your son. You can see his heartbeat there.” She stopped, looked to make sure, and blinked.
Leaning forward the better to cut into the sudden silence, Lynn asked, “Is he all right?”
Cameron quickly moved the equipment away before she could get a good look at the image and understand what had been so surprising. “Mrs. Clapp…” Why didn’t House get Chase to do this? “…there have been a number of theories put forth on the different effects exposure to the Fiorello toxins have had on various people, and several of them are in regards to developing fetuses. We’re still looking for evidence to support them, and your baby…” She took a breath, trying to form a good set of words to calm the older woman down and convince her everything would be all right. Her confused, stricken expression dashed all of them.
“He…he’s not going to be normal, is he?”
Cameron stared, not sure how to respond to that. After a moment, she did as best she could and attempted to project a caring, thoughtful image and persona, making eye contact as much as possible: “There’s nothing you need to be concerned about. We’ll be monitoring him closely, and –”
“What’s wrong with him?”
“Nothing’s wrong with him; he’s coming along perfectly fine. All his stats are normal and healthy for someone in his stage of development. We’ll be here for you two every step of the way.”
Nothing Cameron was saying seemed to get through. She was staring off into space, hands resting on her knees. And as much as Cameron wanted to tell her what she knew, as well as what she suspected, she knew that it’d be a bad idea. “I would like to make an appointment with you soon, to draw some blood from your son.”
“Why? You just said he’s fine.”
“He is, but you know the policy. I’m sorry; I don’t like it either.” That the women who’d been exposed had the freedom of choice taken away had gotten as much media attention than Wilson, Brenda, and Rogers’ various skill demonstrations combined – abortions seemed to be the in thing this year for incendiary news.
After making the appointment, seeing Mrs. Clapp off, and sending her blood down to be tested later – the ordinarily tedious lab queues had quickly become unbelievable – she took the stairs back up to Diagnostics to be alone with her thoughts. There was a lot that she could have said, but none of it would have been good to hear, and most of it wouldn’t have made much sense. Lynn didn’t have a medical degree and wouldn’t understand what Cameron had to say to her. Would she really be able to understand what a stir her baby would have once news of him got out?
She hated that she couldn’t simply tell that a naturally occurring, perfectly working bicardiac system would throw so much new information and so many ideas out into the field there’d probably be literal fistfights as to who got to write the first papers. She hated that even if she did tell her everything, disclosure or no, so much of it wouldn’t be understood it wouldn’t be worth it. But that she couldn’t even get the words out to begin with, some kind of sickness in her voice box and mind stopping her from saying the things that Wilson routinely delivered with comfort and ease.
It didn’t hurt, punching the wall – nothing hurt, not when she was ‘on.’ She didn’t get stronger or faster or sturdier; all that happened was nothing could hurt her. Nothing could make her feel anything. She’d tried stabbing herself with a scalpel before she’d learned to turn herself off, she’d been that desperate.
House looked up when she entered his office, removing his now-ubiquitous headphones and sighing at the sight of her dusty right hand. “You know where the spackle is.”
“I’ve got news about the fetal development-exposure theory.” At least with House, talking wasn’t an issue anymore. It was easier to speak her mind when she didn’t need to worry about her voice shaking.
--
House took the scenic route home, making several unnecessary detours to draw out the bike ride. The air was sharp and crisp, a foreshadowing of fall and winter, and there was a smattering of yellow in the trees, but he was more concerned with pulling himself back into his own head than the changing seasons. It was easier to get some privacy when he had something to distract himself, such as music, or a motorcycle ride. He took an extra turn, guaranteeing another twenty minutes before getting home, focusing in on how it felt to swing his body as he turned around the curb, each finger through the gloves as he tightened his grip on the handlebars. Being a psychic was like living with jackhammers going on all the time. You got used to it, but you never could get comfortable.
He knew that technically it was him in everyone else’s head, not them in his, but some days it was difficult to remember that distinction. Today had been especially bad. The public still hadn’t gotten enough of the Fiorello phenomenon – almost, but so close, no bonus points for slant alliteration – and in addition to the regular bedlam that was a well-staffed hospital there was the stress and detached horror from the interviewers. Parts of his brain still felt roasted.
The fewer the people, the easier it was to deal with them. Three was reasonable, if they didn’t start yelling, and one was great, especially if that one knew that he didn’t have to say anything to hold up his end of the conversation. The smell of fresh bread hit him as soon as he opened the door, prompting a satisfied sigh.
“You don’t bake nearly often enough. Think you could try cookies sometime?” He’d made chicken tetrazzini, and if he wanted more baked goods he’d have to buy the ingredients for that himself. “Consider it done. We’ve got flour, right?” Apparently the last batch of pancakes had used up the last of it, and he’d reminded House of that already.
“Oh, Wilson?” A spark of curiosity. “While it’s nice to know your libido’s healthy, could you please not masturbate unless you know I’m asleep? Waking up to your jerking off in the shower throws off my whole day.” Wilson’s double-takes were always entertaining, though this one should probably be a quadruple-take, given that there was one on the inside as well as the outside. “And I’ll admit that it’s flattering so many of your fantasies include me, but it’s somewhat insulting that you thought I wouldn’t find out, and that you didn’t even ask me if I wanted to try some of them out.” He paused for emphasis. “But like I said, it’s flattering.”
“You don’t mind?” It came out almost as a squeak, but House wasn’t listening to Wilson’s voice anyway.
That night, waking up in the small hours to piss, House learned Wilson now slept above the covers – several feet above them, in fact, curled on his side in the air above the bed. He watched for a couple of minutes, still glad he couldn’t hear dreams, before going to empty his bladder.
The next morning, he snuck up on Wilson while he was making French toast. “I take it you’re above the whole sleeping together thing?” A pained groan. “No, that’s never going to get old.”
Four days later, he bestowed a family heirloom upon Wilson, explaining that he’d get more use out of them than anyone else he could think of. The aviator goggles did look kind of silly on him, but they’d work. Motorcycle rides had taught House how many bugs could hit your face at high speeds, and Wilson had abandoned driving to work about the same time that everyone had been let back out into the world. He still did his best to walk along in the air instead of floating around, which was an odd sight but no odder than anything else that could be seen these days.
“You want to race today?”
Wilson grinned as he adjusted his new headgear. “If you’re not afraid of losing.”
His enthusiasm and delight tasted almost as good as the toast.
Author: Hannah R. Orlove
Fandom: House, MD
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: House/Wilson.
Word count: 4410
Warnings: None.
Notes: Written for
wtf27, prompt #10: Supernatural (powers), and betteronvicodin, AU #56 and Bad!Fic #131. Set in the latter half of the second season, after “Sleeping Dogs Lie.” Thanks to cryptictac, thedeadparrot, and catalase for discussions and deelaundry for beta-reading.Wilson didn’t nap. It wasn’t that he disliked them – he did in theory, and knew a fair number of people who did in practice – but taking one tended to throw him off for the rest of the afternoon and left him groggier than before he’d taken one. So he just didn’t take any.
When he’d woken up enough to realize he’d been asleep, the most surprising thing was that he didn’t recall falling to sleep in the first place, and moreover, he wouldn’t do it in his office to begin with.
When he opened his eyes, the most surprising thing about the situation became the fact that he was looking down over his office. It overtook the fact that he’d been sleeping by a mile and then some. His back was to the ceiling, his tie dangling down and waving slightly in the breeze from the opened balcony door. Wilson himself wasn’t moving. He was just lying there, if that was the verb for the situation.
His eyes went wide and then clamped shut, all his limbs pulled in close and he wrapped his arms around his legs. Now he was moving a bit, trembling slightly. This didn’t feel anything like a dream. He didn’t have vivid dreams – like naps, he knew other people who had them but he didn’t partake in them himself. The most realistic his dreaming got was having color. He opened his eyes, took in the top of his desk, and shut them again.
There was no good explanation for this. The most realistic one he could think of was that it was a night terror of some kind, but that didn’t explain why the last thing he remembered was checking his e-mail to see if Brown had replied yet, or why he was just floating here, when he’d never had night terrors and hadn’t had a nightmare in years. Realistic, but not good.
He opened his eyes again, taking deep breaths in an attempt to avoid panicking. Getting down would be good, too, but he had no idea how to do that. None of the comic books and cartoons he’d seen as a kid that had people who could fly had ever bothered to explain how to do it. At the time, it hadn’t seemed like such a grievous oversight.
He’d gotten up here, so there had to be a way to get down. Obviously. He wasn’t sure how he was supposed to do that, though. He had a sudden gibbering train of thought that was saying gravity no longer had any hold on him and he’d float out past the atmosphere and suffocate in space. He grabbed for his bookcase and latched onto it to get some kind of anchor and maybe use it to pull himself down. Another part of his mind started yelling at the gibbering bit, saying that if he wasn’t pinned to the ceiling he wouldn’t float away. It was a small amount of comfort that he nonetheless latched onto.
He let go of the bookcase and didn’t move. Floating while staying still. He reached out for the bookcase and managed to pull himself closer to it, though it took more effort than he would have thought. Then again – he could tell from the calmness that this was the second part of his mind talking again, completely cutting off the first part – he was using his arms to pull himself along instead of pushing his body closer to his hand. It made a certain amount of sense.
Swinging his legs under himself, catching his feet on the underside of some of the lower shelves, he managed to get himself back into an upright position. Gripping the shelves tightly, he assessed his options and decided that climbing down would probably be best. It wasn’t like there wasn’t space for him to reach down with his foot or anything.
Jumping off didn’t seem like the wisest thing to do, from what he remembered about equal and opposite reactions combined with the floating from a few minutes ago. So he gingerly stepped off, and when he found he wasn’t floating back up to the ceiling, went off – through the hallway – to find House.
--
Chase couldn’t see anything. It wasn’t as though there was nothing for him to look at; while there were things for him to see – if he reached out he could touch the legs of the chair he’d been sitting in – he was unable to do so. Having fallen down in the middle of the DDX was somewhat less pressing. The rest of his senses were functioning normally, his body telling his mind that everything inside of it was feeling fine. As far as he could tell, there wasn’t anything wrong with his eyes in and of themselves, so it was either some kind of miraculous head trauma that had resulted from hitting his head on the carpet or some kind of drug in his system that caused both blackouts and blindness. He couldn’t think of any offhand, nor could he think of any reason someone would intentionally poison his tea. If House wanted to drug someone, it was either himself or Wilson, and neither Cameron nor Foreman was nasty enough to try something like this.
Closing his eyes didn’t make any difference, but it made him feel a bit calmer about the situation, so he kept them shut while he fumbled around for a chair. There wasn’t a point in staying on the floor any longer than he had to. He could hear Cameron frantically running on and on about her skin, and Foreman trying to calm her down, but not being able to see them, he couldn’t really orient himself to figure out where in the room they were.
“They’re on the far side of the table, where they were sitting before we all blacked out.” He felt the tip of House’s cane tap against his shoulder. “Okay, now that is really nifty.”
“House?”
“There’s this personal-space-shaped bubble of non-visibility around you. It’s an interesting effect. No wonder you’re blind. Are you aware you’re doing anything different? Everyone else in the room is, including yours truly.” This time the tap came from a hand. “Whoa, did you see that? You totally could not see my fingers.”
“This isn’t the time!” Cameron spoke up. “Shouldn’t we be figuring out –”
“Oh, by all means, I’d love to hear a diagnosis and cure for blackouts and mind-reading.”
“Did everyone else faint?” Chase asked, finally getting into the chair.
“Yes.”
“Then –” The low squeak of whiteboard markers started before he’d finished.
“Okay, good, we can rule out infections and environmental causes, so it’s got to be something from the hospital. Chase, if you’re so gung-ho about your skin, talk to Cameron, she won’t shut up about hers.”
“What about –”
Foreman was cut off mid-sentence too. “Good idea, but not a terribly brilliant one – I haven’t eaten anything from the cafeteria in weeks. Neither would you, if you had Wilson cooking for you.” More squeaking. “Ten points to the first person who comes up with a good reason as to why the same apparent stimulus produces such wildly different symptoms.” A sigh. “No, Cameron, I’m not having fun. I am doing this because it is my, and by extension, your job to figure out what’s happened to people. So please, keep your snide remarks to yourself unless you’re using them to couch useful information.” Chase heard her humph. “Okay. Not a bad idea, but Yersin would probably disagree.”
Breathing slowly, he began to tune them out. House had said there was a bubble around him; not that he could feel it. Still, it couldn’t hurt to ask. He reached out over the table and set his hand down. “Is the –”
“Where you touch it, yes.”
Chase nodded. Opening his eyes, he tried to focus in on his memories of the back of his hand. If he ever found whoever came up with that phrase, he’d kick them into next week.
He tried to think of a switch being on in his brain that wasn’t there before, in the same space he thought of when he tried to think of where mental images were. Then he thought of it being off.
At first, the world was flickering and faint, like an old light bulb being turned on, but it quickly snapped back into full illumination, to carry out the metaphor.
“I take what I said back. That is really nifty.”
It was then that Wilson walked in. “Do you have any idea about what’s going on?”
“As a matter of fact, I’ve got it on vinyl, but I can pull it up on iTunes if you’re really jonesing for Motown.” House’s grin faded when he looked down. His fellows followed his gaze to see that Wilson was standing perfectly normally, just elevated a few inches above the carpet.
“Divine intervention?” Chase suggested lightly.
House put that one up on the caveat there would be no ‘holier than thou’ jokes made, “Not unless they’re actually funny.”
--
“Everybody down!”
It was a cliché to say the least, but that phrase was one for a reason: sometimes, people did need to flatten themselves against the floor. This was one of those times. Cuddy didn’t take notice of the mass action, instead focusing on the figure now hunched on the floor in the middle of the clinic. Flames were flickering and dancing all over her body and her scrubs, the smell of burning hair pungent and rich like an old bog. Grabbing the fire extinguisher, Cuddy practically leapt over to Nurse Previn, pulling out the pin and spraying her head-to-toe with the white foam. Discarding the extinguisher, she crouched to check on her. “It’s okay. Relax.” Brenda nodded, her breath becoming more even as soon as Cuddy spoke. “Are you all right?”
“I think I will be…what happened?”
“I’m going to find out,” she promised. Brenda just had superficial burns, nothing requiring any sort of surgery. “Let’s get you to an exam room. Leonard, come and give us a hand.” He did so, moving with a somewhat dazed expression, as though he was perfectly aware of what he was doing but not quite sure why he was doing it. “Take Brenda to exam room one and help her with her burns.” In rapid succession, Matthews was told to contact the psych ward, the patrons were told to stay where they were and remain calm, and the remaining nurses were to help maintain order. Even the toddlers didn’t do anything to contradict her.
As soon as the clinic was stabilized, she went marching through the hallways, fairly pessimistic about what she would find after witnessing Brenda’s handiwork, dispensing orders to the people who came up to her and trying not to pay attention to the weird little buzz in her brain when she gave them out. “Nobody’s leaving until we figure out what’s happened.” She’d decided to check on the operating rooms first, and had found a second patient dead as a result of blacked-out surgeons when Cameron ran up to her, clearly out of breath. “Doctor Cuddy!”
“This had better be good.”
She nodded before delivering the news. “House thinks it’s some kind of pathogen. It probably was released in the hospital, judging by the way that nobody outside it seems to be affected – we made some calls and nobody’s –”
“Keep talking, and follow me.” Cameron nodded and kept going, not missing a beat, continuing on with the theories about what had caused everything. “We don’t have any evidence quite yet, but we drew some blood from a few people and sent it to the lab to see if they can find anything.”
A sudden stab of sympathy passed through her, thinking of all the tests that would have to be done to get to the bottom of this – House would figure it out eventually, she knew him well enough for that, but like normal, it’d be Hell getting there. It was bad enough when he had one patient; she didn’t want to think what he would be like when he had a whole hospital to diagnose. “Remind me to double their bonuses this year.”
“Of course.”
Another OR gave up the answers, prompting Cameron to literally run to deliver the information taken from that situation back to House rather than stay and look at the body.
The girl who turned out to be Patient Zero got the short end of the stick, as this sort of thing could be measured. She’d come in for a routine appendectomy and as soon as the surgeons had made the first incision, her blood had started to evaporate. It hadn’t taken too long, and she’d been under anesthesia, so at least it had been painless. Her newly gaseous blood had seeped out to cover the hospital quickly; judging from when the surgery had been scheduled and when most of the blackouts occurred it’d taken just under an hour to hit everyone.
Five people had died on the operating tables. At least seventeen people besides Brenda were injured as a result of a lack of control over their newly-discovered abilities. She didn’t even want to think about the maternity ward. And more news kept rolling in.
--
Everybody was dealing with the changes that had happened in different ways. Some were soaking up the attention they were getting, from the hospital’s staff and the press alike. Others were doing their best to stay as normal as they could, regardless of the circumstances life had found them in. Foreman was proudly in the latter category. He was doing his best not to dwell on the bizarre turn his life had taken recently and instead focused his attention on the problems at hand.
Thankfully, he’d acclimated quickly, much faster than either Cameron or Chase. He’d gotten the knack of his new skill set after a couple of days, while they were still working on mastering theirs. There didn’t seem to be any correlation between age and acclimation, which made it particularly interesting when it was time to do tests with the kids – there was this one little girl who put everyone else in the hospital to shame. Foreman enjoyed working with her.
It was pretty weird, though, for Foreman to ask House to read his mind from inside an MRI to try to get an accurate scan of his brain while his skills were in use. Nobody was safe from the tests, no matter how much they wanted to be. Even the people who couldn’t actively participate – babies, long-term coma patients – had blood drawn for cultures.
House was still behaving the same way he always had, from making inappropriate and potentially job-threatening comments to hiding from authority figures. Or their representatives.
Foreman felt the familiar flex from phantom muscles as he pushed the door to the morgue open before stepping through it, his hands warm and resting in the lab coat’s pockets. Simple things like opening doors didn’t tire him out anymore but he knew he still had a ways to go before thinking about attempting anything like a chair. Phantom muscles were still muscles and needed to be exercised like them, and could easily be overtaxed. Cameron and Chase had covered for him once before he’d figured that out. But he was learning.
He found House sitting on an autopsy table, reading a four-year-old People magazine with Jennifer Aniston on the cover. He didn’t look up as Foreman came in. “This isn’t the time for gloating.” He flipped a page as Foreman sighed. “Anything new?”
“I wasn’t –”
“You were, and it’s almost as much a pain as listening to people after Cuddy uses her voice on them.” As hard as it had been to talk to House beforehand, now it was verging on impossible – he had even less patience for listening to people, cutting them off or not bothering to listen to what was coming out of their mouths to begin with. While it was entertaining to see him tear a mutually annoying government representative a new one, when he turned his attention onto you all the fun was lost. “Congratulations on getting a handle on your completely voluntary power while those who can’t turn theirs off have to hide with the nice, quiet dead people to get a little peace. Now, is there anything new with the lab results?”
Foreman shook his head as House went back to the magazine. Nonverbal language wasn’t something he could silence by talking first, and helped reestablish a more typical flow of conversation. House nodded a couple of time as Foreman ran over the stats in his head about the lack of manifestations within the obstetrics ward and the general age of proliferation. Six was the earliest they’d found so far.
“And the search for the elusive red gold?”
Patient Zero had been Jackie Fiorello, who had gotten far more attention posthumously than would have been conceivable to her alive. House snorted. “You’ve got to be kidding me. Did they really say that about her?”
When on the receiving end, there wasn’t any way to tell House was listening or looking for anything, but he did get the same glint in his eye he usually got when fitting some more pieces of a case’s puzzle together. Invasion without permission bothered Foreman on general principle. “Get out of my temporal lobe, House.”
He made an amused sound in response. “All you had to do was ask.” He reached over to his bottle and shook out a pill as Foreman began to leave. “Keep at it with the cultures. And get Dawson on antidepressants.” Foreman turned to look at him from the doorway. “He tipped over into suicidal this morning and Psych’s already overclocked as it is. Shove some pills down his throat, that’ll calm him right down.”
Finally deciding to ask the question, “What’s it like, being psychic?”
He shrugged. “It’s just more information. Everybody lies, but now I know what they’re lying about.”
--
“And here we are,” Cameron pointed at the picture on the monitor after a moment of searching, “there’s your son. You can see his heartbeat there.” She stopped, looked to make sure, and blinked.
Leaning forward the better to cut into the sudden silence, Lynn asked, “Is he all right?”
Cameron quickly moved the equipment away before she could get a good look at the image and understand what had been so surprising. “Mrs. Clapp…” Why didn’t House get Chase to do this? “…there have been a number of theories put forth on the different effects exposure to the Fiorello toxins have had on various people, and several of them are in regards to developing fetuses. We’re still looking for evidence to support them, and your baby…” She took a breath, trying to form a good set of words to calm the older woman down and convince her everything would be all right. Her confused, stricken expression dashed all of them.
“He…he’s not going to be normal, is he?”
Cameron stared, not sure how to respond to that. After a moment, she did as best she could and attempted to project a caring, thoughtful image and persona, making eye contact as much as possible: “There’s nothing you need to be concerned about. We’ll be monitoring him closely, and –”
“What’s wrong with him?”
“Nothing’s wrong with him; he’s coming along perfectly fine. All his stats are normal and healthy for someone in his stage of development. We’ll be here for you two every step of the way.”
Nothing Cameron was saying seemed to get through. She was staring off into space, hands resting on her knees. And as much as Cameron wanted to tell her what she knew, as well as what she suspected, she knew that it’d be a bad idea. “I would like to make an appointment with you soon, to draw some blood from your son.”
“Why? You just said he’s fine.”
“He is, but you know the policy. I’m sorry; I don’t like it either.” That the women who’d been exposed had the freedom of choice taken away had gotten as much media attention than Wilson, Brenda, and Rogers’ various skill demonstrations combined – abortions seemed to be the in thing this year for incendiary news.
After making the appointment, seeing Mrs. Clapp off, and sending her blood down to be tested later – the ordinarily tedious lab queues had quickly become unbelievable – she took the stairs back up to Diagnostics to be alone with her thoughts. There was a lot that she could have said, but none of it would have been good to hear, and most of it wouldn’t have made much sense. Lynn didn’t have a medical degree and wouldn’t understand what Cameron had to say to her. Would she really be able to understand what a stir her baby would have once news of him got out?
She hated that she couldn’t simply tell that a naturally occurring, perfectly working bicardiac system would throw so much new information and so many ideas out into the field there’d probably be literal fistfights as to who got to write the first papers. She hated that even if she did tell her everything, disclosure or no, so much of it wouldn’t be understood it wouldn’t be worth it. But that she couldn’t even get the words out to begin with, some kind of sickness in her voice box and mind stopping her from saying the things that Wilson routinely delivered with comfort and ease.
It didn’t hurt, punching the wall – nothing hurt, not when she was ‘on.’ She didn’t get stronger or faster or sturdier; all that happened was nothing could hurt her. Nothing could make her feel anything. She’d tried stabbing herself with a scalpel before she’d learned to turn herself off, she’d been that desperate.
House looked up when she entered his office, removing his now-ubiquitous headphones and sighing at the sight of her dusty right hand. “You know where the spackle is.”
“I’ve got news about the fetal development-exposure theory.” At least with House, talking wasn’t an issue anymore. It was easier to speak her mind when she didn’t need to worry about her voice shaking.
--
House took the scenic route home, making several unnecessary detours to draw out the bike ride. The air was sharp and crisp, a foreshadowing of fall and winter, and there was a smattering of yellow in the trees, but he was more concerned with pulling himself back into his own head than the changing seasons. It was easier to get some privacy when he had something to distract himself, such as music, or a motorcycle ride. He took an extra turn, guaranteeing another twenty minutes before getting home, focusing in on how it felt to swing his body as he turned around the curb, each finger through the gloves as he tightened his grip on the handlebars. Being a psychic was like living with jackhammers going on all the time. You got used to it, but you never could get comfortable.
He knew that technically it was him in everyone else’s head, not them in his, but some days it was difficult to remember that distinction. Today had been especially bad. The public still hadn’t gotten enough of the Fiorello phenomenon – almost, but so close, no bonus points for slant alliteration – and in addition to the regular bedlam that was a well-staffed hospital there was the stress and detached horror from the interviewers. Parts of his brain still felt roasted.
The fewer the people, the easier it was to deal with them. Three was reasonable, if they didn’t start yelling, and one was great, especially if that one knew that he didn’t have to say anything to hold up his end of the conversation. The smell of fresh bread hit him as soon as he opened the door, prompting a satisfied sigh.
“You don’t bake nearly often enough. Think you could try cookies sometime?” He’d made chicken tetrazzini, and if he wanted more baked goods he’d have to buy the ingredients for that himself. “Consider it done. We’ve got flour, right?” Apparently the last batch of pancakes had used up the last of it, and he’d reminded House of that already.
“Oh, Wilson?” A spark of curiosity. “While it’s nice to know your libido’s healthy, could you please not masturbate unless you know I’m asleep? Waking up to your jerking off in the shower throws off my whole day.” Wilson’s double-takes were always entertaining, though this one should probably be a quadruple-take, given that there was one on the inside as well as the outside. “And I’ll admit that it’s flattering so many of your fantasies include me, but it’s somewhat insulting that you thought I wouldn’t find out, and that you didn’t even ask me if I wanted to try some of them out.” He paused for emphasis. “But like I said, it’s flattering.”
“You don’t mind?” It came out almost as a squeak, but House wasn’t listening to Wilson’s voice anyway.
That night, waking up in the small hours to piss, House learned Wilson now slept above the covers – several feet above them, in fact, curled on his side in the air above the bed. He watched for a couple of minutes, still glad he couldn’t hear dreams, before going to empty his bladder.
The next morning, he snuck up on Wilson while he was making French toast. “I take it you’re above the whole sleeping together thing?” A pained groan. “No, that’s never going to get old.”
Four days later, he bestowed a family heirloom upon Wilson, explaining that he’d get more use out of them than anyone else he could think of. The aviator goggles did look kind of silly on him, but they’d work. Motorcycle rides had taught House how many bugs could hit your face at high speeds, and Wilson had abandoned driving to work about the same time that everyone had been let back out into the world. He still did his best to walk along in the air instead of floating around, which was an odd sight but no odder than anything else that could be seen these days.
“You want to race today?”
Wilson grinned as he adjusted his new headgear. “If you’re not afraid of losing.”
His enthusiasm and delight tasted almost as good as the toast.
