Title: Fit Us Right
Mar. 13th, 2011 04:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cosmic_tuesdaysTitle: Fit Us Right
Author: Hannah Orlove
Fandom: House MD
Pairing: House/Wilson
Rating: PG-13
Notes: Set in this ficverse, during House’s time in Mayfield. Meant fordeelaundry as a birthday present, and apologies for finishing it so late. Thanks to nightdog_barks for beta-reading. Title from the song “Country Feedback” by R.E.M.
The thing about chronic pain, the absolute bitch of it, was that it was chronic. It was always there, usually more and sometimes less depending on the seasons and the weather and the drugs, but less was always more than none. There was never none of it. And the only way to get as little of it as possible was better living through chemistry, which just wasn’t on the table right now. Just pain. More and less, then more and even more and then finally too much, goddamn his leg!
House dropped the tray and fell to the floor, curling up before he hit it, clutching his thigh, hissing and moaning through his teeth. Everything was so sharp – the cold tiles, the fabric against his skin, the air shaking against him. It hurt so much he couldn’t hear any of them, just the sounds they were shouting. He whimpered, goddamn it hurt, reached out and grabbed the nearest person, an orderly he didn’t know, “Please. It hurts, please.”
“Who –”
“My leg,” he whispered, too hurt to speak fully. “The drugs, I need my leg, I need the drugs.” The orderly crouched down, looked around at the rest of the room, looked back down at House when he gripped harder, “Please help me.”
“Am I talking to House?” The question made so little sense House had to take a full moment to wonder why he’d asked.
“Of course it’s me, who else is this? Are you listening, I need the drugs –”
“House, I’m talking to Alexis. Alexis.” House didn’t know what that meant, reached out and then blinked, that wasn’t his hand, it was the wrong shape and his arm wasn’t his and – and his leg didn’t hurt here, not right here in the kitchen with the other patients and the staff, he could feel it was Alexis-nurse-nothouse in the body and him in her head. “House, we’ll get you the drugs.”
And then he crashed back into himself: back into his head but still in hers, curled up in bed and hitting the wall of his little cell with his own fist and curled up and clutching the orderly’s hand in the kitchen with Alexis’ when he’d borrowed so deep into her she wasn’t in herself right now. He hurt there and not here but he always hurt, and he looked back up at Tom who wasn’t wearing a tag but always knew his name, he heard Tom’s fear biting all over him, “Tom, please.”
“People are coming.” And they were, Tom said it in the kitchen and there were two doctors running down the halls and bursting into House’s room. He looked up from the bed and there was the syringe, a beautiful needle coming to give him a kiss, and he shuddered on the kitchen tiles in Alexis’ small little body when it jabbed his arm in his room and he sighed in Tom’s arms, unclenching, uncurling.
“Thank you,” he whispered, falling limp, falling all the way back into himself, smiling at the doctor in the tiny room.
-
He honestly didn’t know why everyone insisted on talking. He could hear them all just fine, and he knew they all knew that.
“Use your words,” Nolan reminded him, fingers crossing over his lap.
House glared, trying to explain one more time why –
“With your mouth, please.”
He didn’t have to, and really didn’t want to.
“I know you find it easier to do otherwise, but it’ll be best for me if I hear you speak.”
“If they’d just talk in line, I know they can’t but –” He was doing it now, just great, wonderful. House glared out the window at the forcibly serene garden before trying again. “If people just said what’s on their minds, maybe not the way it’s there but in line with what it is, I’d be that much happier to meet them halfway.”
“I’m under the impression there’s very little which makes you happy.” And that was true, but – oh. House looked at Nolan who wasn’t smiling but had everything set up straight in his mind, and he remembered the man was also in the business of being lied to.
-
As it turned out, former insane asylums made for great mad scientist labs, ready-made with spare lab coats. It was a running joke that the President saw too many scary movies as a kid. No matter the reason, Executive Order one-three-four-three-six was on the record to declare Mayfield the off-site center for research into the Fiorello Phenomenon, the gift that kept on giving. Once Princeton’s quarantine was lifted, everything got shunted over here. It’d taken House a while to follow everything, but he’d gotten here all right.
His ninth day here, he’d been riding low on morphine and hiding in a groundskeeper out front when the bi-monthly federal liaison drove up, the shock of the license plates dumping enough information so that he shot his way over to the offices where people that knew about genetics and chemistry were preparing briefs and PowerPoint slides. He hung around there, going from person to person, until it was time for his afternoon shot and he couldn’t go anywhere.
Weaponizing it made less sense than trying to perfect it, but if sanguine evaporation was the only way to distribute then recruitment was their best option. Recruitment and treatment. Recruitment, treatment, glossy magazine covers, entire issues of leading medical journals devoted to the subject – journals that people bought to see how their relatives and loved ones were doing when access and contact were cut off for the duration.
-
Jeff was a lawyer who’d been in the clinic on the wrong day at the wrong time and doomed himself to a life spent alone without touching anyone unless he wanted to shatter their brain; he was in Mayfield trying out therapists as surrogate friends. Prostitutes would be cheaper. Lindsay, who’d moved back to Arizona as soon as she’d been able and tried to cope with talking to animals through vegetarianism, just gave birth to a girl who, going by what the glands in her mouth made, could probably melt someone’s eyes out of their head as soon as she got the muscle control for spitting. They were both in Mayfield since she felt guilty about carrying to term; House knew telling her she wasn’t alone in that wouldn’t help. Cary had been a typical phlebotomy lab intern who couldn’t get within twenty feet of any lab tubes he didn’t want freezing anymore; he was also trying out meds.
House took his pills and told the doctors what they needed to know like a good little patient. Sometimes they did their job too well, sometimes not well enough. When he talked to Nolan, he always remembered to use his mouth, and when he talked to the team assigned his case – he didn’t let himself linger on how that felt to say – he made sure he didn’t forget anything. Cooperation wasn’t in his nature and wasn’t something that came easily even with practice, but he knew what he was working towards and used that to keep going.
Princeton had been for preparation; Mayfield was for crisis management. There was a difference.
Two people left and three came in, six were gone after a month and four arrived to fill the beds, in and out like a brothel except without the fun. Nobody who was in Mayfield wanted to be. Some of them wanted to get out, and some didn’t, since it was better for them here than anywhere else.
He didn’t like Cary, bubbly puppy of a guy that he was, but he liked talking to him anyway. When he got close enough, it was easy to hear how it felt to knit ice and snow together, hooking and looping the water and shifting them just enough. Even if he wasn’t doing it on purpose. He couldn’t stop it, the way Wilson couldn’t, and like Wilson, didn’t want it to stop – he just wanted less of it so he could go back to what he’d been doing.
“Just enough less,” he’d said with a small smile, the most he could manage with how tired his new strain of meds made him.
House got his meds tweaked to work with his painkillers, Jeff’s got his poked at with his antidepressants, Eleanor’s with her birth control, Heather with her ACE inhibitors. Cary just took them straight – about the only lucky thing he had in this mess. Not everyone could shut off what they did on their own, and not everyone wanted it on every second. Even Wilson lay down sometimes.
Everyone knew the important part was being able to get up again.
-
“It’s different,” he told Nolan. “It just is.”
“Not being able to hear them, but with the capacity to do so?”
Something like that. “Yeah.”
“The goal of your time here…”
“Bottles in front of me or frontal lobotomies, I know.”
Nolan getting angry sounded exactly like guitar strings snapping. “To see you functional in society again.”
“That doesn’t mean the same thing,” House snapped.
“And if you could meet us halfway on that, we might have more success.”
-
About the only good thing about the forced quarantine was the limited human contact – that, and the people he was allowed to interact with all had some idea how to deal with him. He didn’t leave his room much, no, scratch that, he didn’t move his ass out of his room too often, but when he did, most of the bodies he came across in hallways and offices were occupied by people who’d been briefed on his particular condition and did their best to accommodate. Even if it was stuff like the nurse that gave him his morning shots playing “Hey Hey Kiss Him Goodbye” in his head on an infinite loop so House couldn’t hear what he was thinking underneath that. The orderly who changed his sheets went through those old Scots-Irish ballads with a thousand verses.
Wilson used Sondheim.
Some of the ones here didn’t bother hiding anything and kept their mouths shut and let him in to hear what they’d otherwise have said out loud. That worked well enough that House settled on resenting instead of hating. Three of the doctors tried to be honest and keep everything that came out of their mouths in line with what was in their heads, and that was so comical – the idea of it, that they’d think it would work, wrong on so many levels – it was almost funny enough for him to smile. Just because they weren’t thinking it up top didn’t mean it wasn’t around the corner or right underneath. After all, it wasn’t like he wouldn’t have gone looking for it if they hadn’t screamed there was something else going on in the first place, the way they’d drawn in their hands or flicked their eyes away.
Trial and error, guess again, learn from your mistakes. That’s how discoveries were made and diagnosis puzzled out, that’s how he treated patients and saved their lives, that’s how they treated him now. One idea after another, throwing chemicals into his body to see what stuck. They tried to figure out how to make him stick inside himself but nothing worked for that, and he didn’t want to think about what’d happen to him if it did – stuck in the cold walls of his body and the tiny prison of his head.
-
House had gotten used to nighttime waking a long time ago, before, even before his leg. He didn’t try fighting it anymore, and these days knew to find a security guard on patrol outside or a janitor working nights to help him pass the time. He’d learned how to ride along without them figuring out they had a passenger on his second try; he always was a fast learner. Depending on what they’d tried that day, sometimes there was enough in his system to make sure he couldn’t get out of his room. Those nights were the worst. It wasn’t quiet, it was silent. There was nothing.
He hated giving into them when he wasn’t trying to fall asleep, but on those silent nights he let fantasy take over. When he did, it was always playing with the idea of waking up to see Wilson at his third-floor window. Smiling softly, all dressed for high skies, just waiting there for House to open it – and the fantasy part here was there wasn’t a grate bolted to the wall, just a regular glass window – and hold him tight and take him up where it was just the two of them. Not silent, just quiet, a little island in the sky.
Like Cary said, sometimes he wanted just enough less.
Author: Hannah Orlove
Fandom: House MD
Pairing: House/Wilson
Rating: PG-13
Notes: Set in this ficverse, during House’s time in Mayfield. Meant for
deelaundry as a birthday present, and apologies for finishing it so late. Thanks to nightdog_barks for beta-reading. Title from the song “Country Feedback” by R.E.M.The thing about chronic pain, the absolute bitch of it, was that it was chronic. It was always there, usually more and sometimes less depending on the seasons and the weather and the drugs, but less was always more than none. There was never none of it. And the only way to get as little of it as possible was better living through chemistry, which just wasn’t on the table right now. Just pain. More and less, then more and even more and then finally too much, goddamn his leg!
House dropped the tray and fell to the floor, curling up before he hit it, clutching his thigh, hissing and moaning through his teeth. Everything was so sharp – the cold tiles, the fabric against his skin, the air shaking against him. It hurt so much he couldn’t hear any of them, just the sounds they were shouting. He whimpered, goddamn it hurt, reached out and grabbed the nearest person, an orderly he didn’t know, “Please. It hurts, please.”
“Who –”
“My leg,” he whispered, too hurt to speak fully. “The drugs, I need my leg, I need the drugs.” The orderly crouched down, looked around at the rest of the room, looked back down at House when he gripped harder, “Please help me.”
“Am I talking to House?” The question made so little sense House had to take a full moment to wonder why he’d asked.
“Of course it’s me, who else is this? Are you listening, I need the drugs –”
“House, I’m talking to Alexis. Alexis.” House didn’t know what that meant, reached out and then blinked, that wasn’t his hand, it was the wrong shape and his arm wasn’t his and – and his leg didn’t hurt here, not right here in the kitchen with the other patients and the staff, he could feel it was Alexis-nurse-nothouse in the body and him in her head. “House, we’ll get you the drugs.”
And then he crashed back into himself: back into his head but still in hers, curled up in bed and hitting the wall of his little cell with his own fist and curled up and clutching the orderly’s hand in the kitchen with Alexis’ when he’d borrowed so deep into her she wasn’t in herself right now. He hurt there and not here but he always hurt, and he looked back up at Tom who wasn’t wearing a tag but always knew his name, he heard Tom’s fear biting all over him, “Tom, please.”
“People are coming.” And they were, Tom said it in the kitchen and there were two doctors running down the halls and bursting into House’s room. He looked up from the bed and there was the syringe, a beautiful needle coming to give him a kiss, and he shuddered on the kitchen tiles in Alexis’ small little body when it jabbed his arm in his room and he sighed in Tom’s arms, unclenching, uncurling.
“Thank you,” he whispered, falling limp, falling all the way back into himself, smiling at the doctor in the tiny room.
-
He honestly didn’t know why everyone insisted on talking. He could hear them all just fine, and he knew they all knew that.
“Use your words,” Nolan reminded him, fingers crossing over his lap.
House glared, trying to explain one more time why –
“With your mouth, please.”
He didn’t have to, and really didn’t want to.
“I know you find it easier to do otherwise, but it’ll be best for me if I hear you speak.”
“If they’d just talk in line, I know they can’t but –” He was doing it now, just great, wonderful. House glared out the window at the forcibly serene garden before trying again. “If people just said what’s on their minds, maybe not the way it’s there but in line with what it is, I’d be that much happier to meet them halfway.”
“I’m under the impression there’s very little which makes you happy.” And that was true, but – oh. House looked at Nolan who wasn’t smiling but had everything set up straight in his mind, and he remembered the man was also in the business of being lied to.
-
As it turned out, former insane asylums made for great mad scientist labs, ready-made with spare lab coats. It was a running joke that the President saw too many scary movies as a kid. No matter the reason, Executive Order one-three-four-three-six was on the record to declare Mayfield the off-site center for research into the Fiorello Phenomenon, the gift that kept on giving. Once Princeton’s quarantine was lifted, everything got shunted over here. It’d taken House a while to follow everything, but he’d gotten here all right.
His ninth day here, he’d been riding low on morphine and hiding in a groundskeeper out front when the bi-monthly federal liaison drove up, the shock of the license plates dumping enough information so that he shot his way over to the offices where people that knew about genetics and chemistry were preparing briefs and PowerPoint slides. He hung around there, going from person to person, until it was time for his afternoon shot and he couldn’t go anywhere.
Weaponizing it made less sense than trying to perfect it, but if sanguine evaporation was the only way to distribute then recruitment was their best option. Recruitment and treatment. Recruitment, treatment, glossy magazine covers, entire issues of leading medical journals devoted to the subject – journals that people bought to see how their relatives and loved ones were doing when access and contact were cut off for the duration.
-
Jeff was a lawyer who’d been in the clinic on the wrong day at the wrong time and doomed himself to a life spent alone without touching anyone unless he wanted to shatter their brain; he was in Mayfield trying out therapists as surrogate friends. Prostitutes would be cheaper. Lindsay, who’d moved back to Arizona as soon as she’d been able and tried to cope with talking to animals through vegetarianism, just gave birth to a girl who, going by what the glands in her mouth made, could probably melt someone’s eyes out of their head as soon as she got the muscle control for spitting. They were both in Mayfield since she felt guilty about carrying to term; House knew telling her she wasn’t alone in that wouldn’t help. Cary had been a typical phlebotomy lab intern who couldn’t get within twenty feet of any lab tubes he didn’t want freezing anymore; he was also trying out meds.
House took his pills and told the doctors what they needed to know like a good little patient. Sometimes they did their job too well, sometimes not well enough. When he talked to Nolan, he always remembered to use his mouth, and when he talked to the team assigned his case – he didn’t let himself linger on how that felt to say – he made sure he didn’t forget anything. Cooperation wasn’t in his nature and wasn’t something that came easily even with practice, but he knew what he was working towards and used that to keep going.
Princeton had been for preparation; Mayfield was for crisis management. There was a difference.
Two people left and three came in, six were gone after a month and four arrived to fill the beds, in and out like a brothel except without the fun. Nobody who was in Mayfield wanted to be. Some of them wanted to get out, and some didn’t, since it was better for them here than anywhere else.
He didn’t like Cary, bubbly puppy of a guy that he was, but he liked talking to him anyway. When he got close enough, it was easy to hear how it felt to knit ice and snow together, hooking and looping the water and shifting them just enough. Even if he wasn’t doing it on purpose. He couldn’t stop it, the way Wilson couldn’t, and like Wilson, didn’t want it to stop – he just wanted less of it so he could go back to what he’d been doing.
“Just enough less,” he’d said with a small smile, the most he could manage with how tired his new strain of meds made him.
House got his meds tweaked to work with his painkillers, Jeff’s got his poked at with his antidepressants, Eleanor’s with her birth control, Heather with her ACE inhibitors. Cary just took them straight – about the only lucky thing he had in this mess. Not everyone could shut off what they did on their own, and not everyone wanted it on every second. Even Wilson lay down sometimes.
Everyone knew the important part was being able to get up again.
-
“It’s different,” he told Nolan. “It just is.”
“Not being able to hear them, but with the capacity to do so?”
Something like that. “Yeah.”
“The goal of your time here…”
“Bottles in front of me or frontal lobotomies, I know.”
Nolan getting angry sounded exactly like guitar strings snapping. “To see you functional in society again.”
“That doesn’t mean the same thing,” House snapped.
“And if you could meet us halfway on that, we might have more success.”
-
About the only good thing about the forced quarantine was the limited human contact – that, and the people he was allowed to interact with all had some idea how to deal with him. He didn’t leave his room much, no, scratch that, he didn’t move his ass out of his room too often, but when he did, most of the bodies he came across in hallways and offices were occupied by people who’d been briefed on his particular condition and did their best to accommodate. Even if it was stuff like the nurse that gave him his morning shots playing “Hey Hey Kiss Him Goodbye” in his head on an infinite loop so House couldn’t hear what he was thinking underneath that. The orderly who changed his sheets went through those old Scots-Irish ballads with a thousand verses.
Wilson used Sondheim.
Some of the ones here didn’t bother hiding anything and kept their mouths shut and let him in to hear what they’d otherwise have said out loud. That worked well enough that House settled on resenting instead of hating. Three of the doctors tried to be honest and keep everything that came out of their mouths in line with what was in their heads, and that was so comical – the idea of it, that they’d think it would work, wrong on so many levels – it was almost funny enough for him to smile. Just because they weren’t thinking it up top didn’t mean it wasn’t around the corner or right underneath. After all, it wasn’t like he wouldn’t have gone looking for it if they hadn’t screamed there was something else going on in the first place, the way they’d drawn in their hands or flicked their eyes away.
Trial and error, guess again, learn from your mistakes. That’s how discoveries were made and diagnosis puzzled out, that’s how he treated patients and saved their lives, that’s how they treated him now. One idea after another, throwing chemicals into his body to see what stuck. They tried to figure out how to make him stick inside himself but nothing worked for that, and he didn’t want to think about what’d happen to him if it did – stuck in the cold walls of his body and the tiny prison of his head.
-
House had gotten used to nighttime waking a long time ago, before, even before his leg. He didn’t try fighting it anymore, and these days knew to find a security guard on patrol outside or a janitor working nights to help him pass the time. He’d learned how to ride along without them figuring out they had a passenger on his second try; he always was a fast learner. Depending on what they’d tried that day, sometimes there was enough in his system to make sure he couldn’t get out of his room. Those nights were the worst. It wasn’t quiet, it was silent. There was nothing.
He hated giving into them when he wasn’t trying to fall asleep, but on those silent nights he let fantasy take over. When he did, it was always playing with the idea of waking up to see Wilson at his third-floor window. Smiling softly, all dressed for high skies, just waiting there for House to open it – and the fantasy part here was there wasn’t a grate bolted to the wall, just a regular glass window – and hold him tight and take him up where it was just the two of them. Not silent, just quiet, a little island in the sky.
Like Cary said, sometimes he wanted just enough less.
