Morning Drill

[readingrat]

Category: One-shot
Time: Season 2 or 3/ Flashbacks
Pairings: None
Rating: K

Author's Note: ´This one-shot was inspired by some exchanges with my beta, Brighid, on the influence John House's abuse has on his son's life. Many thanks to Brighid for inspiration, beta-ing and lots of interesting thoughts on a multitude of topics. I can't recommend her Treatment series too warmly!

Morning Drill

His alarm shrills at six am. He rolls out of bed, half his mind still on the dream the alarm clock interrupted, the other half cursing the lack of self-restraint that let him indulge his desire to read till well past midnight.

6:02 am: He shuffles to the bathroom to wash himself. Giving his reflection a cursory glance in the bathroom mirror, he realizes that his unruly mop of brown hair hasn't responded so well to his efforts at tidying it as is desirable. He wastes thirty precious seconds trying to bring it into a semblance of order with comb and water before he gives up.
6:07 am: He is back in his room at the wardrobe, pulling out T-shirt, shirt and pants with practised movements even as he struggles out of his pyjama pants.
6:12 am: He's dressed, his pyjamas are folded, he's back on schedule. He makes his bed, muttering under his breath, "Smooth the sheet, tuck it in tight, fluff the pillow, place it at the head of the bed, fold the blanket in half, place it so that the crease runs parallel to the edge of the mattress."
6:14 am: He casts a last cursory glance around the room. Everything is as it ought to be. Wait! There's a gap in the books on his shelf, the surrounding books leaning against each other drunkenly. He remembers that he was too tired (or lazy) last night to replace the book he'd been reading. Where is the book? His mind spinning frantically, he focusses on last night, blocking out thoughts of what will happen if he can't find the bloody tome. He dives onto the bed and reaches behind it.
6:15 am: Colonel John House enters his son's room, his mien tightening as he spots him on tiptoe next to the bookshelf.

"Good morning, Greg."

"Good morning, sir."

"Where are you supposed to stand when I enter the room?"

"At the head of the bed, standing to attention, sir."

"Twenty push-ups."

Greg complies silently, push-ups being the least of his worries.

He doesn't set an alarm any more. Most nights he dozes fitfully, the dull pain in his leg pre-empting deep sleep once the sharp edge has been honed off his tiredness, so if he wished he could rise at any time from two am onwards. He doesn't, though.

He lies in till well past eight, the sounds of the awakening neighbourhood washing over him: the morning rush hour traffic outside, the teen from upstairs hopping down the stairs two at a time in his daily race to catch the school bus, the thump of newspapers being thrown on doormats. He rises at a quarter past eight, content in the knowledge that even if he rushed (which he won't), he wouldn't be on time for clinic duty at nine. There is the faintest of possibilites that Cuddy will want him to catch up on the missed clinic hours, but even if she tried, she wouldn't be able to make him do all the hours he's shirked or slept through, not unless she dogged his steps till his retirement.


His father musters his appearance, starting at his head. "Haircut. Today."

Given the state of his curls, he supposes that it was inevitable. If he is lucky, however, ...

"I'll take you," John House adds.

He isn't lucky. This means a buzz cut.

John House's eyes move down to his shirt.

"Clean," he notes with approval, overtly oblivious of the wave of relief his tone engenders. "But there's a crease along the right sleeve. Shoddy ironing." Relief dries into despair.

John House flings open the doors of Greg's wardrobe and pulls out the entire stack of shirts, folded and placed there by Greg with millimetric precision. All in vain, once again.

"Iron these again as practice," his father instructs.

After an extended shower he towels his hair dry and pays lip service to neatness by raking his fingers through it. The stubble on his chin warrants a glance in the mirror to reassure himself that postponing the trim for another day will not tip the persona he is projecting from 'scruffy and unkempt' to 'trying to cultivate a beard, albeit unsuccessfully'.

His wardrobe is a massive old piece of furniture made of solid oak that he discovered in an antique shop in Philly. He tugs a shirt from the top of a messy pile and pulls it on as it is, unironed, straight from the dryer. During his college days he'd stuff his laundry directly from the dryer into his wardrobe without bothering to sort it, but searching for matching socks among a melange of jeans, T-shirts and boxers exacerbates his pre-caffeine grouchiness, so nowadays he has designated areas for shirts, T-shirts, jeans and underwear. There is even an iron hidden somewhere in the recesses of the hall closet, and although he'd never admit it, he quite enjoys dressing up a bit for the occasional fundraiser that he's pressured into attending. Just so long as it's 'dressing up', not a daily necessity.

Colonel House continues his inspection of the room, nodding grudging approval at the ordered contents of the wardrobe, brushing a finger over the bookshelves to check for dust, frowning slightly as his eyes wander over the bed. Greg follows his line of vision with alarm. The pillow is slightly dented and askew where he flung himself across it to retrieve his book. He'd managed to replace the book in time, but he hadn't been able to straighten the pillow again.

"Messy," House Senior notes. Greg quails, but his father leaves it at that.

His pyjama bottoms join the two pillows and the casually thrust-aside blanket on the bed. He never makes it. Why should he? To impress the occasional hooker he brings in here or the even rarer one-night stand? Wilson, to whom order is a life-buoy in the stormy sea of terminal patients and disintegrating marriages, shakes his head in disbelief at House's mess. Cameron, on the few occasions that she managed to worm her way past his front door, appraised the situation with a 'nothing that a loving woman can't fix' sort of glance. Both choose to see his disorder as a lack of order, a paucity, a regrettable absence of the mindset and skills that make other people organize, sort and shelve their belongings. Percipient as both of them are, neither has registered that House can find obscure objects at short notice, that the books on his shelf, although all higgledy-piggledy, are ordered by subject matter and then alphabetically by author and that his haphazard piles of medical journals are stacked chronologically by date of issue.

Disaster strikes when his father inspects his desk. Not that Greg is still so naive as to believe that the colonel's inspections are about order and tidiness. For years he was dumb enough to buy it, to believe that if he achieved the required standard, then he'd gain the acknowledgment he craved and possibly be cut some slack. But now, at thirteen, he recognizes the daily ritual for what it is, an exercise in humiliation and an invasion of his privacy that allows his father to snoop around in his belongings under cover of promoting higher aims.

John House opens the drawers of his desk one by one. The contents are inoffensive: writing implements neatly sorted into boxes in the top drawer, school books tidily stacked in the next, sports magazines in the bottom one. John House, mollified by his son's attempt to 'make the mark' this morning, decides to propagate a spirit of comradeship by initiating some man-to-man small-talk about sports.

"Good season for the Yanks," he observes, taking the top magazine from the pile, flicking it open and ... freezing.

He switches on his laptop in passing as he limps to the kitchen for his morning caffeine fix. By the time he's holding a scalding mug of coffee, the system has booted. He scrolls through his inbox: a message of appreciation from Wilson for a link to a YouTube clip, a notification from his car insurance and a staff memo from Cuddy.

"An acute staff shortage coupled with a rise in clinic patients due to the seasonal influenza epidemic forces me to increase clinic hours for all staff members. Revised clinic hours for the coming fortnight are listed in the attached schedule."

He eyes this with a frown of displeasure. Then he logs into the hopsital network, hacking Cuddy's password at the third try. After adjusting the clinic schedule to meet his needs (which means deleting himself entirely while rotating everyone else around at random, so that the identity of the person who rearranged the schedule won't be obvious to anyone but Cuddy), he sends it off to everyone on the mailing list with a short note of apology for the 'inconvenience caused by the earlier incorrect schedule'.

Cuddy's inbox is flooded with work-related mails of varying importance. He hovers for a moment over the minutes of the last board meeting typed up by Wilson, briefly considering whether to mess with those, but it's Cuddy he wants to aggravate, not Wilson. Then he spots an email from an unknown sender. He opens it. Someone named Jeff informs Cuddy ("Dearest Lisa!") that he has a reservation for seven-thirty tonight and will pick her up at seven ("Looking forward to this evening!"). Interesting. If Wilson decides to opt out of their bowling evening once again to pursue some floozie, this could be a welcome distraction.

He trails miserably into the kitchen behind his father, telling himself that he is an idiot, a moron, an imbecile for attempting to hide the porn magazine in his drawer. Deep down, however, he is aware that he provoked this outcome: the porn magazine with the fake sports cover has been in the drawer for days, initially hidden at the bottom of the pile, but then moving up steadily until it hit the top of the stack, waiting, nay begging, to be discovered. It had started off as a secret gesture of defiance, but as the days passed without its discovery, his aim in planting the magazine in his desk changed from wanting to outwit his father to proving that he won't and can't be cowed into submission. Sheer, senseless stupidity! Now he's earned himself a hiding that'll top anything he's ever experienced before.

His mother looks up from the breakfast table, her expression changing from expectant hopefulness (she sneaked into his room last night to help him prepare for today's ordeal) to chagrin at her husband's stony expression.

"Oh, dear," she says. "Wasn't it tidy?" She looks at Greg with reproach - she knows the room was spick and span when she left last night, so if it wasn't this morning, then Greg must have sabotaged it himself.

"Oh, it was tidy all right," his father admits, nothing if not fair. He sits down heavily. Greg remains standing, awaiting his sentence. A leaden silence descends, and he realizes with a rush of satisfaction that the nature of his crime has rendered his father speechless.

He moves around the apartment, gathering up the odd object here and there and dropping it into his backpack: a bottle of vicodin from his medicine cabinet, his i-pod from the bedside table, a candy bar from the kitchen, his gameboy from the coffee table. A couple of medical journals get thrown in for good measure, as does a porn magazine, if only for the pleasure of seeing the disgust on Cameron's faux-innocent face when he pulls it out of his backpack and demonstratively buries his nose in it. It's a dead-sure way to put an end to her cloying concern about his pain level, his addiction, his loneliness.

John House fiddles around with a knife. "Greg," he finally says, "had a men's magazine disguised as a sports journal in one of his drawers." Double crime: contraband goods plus sneakiness. The latter, however, is no surprise to anyone.

"Oh, dear!" His mother's scope in intonation more than makes up for her limited vocabulary.

"He needs more exercise," John House pronounces. Blythe House looks at him questioningly. "The boy is spending too much time sitting around reading and too little time out in the open participating in healthy activities." Greg decides to let this pass despite its erroneousness - it is better not to draw attention to himself. "He needs to be out in fresh air, tiring himself out with sports. That'll take his mind off ... this sick crap. A healthy mind in a healthy body."

The relief that sweeps through the room at this mild, nay, merciful dictum of John House's is palpable. What has happened to the laws governing the cosmos that the response to a misdeed of such magnitude is of the order normally reserved for minor misdemeanors such as crumpled pillows? Greg decides to show his appreciation for this unprecedented display of benevolence by joining in the spirit of cleansing his mind.

"I could sign up for the football team," he offers. The thought fills him with distaste - endless drills, mind-numbing psychobabble to promote 'team spirit', tyrannical discipline - but he grits his teeth and tries to look eager and enthusiastic.

His father gives him a measuring glance. "You'll get yourself thrown off the team within two weeks." He knows his son all too well. "No, I'll supervise your drill. We'll do an hour in the morning before school and another two in the evening."

Greg's heart sinks. They've done this time and again: on camping trips, cycling tours or climbing outings - in short, whenever his father feels the need to bond with his son. No matter how hard he tries or how far he pushes himself, his father is never satisfied; he insists on that extra mile, one additional ascent, the further peak, until Greg collapses, floored by an ordeal that would exhaust a well-trained grown-up, let alone a mere child. "Heavens, boy, can't you try?" his father then yells, disappointment printed across his face. Greg wants to shout that he is trying, that he's faster and nimbler than other boys his age, but he's too winded to say a word. Besides, while he excels compared to other boys, he falls short of the absolute standard set by Colonel House.

Even a whole season with the football team would be better than the weeks that loom ahead of him.

The telephone rings as he slips into his trainers. He ignores it. The answering machine swings into action and the voice of the caller cuts through the morning calm, obnoxiously cheerful and energetic.

"Dr House, you missed your PT session again. I just wanted to remind you that it's always on Tuesdays at five pm. I'll see you next week."

You wish, he thinks as he heads for the door. His former physiotherapist is on maternity leave. Her replacement had seemed a gift of the gods at first: young, blonde, lithe, pretty. He'd ceased fantasizing about her legs winding themselves around his waist about ten minutes into their first session. He'd put himself through every exercise she proposed as often as she demanded, egged on by her hectoring and by an unwillingness to admit defeat to a girl young enough to be his daughter.

"Not bad, Dr House, but let's do it a few times more."

"It hurts!" he'd gasped through gritted teeth, eyes screwed shut to prevent tears from leaking out.

"Yes, I know," she'd said in soothing tones, as though she, in the prime of youth and the pink of health, had any notion of real pain. "But we need to repeat the exercise a few more times to stimulate muscle growth in the affected area. You'll find that the pain decreases as your muscles regenerate. Now, let's do that again!"

He'd wanted to scream at her that a missing chunk of muscle couldn't grow back, that the pain had been there for six years now and wouldn't miraculously cease, and what the hell had they taught her in her physiology-for-dummies course, but he'd been too busy holding back grunts of agony to yell anything at all. He'd limped out defeated and humiliated, pursued by an oblivious, "See you next week, Dr House!"

He'd actually turned up for a second session, telling himself that the first one couldn't have been as bad as he'd thought it was, but there's no way he's attending a third one.

"Well, that's settled, then," his mother says brightly, relieved at the fortuitious outcome of what could have become a very unpleasant situation. She gives Greg the slightest of nods, willing him to sit down unobtrusively so as not to wake the sleeping dragon. But she has mistaken her husband's embarrassment at his son's choice of reading material for mercy. The embarrassment now wearing off, the anger seething under Colonel House's collected demeanour bubbles to the surface.

"He still needs to be punished," he growls, frowning at his wife to pre-empt contradiction.

Greg freezes and pales. His eyes lock on his mother's face, willing her to look at him, to see his fear, to intercede for him. She, however, won't meet his gaze - she never does in situations like this - for while she may consider the punishments his father metes out too harsh, she won't undermine his authority.

To Greg's surprise she says, "Don't you think he's a bit too old for ... ?" Her voice peters out at John House's stare while it dawns on Greg that his parents must have discussed corporeal punishment and come to some sort of agreement. The part of his brain that isn't paralysed with fear casts back and returns with the information that he hasn't been bodily chastised since last summer, that dreadful summer during which his father didn't talk to him at all.

After a moment that stretches out indefinitely in Greg's mind, John nods his assent.

Colonel John House does not renege on deals, not even on domestic ones, but the effort of keeping his temper in check is making the veins in his temples throb. He rises abruptly, almost tipping his chair over, and marches into the living room. There's a sharp thump that Greg identifies as the lid of the piano being slammed shut, then a click that must be ...

His father returns brandishing a small key. "No piano for two months."

It's a death knell. He hasn't had lessons in years, not since he pissed his second piano teacher off at the age of eight by practising anything but the etudes that she deemed necessary for structured progress, but his music is his crutch, the support that enables him to survive the adversities of daily life: his classmates' antagonism, the teachers' animosity, his father's indifference. He tries to persuade himself that this punishment is better than having his hide tanned, but he knows it isn't true. That would be over quickly, his father's anger appeased in the process, but this ordeal will drag on and his father's rage, unable to find a physical outlet, will smoulder all the longer.

He stops at the letterboxes to collect his mail. Mrs McMillan from upstairs is lying in wait.

"Dr House!"

He ignores her, but she is not easily cowed. She whizzes around him with an agility that belies her age, planting herself between him and the front door as she draws herself up to her unimpressive height of five foot one.

"Dr House, you played the piano last night at eleven pm!"

"Did I?" They've been through this so often that it's become a ritual.

"You know you did!"

"Ah, caught me, haven't you?" He winks at her conspiratorially. "Must have been plastered, wasted, stewed to the gills."

Being a teetotaller, she bristles. "I'm not interested in your hedonistic lifestyle. You're not supposed to play the piano after eight, and I'll thank you to keep that in mind!"

He stares down at her, remembering the previous night when neither vicodin nor scotch dulled the pain sufficiently for him to consider sleeping. If he told her that, she'd stop yapping and go all Cameron on him. Not an option, so he pushes past her saying, "Turn your TV up louder, then you'll be fine. Oh, forgot, you're at the volume limit already."

"Next time I'll call the police!" she fires after him. He shrugs.

John House pockets the key.

"Son," he says, "I am very disappointed in you."

"Oh, Gregory," his mother says, the use of his full name saying it all.

Cuddy darts out of the clinic before he can reach the elevators, thrusts a file into his chest and grabs his arm to guide him towards her office.

"Whoa! I get that you're frisky, but that's an old cripple you're manhandling," he protests. She ignores him, reeling off patient data and symptoms as they cross the clinic area. Through her office doors he can see a well-dressed middle-aged couple.

"Donors? Not interested," he says, stopping short in front of her office and turning on his heels.

Her lips tighten. "You're taking that case," she says.

He flicks through the file cursorily before snapping it shut and shoving it back at her in turn. "Booooring."

"It's either this or you'll be swabbing crotches the rest of the week." She opens the door and tugs expertly at his right arm, knowing from experience that this throws him off balance; he must either follow her or risk toppling over. "Dr House," she introduces, "Head of Diagnostics. I must warn you: he's a jerk. But you wanted the best, and he's the best doctor we've got."

It's odd, but his caustic wit, ever ready with a put-down or an excuse, fails him. Cuddy, that scheming witch, keeps her eyes averted from him so that he can't see the triumphant gleam that he's sure is lighting them up. Ignoring the man's outstretched hand he nods bruskely at the couple, mutters, "My team'll put you through some tests," and turns back to the door. "You owe me," he calls to Cuddy over his shoulder as he goes.

Comments

[readingrat.livejournal.com]

Thank you.

Here's the link to the first chapter of her Treatment series:
http://brighidsfire.livejournal.com/12017.html

She's also on ff.net: http://www.fanfiction.net/u/1938929/Brighid45

'Treatment is the first story in a series; since it's basically a story with lots of OCs and it goes into an alternate scenario from Season 6 onwards, one needs to start there to understand the rest.