readingrat | fic: The Kelpie - Part II Chapter 4 (Reply)

Part II: Philadelphia

Chapter 4: Riddles in the Dark II

Wilson leans back in the passenger seat of the car, allowing the gentle throb of the engine to soothe him while he replays the last hour or so in his mind. There's the shock of seeing House again, so changed and yet so unchanged: his face is smoother, now that the pain that etched such deep grooves in it has receded; the slight unevenness of his gait is practically unnoticeable and he's a lot less self-conscious now that he can't be singled out as a cripple at first sight; he laughs noticeably more, at things that in his last years in Princeton would at best have earned a lip twitch. But he's still the same jackass with little sense of moral or of decency. Good grief, mentioning the house collapse in front of Rachel! It's a good thing the kid is as unflappable as her mother.

"What happened?" Cuddy asks after giving him ten minutes to find his inner zen.

"You know P.G. Wodehouse? Those stories where some rich heiress's father wants to scalp Bertie Wooster and throttle him with his own innards because he suspects him of stealing a family heirloom and seducing his daughter, when in fact the heirloom was sold by the daughter to finance her elopement with her only true love, who also happens to be Bertie's best chum?" He's been doing a spot of light reading at Mayfield.

Unfortunately, Cuddy's exposure to one of the landmarks of comic literature is limited. "I have no idea what you're talking about. And this - isn't funny!"

He won't argue with that, so he drops the literary allusions and kindly summarises the afternoon. "My multi-tasking abilities were challenged at meeting an old acquaintance whom I wasn't expecting to see and whom I had to pretend not to recognise, carrying on a conversation about an incident which that person had caused, but couldn't remember, and which I was supposed to have caused but can remember not to have caused, and losing a game of chess against Rachel - all at the same time."

"I still have no idea what you're talking about."

"Someone told House that I ran a car through your house, which brought his protective instincts to the fore. He was doing his version of a knight in shining armour rescuing the damsel in distress from the bad fire-breathing dragon when you interrupted us."

"No one told him anything. He did a little research of his own and came up with that outrageous conclusion. He thinks I'm some kind of abuse victim who keeps coming back for more." Cuddy does an eye-roll.

"That's just so ridiculous!" he says. "As though you'd ever go back to him again after what he did! Oh, wait, you have gone ..."

"Shut up, Wilson!" She pulls the car over to the side of the road, turns off the engine and leans back exhaustedly. "What the hell are we going to do?"

This is where Jeeves is supposed to materialise at his elbow, coughing discreetly, with a solution ready on a silver tray. But life's a bummer. "He suggested that I depart to some other part of the country."

"That - would be extreme!"

"There can only be one," he quotes. Cuddy looks blank; apparently, Highlander is another cultural milestone that never lined the road along which she is travelling. "Never mind," he says. "Nolan suggested much the same, though for different reasons. Do you have a better suggestion?"

"We sit this out and wait for him to go back to Bristol?" Cuddy hazards.

"Fat chance of that happening now that you've started something with him! Or was that just wishful thinking on his part?"

"No, but he isn't so clingy this time. But even if you moved away, letting him believe that you could potentially harm me is still ridiculously, insanely dangerous for you. He nearly caused a relapse! Why didn't you tell him it wasn't you who crashed that car?"

"Why didn't you?" he counters.

"I tried. He wouldn't believe me, and I let it slide since there seemed no pressing reason to exculpate you. But now he's stalking you!"

He rubs his face tiredly. "If we manage to convince him that it wasn't me driving that car, he's going to dig around till he finds out the truth." Cuddy shrugs in a 'can't be helped' manner. "Cuddy, I helped him to escape his past so he could be happy again - as far as it's in his nature to be happy. He was desperate; he was prepared to sacrifice what was dearest to him - do you know the movie 50 First Dates, where Drew Barrymore wakes up every morning with no memories of the previous day?" A chick flick, so she nods. "Yeah, well, no matter how much House and Foreman insisted that they had everything under control, something like that could have happened. Chase refused to perform the surgery, saying that it was insane." He pinches the bridge of his nose. "If we tell him who he is and what he did, he'll be stuck with all the crap from his new life - no proof of formal education, blue-collar job, no money, no reputation - plus all the ballast from his old one. It would be a lose-lose."

"You're prepared to turn your life inside-out on the very slim odds that Pete ... House won't discover his own past at some point."

Wilson shrugs. "There isn't much left to turn inside-out. Besides, what about you? For years, you refused to forgive him for what he'd done to you and Rachel."

"Rachel wasn't his fault, and I never blamed him for that," Cuddy interjects. "I bled the construction company dry."

"Okay. But you're in a relationship with a man who, so you believe, tried to kill you four years ago. I may be playing the martyr for House, but by that self-same token you're suicidal."

Cuddy is silent for a long time. Finally she says, "When you testified in court that he wasn't trying to kill me, but himself ..."

"It was the truth, Cuddy!"

"I know! I believed you as soon as I'd had time to cool down - about a year later," she adds with a wry grin. "It made more sense, and it was exactly what House would do. He's always been borderline suicidal, but he's never been a hypocrite."

"No?" Wilson can't help interjecting.

Cuddy raises her eyebrows in surprised disagreement.

Wilson expounds, "We're talking about the man who never forgave his girlfriend for overriding his medical wishes, although he made an art form of ignoring patient wishes."

Cuddy considers this. Then she says, "Different battle field. I mean that he's not a hypocrite as far as social standards are concerned." She thinks a moment, biting her lip, before she comes up with, "I've been sexually harassed by a lot of guys, and most of them do it because it's a turn-on for them, a way of displaying power over women. House did it because it was a game; he knew I'd fight back and give as good as I got. And unlike other guys I've dated, he never thought he owned me."

"That doesn't mean he couldn't be jealous." Wilson has no idea why he's playing the devil's advocate; perhaps it's because he'd rather not be considered responsible for advocating something that could well end in major incidents of mayhem.

"Jealous? Oh, hell, yes! I had fantasies of scratching out the eyes of every hooker he screwed after the break up, but I even managed a modicum of politeness towards his green card whore. I'm not denying that seeing me with another guy hurt him; I'm saying that his reaction wouldn't have been turned against me but against himself. Which it was, I guess." Cuddy sighs. "But that didn't make it any better for me. In some ways it was even worse."

"You're saying ... that House trying to kill himself made you as angry as House trying to kill you?" And he'd thought that with House's departure from his life he'd be done with elliptical logic and weird associations.

"Yes. He chose the tree in front of my house," Cuddy says, as though this explains everything.

"Umm, that was kind of the point. Like marrying Dominika under your nose."

"Exactly! The rest of the world marries for love (or money); House does it solely to piss me off. Others commit suicide because they're miserable; House does it so that I'll feel remorse for the rest of my life. If I'd heard the crash, watched the EMT team peel his body out of the car and known that he'd died on my doorstep because of me, I'd have been racked with guilt till eternity."

"Cuddy, he short-circuited. If he'd stopped to think, I doubt he'd have tried to off himself at all, much less deliberately have chosen a tree just to mess with your head."

"I believe House is incapable of doing anything without trying to mess with other people's heads at the same time." After a pause she adds, "But whatever his motives may have been, I doubt he's any danger to me."

"Good!" Wilson exclaims with mock jollity. "And of course you don't expect him to change for you anymore. Or live up to whatever standards you set. Because although he may not endanger you the next time you dump him, we'd hate to have him wrap his car around one of the picturesque trees in Germantown, where it may cause you distress."

Cuddy's knuckles on the steering wheel whiten, but she only says quietly, "He has changed."

"Cuddy, it doesn't matter how much he has changed, because no one can live up to your unrealistic expectations!"

"That's not what I meant," she says, pained. "I meant that even if I dumped him, I doubt he'd care enough to have any sort of melt-down. At the moment he's wondering how to spring the news that he's going to dump me."

The moment the elevator doors close, Rachel swings her wheelchair around towards the door of the apartment they've just left. Pete presses the 'down' button to bring the elevator back up again for him, and turns around to watch the child. She stops in front of the doormat and leans down, but she can't reach.

"Can you help me?" she asks him. "There's a key under the mat."

"You're supposed to go to your neighbour's place," he says dubiously.

"I don't want to. I've had to go there two times this week already because Mom is so busy."

He has never as much as wondered what Lisa does with the squirt while she's with him. Now he knows. "I don't think your mom wants you to be alone."

"I can look after myself. She'll be back soon," Rachel argues.

He purses his lips, but then he bends down and retrieves the key. Opening the door he goes inside, leaving the door open for Rachel to follow.

"You can go," Rachel says. "I'm fine. I don't need you."

"You can choose: stay at home with me, or at Louisa's without me," he informs her.

"Oh, okay then," she says with offended dignity. "Can I watch television?"

"I suppose so," he says. "What do you want to watch?"

"Cartoons," Rachel says with such relish that he suspects she isn't normally allowed to watch them.

He doesn't particularly want more trouble with Lisa than he's headed for already, so he moves to the shelf next to the smallish flat screen where there's a selection of children's DVDs. That'll be stuff Lisa allows the kid to watch, and he'll persuade her to watch one of those. She'll probably have a few Disney cartoons.

"No, I mean those on TV!" Rachel whines. "Like Tom and Jerry."

There's one cartoon among the stack next to the flat screen that may meet her demands; it's a pirate cartoon that he vaguely remembers - he can remember the contents of a lot of movies and series, but not when or where he watched them. It's not really meant for children, but if Lisa keeps it here, she can't really disapprove. Besides, what does he care?

"No, not that one," Rachel says.

"It's a cartoon and it isn't sappy Disney stuff," he argues.

"No, but if Mom comes back when I'm watching it, she'll think I'm mad at her, and I'm not," Rachel explains, leaving him more confused than before.

He turns the cover over in his hands. "Why should she think you're mad at her?"

"Because that's the cartoon I watch when I am mad at her, coz it makes her upset."

There's some sort of subtext there, but one probably has to be a Cuddy to understand it. "Well, it looks like the only DVD here that won't bleach my brain, so in it goes." He flops down on the couch. Rachel parks her wheelchair at the other end. "You want out?" he asks, gesturing at the other end of the couch. She shakes her head, probably more from a desire to avoid closer contact with him than to eschew the comforts of the couch. Her loss.

He's soon immersed in the cartoon, which isn't half bad, though he can see why Lisa objects to it. It has no educational value whatsoever (unless one counts pirate jargon as educational), and some of the situational humour can, at a stretch, be considered adult. What he can't see is why Lisa doesn't confiscate the DVD if she doesn't approve of it. Why allow a seven year old to manipulate her with it?

Rachel is soon forgetful enough of his presence to laugh heartily and even to speak the characters' lines along with them. But after half an hour she gets fidgety. Then she says, "I'm hungry."

"You wanna eat in front of the TV?"

"No, I don't want to watch anymore." She's clearly worried she'll be caught watching the pirate cartoon.

He sighs. "Let's see what we can hustle up for you," he says, rising stiffly. She wheels her chair into the kitchen behind him.

"Have you really got a peg leg?" she asks as he roots around in the fridge.

"Yep," he says to the butter.

"Can I see it?" Pause. "Please?"

He turns and regards her with pursed lips, but then he tugs up his jeans to display the bottom of his prosthetic.

Rachel does not appreciate this unique gesture as the selfless act of soul-baring that it is. "Aw, no, that's not a peg leg! Everyone's got those."

"Everyone?" He's not exactly proud of his prosthetic - far the opposite, in fact - but he has always assumed that he belongs to a small, unfortunate minority.

"Everyone in the rehab I went to who'd had an ... an ampertation," she elucidates. "No one had a wooden one like the pirate."

Well, it's too bad that he can't satisfy her peculiar brand of voyeurism.

There's absolutely nothing in that fridge that can be chucked into the microwave and heated, so he figures he'll have to order takeaway. As he straightens and closes the fridge Rachel says yearningly, "Wilson was going to make meat balls."

Good for Jimmy. That explains the ground beef in the fridge. Unfortunately for Rachel, he isn't a doormat like James. He scans the flyers on the pin board for a pizza delivery service.

"He made them last time," Rachel continues. "They're the best ever. He promised to make them again today." Pause. "Is he coming back today?"

"I doubt it." No pizza delivery service. No delivery service whatsoever, to be exact.

"Oh."

At least she isn't throwing a tantrum. He eyes her, wondering whether the idea of pizza will appeal to her. Then again, what child doesn't like pizza? Lisa will probably freak; if she approved of takeaway, there'd be flyers and the like.

But then another thought strikes him: maybe part of James's toxic appeal is his ability to play Domestic God, as in: keeping Rachel entertained, cooking for all of them, and probably even doing the dishes afterwards. He can picture James in an apron wiping down the kitchen surfaces and stacking the dirty dishes in the dishwasher according to some anal system, and it's understandable that such qualities would appeal to a working single mom. If he, Pete, really wanted to do Lisa a favour, he'd do well to show her that James is nowhere as unique as she seems to believe, rather than try to scare him away (which, in hindsight, was probably a stupid move calculated to bring Lisa's protective instincts to the fore).

Besides, he's certain that he can beat James's mad meatball skillz hands down.

Meatballs will take a while, so he cuts some carrots, cucumber and celery into sticks, whips up an avocado-and-soured-cream dip and plonks that in front of Rachel to keep her busy until he has converted the ground beef into meat balls in tomato sauce.

"You're quick," Rachel remarks as he chops up an onion. She's slowly beginning to thaw. The way to a woman's heart is through her stomach.

He nods to acknowledge the compliment. "You must be mad at your mother pretty often, the way you know every word of that pirate cartoon."

"Naaah. I've had it a loooong time, that's why I know it so well. Since I was this small." She holds her hand about one foot over the ground.

"Why does your mother let you have it if she doesn't like you watching it?"

"Because it's mine, not hers. I got it from House, and House was a bad egg. A Bad Egg with a Gimp Leg," she chants.

He eyes her, perplexed, his mind racing back to Lisa waking up in Bristol, saying something about a house. Not a house, but House. A name. Whose name?

"Bad egg? That's what your mom calls him?"

"No, that's what Nana says. Mom doesn't talk about him. Nana says he's a meshugener, a shtik drek." She lets the words roll off her tongue with aplomb as she dips a finger into the avocado mush and licks it.

Okay, if Lisa won't talk about him and Lisa's mom hates him, then he's an ex-boyfriend. If Rachel can remember him, he must have been James's successor, the one James went ballistic over, turning his car into a cruise missile. That woman has a curious taste in men: James the Abusive Alcoholic; House the Bad Egg; and he himself isn't exactly God's Gift to Womankind either. ... Wait: gimp leg?

"What about his leg? He had a peg leg?"

"I don't remember, really. It was long ago. We took him to hospital once in the middle of the night. There was blood from his leg everywhere, so he must have had a really bad leg - my legs don't bleed at all. He had a stick to walk with," she recalls.

That explains Lisa's initial attraction to him, Pete. His uneven gait must have reminded her of Gimp-Legged Bad-Egg.

"What happened to him?"

"Dunno. I guess he left. Nana says no one can put up with mom, but I think it had something to do with the crash, because no one will talk about that either. Except for Nana, when she thinks I'm not listening. Maybe he's dead," Rachel concludes casually. "There was a LOT of blood."

His meat balls are burning, and he isn't surprised Bad Egg took off after the crash. That sort of thing - being given the Evil Eye by one's girlfriend's ex, who then proceeds to reinforce the message with a ton of steel at 40 mph - can kill a blighter's romantic urges.

It's when he's rescuing the meat balls with a dose of vinegar that he becomes aware of the Evil Eye on himself. He turns to find Lisa in the kitchen doorway, any number of emotions chasing over her face, and none of them boding well for him.

"Who is dead?" she asks Rachel gently, but Rachel isn't fooled. She draws a pattern on the table with a finger, one that is, unfortunately, covered in dip. "Rachel?" Lisa prods.

"House," Rachel mumbles.

Lisa draws up a kitchen chair and sits down next to Rachel. "Rachel," she says. Then she sees what Rachel has done to the kitchen table. She plucks Rachel's hand off the table, swivels round and says to him, "Here, give me something to wipe this up with."

He throws her a cloth from the sink with which she wipes Rachel's hand and the table before throwing it back at him. It hits him squarely in the chest. Someone is not happy with him.

"Rachel, House isn't dead. He's alive and ... living a happy life somewhere. He moved away. And the blood you remember, ..." She pauses, caught up in some memory. "The blood was when he tried to fix his leg himself. We took him to hospital, they ... stopped the bleeding, and then he was fine."

Rachel eyes her doubtfully. Lisa sees it and gives a little laugh. "He was hopping around again within three days, and he got his stitches taken out two weeks later. That's a lot less time than you had to spend in hospital when you got hurt, isn't it? Ask Wilson if you don't believe me."

"Is Wilson allowed to talk about House?" Rachel asks.

Lisa looks as though she's bitten into a lemon. "Everyone is allowed to talk about House. Well, everyone except for Nana," she amends. Rachel grins at that. "I - I didn't think you remembered him."

"You talk about other things I don't remember."

"Only if I like remembering them," Lisa says.

That guy must have been a Very Bad Egg indeed, if Lisa, who has let Abusive Wilson into her house and into her life again, prefers not to remember him.

The meal is as amicable as is possible given the giant elephant that's perched on the kitchen counter, and then Lisa brings Rachel to bed. He toys with the idea of tidying up the kitchen to earn some brownie points, but while he quite enjoys cooking, he's less enthusiastic about clearing the debris afterwards; and as for warding off Lisa's death rays, cleaning up the kitchen will shield him about as much as a paper bag over one's head will repel nuclear radiation - helpful against alpha radiation, but of no use whatsoever against beta and gamma rays. So he rescues a carton of orange juice from the confines of the fridge, props his feet up on the kitchen table and awaits the inevitable.

When Lisa returns to the kitchen, she says, "Thanks for cooking."

"S'okay."

"Why didn't she go to Louisa's?"

Good question. He should have made her go there and then run for the hills. Then he would have avoided the pitfall named 'House' and by the time Lisa caught up with him, she'd have calmed down. Not that she appears particularly upset at the moment. She's already busy clearing the dishes into the sink and wiping down kitchen surfaces, instead of sharpening knives whilst looking for particularly vulnerable spots on his torso.

When she has restored some semblance of order she leans back against the kitchen counter looking down at him with a basilisk stare. (Stupid position to get into, he tells himself.) "Here's how this will go: you do not, ever, tap my daughter for information. Do you understand?"

He nods. There's no sense in debating this point, since by the time she's done with him he probably won't be in a position to wring the slightest bit of informational dew out of Rachel even if she should be dripping with it. She wasn't all that informative, anyway. He learned more in the two minutes Lisa talked to her than in the two hours that preceded them.

"Oh, and you don't talk to my mother either. Do you get that?" He gapes at her - how did she guess that he was considering that move? She pokes a finger into his chest. "My mother is a sadistic monster who takes great pleasure in rubbing my failures into my face. I don't want her in my private life. If you phone her, email her, friend her on Facebook or, God forbid, turn up on her doorstep, I will find out. And trust me, afterwards you'll be wishing that you'd gotten involved with a shark. Do. You. Get. That?"

"Got that," he says, his mind absolutely frothing at all the subtext that needs to be deciphered. There's no way he can keep away from her mother, not after this performance, but it'll take him a while to figure out how to do that without incurring wrath from heaven.

"Okay," she says. "Cup of coffee?"

That's it? That is all? "If I say yes, will you lace it with arsenic?"

"No, strychnine," she parries. "I'm not happy that you're here, that you sneaked your way in by faking an emergency - ever heard of the boy who cried wolf? - or that you tried to start some sort of territorial dispute with Wilson, who, by the way, hasn't done a thing to deserve being subjected to your particular brand of alpha male pissing contest. But I can sort of see where you're coming from. You think your 'intervention'," she sketches quotation marks, "may keep Wilson from becoming abusive again." She leans over to give him a quick peck. "It's very sweet of you, but entirely unnecessary. I can look after myself, and Wilson, contrary to what you believe, is not abusive."

"And I'm imagining your PTSD."

"What happened to me - the car crashing into my house, the house collapsing on Rachel in my presence during Hurricane Irene - is enough to warrant PTSD without any sort of abuse." She brushes the hair out of her face with one hand. "That car crash was a suicide attempt, not attempted murder or manslaughter."

"And it was pure coincidence that he chose your house with you in it to off himself."

"He chose the tree in front of my house, not the house." She pushes his cup towards him and sits down opposite him.

"Then he must have been really, really drunk. Or a really bad driver."

Lisa leans her forehead on both hands. "There was someone in front of that tree, so he swerved at the last moment. The car hit the curb and then went through my wall."

"How unfortunate! And you saw all this with your magic swivelling eye through the walls of your house, and mind-read his intentions."

Lisa raises her head and her voice. "I've known him for years. He'd never been abusive till then, or violent. And the witness outside testified in court."

"Someone James knew?" She's silent. "A friend, huh?" She flushes. "Don't see him any more without some form of protection."

"Sorry?"

"You heard me. Don't go near James unless you have someone with you who can call the police and fend him off for a while. And don't let him stay here."

"Are you telling me what to do?"

"I'm telling you what needs to be done so you don't end in the morgue. Tell me when you want to visit him, and I'll accompany you. But don't go by yourself, don't bring him here, don't ..."

"You think because we've got something going that you can order me around? You're jealous of Wilson."

"No!" This is not going well at all. "This has nothing to do with ..."

"I'm not discussing this!" She pushes her chair back in an uncontrolled movement that nearly tips it over and rises, backing away towards the kitchen counter. "I don't care what you want me to do or why. You can call it what you like - you're behaving like the jealous abuser that you make Wilson out to be."

He has really put his foot in it. He doesn't mean to sound controlling; he just finds what he demands so logical, so grounded in common sense, that he doesn't see what need there is to clothe it in terms that are acceptable to her in her present state of mind. '"I ..."

"No!"

Only now does he realise that her hands are trembling uncontrollably. Shit, he's done it again! She's on the verge of an anxiety attack.

He glances around the kitchen for inspiration, but finds none, so he slowly gets to his feet and limps to the hall where he left his backpack. He picks it up. She has followed him as far as the kitchen door and is now standing at a safe distance in the doorframe watching him.

He turns to her when he reaches the front door. "Let me know if you change your mind about discussing how to avoid getting killed by James."

"And if I don't change my mind?" He is silent. "Are you threatening to break up because I won't stop helping an old friend?"

He closes his eyes to stop her from seeing into them. "No. This isn't about your helping an old friend. This isn't even about my jealousy, because I'm not jealous."

"Right" she says, the word loaded with disbelief.

Fine - if it'll break her resistance he'll admit to jealousy. "Okay, so I'm jealous, too. But that's not the issue. What I want ... am asking of you is logical. It makes sense. What you're doing, doesn't. It's suicidal. If you won't be reasonable about this, ..."

"Reasonable!" She laughs slightly hysterically.

"...and won't even discuss it with me, then I guess James still means too much to you. And if that's the case, I'd rather not stay around and get hurt."

He lets himself out and closes the door behind him.