fic: The Kelpie - Part III Chapter 3

[readingrat]

Part III: Princeton

Chapter 3: Flies and Spiders

Unified in action, if not in opinion, Cameron and Lisa finally manage to bundle Wilson into the car. Once that is achieved, Cameron hurries back to the hospital to return to her representational duties, while Lisa swings her car keys, looking over at him doubtfully.

"I suppose you aren't coming along," she says.

He avoids her eyes. "Nope. Got my car here."

She nods, looking down herself now. After a moment she asks, "Where are you staying?"

"Don't know yet. I'll find something."

"Will I see you?"

He doesn't answer. Her shoulders slump as she turns away to slide into the driver's seat. He watches the car's tail lights recede, and then he turns back to the three waiting physicians.

"Know any bars around here?" he enquires.

They all perk up visibly - he isn't the only one, apparently, who found Cameron's performance dampening. A short consultation, then Foreman and Taub walk off to Foreman's car while Chase comes with him to direct him to the bar of their choice.

"I was going to get plastered and take a taxi home, anyway," is Chase's reply to his query how the younger man will get back to his own car.

He can't help approving of their taste; the place Chase directs him to is well-frequented, but the music is muted and there are enough secluded booths to ensure their privacy. Vexingly, putting that privacy to productive use proves to be somewhat of a challenge. He's too wily to start off with topics that they'd rather not talk about - his inglorious exit from PPTH, his relationship (past and present) with Lisa - but they don't seem to know much about him that isn't riddled with all sorts of landmines. His very first question, about his family - can there be anything more innocent or less controversial? - not only draws pretty much a blank, but also opens the curtain to the key note of their joint performance: given the most straightforward question, his three former fellows invariably voice three different and mutually exclusive opinions.

They all agree that his father died eight or nine years ago and that his mother was still alive at that point, but they can't agree on whether she's still alive or whether he has any siblings. There's also no common denominator in their opinion on his relationship with his parents.

"You hated them," Taub says. "Cuddy and Wilson had to drug you to get you to your father's funeral."

"He didn't hate his mother," Foreman promptly contradicts. "It was his father he had an issue with."

"Evading the funeral punished his mother more than his father, who couldn't have cared less, being dead already," Taub asserts, "ergo, he must have hated his mother too."

"It's more complicated than that," Chase interposes. "Just because he didn't want to attend the funeral, doesn't mean he hated either of them." Everyone stares at him. "You can have lots of reasons for wanting to avoid your parents," he adds defensively.

That's not a sentiment he's inclined to disagree with, but hearing it from Chase is unexpected.

"What happened to his wife?" Taub suddenly asks the others.

"What wife?" he asks, his voice hoarse with dread.

"You got married just before, ah, the accident," Taub explains, "to a very pretty and accomplished hooker. And you guys don't need to kick me under the table."

For once he's speechless.

There's a clarification of sorts on this - it seems the lady in question was a green-card aspirant, not a hooker -, but the nature of her services to him are a point of some controversy (unlike the quality of her knishes), and there's a certain amount of reluctance to talk about his reasons for entering the state of matrimony with someone who was apparently a total stranger.

"You were stoned," Chase offers, as though this exculpates him.

"Why was I stoned?"

"Why does the sun rise?" Taub mutters.

"Wilson will know what happened to her," Foreman says, diverting the conversation away from this pitfall, back to the original question. "He's bound to have taken care of it."

There's general agreement on that, and it isn't the first time that Wilson's name has fallen as an unfailing source of information. The question of his family, he has been told, should be referred to Wilson, as should anything pertaining to his employment prior to PPTH. Despite their appalling ignorance, he manages to piece together a picture of his past: an unhappy childhood moving from base to base; his pre-med and med school careers extremely chequered and featuring at least two expulsions (one from Johns Hopkins); his rising reputation inversely proportional to his ability to keep down a job; the infarction ...

"Infarction? Not an accident?" For some reason he'd assumed that the amputation was the result of an accident, not a medical condition.

His former employees gladly latch onto that, and soon the group is immersed in the medical details of infarction, muscle death, debridement surgery versus amputation, etc. It's a lot of information, even for his restless brain, and he's beginning to wonder whether he has the time line of his life down right.

"I was crippled for years before the amputation," he summarises.

"Yeah, and you got addicted to the Vicodin you were using as pain management," Chase elucidates.

"Wait - I didn't get expelled from school or lose my other jobs because of my addiction?"

They look at each other. "Not that we know of," Foreman says. "You were that annoying even without the drugs."

"No, he wasn't," Taub, who so far hasn't given the impression that he's his greatest fan, counters. "The years he was sober, he was fairly mellow."

"There could have been addiction issues before the infarction," Foreman concedes. "We wouldn't know."

"Wilson would," Chase supplies. "You'll have to ...,"

"… ask Wilson," he grumbles. "Yes, I've figured that."

They talk about his detoxes next - what the hell was his life like if his former employees consider his addiction to be 'neutral' information? There were two major ones, one out-of-state and one at PPTH under Wilson's supervision (yes, the ubiquitous Wilson again) just before the EST. Chase mentions two more, one during the 'Tritter Affair', a period during which he fell foul of the law ("You forged prescriptions and insulted a police officer - addicts are stupid," Foreman remarks with dry satisfaction), but only stayed clean for long enough to escape being sentenced; and another 'informal' one of his own accord that only Chase accepts as a detox. ("I'm not counting a clinic hour bet as a medical detox!" Foreman objects.)

"If I was such a liability, why'd the hospital keep me?"

There's rare agreement on this: he was a brilliant diagnostician.

Chase murmurs that he learned a lot from him and Taub chimes in to say that his time under House was the most challenging of his life. "Not saying that everything you did was okay, but you knew how to get results," even Foreman can't help admitting.

"Cameron doesn't?" he asks, remembering her statistics and the growth of the department under her aegis. He doesn't want (or need) a confirmation of his superiority - the presence of his three former fellows here with him instead of at the gala dinner with the guests of honour speaks its own language; he needs to figure out where he, in his present licence-less state, can fit in again.

"Quantity does not make quality," Foreman proses. "My department only has four fellows, but we ..."

"You're just pissed because Seattle Metropolitan won't give you the funds that Cameron commands," Chase needles him. It's become predictable; equally predictable is that Foreman never learns, rising to every jab Chase administers.

"Cameron treats five hundred a year, she doesn't diagnose them all," Foreman promptly re-joins. "I know the statistics - under House we barely lost five per cent of our patients; she's losing between twenty and thirty per cent, and among the ones she saves are any number that would never have made it to Diagnostics in our day because anyone could have diagnosed them. Cameron has turned Diagnostics into a big shop that sells everything from diagnoses of rare genetic conditions to the common cold, but she's lost sight of its main product." Interestingly, Foreman doesn't mention the success rate of his present department.

"Big shop has its upsides," Taub says. "More fellows and residents means regular working hours, time for your family and for the second job that you need to support that family." The others laugh; he shrugs.

"I doubt the patients see it that way; part of Cameron's problem is that there's too little continuity in patient assessment and treatment, with a different fellow on duty every eight hours," Chase says.

It takes two more scotches before they are mellowed enough to divulge sensitive information. As usual, they can't agree on much, but the more wasted they get, the fewer their inhibitions, so although the facts remain somewhat foggy, he gets a pretty good picture of the horror of those last disastrous years at PPTH.

"Workplace relationships are never a good idea, especially when they connect different levels of hierarchy," Foreman pontificates. "You guys were bound to combust, what with you challenging her authority. That was fine as long as she had no personal stake in you, but the moment the border line between professional and personal relationship becomes fuzzy, ..."

"Are we still talking about House and Cuddy, or about yourself?" Chase asks. "Cuddy's problem wasn't House challenging her authority, it was the unrealistic expectations she had. She couldn't accept him the way he was; she wanted to press his personality into the mould she'd made for it."

"We're still talking about Cuddy here, right?" Taub asks drily.

"Why don't you explain why two people who have years of shared history and love each other can't make it last for as much as a year!" Chase responds angrily.

"Oh, definitely still about House and Cuddy," Foreman mutters.

"Sometimes love isn't enough," Taub muses. "The more you love each other, the more you can hurt each other, until it's besht - best for both sides to part. Sometimes it's better to leave the one you love, instead of hurting them even more."

"Yeah, seems to have worked just great for me," he interjects. For the most part, he's been sitting quietly, just throwing in a question or two to keep the flow of intel going, but considering what he knows of the calamitous end of his relationship with Lisa, Taub's philosophy seems to be limited in its validity.

"You were lucky she dumped you, even if you didn't see it that way," Foreman opines, leaning back and folding his hands behind his head. "You were a crappy doctor while you were dating her."

"You were even crappier when she stopped dating you," Chase says.

"Why'd she end it?" he asks casually, but hammered though his fellows are, they are not fooled. They look at each other in silence, sober for a brief moment.

"Patient confidentiality," Chase finally says.

"What, do I have to ask Wilson?"

"Asking Wilson about Cuddy would be like asking my ex-wife about my girl-friend," Taub says with a hiccup that turns into a giggle.

"Good point," Chase agrees.

"Were Wilson and I ...?" he rolls his hand in a suggestive gesture, unable to keep the surprise he feels off his face. There's some dismay too - he's never really thought about it, but he sees himself as straight.

"Much worse," Chase says. "Best friends."

"I've been told that already," he growls.

"Forget it," Foreman advises Chase. "That kind of parasitic relationship is difficult to describe." He turns to Pete. "Wilson would tell you that you messed it up by not being there when she needed you, and he'd tell her that she messed it up for giving up on you because of one vicodin. And he'd probably be right on both counts."

"Probably not," Taub says. "You were there when she needed you. You were stoned, but that's what addicts do - they relapse."

"Well, that was kinda Cuddy's point, wasn't it," Chase says, "that House would always relapse when he was needed? You definitely went out of your way afterwards to prove her right!"

He's got the general gist of the matter: he'd failed to make the mark during some sort of crisis, he'd relapsed, and then he'd got dumped. The fellows, their tongues loosened by the alcohol he's been plying them with, regale him with tales of the atrocities he'd committed in the wake of his relapse, their narrative soon widening to include the crapassery he had indulged in before those days. As they relive those days, joking and laughing at their memories, he can feel a blanket of gloom settling over him. He'd had a good life, a job that didn't suck altogether, a nation-wide reputation, and he'd managed to fuck all that up completely and utterly. It doesn't really matter whether one considers his downward spiral to begin with the infarction and his subsequent addiction, his decision to start a relationship with his boss or his violent reaction to the end of that relationship: every time there had been a fork in the road along which he'd travelled, he'd chosen the wrong path with self-destructive determination.

He looks at their flushed, jovial faces, and for the life of him he can't figure out what they find hilarious about sticking a knife into an outlet in order to find out whether there's an afterlife, a stunt that wouldn't have proved anything even if he'd seen the Lord on his throne surrounded by hosts of angels - other than that electric current alters the way the brain processes neurological signals. How stoned does one have to be in order to risk one's life examining so-called paranormal phenomena instead of following the dictates of logic and reason? It's even worse than the rat poison fiasco - he can sort of see the logic behind that attempt to regain the mobility and the freedom from pain that had been eluding him for years, even if his method didn't fulfil any scientific criteria.

For the first time in these past three-and-then-some years he concedes that he may have done himself a favour by re-formatting his hard disk; under all the brilliance and uniqueness that their joint narratives depict, there's the on-going theme of a deeply troubled and miserable soul. Undoubtedly he still isn't exactly easy maintenance or the essence of cheer, but he wouldn't describe himself as a suicide bomber aiming at taking as many people as possible down with him. Because that's the metaphor that comes to mind when one hears his fellows' Merry Tales of Gregory House MD.

"I'll leave you guys to it," he says suddenly, pushing his chair back. Chase and Taub, flushed, barely notice his departure, but Foreman, the soberest of the three, rises to accompany him to the door of the bar.

Outside, Foreman stops and says, "I'm returning to Seattle tomorrow - today -, but we should stay in contact. I may be able to get you in as a consultant to my department."

A sudden rush of adrenaline momentarily lifts the gloom that has settled on him, and he lets a slight smile escape to twitch on his lips. He nods, plucking the card that Foreman extracts from his wallet from Foreman's fingers and walking over to his car without another word.

"Goodnight, House!" Foreman calls.

He slams the door and lifts a hand in acknowledgement as he pulls away from the curb.

---

He'd really like to talk to Wilson, but after what happened in Princeton there's no hope that Mayfield will let him anywhere near the man during the next weeks. So he spends the next few days poring over court records and newspaper archives, his findings confirming the picture his fellows painted of his previous life. Peeking at his past through the keyhole of strangers' reports is frustrating in that it offers him only the barest of glimpses of what happened - even his fellows' drunken tales gave him a better whiff of the essence of Greg House than these sterile reports. There's stuff that he seriously doesn't understand. Yes, he gets what made him sabotage the last trial, the one for attempted manslaughter. If anything surprises him it's that he didn't plead guilty and spare the prosecution the bother of trying to get him convicted.

It's the other trial that's harder to comprehend. He'd risked getting sentenced to a long stint in jail, where detox is painful and drawn out, in order to avoid a detox in an institution of his choice? If Lisa hadn't stepped up at the last moment ... Then there are the charges against him: theft of a prescription pad, prescription forgery, theft of patient medication; all palpably true and in their entirety numbingly sordid - more than enough to have justified losing his licence, if not his freedom.

You knew you were an addict; what the hell did you expect? the voice of reason enquires.

Whatever he expected, it wasn't this. Some inner romantic in him must have believed that his addiction had 'merely' moved his medical career from legal institutions of medicine to semi-legal ones. Personally, he doesn't care how the persons he treated earned their living; his job was to save lives, not to judge them. And if he got paid in kind rather than in cash, in the form of intoxicating substances, that wouldn't cause his inner moral compass to swerve or waver in the least. But forgery and theft from hospital bedsides to maintain his addiction is petty and mediocre; it has neither glamour nor moral justification.

It isn't that he has an innate respect for the concept of private property (unless it's his own) or that he's above a bit of 'borrowing' when the occasion demands it; there is, however, a world of difference between taking something because the opportunity presents itself and taking it because one's inner compulsions won't permit abstinence. It's a question of control, and if there's something lacking in the life of Gregory House, it's control over himself, whether it's his addiction (addictions?) or his reaction to frustration.

It's when he gets an email from Foreman in the middle of the week that his subliminal unease with his present situation crystallises into something tangible. Foreman's mail is short and to the point: his dean would be only too happy to approve of additional funding for consultations, but only if the consulting physician was the famous Gregory House. He should change his identity back to Gregory House asap, and then get back in contact with Foreman, who already has a few cases lined up for him.

This doesn't really come as a surprise; why, after all, should anyone wish to pay Peter Barnes, lately cook in Bristol, for medical consultations? Nor should reclaiming his identity prove to be a major problem - there's enough evidence, starting with his medical records at PPTH and ending with his fingerprints at the Princeton Police Department, to prove that he is indeed the world-famous diagnostician, and there are no major legal repercussions to be expected - should he resume his old identity.

And that's the problem: it isn't, ' ... when he resumes his former identity', as it should be. There's a definite question mark there, and that is odd. He has the chance to quit his deadly boring job as cook (now that there's an alternative, he can freely admit that the job sucks) and take up his former much-loved profession again, and yet he's hesitating. It has nothing to do with any sense of loyalty or longing for his life in England; that life seems so alien already, his present one in America fits him so much better that he's surprised it took him so long to realise that he's American. Nor can his reluctance to return to House be traced to an active dislike of the people associated with his former existence in New Jersey. Other than Lisa, he hasn't seen much of any of them so far, and although they are all weird in more than one way, it's an amusing kind of weird, promising a lot more entertainment than his rather staid companions back in Bristol.

No, it's a lot simpler than that: he doesn't like Gregory House. His dislike isn't rooted so much in single aspects of his character that he can pin down, for although his addiction issues are depressing, his self-destructive tendencies annoying and his act of domestic violence (if that was what it was) despicable, it's the attitude which these facets of his character reveal that really gets his goat. Gregory House is a defeatist; when life pitches a left hook at him, he allows it to sock him straight on the jaw. No fight, no evasion, no flight, nothing. He defines himself by what he lacks, not by what he has, whether it's his disability versus his genius or his capsized relationship versus his functioning friendship. As Pete Barnes he's one leg short of a couple and he boasts no close friends whatsoever, but compared to what he knows of Greg House, Pete Barnes is chirpy and optimistic (two terms he'd never have thought he'd apply to himself).

It isn't that he doesn't recognise himself in Gregory House; if anything, he recognises himself all too well. Slipping back into his old identity might be easier if that weren't the case; he'd felt few qualms at taking over the formal trappings of Peter Barnes of Sussex, who'd had nothing whatsoever in common with him and had thus presented no peril to his sense of identity - as far as he'd had one at that time. House, however, poses a very real threat. Slip back into his skin, and it won't be long before House winds his tentacles around him and pulls him back into his former misery. That sounds like a story from one of his paranormal series, but there's a rational background to his fears: once he resurfaces as Greg House, the people who used to know him will reappear with all their old preconceptions and expectations (spending an evening with Chase, Taub and Foreman has alerted him to how his former acquaintances see him and how he reacts to their perception), and he'll probably revert to the habits that caused him to be miserable and malcontent in that previous life of his, for whatever the nature of his past issues, it is unlikely that they'll have dissolved into thin air along with his memories of them.

He doesn't want to be Gregory House.

He knows that he has no choice but to resume his true identity if he is to work as a diagnostician again, but that doesn't mean that he has to go back to being House. He could move to Seattle where no one but Foreman knows him; from what he has seen of Foreman they are unlikely to become bestest buddies, so there's no reason why he shouldn't construct a new existence for himself in Washington the way he did in England, a life which has nothing in common with his life in Princeton.

Which leaves him with an unpleasant task to complete before he reclaims his place in the medical world. Other than sending him a short text message asking him to contact her as soon as he feels up to it, Lisa has left him strictly to his own devices since that fateful anniversary gala - for which he is grateful, very grateful. He has no idea how he would have handled a confrontation with her in those first hours and days after discovering that they have a common past. Come to think of it, he still has no idea how to handle it, but the matter can't be avoided forever, which is why he drives down to Philly the day after he gets Foreman's email.

When she opens the door and sees him standing there, a smile lights up her face, but it disappears as she takes in his sombre expression. Coming out into the hall, she pulls the door to behind her.

"I know you're angry with me ..."

"I'm not," he cuts her off. He'd like to keep this as short as possible. "But there's no sense in this. It didn't work the last time; it won't work this time."

"You don't know that!"

"Nothing has changed: I'm still an addict; I'll relapse if I'm stressed too hard; you'll dump me." He can sense that she wants to contradict him, so he continues quickly, "Maybe not because of a relapse, but sooner or later I'll do something that's 'dump'-worthy, and out I'll go. People don't change, Lisa. Don't fool yourself into believing that either of us have."

She swallows hard. Then she looks down at her feet. He can sense it's because she doesn't want him to see the tears in her eyes.

"I'm sorry," he says.

That makes her head snap up. "You're ... what?"

"Sorry." He scratches an eyebrow with his thumb, now looking down awkwardly in turn. "I didn't mean to ...," he trails off. This is stupid. He's hurting her. Apologising won't change that.

"You're apologising for not giving me another chance?"

"Why not?" he says defensively. "You're getting hurt because I don't want to take a risk."

"You never apologise for things you can change. And you never explain yourself." She comes closer and peers at him in the semi-darkness of the hall. "This isn't about me at all, is it? This is about you. You're not worried about me dumping you again - you can't remember the last time, so you have no memory of how it hurt you, and besides, you can't really imagine feeling that intensely about me, can you?" She pauses to give him an opportunity to contradict her statement, but she's right, so he says nothing, his eyes flickering around as he does his best to avoid her gaze. "You're afraid that you could turn violent again, aren't you?"

He's silent; it seems safer than a denial.

"Well, that's illogical. If you are an inveterate domestic abuser, then avoiding me isn't going to change that. You'll just rough up your next girlfriend." When he still doesn't reply, she puts a hand on his arm, saying adjuringly. "Pete, you aren't an abuser. You didn't try to kill me - you'd never as much as lifted a finger against me till then. You ... you should really talk to Wilson about what happened."

"I can't talk to Wilson because his shrink won't let me. But from what Chase has told me about Wilson, his view of my life is anything but objective. I seem to have a knack for polarising people one way or another. So we'll never know, will we? We'll never know whether I tried to kill you, or whether your house was just collateral damage to my working off my frustration, or whether I tried to kill myself. You don't want to expose yourself to that again."

"Let me be the one to decide what I ..."

"No!" he almost shouts. She flinches away. He steps away, rubbing his forehead in frustration.

"Because you know best as usual!" she says with stinging sarcasm.

"Suppose we become an item. One fine day you decide you'd like to end it. What do you do?" he asks more or less rhetorically.

She says nothing.

"Exactly," he says with bitter triumph. "You do nothing, because even if you'd love to kick my sorry ass out the door, you can't risk it. You can't risk me going ballistic and possibly killing someone this time round. You'd be eternally trapped in our relationship. And I - I'd wake up every morning wondering whether we're still together because you want it or because you're too scared to end it."

He rubs his brow tiredly. "This isn't what you deserve or what I want. I want a relationship where my woman doesn't shrink away in fear when I start yelling and doesn't wake up from nightmares where I'm ... doing whatever I do to you in your nightmares."

There's no reply to that. He observes her for long enough to see her teeth draw blood from her lips, and then he turns away to go.

After leaving Lisa's place he drives aimlessly through Philadelphia. Well, maybe not as aimlessly as it seems to him at first. The streets get increasingly disreputable; he's back in the haunts where he bought his car. He isn't sure what he wants here or why he isn't heading back for Princeton until he passes a sordid alley with a shadowy figure in it.

It's just curiosity, he tells himself as he pulls the car into the next free parking spot, his unquenchable need to know everything.

The guy in the alley musters him suspiciously. "Whatdoyawant?" he drawls.

"Vicodin."

---

	Chapter Index

Comments

[menolly-au.livejournal.com]

the tree into House incident

LOL - yeah, that was my brain and fingers not connecting I think:) Although apparently a commmon insurance report line is that 'the tree hit my car'. I hope the driver who hit your Mum didn't get away with that line...

can't really say I've been kinder than Shore

After the latest chapter I have to agree....