A Lame Little Pony (sequel to The Beggar's Horse)

[blackmare]

Title: A Lame Little Pony (sequel to The Beggar's Horse)
Author: blackmare_9   and deelaundry  
Rating: R for some profanity
Characters: Wilson, House
Warnings: None; you'll need to read The Beggar's Horse, by nightdog_barks  , first; this is its sequel.
Summary: Getting what you asked for isn't always the same thing as getting what you want.
With thanks to nightdog_barks   for letting us play in her sandbox.



A Lame Little Pony

Against whatever better judgment he still had, House opened the door without bothering to peer through the peephole first. Instantly he regretted it: nobody but Chase, dirty hair in a tired halo around his face.

"You need to come with me," said Chase, his voice as soft and firm as his knuckles had been on the door. "Now, House."

"No." He tried to slam the door, but the whole world was rocking like a rowboat and Chase had got him by the arm.

"I don't care that you're drunk. I understand, but there's a patient who needs you, drunk or not. I'm driving. Come on."

"Wish you were still my minion," House replied, shuffling out the door in his bare feet, "so I could fire you again."

The moment he saw the monitor -- and the patient to whom, impossibly, it belonged -- the alcohol burned out of his system in a firewall of adrenaline.

"How?"

"We were hoping you could tell us. I mean, we've all heard of the Lazarus phenomenon, but we... we can't find any hard evidence as to --"

"Get out."

Chase blinked at him.

"You heard me. Out. Now."

The moment Chase was gone, House began to touch, starting with that all-important carotid pulse. Which was present. It wasn't a malfunction of the monitors, not a trick.

In the back of his head, a tiny blue monkey swung from vine to vine, its screeching laugh ringing loud in his ears. The hospital lights flickered and darkened. Not possible, not possible, not ...

House sank to the floor beside Wilson's bed before he passed out.

It took five days before Wilson woke up, his oxygen-starved organs reviving -- impossibly -- one by one.

As always with Wilson, the brain was the last to clock in.

He'd been wrong, he thought, entirely, catastrophically wrong in that way that he could only have achieved through a potent confluence of grief and alcohol.

There were, it turned out, worse things than Wilson being dead. There was Wilson-as-a-zombie: this gigantic five-year-old child inhabiting Wilson's shell, failing to fit together the multicolored wooden blocks of his own life.

"Your name is Chase," Wilson said, for the fifth time in the five hours since he awoke. "Bobert." Wilson smiled, and Chase smiled back. House didn't share in the moment.

"Who am I?" House demanded, towering over the bed. "C'mon, Wilson, you know this."

"I don't know," said Wilson, eyes wide. "But you're not very happy, are you?"

House walked out.

Thirteen weeks had passed, and it still made no more sense than it had in that first hour with the sirens shrieking their way across town.

Doctor Wilson came back to work. Jimmy, though, lay cold and unmoving, an invisible wisp forgotten on the bank lobby tiles.

There was no explanation, none. Wilson had no brain damage. Zombie Wilson had quickly given way to Miraculous Recovery Wilson. Everything else fell back into place, the marriages and the medicine, the other doctors and the multiple divorces, with a single crucial bit at the center entirely gone: House.

In the landscape of Wilson's head, the house that was House had been bulldozed, the plot grown over with soft green grass, as if it had never existed at all.

Over the past three months and eight days, House had hunted endlessly for what was gone. He had grabbed onto every curve and angle of Wilson's life, searching for the cracked wall that would let him in again, the secret lever, hidden in a candelabra perhaps, that would open up the chamber Wilson had hidden even from himself.

He'd been through every nook and cranny of Wilson's apartment, every molecule of Wilson's car. He'd lurked (carefully) at the gun range where Wilson got his concealed carry permit. He'd called Lucas back in on the case, bugged phones and had photos taken, acquired copies of every EEG, EKG, CAT scan, email, and medical certification test.

Bupkis.

The video cam -- House suspected Lucas had hidden it in that godawful lab-coat-wearing teddy bear -- allowed House to watch Wilson's office from the comfort of his own desktop, but Wilson's life in House's absence was, for the most part, blindingly mundane.

“Hey,” Wilson said to his assistant one day, “from now on, I want to lead the introduction when we have new resident orientation.”

“You delegated that to Dr. Hernandez,” Mousy Girl replied.

“I know,” Wilson said with a sigh, “along with development, coaching - in fact, almost all interaction with my team, period. I just can’t remember why.”

Timidly (of course), Mousy prompted, “You ... were busy. You were, um ... spending a lot of time with Dr. House.”

"Oh." Wilson looked down at his calendar and nodded. "Set up ..." There was a momentary pause on the feed, during which someone coughed quietly, before Wilson continued, “Set me up a lunch with Dr. Hernandez, so I can discuss getting some of those responsibilities shuffled back onto my plate where they belong.”

That was as much as House ever really learned from Wilson's private reality TV show. There were no further clues, no hints that the selective amnesia was anything other than authentic and permanent.

He tried everything, looking for that magical trigger that would bring on the cascade reaction of memory.

“Monster trucks,” House said one day in the cafeteria line.

“Good morning, Dr. House,” Wilson replied in the patiently instructive tone of a kindergarten teacher. He looked pale.

House shoved a banana onto Wilson’s tray. “You like monster trucks.”

“Yes, I do,” Wilson said with a smile. A warm one, a real one, not the patronizing fake kind he’d been doling out to House left and right.

“A-ha!” House crowed.

Wilson stepped forward to the cashier and pulled out his wallet. “My cousin’s teenager is into them. We went last year to an event at the Meadowlands and had a blast. I should get tickets and take her again.” He put his hand down on his tray, forming a short divider wall. “The banana’s not mine; it’s Dr. House’s.”

“But -”

“Thanks for the reminder!” Wilson called cheerily as he walked away with his oatmeal.

The only trigger House had uncovered, in the end, was the tiny red button that finally shut down Wilson's Juggernaut of Politeness.

"I told you to leave me alone," said Wilson, the last time (ninth out of nine) House pounded on his office door while he was inside with a patient. "I hate to say this, because I know you're having a rough time right now, but you have to stop following me around. You're being... creepy! And weird. And the weirdest thing is that people tell me you were like this with me before, too." Wilson shuddered slightly before starting to close his office door. "I'm glad I can't remember."

"You're lying," House insisted. "You have to be. You remember everything, everyone else, and not me? You even remember Crandall."

Wilson blinked through the narrow slice of space between the jamb and the almost-shut door. "Dylan Crandall. Whose ... whose daughter almost died. Brown figured it out and saved her life."

"Where was I?"

"Hell if I know. You need help, Doctor. Now if you'll excuse me?"

Now and then, Cameron and Chase would form their own sad Salvation Army, flanking him on either side in the cafeteria.

House tried to drive them away, or at least not to talk to them, and discovered he couldn't do either one. Their pity slid down his throat with the food, congealing in his gut, but so hungry was he by then that he took the few sad scraps of companionship he could still get.

Even Kutner had begun to avoid him.

He let his two tawny-haired lovebirds chirp away on either side of him, all the while watching, across the room, the back of Wilson's lost and unknowable head.

Evenings, he spent in the scintillating grip of neurological journals, old and new, obscure and reknown -- it was all the same to House.

On the nights when he slept at all, he often slept on the sofa. He would go to sleep staring at the monkey's back and find when he awoke that it was facing him. This had to be due to vibrations from the road, or the settling of the building, or some other unexplained thing: the resonance of radio waves with the crystallized tin and copper in the ancient faience. Who the hell knew.

He had moved the Evil Monkey several times. It sat atop the piano and had nothing to do with the strings going too slack and producing sour notes. It perched on a bookshelf and was absolutely not responsible for the collapse of said shelf or for the volume of Gray's Anatomy that fractured House's right middle toe. It rested on the toilet tank lid and was in no way connected with the stoppage and overflow that soaked the apartment the following day.

House didn't dare put the thing in the kitchen, too close to the propane stove.

What he wanted, more than anything, was to destroy it. Yet he stayed his hand, unwilling to concede victory to a New Kingdom knickknack. Even if there were any malevolent intelligence at work here -- and there was not; it was a fucking ceramic monkey -- surely House could outwit it.

He just needed to think.

Sadly, the one person who best facilitated House's mental processes was no longer speaking to him at all.

Four months to the day since he had died, and Wilson looked half-dead again. The Monkey giveth, thought House, and the Monkey taketh away.

"You need another MRI," he said, moving not quite fast enough this time to wedge his body inside Wilson's office door before Wilson -- pale-faced and shadow-eyed -- slammed it.

Looking up, he found Cuddy coming at him like a torpedo. "Leave him alone, House. One more interrupted patient appointment, one more stolen medical file, and I swear I will lead the board in voting to fire you. Are we clear?"

Cuddy had threatened to fire him so many times that even House had lost count, but this time, he knew that she meant it.

"Wilson, I'm sorry. For ... for all of it."

The Ghost of Wilson stopped, turning away from the side of his squeaky-clean Volvo. "And?"

"And you look anemic, and exhausted, which is probably at least a little bit my fault. And you're planning to move your office, which is definitely my fault. And you're hungry, which ... let me buy you dinner. Okay?"

"I'm afraid I've had enough cafeteria --"

"Not the damn cafeteria. Anywhere. Delmonicos at Charley's Steakhouse, if that's what you want."

Wilson blinked at him. "That's ... generous. Really. But I'm afraid I'm too tired to go anywhere tonight."

"Tomorrow, then?"

"Doctor House," Wilson said, using that dove-soft voice he employed for terminal patients, "you know I won't remember any better tomorrow than I did yesterday or the day before that."

"Doesn't it make you crazy, missing a whole chunk of your life? Don't you even want to know?"

Wilson shook his head; he looked so old. "I'm sorry, Doctor House. I think it's best if we both accept that some things, once they're broken, just ... can't be fixed." He climbed into the car, easing himself down the way he never used to do because he was far, far too young for that.

House watched the car pull away and wondered how long it would be before he would, once more, have to watch helplessly while James Wilson's heart stopped beating. He'd only said, after all, that he wanted Wilson alive. He'd never specified the lifespan.

The Monkey, if the Monkey were real, might have merely stamped Wilson with a different expiration date. It would have been just the style of that double-crossing shit-flinging con artist. That didn't exist.

Damn. Take Wilson away and House's sanity went with him. Talk about unexpected side effects.

"Where's Wilson?"

Cuddy hesitated; he could see her compose her face just so, preparing to launch a ready-made lie and then --

"Leave him alone, House." Her tone was gentle, sad, pitying. "He's in the MRI. His blood work will be back in a few hours; yes, it's a full panel, no, we haven't found anything yet and by 'we' I mean myself and your old team."

"And you're telling me this because?"

"Because if I don't tell you you'll do something both illegal and stupid to find out. And ..."

"Because if you keep me in the loop, I might just solve the case."

"There's that."

"Does he know you're sharing his information?"

"Yes, and he doesn't want to see you."

They had sent Wilson home, having, of course, found nothing.

House took all the Nothing with him at the end of the day: files and films and blood panels rife with normality, an EKG that could've belonged to a twenty-year-old track star, nothing but perfect health as far as the eye could see. Unless the eye rested upon Wilson himself, who looked as blurry and overexposed as a bad Polaroid.

The Monkey, which House had left on the coffee table with its face to the TV, had turned around to greet him when he walked in the door.

He picked up the remote and his flat-screen turned on with a curt little pop, and then with another pop it went black again. It popped no more after that, no matter how hard the power button got pressed. There would be no point, House knew, in trying to revive it.

Some things, once they're broken, just can't be fixed.

"You're coming with me," said House, "you evil little bastard."

He didn't take the bike. The Buick would do; House needed safety, not style.

Nobody even asked House why he was carrying a portable defibrillator unit out of the hospital at seven in the evening. The case bumped uncomfortably against the tiny wicked figure in his coat pocket as he walked out the door.

A light was on inside Wilson's apartment. Outside, dusk was sweeping in from the clouded eastern sky.

House stood there, agitated, painfully aware of his own growing insanity, with the portable AED at his feet, the Monkey in one hand and the cane in the other. "Guess I'm changing specialties," he muttered. "So long, infectious diseases; hello, voodoo."

If and when it turned out that he was nuts, and Wilson came perplexed to the door, wanting to know what the hell -- then House would make a joke of it. I came here because I felt like being nice, he'd say. Wanted to be prepared, in case the shock was too much for you.

The thing he meant to do was superstitious and insane, and he disgusted himself with his own thoughts of It couldn't hurt, the same ridiculous crap all idiots said when they knocked on wood for luck. It couldn't hurt, and when it also failed to help, he'd find some other way. Not to fix the thing they'd had, but to build a new thing. That was, if Wilson lived. If House could figure out what was wrong with him in time. The tests showed nothing amiss, but ...

"But first things first," he murmured, "you rotten fucking shithead."

He dropped the Monkey on the concrete steps and bashed it, again and again, with the old steel-handled cane he'd picked just for this occasion.

House was grinding blue bits into white dust with his heel, so intent on annihilation that he barely heard the door swing open above him.

"What the hell are you --" Wilson began, and then his hands clutched at his chest and he became, in a moment, an oversized doorstop.

House had called the ambulance only after he jolted Wilson's heart back to life.

He'd ridden with them, armored against the EMTs who couldn't understand how it was that House had shown up on the scene of an imminent cardiac arrest, fully prepared for a battle he couldn't have seen coming.

"I saw it coming two weeks ago," he'd said, pushing them aside to crouch over Wilson himself. "That's why I'm me and you're not. Now stay out of my way. I've got him."

It was raining, ice-cold drops striking the top of House's head, his cheek, his nose.

The graveyard was full of people shorter than House, their heads huddled beneath black umbrellas.

Wilson's coffin was white and the rain was bouncing off it like pebbles off a window pane. The wind in House's ears sounded hollow, mechanical, like ... like ...

"C'mon, House."

Like an air conditioner, House thought. More cold flecks struck his skin, and House discovered his own body, contorted into a singularly unfriendly chair. In Wilson's hospital room, with Wilson in bed, a plastic cup of ice rattling in his hand.

"I'm touched," Wilson said, flicking another round of water off his fingertips, "that you stayed here."

"You'd really be touched if you knew me."

"And you've ... decided it's all right that I don't?"

"Only in the same sense that it's all right being crippled. It is what it is." He got up, his body and the chair both creaking.

"Soon as they let me out of here," Wilson said, "I'll take you up on that steak dinner."

"I saved your life." House checked Wilson's updated chart; it was, naturally, normal. "You could at least feed me."

"I almost died. I could at least get fed."

"By that logic, the universe owes me at least --"

"Eight steak dinners," Wilson supplied.

"Nine," House corrected, sitting down again to placate his very unhappy leg, "if you count the time I was five and hitched my Huffy to the bumper of a station wagon."

"You don't get free food if the near-death experience was the result of your own willful idiocy. Which leaves your tally at ... four, if I recall correctly." Wilson's eyes went very wide. "House. If I ... if I recall ..."

"So," said House, shoving his chair as close to the bed as it would fit. "Do you?"

~end~

Note: I didn't entirely make this stuff up. Return of spontaneous circulation is a known, if rare, occurrence. It is also known as the Lazarus phenomenon.