Housefic: American Gothic, Part Two
Title: American Gothic
Author: nightdog_barks, third_owl, and pwcorgigirl
Characters: House, Wilson
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: No
Spoilers: Yes, for the Season 8 series finale arc.
Summary: Halloween comes early for House and Wilson when they seek shelter from a storm. This part is 5,499 words.
Disclaimer: Don't own 'em. Never will.
Author Notes: This is set in the Riververse -- a ficverse set after the end of Season 8 and in which House and Wilson's road trip has continued longer than either of them would've ever thought. This fic takes place a month or so after the events of Will It Go Round in Circles. The cut-text is from Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House.
Beta: Our intrepid First Readers, with especial thanks to yarroway and joe_pike_junior.
Part One
Part Two
House would recognize that scream anywhere. Same one he heard when he was cannonballing five floors down into a hotel pool like the damn fool he was. Instantly he's on his feet, scrambling for the stairs, but as it turns out there's no need for him to go anywhere. The basement door flies open, slamming against the wall so hard it bounces back, and there's Wilson, almost tumbling down the steps, gulping for air, his eyes wild.
"House," Wilson gasps out. "God, House -- " and then he stops and takes a deep breath. He sets the lantern on the floor and looks searchingly into House's eyes.
"House," he says. "You're ... talk to me, House. Talk to me?"
"Okay?" House says carefully, not quite sure what the right answer is here, but apparently that's enough, and before House can think of anything else to say, he's enveloped in a Wilson bear-hug.
"Um," House says. Wilson doesn't let go. "Um," House says, a little more forcefully, and then, "What happened up there? You were screaming like a little girl," and that does the trick.
"I didn't scream!" Wilson insists, and damn it, now that Wilson has let him go, House misses the warmth.
"I heard you," House says, "and it was a scream. Where the hell were you, anyway?"
"Attic. I may have ... shouted," Wilson allows, and House knows that's as far as he'll go. "As for what happened ... " He steps back and shrugs off the bag he's carrying. "The, uh ... spiders came out, while we were down here." He's doing that thing House recognizes very well: fumbling around for something, anything that House might believe. House decides to let him flounder. "Lots of spiders. Big spiders. I walked into a web. I, I have a phobia, okay?"
"What you have is a total inability to lie when you're on the spot." House retrieves the lamp from the floor, holds it aloft, and studies his face carefully. "There's not a strand of silk on you. You've been twitchy ever since we looked down the basement stairs -- the same way you were wound up tight in that mine shaft in Fort Bumfuck, California."
"Calico Town," Wilson says.
"What?"
"It was called Calico Town," Wilson says. "Outside Barstow."
House would throw up his hands if he weren't holding the goddamn lamp. "I don't care what it was called!" he says. "Then, I thought it was caffeine. Now, I know it's not. If you do have a phobia, spiders aren't it. We got stuck in that elevator in Jacksonville, and you didn't freak, so 'enclosed spaces' is out. You've happily gone camping under a pitch black sky, so cross off 'lack of light.' I'd diagnose basement-related PTSD, but it's clearly not basement-specific, which leaves me no choice but to ask my lying weasel patient what the hell happened."
Wilson is staring at the bag at his feet.
"I don't mean just now. I mean before. Whenever it was."
Wilson looks up, finally, but he keeps moving his eyes around the basement, like he's waiting for something to come creeping out of the bricks. "It was stupid, House. This whole thing is stupid."
"Stupid beats boring," House says, and he might be winning, because Wilson blinks, takes a breath, and picks up the bag again. Their food, such as it is, is inside. "So," House continues, "wanna tell me about it over dinner?"
Wilson doesn't want to tell him, but he can't figure out why not. Well, other than the obvious reason, which is that House will mock him into oblivion, but that's always been a given. He rummages through the packs and thinks about baggage. What he's afraid of, after all these years. He looks up to find House watching him. Even in the flickering light of candles and lantern, that familiar, sharply curious expression is clear.
"Next time, I buy the snacks," Wilson says. He's hoping, if he gripes enough, he'll seem normal again and House won't mention the way Wilson's sitting, pressed close against his side. He pulls a crushed, deflated cellophane bag out and holds it to the light. "Seriously? Who the hell still eats Funyuns?"
"You, and then you'll conveniently blame the aftereffects on me. Find the Moon Pies yet?"
"It was a hundred degrees out there. I'm not sure I want to find the Moon Pies."
"They're on top of the apples. You can hand me one of those now, if you're going to be a bummer and insist on dinner before dessert." House leans in, looks a little closer. "I'd prefer mine without blood on it."
"What?" Wilson looks at his hand. The makeshift bandage has soaked through again and dark streamers of blood are drying on his arm. "Ah. Yeah. My slow leak."
He holds out his hand for House to wrap another layer of t-shirt strips around it.
"You don't stop bleeding and I'll be able to wear this shirt to a job interview at Hooters," House grumbles.
"Fine, but I'm not paying for the implants. Oh, wait, you wouldn't need implants."
"Shut up and coagulate," House says, and while he must have been aiming for 'brusque and abrasive,' he doesn't quite make it, and Wilson can see him trying not to smile.
"Eat up. It's a holiday," Wilson says. "National Tornado Day. Celebrate it however you want." He finds the Moon Pie packets, much the worse for wear, and holds one up by its edge like he's got a dead rat by the tail. Better this than that disgusting splat-ball, though. House snatches the Pie gleefully. In no time there's melted chocolate on his fingers and lips and chin, and he's licking marshmallow goop off his thumb. The second squashed, melted Moon Pie is looking like a better idea all the time. Wilson peels it open carefully, although he no longer wears the kinds of clothes that a mess will ruin. House mumbles something that might be "go for it" and tips his head back in gooey delight. For a moment Wilson thinks he's going to do that horrible, childish, "see food" thing, opening his mouth to display a gloppy melange of marshmallow and masticated chocolate cookie, but House doesn't, and to Wilson's surprise, he misses it.
There's only one thing to do.
"I was sixteen," Wilson begins. "Which should tell you approximately how smart I was."
"I don't know if this is such a good idea," James said. The entrance to the Chief Oratam Cavern loomed before them, a dark mouth gaping behind the weeds and loose brush. If they were on the side that opened into the park, this would all be cleared away. It would be easy, and boring, and a ranger might catch them.
"Oh, come on, Jimmy." Jason put down the Pabst he'd been sipping as he drove them down here -- slipping it below window-level when another car cruised by. "Don't be such a pussy."
"I'm not a pussy, dipshit."
Jason grinned. "I know you're not," he said, and reached out and playfully punched James on his bicep. And that was why James would do pretty much anything Jason wanted. Because Jason didn't care what anyone thought of him, and he was almost eighteen and a senior, and he still liked James. "Look, we're not gonna get caught. The power company owns this end and there's never anyone down here. So come on. Let's have some fun."
And so they went, each with a backpack slung over one shoulder, to carry whatever they found. Arrowheads, James imagined. Sharks' teeth, maybe, bits of ancient pottery, spear-points, all these beautiful flint-knapped things waiting to be picked up.
"It'll be mostly on the floor of the cave," Jason said, "not stuck in the walls. So watch there." James kept his eyes on the ground as they walked in together, finding insect-trails and sparks of mica, a cigarette butt and a condom wrapper and the wave-patterns left by water that had run through and then dried. His flashlight beam hit on something shiny and dark, and he had just toed it up to reveal it as an ordinary rock when he looked up to say something to Jason, and ...
Jason wasn't there.
Wilson pointed his light ahead of him and turned around, and around again, and out of all the branch-offs from the main cavern, he couldn't see the one Jason must have taken. He'd lost the mouth of the cave, and the safety of daylight, and was near a sort of chamber, like an anteroom, with a low ceiling full of spiny, broken stalactites and what looked like three offshoot tunnels, and enough perfectly preserved footprints so that, when James stopped turning, he had no idea which prints were even his.
He was yelling for Jason when the beam of his flashlight turned from white, to yellow, to dull, dull orange; he could see no more than eighteen inches, then, in any direction.
Damn it, Jason, he thought, trying to get pissed off instead of terrified. Jason and his good ideas. We'll stay together, he said. He'd laughed at James's idea that they ought to get a spool of kite-string, tie one end to a branch outside the cave, and unreel it going in. "I've been in there," Jason said. "It's cool, but it's not that complicated, and anyway, where are we gonna get the string?"
"Hardware store, duh," House says. "You two weren't even wearing helmets, were you? Your friend was a moron."
"You want the story, or not?"
"Touchy, touchy."
James stopped yelling and stood still. He forced himself to take some deep, calming breaths, tried to slow the thumping heart in his chest. He listened with all his might, straining to catch Jason's voice, Jason's laugh, the flap of Jason's sneakers in the thick dust, but there was nothing, nothing out there but a high-pitched squeaking which James assumed must be a bat.
"Jason?" James turned around again slowly, a full circle. Silence. Even the squeaking had faded away. "Jason? This isn't funny, man!" His mouth was so dry he couldn't work up enough saliva to spit. "Jason, come on. Come on, okay? Please?"
"Jimmy!" a voice called, and James gasped with relief. He swung the flashlight in that direction, but the beam was too weak.
"Jimmy!" the voice called again. "Over here!" But where was here?
He took a tentative, sliding step forward.
The last of his light died. He waved his fingers in front of his face, and saw nothing at all.
Breathe, don't cry, think, he told himself. Breathe --
A large, heavy hand closed around his arm, and he screamed and twisted away. Another set of fingers, smaller and colder, clutched at his hair, and then there were hands all over him. Pulling on his shirt, grabbing at his shoulders, snatching at his ankles as he tried to run. He fell, got up, saw a light and sprinted toward it -- watery and pale, maybe Jason's flashlight, or the blue of daylight coming in, but then it was gone and his foot hit a stalagmite.
James went to his knees in the dust.
The ground beneath him seemed to lurch and spin. He could hear himself screaming, panicking, and when he managed to stop, there were other voices. Distant, distorted fragments, like someone talking, way too far away on a short-wave radio, in a language he didn't understand.
Desperate, he scrambled back to his feet, looked upward, and there was Jason -- above him, a luminous round face floating in the darkness, up there where he had no right to be. And then it changed and James didn't know what the fuck it was, but it wasn't Jason anymore.
James ran, hands outstretched, swinging the dead flashlight ahead of him like a club. Ran straight into one wall after another, trying to get out, away from the hands, away from the disembodied face of his friend, running for his life with the voices of cave-things all around him. He had no way to know which direction he was going, out to daylight and safety, or into an unknown, unmapped crevasse.
He never knew how the hell he made it out alive.
"I found Jason in the Nova, huddled down in the seat with the doors locked. Face all scratched up, I guess from crashing so hard through the brush getting out of there. He was ... I've seen cadavers that weren't that pale."
"So what did the boogeyman do to him?"
Wilson shakes his head. "I don't know. He didn't say and I didn't ask. He'd been crying, I'd been crying, we were guys in high school, we were supposed to be cool and grown-up and we'd practically wet our pants. It would've been too weird. His parents were out of town that weekend, so we went back to his house and tried to forget about it. Watched racy stuff on cable we weren't supposed to watch. When it got dark, we raided all the dusty old bottles of Triple Sec and Cointreau and Blue Curaçao, sweet shit like that, down in the basement. Things nobody really wanted but they'd never thrown out. Didn't sleep until dawn, and we were still so drunk. I was hammered. First time I ever had more than a few sips of anything."
"You were both idiots."
"What, going into the cave unsupervised and not marking our trail? Yes, I think we established that part, House."
"You're still an idiot. You were drinking, on top of chemical intoxication from whatever toxic sludge the power company dumped in that cave. You'd been inhaling the Ghost of Regulatory Violations Past, with no EPA Angel to wave her magic Superfund wand."
Wilson blinks. "That's your explanation? Chief Oratam Cavern State Park was a toxic waste site?"
"Makes logical sense." House shrugs; he's filed the story away for future reference and is ready to move on. "Or you and your bud managed to freak each other out, there in the dark. Still, I'm surprised you didn't puke your guts out."
Wilson barks out a laugh. "Who says I didn't? Jason kept pouring more, and it's not like I knew when to stop. He said I was a fun drunk."
The kid was right, House thinks. Wilson is the funnest of fun drunks, not because he does anything cool but because, once you get enough alcohol into him, his inner dork comes out to play. Really play, like the innocent kid he would have been back then, and House finds himself jealous of Jason What's-his-face, with the absent parents and the car and the unspoiled young Jimmy.
"I'm seeing a pattern in your friendships," House announces.
"What?"
"Best bud who's a little older. Misfit who isn't even trying. Does stupid things and takes you along. Bad influence who gets you wasted. This doesn't sound familiar?"
"Oh." Wilson digs the very last Funyun bits out of the bag. "Yeah, I can see that. He was a good guy."
"A good guy." This was not the expected Wilson response.
"He was. It was a ... bad year, for me, and he was a pretty good friend. Thing is, he knew I was lost in there, but once he got out, he didn't go back. He'd have called for help, but he wasn't going back in after me."
"Smart kid."
"Yeah. Smarter than you." Wilson crumples the bag and tosses it aside. "Good thing stupid trumps boring."
"I'm never boring," House counters, trying to recover his conversational groove. "I even had the forethought to bring some entertainment."
"Entertainment? You have a phone with games, and a harmonica. Neither of which counts."
"They do so, but that's not what I meant. I am speaking of the classics of modern literature."
He watches while Wilson's brain takes a few seconds to make the leap back to ... an hour ago? Two? Is that all? -- and realize what House must mean. At Wilson's You've got to be kidding me stare, House merely smiles.
"You're gonna need your glasses," Wilson says.
"'Delia moaned eagerly as she felt the hot thrust of his marble-hard manroot at the gates of -- '"
Wilson sputters. Loudly. "It does not say that."
"Does so. Hopefully his condition's treatable. Now knock off the coitus interruptus."
"But my book's better." Wilson turns it so that the gold-embossed title catches the lamplight and starts to read. "'He pushed me down upon my belly among the rough woolen blankets, with one strong hand on my back and the other rucking my skirt up about my waist. His fingers slipped betwixt my legs, drawing out the wetness there before pressing into me again, in the one place I thought unfit for any touch.'"
House actually looks surprised. "Whoa. Is he about to -- "
"Oh yeah. 'He entered me first in the usual fashion, then drew back and followed in earnest that forbidden path his fingers had made.'" Wilson raises his voice to a falsetto and lays his hand across his forehead for effect. "'No,' I protested, 'tis not meet!' 'Tis better than the beating you deserve,' he growled. Soon he had -- '"
"His dick all the way up her ass. Why didn't anyone ever tell me what was in these books?"
"' -- filled me in that strange new way, and as he moved I cried out in amazed delight, spreading wide that he might sheathe himself fully within me. How many paths are there to sin, and how many roads to pleasure? I think Sir Charles must have known them all.'"
"Our heroine is one kinky, kinky girl," House says, and it might be Wilson's imagination or else House's eyes might have dilated a little more than they already were, in the dim lantern-light. "Not sure I can top that one."
"You could bottom." Wilson's mouth says it before his brain can put the brakes on, and then he's snickering and grinning like a high school kid, like he might have when it was him and Jason, only more so because he was miserable then and he's happy now, here in the basement with the tornadoes and no real food and House. Who is staring at him as if he's just ... abruptly grown an extra head or something. House's mouth is hanging half-open.
"We're going to burn these," House says, finally. "Next place we stay that has a fireplace or a grill. And roast smutty, smutty marshmallows."
"You burn yours. I'm keeping this one." And he is, even though he needs to stop these vague thoughts about that scene and why it was the one he chose to read to House. And whether he truly wants to know. "Have we got any more Moon Pies?"
Somehow, House is depressed to learn, they have become so boring that they are talking about the weather. Not the current weather, at least. Stories of the harshest and weirdest shit they've seen; of Wilson's mother's car being ruined when she put off the antifreeze and that crazy cold snap burst the radiator; of the lightning that hit his cabin that one year -- it was only one year -- when he was in the Boy Scouts; of the Florida Panhandle hurricane House and his mom survived, evacuating just minutes ahead of the storm surge that took out the roads.
"I was pretty calm about it, for an eight-year-old."
"You weren't freaked out knowing you were about to lose your home?"
"Military brat. Never felt like I had a home to lose. It was -- " He's about to say something like 'normal' or 'expected,' but he's just noticed ... something. A pair of somethings, and they look like eyes.
They are golden-orange and quite small, and they are shining out of a dark, dark corner, over past the washer and dryer. "Wilson," he says, and then realizes Wilson has seen it, too. Wilson is sitting very, very still.
"Rat," House guesses. Norway rat, roof rat, except this isn't the roof and it's in the wall -- and that's when the first set of eyes moves, a head bobbing, and another set appears. One eye, that vanishes, then another (or else the creature is blinking), and then two, faint and narrower, and then it moves again. And that's how they all are, the first two and the next six and the following dozen and oh, holy shit.
"That's a lot of fucking rats," Wilson whispers.
"Rats can have eight litters a year," House says, just as softly, "with up to twenty pups in a litter. They do a lot of fucking."
Something talks back to him, but it isn't Wilson. The voice says something in a language House does not know, low and dark, and the horde of high-wall rats bursts into noise and motion and it isn't rats. It's a storm of black feathers, orange-glinting eyes, wings pushing cold cold air down on them, so low House can feel it in his hair, feel the wing-tips brushing his arm when he raises it to shield his face, and the touches are like sleet and then he can't see a damn thing because the lamp has gone out.
They sit there in the dark, no longer holding hands because they're holding onto each other, for a while. How long, no telling. Long enough for Wilson to regain his senses and find his lighter in his pocket. House can see the sparks shaking each time Wilson tries to get the thing to work.
He doesn't offer to help. He's in no better shape than Wilson.
Once the lantern's lit and they've both remembered how to breathe, House gets up.
His leg hurts, but he needs to move, and to see. Specifically, to see the wall where the crows, or whatever they were, seemed to gather.
He lights the candles so he won't leave Wilson in the dark, and takes the lantern over to the corner where everything seemed to start. He finds no windows, bricked-over or otherwise. No air vents. No trapdoors, no shelves, nothing. House steps forward, running his hands over the stone surface, and notices an odd sensation under the toe of his boot.
Sand? he thinks. He leans down with his lamp, touches the stuff, and his fingers come up coated in ash. The same fine, gritty stuff he'd seen in the bird cages, in the attic, where whatever happened to Wilson, happened to Wilson.
House can't remember if the ash was here before. It must have been. It couldn't possibly ... but nothing that's happened tonight could really possibly have happened, and there must be an explanation for the shared delusions and he hopes there's not some kind of weird gas leak in here, a fissure in the ground filling the basement with CO2 or --
"House," Wilson says, but House is thinking. "House!"
House turns around to find Wilson standing at the base of the steps, their bags slung over his shoulder. "I want out of the basement," he says. "Now."
In a direct manifestation of Anticlimax Hell, nothing else happens the entire night. There are only routine noises -- the house settling as the air cools, a rustle of small animals in the grass outside, the crickets and frogs and an owl somewhere. Thunder rumbles, a tiger growl in the distance as they pace, talk very little, and keep each other company. There's no telling if the storms are truly gone, so they pull the dusty twin mattress out of the back bedroom, the one with the abandoned broken doll, which Wilson throws out the window into the darkness before he'll pick up his corner of the mattress.
House doesn't even mock him. Probably some kind of failure on his part, but if there's one thing he doesn't need, it's a fresh set of hallucinations involving Chucky's distant cousin out in Kansas. Or Nebraska. He's still not sure which state this is.
They drag the mattress into the front room, dust it off as best they can, and stretch out, if you can call it that. It's a twin size, barely enough room for the two of them to fit, but it's the only place to lie down at all and so they do, arranged closely together and wondering out loud if that faint scent is urine, or what.
They lie in the dark shoulder to shoulder on the narrow mattress. The smell that might be urine fades into the background. House can smell dust and the riper odor of rotting wood, but the strongest scent is the coppery tang of Wilson's blood. The bandage on his hand is soaked again and Wilson's fallen asleep with that hand on his chest.
House turns on his side, reaches across Wilson and takes hold of his hand. Light pressure that won't wake Wilson up, but it should help stop the bleeding. Tomorrow he'll look at it in good light and rig up a pressure bandage.
Wilson makes a small noise in his throat and House pushes up on one elbow. It's so dark he can't see Wilson's features, just the pale blur of his sweat-damp face.
It's like a flashback to the worst hours of Chemo Weekend, when he was damned near sure that Wilson was going to die on his sofa before morning, when all House could smell was stale vomit, piss, sweat and fear.
He wraps his arm tighter around Wilson and listens to the steady sound of his breathing for a long time.
When House dozes off, he dreams things that wake him again, and doesn't talk about it. The same thing happens to Wilson, House can tell, and so he doesn't ask. He already knows.
They sleep, and wake, and sleep again. They keep checking their watches, but one or both of them is no longer keeping accurate time; they know this because of the discrepancy between the two. It hardly matters which one is correct; it is still a long, long night on a stiff and ruined mattress, and the only thing the least bit comfortable here is the heat and heft of Wilson against his side, as the air keeps getting colder.
The moment it's light enough to see what they're doing, they are out the door. Wheeling the bikes (unharmed, though the garage lost most of its roof in the night) into the open, and packing their saddlebags, and looking over their shoulders.
"First hotel?" Wilson says.
"Or motel. Campground. Convenient rest stop. Whichever comes first."
"Preferably with food available."
By the time they're ready to ride, the sun's just coming up, a thin yellow sliver on the horizon.
The old Buick, some thirty yards from the house, is now on its back in the weeds.
To the left of the car, the windbreak is down. How none of the trees struck the old house, House doesn't care to speculate. Snapped-off trunks litter the area like scattered Lincoln logs, tossed across the land and the pavement. It'll be a bitch to maneuver their bikes around it, and they'll likely have to detour through the tall grass and smaller hunks of debris, but House figures anything that will get them further away from this place is worth the effort.
He swings his leg over, so tired and so sore.
A phone rings.
It's a shrill sound, an old-fashioned stuttering mechanical chime, and it's coming from inside the house. The blood drains from Wilson's face; he looks sick.
"Let's go, House," he says. "Come on."
But House sits still, looking back at the door. What if, he thinks. What if I went back, and answered?
Have to find it first, says something irrational in his head. Hide and seek, trick or treat.
"House," Wilson says, and his voice is low and urgent. "House, look."
He's pointing at the ancient pole a few yards behind and to the left of the house. It lists sideways, its service box busted open, its few frayed broken wires swaying in the fresh morning breeze. "We went through every room. You know we did. There is," Wilson says, "no fucking phone."
House looks at Wilson, Wilson looks at House, and the phone that can't ring keeps ringing.
They start their bikes without another word, and ride until the house is lost from sight.
~ Epilogue ~
The diner is like every one of the other roadhouses they've stopped at over the past months -- the smell of fried grease heavy in the air, an industrial-size Bunn coffeemaker behind the counter, the sizzle of eggs and bacon on the grill. House feels right at home. Of course, it's Wilson who wants to talk.
"House, what we saw, last night ... "
"Birds?"
Wilson hesitates, stirring his coffee with his left hand. His right is wrapped in a light gauze bandage, fresh from the Walgreen's next door. A clean gauze bandage; the cut had apparently stopped bleeding somewhere on the road.
"Birds," he says. "Yeah. Big ones, a lot of them."
"Yeah." House steals the biggest, ripest strawberry from the top of Wilson's waffle stack. "I like that idea you and what's-his-name had. Jason. The one where you never talked about it."
Wilson opens his mouth like he's going to say something else, but then he closes it and gives a short, sharp nod.
"Works for me," he says.
And then they change the subject. How a flock -- no, a murder of crows -- could possibly get into the sealed basement and back out again is not something House wants to think about right now. I think "impossibility" is the word you want, House's brain informs him. He tells it to shut up, and swipes a second strawberry.
They linger over their breakfast, refilling their coffees until they both know they'll have to pull over by the side of a road somewhere.
By the time they stagger outside, overfed, overtired, and squinting into the sunlight, House has almost stopped trying to figure out whether a combo of stress, radon gas, and Moon Pies could somehow cause mutually simultaneous multi-sensory hallucinations, and what it means if the answer is no, it couldn't.
And that's when they round the corner of the diner and see the crow there.
It's a crow like any other crow, Corvus brachyrhynchos, House's mind helpfully pipes up, and nothing at all like the golden-eyed things from last night. Yet the sight of it brings him to a dead stop.
The crow sits on House's bike and looks at them.
"Shoo," House says, and waves his arms.
The crow cocks its head.
"Shoo!" House says, more loudly. "Get out of here!" He starts toward it, only to be stopped by Wilson's hand on his arm.
"Don't," Wilson says.
"Wilson," House says. "It's just a crow."
Wilson's grip doesn't loosen. "Are you sure?" he says, and his voice is low and he's actually serious about this.
House looks from him to the crow. "Grawk!" the crow says.
"Give him something," Wilson says.
"Wilson -- "
"Give him something."
"Fine," House grumbles. "Fine. What have you got?"
"You're the one with the loose change," Wilson says, and House sighs. He digs in his jeans pocket, holds up the Mercury dime. The silver coin shines in the sunlight, and House flips it in the air, away from the crow, away from their bikes, and watches it sail through the air and land with a muffled ting! on the asphalt.
"Grawk!" the crow says again, and flutters from the bike to the ground, where it scoops up the dime in its beak, spreads its wings and flies away.
"That coin," House says, "was worth thousands of dollars. And you made me give it to a crow." He puts his helmet on. "I'm going to remind you of this when we're both old and dying in a gutter somewhere."
"Unless it was a 1916D, brilliant uncirculated with full bands, it was worth about three bucks."
House stares at him. Wilson grimaces and waves his hands in that particularly Wilsonian way of his.
"My dad," he says. "Coin collection. We weren't allowed to touch it."
"You weren't allowed to touch much of anything, were you?" House swings his leg over, surprised at suddenly how little it hurts just now. "Let me guess -- plastic on the furniture?"
Wilson's fishing out his keys, looking at those more than at House. "Only in the living room."
"You do realize that's still weird, right?"
"Shut up," Wilson huffs, getting on his bike. "Let's go find somewhere to sleep."
Whatever comeback House might have had is lost in the engine noise, so he just follows Wilson out onto the road. For a half second, his left-hand mirror reflects the top of the diner's power pole. The crow is up there, watching, like it's waiting for him to turn around.
"Not this time," House mutters.
He throttles up to a higher gear and aims the bike east.
~ fin
Author: nightdog_barks, third_owl, and pwcorgigirl
Characters: House, Wilson
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: No
Spoilers: Yes, for the Season 8 series finale arc.
Summary: Halloween comes early for House and Wilson when they seek shelter from a storm. This part is 5,499 words.
Disclaimer: Don't own 'em. Never will.
Author Notes: This is set in the Riververse -- a ficverse set after the end of Season 8 and in which House and Wilson's road trip has continued longer than either of them would've ever thought. This fic takes place a month or so after the events of Will It Go Round in Circles. The cut-text is from Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House.
Beta: Our intrepid First Readers, with especial thanks to yarroway and joe_pike_junior.
Part One
Part Two
House would recognize that scream anywhere. Same one he heard when he was cannonballing five floors down into a hotel pool like the damn fool he was. Instantly he's on his feet, scrambling for the stairs, but as it turns out there's no need for him to go anywhere. The basement door flies open, slamming against the wall so hard it bounces back, and there's Wilson, almost tumbling down the steps, gulping for air, his eyes wild.
"House," Wilson gasps out. "God, House -- " and then he stops and takes a deep breath. He sets the lantern on the floor and looks searchingly into House's eyes.
"House," he says. "You're ... talk to me, House. Talk to me?"
"Okay?" House says carefully, not quite sure what the right answer is here, but apparently that's enough, and before House can think of anything else to say, he's enveloped in a Wilson bear-hug.
"Um," House says. Wilson doesn't let go. "Um," House says, a little more forcefully, and then, "What happened up there? You were screaming like a little girl," and that does the trick.
"I didn't scream!" Wilson insists, and damn it, now that Wilson has let him go, House misses the warmth.
"I heard you," House says, "and it was a scream. Where the hell were you, anyway?"
"Attic. I may have ... shouted," Wilson allows, and House knows that's as far as he'll go. "As for what happened ... " He steps back and shrugs off the bag he's carrying. "The, uh ... spiders came out, while we were down here." He's doing that thing House recognizes very well: fumbling around for something, anything that House might believe. House decides to let him flounder. "Lots of spiders. Big spiders. I walked into a web. I, I have a phobia, okay?"
"What you have is a total inability to lie when you're on the spot." House retrieves the lamp from the floor, holds it aloft, and studies his face carefully. "There's not a strand of silk on you. You've been twitchy ever since we looked down the basement stairs -- the same way you were wound up tight in that mine shaft in Fort Bumfuck, California."
"Calico Town," Wilson says.
"What?"
"It was called Calico Town," Wilson says. "Outside Barstow."
House would throw up his hands if he weren't holding the goddamn lamp. "I don't care what it was called!" he says. "Then, I thought it was caffeine. Now, I know it's not. If you do have a phobia, spiders aren't it. We got stuck in that elevator in Jacksonville, and you didn't freak, so 'enclosed spaces' is out. You've happily gone camping under a pitch black sky, so cross off 'lack of light.' I'd diagnose basement-related PTSD, but it's clearly not basement-specific, which leaves me no choice but to ask my lying weasel patient what the hell happened."
Wilson is staring at the bag at his feet.
"I don't mean just now. I mean before. Whenever it was."
Wilson looks up, finally, but he keeps moving his eyes around the basement, like he's waiting for something to come creeping out of the bricks. "It was stupid, House. This whole thing is stupid."
"Stupid beats boring," House says, and he might be winning, because Wilson blinks, takes a breath, and picks up the bag again. Their food, such as it is, is inside. "So," House continues, "wanna tell me about it over dinner?"
Wilson doesn't want to tell him, but he can't figure out why not. Well, other than the obvious reason, which is that House will mock him into oblivion, but that's always been a given. He rummages through the packs and thinks about baggage. What he's afraid of, after all these years. He looks up to find House watching him. Even in the flickering light of candles and lantern, that familiar, sharply curious expression is clear.
"Next time, I buy the snacks," Wilson says. He's hoping, if he gripes enough, he'll seem normal again and House won't mention the way Wilson's sitting, pressed close against his side. He pulls a crushed, deflated cellophane bag out and holds it to the light. "Seriously? Who the hell still eats Funyuns?"
"You, and then you'll conveniently blame the aftereffects on me. Find the Moon Pies yet?"
"It was a hundred degrees out there. I'm not sure I want to find the Moon Pies."
"They're on top of the apples. You can hand me one of those now, if you're going to be a bummer and insist on dinner before dessert." House leans in, looks a little closer. "I'd prefer mine without blood on it."
"What?" Wilson looks at his hand. The makeshift bandage has soaked through again and dark streamers of blood are drying on his arm. "Ah. Yeah. My slow leak."
He holds out his hand for House to wrap another layer of t-shirt strips around it.
"You don't stop bleeding and I'll be able to wear this shirt to a job interview at Hooters," House grumbles.
"Fine, but I'm not paying for the implants. Oh, wait, you wouldn't need implants."
"Shut up and coagulate," House says, and while he must have been aiming for 'brusque and abrasive,' he doesn't quite make it, and Wilson can see him trying not to smile.
"Eat up. It's a holiday," Wilson says. "National Tornado Day. Celebrate it however you want." He finds the Moon Pie packets, much the worse for wear, and holds one up by its edge like he's got a dead rat by the tail. Better this than that disgusting splat-ball, though. House snatches the Pie gleefully. In no time there's melted chocolate on his fingers and lips and chin, and he's licking marshmallow goop off his thumb. The second squashed, melted Moon Pie is looking like a better idea all the time. Wilson peels it open carefully, although he no longer wears the kinds of clothes that a mess will ruin. House mumbles something that might be "go for it" and tips his head back in gooey delight. For a moment Wilson thinks he's going to do that horrible, childish, "see food" thing, opening his mouth to display a gloppy melange of marshmallow and masticated chocolate cookie, but House doesn't, and to Wilson's surprise, he misses it.
There's only one thing to do.
"I was sixteen," Wilson begins. "Which should tell you approximately how smart I was."
"I don't know if this is such a good idea," James said. The entrance to the Chief Oratam Cavern loomed before them, a dark mouth gaping behind the weeds and loose brush. If they were on the side that opened into the park, this would all be cleared away. It would be easy, and boring, and a ranger might catch them.
"Oh, come on, Jimmy." Jason put down the Pabst he'd been sipping as he drove them down here -- slipping it below window-level when another car cruised by. "Don't be such a pussy."
"I'm not a pussy, dipshit."
Jason grinned. "I know you're not," he said, and reached out and playfully punched James on his bicep. And that was why James would do pretty much anything Jason wanted. Because Jason didn't care what anyone thought of him, and he was almost eighteen and a senior, and he still liked James. "Look, we're not gonna get caught. The power company owns this end and there's never anyone down here. So come on. Let's have some fun."
And so they went, each with a backpack slung over one shoulder, to carry whatever they found. Arrowheads, James imagined. Sharks' teeth, maybe, bits of ancient pottery, spear-points, all these beautiful flint-knapped things waiting to be picked up.
"It'll be mostly on the floor of the cave," Jason said, "not stuck in the walls. So watch there." James kept his eyes on the ground as they walked in together, finding insect-trails and sparks of mica, a cigarette butt and a condom wrapper and the wave-patterns left by water that had run through and then dried. His flashlight beam hit on something shiny and dark, and he had just toed it up to reveal it as an ordinary rock when he looked up to say something to Jason, and ...
Jason wasn't there.
Wilson pointed his light ahead of him and turned around, and around again, and out of all the branch-offs from the main cavern, he couldn't see the one Jason must have taken. He'd lost the mouth of the cave, and the safety of daylight, and was near a sort of chamber, like an anteroom, with a low ceiling full of spiny, broken stalactites and what looked like three offshoot tunnels, and enough perfectly preserved footprints so that, when James stopped turning, he had no idea which prints were even his.
He was yelling for Jason when the beam of his flashlight turned from white, to yellow, to dull, dull orange; he could see no more than eighteen inches, then, in any direction.
Damn it, Jason, he thought, trying to get pissed off instead of terrified. Jason and his good ideas. We'll stay together, he said. He'd laughed at James's idea that they ought to get a spool of kite-string, tie one end to a branch outside the cave, and unreel it going in. "I've been in there," Jason said. "It's cool, but it's not that complicated, and anyway, where are we gonna get the string?"
"Hardware store, duh," House says. "You two weren't even wearing helmets, were you? Your friend was a moron."
"You want the story, or not?"
"Touchy, touchy."
James stopped yelling and stood still. He forced himself to take some deep, calming breaths, tried to slow the thumping heart in his chest. He listened with all his might, straining to catch Jason's voice, Jason's laugh, the flap of Jason's sneakers in the thick dust, but there was nothing, nothing out there but a high-pitched squeaking which James assumed must be a bat.
"Jason?" James turned around again slowly, a full circle. Silence. Even the squeaking had faded away. "Jason? This isn't funny, man!" His mouth was so dry he couldn't work up enough saliva to spit. "Jason, come on. Come on, okay? Please?"
"Jimmy!" a voice called, and James gasped with relief. He swung the flashlight in that direction, but the beam was too weak.
"Jimmy!" the voice called again. "Over here!" But where was here?
He took a tentative, sliding step forward.
The last of his light died. He waved his fingers in front of his face, and saw nothing at all.
Breathe, don't cry, think, he told himself. Breathe --
A large, heavy hand closed around his arm, and he screamed and twisted away. Another set of fingers, smaller and colder, clutched at his hair, and then there were hands all over him. Pulling on his shirt, grabbing at his shoulders, snatching at his ankles as he tried to run. He fell, got up, saw a light and sprinted toward it -- watery and pale, maybe Jason's flashlight, or the blue of daylight coming in, but then it was gone and his foot hit a stalagmite.
James went to his knees in the dust.
The ground beneath him seemed to lurch and spin. He could hear himself screaming, panicking, and when he managed to stop, there were other voices. Distant, distorted fragments, like someone talking, way too far away on a short-wave radio, in a language he didn't understand.
Desperate, he scrambled back to his feet, looked upward, and there was Jason -- above him, a luminous round face floating in the darkness, up there where he had no right to be. And then it changed and James didn't know what the fuck it was, but it wasn't Jason anymore.
James ran, hands outstretched, swinging the dead flashlight ahead of him like a club. Ran straight into one wall after another, trying to get out, away from the hands, away from the disembodied face of his friend, running for his life with the voices of cave-things all around him. He had no way to know which direction he was going, out to daylight and safety, or into an unknown, unmapped crevasse.
He never knew how the hell he made it out alive.
"I found Jason in the Nova, huddled down in the seat with the doors locked. Face all scratched up, I guess from crashing so hard through the brush getting out of there. He was ... I've seen cadavers that weren't that pale."
"So what did the boogeyman do to him?"
Wilson shakes his head. "I don't know. He didn't say and I didn't ask. He'd been crying, I'd been crying, we were guys in high school, we were supposed to be cool and grown-up and we'd practically wet our pants. It would've been too weird. His parents were out of town that weekend, so we went back to his house and tried to forget about it. Watched racy stuff on cable we weren't supposed to watch. When it got dark, we raided all the dusty old bottles of Triple Sec and Cointreau and Blue Curaçao, sweet shit like that, down in the basement. Things nobody really wanted but they'd never thrown out. Didn't sleep until dawn, and we were still so drunk. I was hammered. First time I ever had more than a few sips of anything."
"You were both idiots."
"What, going into the cave unsupervised and not marking our trail? Yes, I think we established that part, House."
"You're still an idiot. You were drinking, on top of chemical intoxication from whatever toxic sludge the power company dumped in that cave. You'd been inhaling the Ghost of Regulatory Violations Past, with no EPA Angel to wave her magic Superfund wand."
Wilson blinks. "That's your explanation? Chief Oratam Cavern State Park was a toxic waste site?"
"Makes logical sense." House shrugs; he's filed the story away for future reference and is ready to move on. "Or you and your bud managed to freak each other out, there in the dark. Still, I'm surprised you didn't puke your guts out."
Wilson barks out a laugh. "Who says I didn't? Jason kept pouring more, and it's not like I knew when to stop. He said I was a fun drunk."
The kid was right, House thinks. Wilson is the funnest of fun drunks, not because he does anything cool but because, once you get enough alcohol into him, his inner dork comes out to play. Really play, like the innocent kid he would have been back then, and House finds himself jealous of Jason What's-his-face, with the absent parents and the car and the unspoiled young Jimmy.
"I'm seeing a pattern in your friendships," House announces.
"What?"
"Best bud who's a little older. Misfit who isn't even trying. Does stupid things and takes you along. Bad influence who gets you wasted. This doesn't sound familiar?"
"Oh." Wilson digs the very last Funyun bits out of the bag. "Yeah, I can see that. He was a good guy."
"A good guy." This was not the expected Wilson response.
"He was. It was a ... bad year, for me, and he was a pretty good friend. Thing is, he knew I was lost in there, but once he got out, he didn't go back. He'd have called for help, but he wasn't going back in after me."
"Smart kid."
"Yeah. Smarter than you." Wilson crumples the bag and tosses it aside. "Good thing stupid trumps boring."
"I'm never boring," House counters, trying to recover his conversational groove. "I even had the forethought to bring some entertainment."
"Entertainment? You have a phone with games, and a harmonica. Neither of which counts."
"They do so, but that's not what I meant. I am speaking of the classics of modern literature."
He watches while Wilson's brain takes a few seconds to make the leap back to ... an hour ago? Two? Is that all? -- and realize what House must mean. At Wilson's You've got to be kidding me stare, House merely smiles.
"You're gonna need your glasses," Wilson says.
"'Delia moaned eagerly as she felt the hot thrust of his marble-hard manroot at the gates of -- '"
Wilson sputters. Loudly. "It does not say that."
"Does so. Hopefully his condition's treatable. Now knock off the coitus interruptus."
"But my book's better." Wilson turns it so that the gold-embossed title catches the lamplight and starts to read. "'He pushed me down upon my belly among the rough woolen blankets, with one strong hand on my back and the other rucking my skirt up about my waist. His fingers slipped betwixt my legs, drawing out the wetness there before pressing into me again, in the one place I thought unfit for any touch.'"
House actually looks surprised. "Whoa. Is he about to -- "
"Oh yeah. 'He entered me first in the usual fashion, then drew back and followed in earnest that forbidden path his fingers had made.'" Wilson raises his voice to a falsetto and lays his hand across his forehead for effect. "'No,' I protested, 'tis not meet!' 'Tis better than the beating you deserve,' he growled. Soon he had -- '"
"His dick all the way up her ass. Why didn't anyone ever tell me what was in these books?"
"' -- filled me in that strange new way, and as he moved I cried out in amazed delight, spreading wide that he might sheathe himself fully within me. How many paths are there to sin, and how many roads to pleasure? I think Sir Charles must have known them all.'"
"Our heroine is one kinky, kinky girl," House says, and it might be Wilson's imagination or else House's eyes might have dilated a little more than they already were, in the dim lantern-light. "Not sure I can top that one."
"You could bottom." Wilson's mouth says it before his brain can put the brakes on, and then he's snickering and grinning like a high school kid, like he might have when it was him and Jason, only more so because he was miserable then and he's happy now, here in the basement with the tornadoes and no real food and House. Who is staring at him as if he's just ... abruptly grown an extra head or something. House's mouth is hanging half-open.
"We're going to burn these," House says, finally. "Next place we stay that has a fireplace or a grill. And roast smutty, smutty marshmallows."
"You burn yours. I'm keeping this one." And he is, even though he needs to stop these vague thoughts about that scene and why it was the one he chose to read to House. And whether he truly wants to know. "Have we got any more Moon Pies?"
Somehow, House is depressed to learn, they have become so boring that they are talking about the weather. Not the current weather, at least. Stories of the harshest and weirdest shit they've seen; of Wilson's mother's car being ruined when she put off the antifreeze and that crazy cold snap burst the radiator; of the lightning that hit his cabin that one year -- it was only one year -- when he was in the Boy Scouts; of the Florida Panhandle hurricane House and his mom survived, evacuating just minutes ahead of the storm surge that took out the roads.
"I was pretty calm about it, for an eight-year-old."
"You weren't freaked out knowing you were about to lose your home?"
"Military brat. Never felt like I had a home to lose. It was -- " He's about to say something like 'normal' or 'expected,' but he's just noticed ... something. A pair of somethings, and they look like eyes.
They are golden-orange and quite small, and they are shining out of a dark, dark corner, over past the washer and dryer. "Wilson," he says, and then realizes Wilson has seen it, too. Wilson is sitting very, very still.
"Rat," House guesses. Norway rat, roof rat, except this isn't the roof and it's in the wall -- and that's when the first set of eyes moves, a head bobbing, and another set appears. One eye, that vanishes, then another (or else the creature is blinking), and then two, faint and narrower, and then it moves again. And that's how they all are, the first two and the next six and the following dozen and oh, holy shit.
"That's a lot of fucking rats," Wilson whispers.
"Rats can have eight litters a year," House says, just as softly, "with up to twenty pups in a litter. They do a lot of fucking."
Something talks back to him, but it isn't Wilson. The voice says something in a language House does not know, low and dark, and the horde of high-wall rats bursts into noise and motion and it isn't rats. It's a storm of black feathers, orange-glinting eyes, wings pushing cold cold air down on them, so low House can feel it in his hair, feel the wing-tips brushing his arm when he raises it to shield his face, and the touches are like sleet and then he can't see a damn thing because the lamp has gone out.
They sit there in the dark, no longer holding hands because they're holding onto each other, for a while. How long, no telling. Long enough for Wilson to regain his senses and find his lighter in his pocket. House can see the sparks shaking each time Wilson tries to get the thing to work.
He doesn't offer to help. He's in no better shape than Wilson.
Once the lantern's lit and they've both remembered how to breathe, House gets up.
His leg hurts, but he needs to move, and to see. Specifically, to see the wall where the crows, or whatever they were, seemed to gather.
He lights the candles so he won't leave Wilson in the dark, and takes the lantern over to the corner where everything seemed to start. He finds no windows, bricked-over or otherwise. No air vents. No trapdoors, no shelves, nothing. House steps forward, running his hands over the stone surface, and notices an odd sensation under the toe of his boot.
Sand? he thinks. He leans down with his lamp, touches the stuff, and his fingers come up coated in ash. The same fine, gritty stuff he'd seen in the bird cages, in the attic, where whatever happened to Wilson, happened to Wilson.
House can't remember if the ash was here before. It must have been. It couldn't possibly ... but nothing that's happened tonight could really possibly have happened, and there must be an explanation for the shared delusions and he hopes there's not some kind of weird gas leak in here, a fissure in the ground filling the basement with CO2 or --
"House," Wilson says, but House is thinking. "House!"
House turns around to find Wilson standing at the base of the steps, their bags slung over his shoulder. "I want out of the basement," he says. "Now."
In a direct manifestation of Anticlimax Hell, nothing else happens the entire night. There are only routine noises -- the house settling as the air cools, a rustle of small animals in the grass outside, the crickets and frogs and an owl somewhere. Thunder rumbles, a tiger growl in the distance as they pace, talk very little, and keep each other company. There's no telling if the storms are truly gone, so they pull the dusty twin mattress out of the back bedroom, the one with the abandoned broken doll, which Wilson throws out the window into the darkness before he'll pick up his corner of the mattress.
House doesn't even mock him. Probably some kind of failure on his part, but if there's one thing he doesn't need, it's a fresh set of hallucinations involving Chucky's distant cousin out in Kansas. Or Nebraska. He's still not sure which state this is.
They drag the mattress into the front room, dust it off as best they can, and stretch out, if you can call it that. It's a twin size, barely enough room for the two of them to fit, but it's the only place to lie down at all and so they do, arranged closely together and wondering out loud if that faint scent is urine, or what.
They lie in the dark shoulder to shoulder on the narrow mattress. The smell that might be urine fades into the background. House can smell dust and the riper odor of rotting wood, but the strongest scent is the coppery tang of Wilson's blood. The bandage on his hand is soaked again and Wilson's fallen asleep with that hand on his chest.
House turns on his side, reaches across Wilson and takes hold of his hand. Light pressure that won't wake Wilson up, but it should help stop the bleeding. Tomorrow he'll look at it in good light and rig up a pressure bandage.
Wilson makes a small noise in his throat and House pushes up on one elbow. It's so dark he can't see Wilson's features, just the pale blur of his sweat-damp face.
It's like a flashback to the worst hours of Chemo Weekend, when he was damned near sure that Wilson was going to die on his sofa before morning, when all House could smell was stale vomit, piss, sweat and fear.
He wraps his arm tighter around Wilson and listens to the steady sound of his breathing for a long time.
When House dozes off, he dreams things that wake him again, and doesn't talk about it. The same thing happens to Wilson, House can tell, and so he doesn't ask. He already knows.
They sleep, and wake, and sleep again. They keep checking their watches, but one or both of them is no longer keeping accurate time; they know this because of the discrepancy between the two. It hardly matters which one is correct; it is still a long, long night on a stiff and ruined mattress, and the only thing the least bit comfortable here is the heat and heft of Wilson against his side, as the air keeps getting colder.
The moment it's light enough to see what they're doing, they are out the door. Wheeling the bikes (unharmed, though the garage lost most of its roof in the night) into the open, and packing their saddlebags, and looking over their shoulders.
"First hotel?" Wilson says.
"Or motel. Campground. Convenient rest stop. Whichever comes first."
"Preferably with food available."
By the time they're ready to ride, the sun's just coming up, a thin yellow sliver on the horizon.
The old Buick, some thirty yards from the house, is now on its back in the weeds.
To the left of the car, the windbreak is down. How none of the trees struck the old house, House doesn't care to speculate. Snapped-off trunks litter the area like scattered Lincoln logs, tossed across the land and the pavement. It'll be a bitch to maneuver their bikes around it, and they'll likely have to detour through the tall grass and smaller hunks of debris, but House figures anything that will get them further away from this place is worth the effort.
He swings his leg over, so tired and so sore.
A phone rings.
It's a shrill sound, an old-fashioned stuttering mechanical chime, and it's coming from inside the house. The blood drains from Wilson's face; he looks sick.
"Let's go, House," he says. "Come on."
But House sits still, looking back at the door. What if, he thinks. What if I went back, and answered?
Have to find it first, says something irrational in his head. Hide and seek, trick or treat.
"House," Wilson says, and his voice is low and urgent. "House, look."
He's pointing at the ancient pole a few yards behind and to the left of the house. It lists sideways, its service box busted open, its few frayed broken wires swaying in the fresh morning breeze. "We went through every room. You know we did. There is," Wilson says, "no fucking phone."
House looks at Wilson, Wilson looks at House, and the phone that can't ring keeps ringing.
They start their bikes without another word, and ride until the house is lost from sight.
~ Epilogue ~
The diner is like every one of the other roadhouses they've stopped at over the past months -- the smell of fried grease heavy in the air, an industrial-size Bunn coffeemaker behind the counter, the sizzle of eggs and bacon on the grill. House feels right at home. Of course, it's Wilson who wants to talk.
"House, what we saw, last night ... "
"Birds?"
Wilson hesitates, stirring his coffee with his left hand. His right is wrapped in a light gauze bandage, fresh from the Walgreen's next door. A clean gauze bandage; the cut had apparently stopped bleeding somewhere on the road.
"Birds," he says. "Yeah. Big ones, a lot of them."
"Yeah." House steals the biggest, ripest strawberry from the top of Wilson's waffle stack. "I like that idea you and what's-his-name had. Jason. The one where you never talked about it."
Wilson opens his mouth like he's going to say something else, but then he closes it and gives a short, sharp nod.
"Works for me," he says.
And then they change the subject. How a flock -- no, a murder of crows -- could possibly get into the sealed basement and back out again is not something House wants to think about right now. I think "impossibility" is the word you want, House's brain informs him. He tells it to shut up, and swipes a second strawberry.
They linger over their breakfast, refilling their coffees until they both know they'll have to pull over by the side of a road somewhere.
By the time they stagger outside, overfed, overtired, and squinting into the sunlight, House has almost stopped trying to figure out whether a combo of stress, radon gas, and Moon Pies could somehow cause mutually simultaneous multi-sensory hallucinations, and what it means if the answer is no, it couldn't.
And that's when they round the corner of the diner and see the crow there.
It's a crow like any other crow, Corvus brachyrhynchos, House's mind helpfully pipes up, and nothing at all like the golden-eyed things from last night. Yet the sight of it brings him to a dead stop.
The crow sits on House's bike and looks at them.
"Shoo," House says, and waves his arms.
The crow cocks its head.
"Shoo!" House says, more loudly. "Get out of here!" He starts toward it, only to be stopped by Wilson's hand on his arm.
"Don't," Wilson says.
"Wilson," House says. "It's just a crow."
Wilson's grip doesn't loosen. "Are you sure?" he says, and his voice is low and he's actually serious about this.
House looks from him to the crow. "Grawk!" the crow says.
"Give him something," Wilson says.
"Wilson -- "
"Give him something."
"Fine," House grumbles. "Fine. What have you got?"
"You're the one with the loose change," Wilson says, and House sighs. He digs in his jeans pocket, holds up the Mercury dime. The silver coin shines in the sunlight, and House flips it in the air, away from the crow, away from their bikes, and watches it sail through the air and land with a muffled ting! on the asphalt.
"Grawk!" the crow says again, and flutters from the bike to the ground, where it scoops up the dime in its beak, spreads its wings and flies away.
"That coin," House says, "was worth thousands of dollars. And you made me give it to a crow." He puts his helmet on. "I'm going to remind you of this when we're both old and dying in a gutter somewhere."
"Unless it was a 1916D, brilliant uncirculated with full bands, it was worth about three bucks."
House stares at him. Wilson grimaces and waves his hands in that particularly Wilsonian way of his.
"My dad," he says. "Coin collection. We weren't allowed to touch it."
"You weren't allowed to touch much of anything, were you?" House swings his leg over, surprised at suddenly how little it hurts just now. "Let me guess -- plastic on the furniture?"
Wilson's fishing out his keys, looking at those more than at House. "Only in the living room."
"You do realize that's still weird, right?"
"Shut up," Wilson huffs, getting on his bike. "Let's go find somewhere to sleep."
Whatever comeback House might have had is lost in the engine noise, so he just follows Wilson out onto the road. For a half second, his left-hand mirror reflects the top of the diner's power pole. The crow is up there, watching, like it's waiting for him to turn around.
"Not this time," House mutters.
He throttles up to a higher gear and aims the bike east.
~ fin