Fic - Addictive Personality, (1/1)
TITLE: Addictive Personality (1/1)
AUTHOR: SayShe8Ed
SUMMARY: Vicodin is not Greg House’s only addiction….
RATING: PG-13 (for language - two uses of the f-bomb)
PAIRING: Ultimately H/W friendship or preslash, depending on how you want to look at it; some retrospective House/Stacy
WORDS: 2685
WARNING: Spoilers for Detox, Need To Know, Finding Judas, and Merry Little Christmas.
DISCLAIMER: Not mine, not mine, not even vaguely or remotely mine amongst the wildest dreams of what would be mine. Did I mention I don’t own these guys?
A/N: This will become AU as of next Tuesday night. A fair dose of angst and reflection, as written by an optimist. Feedback and concrit despertately craved welcome.
From his seat behind his desk in the darkened office, House looked into the paper cup in his hand, rotating it so the single white pill inside rattled about the bottom. So much power for one stupid little tablet, nothing more than a mass of synthesized chemicals. But he was a drug addict, and for addicts, he knew, chemicals were all. He knew a lot about addictions, actually, he mused, and addictions of all kinds for that matter. This was certainly not his first.
He felt a sudden burst of anger at the Vicodin, and resisted the urge to swallow the damn thing, despite the fact that he had only recently been counting down to the moment that the pharmacist would dispense it. Instead, he set the cup to the side and pulled the patient file that sat on his desk towards him. Flipping it over, he pressed a pen to the smooth cardboard back of the folder and began to make a list.
1. Puzzles
That was an easy one, of course. His first addiction, the earliest, the one that began at his core and radiated outward until it defined him. As a child, there had been actual puzzles, the jigsaw kind - photographs split into a thousand pieces and mixed up until they were no longer recognizable as a whole. He would look for clues - similar colors and patterns, or less obvious ones, like a faint bend in the cardboard he knew nearby pieces would share. He worked the clues, fit it slowly together again, and forced sense and predictability out of the apparent chaos. Then he moved on to the next one, and the next, until the back of his closet was so full that his mother made him give the puzzles away, because she thought a stack that large constituted a fire hazard. That was okay, though, because by then he knew that people were way more interesting. So he turned his attention there. And never stopped.
2. Smoking
Also easy. And a stupid mistake, but a common one. When he was sixteen, an over-stressed buddy of his smoked cigarettes in the parking lot after school to calm himself down. Even then, House tended to need a lot of calming, and this seemed like an easy solution. After a few ill-fated puffs that left him hacking and coughing, enough nicotine finally got into his body to constrict the blood vessels in his brain, faintly relaxing him as had been promised. He was in love with the action immediately, bumming cigarettes from friends or stealing them from his mother’s purse whenever he could. By seventeen he was buying his own, and by eighteen, a full pack was his best friend. He chain-smoked through college, letting the nicotine help him ride out all-nighters and the few painful trips to the Laundromat he managed to make. By his senior year, he had discovered cigars and branched out.
But then, in his first year of medical school, he saw an actual blackened lung, removed from a cadaver that had met its fate in the form of lung cancer. The actual sight was far worse than a public service announcement, even worse than the photos in medical textbooks that he had seen. That night, he pitched his pack of Camels and stopped himself from going out to buy a new one.
Even now, though, more than twenty years later, he often longed for a drag during a rigorous thinking session or after a particularly fantastic differential. Instead, he bought a red and white ball, which he tossed and caught and eventually juggled to keep his hands busy. He still allowed himself the occasional cigar, though he resisted the urge to inhale.
So that addiction was kicked. Mostly, anyway.
3. Running
This one hadn’t broken by choice. Like the cigarettes, years of withdrawal had not been enough to curb the cravings. The rush of adrenaline, the solitary sound of sneaker slapping against pavement, the breathless feeling at the end that seemed to mean you were capable of just about anything....
When he was still under the effects of Ketamine, he had started again. The highs of it had been even better than he remembered, since they now included the rush of genuine mobility that he had missed for so long. It was amazing. Running during that time was like a vacation from everything that he had become, although he had never been able to shake the sense that it was a temporary reprieve. The day that he rescued his cane from the corner of his closet, leaving his sneakers abandoned in its place, he knew that he had been right.
House closed his eyes for a moment as a sharp twinge through his right leg reminded him that the longing from this particular addiction was one he could never escape. With a grimace, he rubbed his thigh through his jeans and told himself to move on.
So he did - to number four.
4. Stacy
Yeah, he was addicted to her, and he had always known it. When it came to Stacy, he had always wanted more - more of her words, more of her laughter, more of her body. He had really believed that he would never have enough, and that what he did get would always exceed his expectations, something that Stacy had a knack for doing. But then, at his bedside, when he had awoken from his coma in agony, she had disappointed him for the first time. He had known it was the beginning of the end, like the moment he first saw that blackened lung.
In some ways, though, he would forever be hung up in that addiction. When it came to Stacy, he would never really recover - but then again, maybe that’s why drug rehab counselors favored the term “in recovery.” Maybe they understand that there are some things you can’t ever recover from, that the best you can hope for is minimal contact with the object of your desire.
When she had shown up in his life again, even with a husband in tow, he had fallen off the wagon - but he got back on. As much as it had hurt to send her away, he was also relieved that she was gone, because he understood on some deep level that Stacy had the power to eat away at him. He knew that he would inevitably lose control, and when he did, she would take it. She always had. That worked fine until he understood that she may just take him somewhere he didn’t want to go.
House realized that he had been lost in thought, rolling the pen over the corner of the folder in a directionless design of concentric circles. Shaking himself out of his reverie, he wrote down the number five, and stopped. Without meaning to, he glanced up to make certain that he was alone. His office and the conference room were still blissfully empty, ducklings still running tests on the patient whose file he was drawing on.
He continued.
5. Vicodin
He had admitted it a hundred times in jest to everyone from clinic patients to Cuddy. He had also admitted it once, in seriousness, to Wilson, after the detox that had forced him to admit it to himself. He hadn’t forgotten what that week had taught him. Nor had he changed his mind about his conclusions.
“It lets me do my job, and it takes away my pain.”
The look in Wilson’s eyes as he uttered that, the frustration, hurt and fear laced throughout the gold and copper of his gaze, had nearly been enough to stop him at that moment. But House had been as angry as only a man coming out of a one-week chemical detox could be, and that stopped him from following when Wilson had turned and left the office without a word.
But the anger didn’t mean that he didn’t come to regret his words. Over time he would come to regret every word he said to James Wilson that resulted in a look like the one he saw that night.
He had seen a lot of those over the past few weeks, more than ever over the last few days. He felt the familiar stab in his gut when he saw that look, even through the haze of his second detox. In fact, seeing it when he could barely handle his own pain made it all the worse.
He glanced longingly at the door to the balcony. It was empty, a fact that stung even though he hadn’t really expected to see Wilson out there. It was enough to make him understand that he was detoxing from a lack of something more than just the hydrocodone.
6. James Wilson
Easily the most mysterious of his addictions, he thought, or at least the most confusing. He didn’t really understand how he had come to have Wilson in his life. He didn’t really understand why most things failed to become real until he shared them with his best friend, or why Wilson was the only one who could look at him like he was looking straight through him. And, although he would never let anyone else in on it, he certainly didn’t understand why someone like Wilson wanted to spend his time sharing with and looking at a misanthropic, crippled drug addict in the first place.
Of course, there were probably those that wondered what a misanthropic, crippled drug addict wanted with someone like James Wilson in the first place.
That was also easy to answer, though he never actually did so aloud.
Because it was James Wilson. Wilson, Jimmy, who he had simply never had enough of. Whose worst moments still didn’t disappoint him. Jimmy, who was probably the most interesting person he had ever met. Who, when it was least expected, never failed to give a high that dwarfed narcotics, be it from a surprise sarcastic remark or an insight or just one of those crooked grins that lit up his entire face.
House was pretty sure no one else saw those smiles, and this made him suspect that Jimmy was just as addicted to the friendship as he was.
But he had still betrayed him.
Anger flared in House’s chest, and he couldn’t decide if it was meant for Jimmy or Tritter or himself or the damned plea bargain or this whole fucking miserable mess.
He moved to crumble up his list before he remembered that it was written on the back of his patient’s file. With a grunt of annoyance, he flipped it back over, concealing it beneath the sheaf of papers inside the folder. A flash of pain shot through his thigh again, and he finally grabbed the paper cup and tilted his head back, letting the pill fall to the back of his throat. He swallowed thickly, bracing both hands against the desk as he waited, motionless, for the pill to take effect.
Nothing. Nothing came. Then, finally, a faint trickle of relief, the slightest blurring of the pain that did little more than vaguely dull the sharp edges of it. His leg throbbed on, and he hurt too much to acknowledge the sense of disappointment that the pill’s failure had left in him. Suddenly needing to move, he flipped the file back over and looked at the list in frustration.
1. Puzzles
2. Smoking
3. Running
4. Stacy
5. Vicodin
6. James Wilson
It was wrong. It was out of date.
He drew a line through “smoking,” forgiving himself the cigars. A second line went through “running,” because even if it wasn’t by choice, it was gone from his life. Another line through “Stacy,” since, he thought, he was securely on the wagon - in all honesty she hadn’t even crossed his mind for months. He examined what was left on the list.
1. Puzzles
2. Smoking
3. Running
4. Stacy
5. Vicodin
6. James Wilson
Interesting, he thought, that only the first and most recent ones remained. The middle three were long gone.
And two more were going.
Keeping #5 had a price. He had always suspected, but when Cuddy informed him of Wilson’s betrayal and the resulting plea bargain, it became crystal clear. Continuing the Vicodin habit would cost jail time and, more importantly, his medical license. That meant no more medicine, which meant no more medical puzzles. The only kind that still gave him a high. He wondered if he would still be called in for consults if that happened. The hospital seemed to need him enough that this felt like a possibility, so maybe keeping #5 didn’t necessarily mean crossing out #1.
It would mean losing #6, though. He was sure of that.
Even through the pain still surging about in his leg, he understood what was happening. He was looking at another corpse’s black lung. He was looking up at Stacy, dangerously close to losing himself. He was staring into his closet, at a cane in the corner and a pair of sneakers on the floor beside it.
His thoughts were swimming wildly about his head, and he was having trouble teasing one out from another. His breathing was turning ragged, heart slamming hard into his ribcage, but he knew it was not from pain or withdrawal. It was the ache and confusion of yet another crossroads, where you knew that no matter what direction you picked, it was going to fucking hurt.
He could make this choice. As he had once said to Stacy, it wasn’t easy, but it was simple.
Down one path, there was Jimmy. There were more talks, bad movies and monster truck rallies. There was no ache in his chest like the one that lingered now. There was no longing. There were second chances.
And there was not only the guarantee of puzzles, but the prospect of working them out on the balcony, Jimmy beside him, listening intently.
No amount of pain could take those things away.
So that was that. Not easy, but simple.
Scribbling two final marks on the list, he ripped the back of the folder off, freeing it from the rest of the file, and slowly left his office. The corridor was mercifully abandoned, so no one was there to see him slip the piece of cardboard under Jimmy’s office door. For a split second, a ghost of a smile fluttered across Greg House’s lips, replaced a moment later with another grimace of pain. Leaning heavily on his cane, he headed down the hallway in the direction of Cuddy’s office.
***
Behind the locked door of his office, Wilson sat at his desk, trying to force himself to read the patient file in his hands. A sudden rustling sound drew his attention to the door, just in time to see what looked like a file folder slip beneath it and come to a stop on the grey carpeting. Curious, he stood, moving closer to the paper as though it might electrocute him because, instinctively, he knew that this had to be from House. After poking it lightly with his shoe, he determined that he was at least safe from bodily harm, and he picked it up. A quick glance at it and his eyes widened, and he found himself reading over it once more to ensure that he had understood correctly.
The words and the meaning were the same at second look, and relief unlike any he had felt for days rushed through him. He felt tears pricking at his eyes, but he bit back the urge to cry, settling on a smile, instead. He dropped the list on his desk before leaving the office in search of House, knowing that later he would find himself holding that piece of cardboard again as he gazed at his best friend’s writing. Then, maybe, he would let himself cry, but right now, he just wanted House to see the apology, forgiveness and hope that he felt shining in his eyes.
1. Puzzles
2. Smoking
3. Running
4. Stacy
5. Vicodin
6. James Wilson