(no subject)
Title: For Every Closed Door (10/?)
Fandom: House MD/Dead Like Me crossover
Author: Starling
Rating: R overall
Characters/pairings: House/Wilson, original characters
Warnings: Afterlife!Fic. Thus, by necessity, also a death!fic, but not depressing. Also, this chapter has some gross and graphic descriptions.
Summary: "Free will isn't quantum physics or trigonometry, it's a relatively simple concept."
Obligatory Disclaimer: I don't own, write for, or produce either of these fabulous shows. I'm just a geek with too much time on her hands.
A/N: I finished moving, and I'm unemployed. I'll probably start updating this more often.
A/N 2: This chapter draws heavily on the plot from episode 1x2 "Curious George" of DLM. The exchange "Correct me if I'm wrong..." exchange between House and Kay was taken and modified from actual dialogue in the episode.
Unbeta'd. All mistakes are mine.
Concrit feedback gives me warm fuzzies.
x-posted to housefic and house_wilson.
Previous Chapters
"I don't know exactly what makes people cross over. I mean, souls. I think they see light where others cannot. I think they see a chance to become something else. Someone else." From Dead Like Me, episode unknown.
"What the FUCK do you think you're doing?" Ada shouted.
"I'm working on a new dance routine for my Rockettes audition, what does it look like? Here, it goes like this: Step, kick, step, kick-ball-change, pirouette-" he started, demonstrating.
"You think this is some kind of joke?" Ada yelled, then seized his hand and started dragging him away. Her manicured nails dug into his skin.
"Ow! Let go of my wrist, you-"
Ada whirled around, some of her tinted and braided extensions hitting him in the face. "You think you can live without consequences? You think what you do doesn't matter? You better wake the fuck up, asshole."
House couldn't recall ever seeing Ada this angry. Or just angry, period. So far, she'd expressed only two emotions in front of him; mild annoyance, and slightly daffy amusement.
"Look-" House started, with no idea of what he was going to say. He was almost relieved when Ada steamrolled over him without noticing.
"Maybe you could get away with all kinds of shit when you were alive, but you are a goddam Reaper now, and you cannot shirk your responsibilities when it suits you. This isn't some fucking game we're playing here."
He'd never even heard Ada say "damn" before, yet here she was, swearing like Samuel L. Jackson with a hangover. Her hands were on her hips, and her head was swinging back and forth like an cobra about to strike.
Something was wrong here. She couldn't be that pissed off because he'd talked to Wilson. And how would she even know who he was? She'd never met him before. Unless Kay had passed around a picture of him, telling the other Reapers to rip House a new asshole if he was seen associating with the man. He certainly wouldn't put it past her.
Meanwhile, Ada was still shouting at him. "I know you don't want to be here, but you are stuck. Do you hear me? You are here to do a job, and while it ain't real glorious and or anything, you still have to do it."
Ada paused to take a breath, and flipped a couple of braids out of her face. "Now tell me why you missed your appointment."
"My appointment?" He hadn't made an... oh. "Oh."
"Fuckin' right, 'oh,'" Ada spat. "Now get in my motherfucking car and I'll drive you to the morgue."
******
Of course the body would be at his hospital. At least he knew how to get to the morgue without raising any suspicions. He kept expecting somebody to stand up, point at him, and start screaming for somebody to get a stake and some holy water. Of course, nobody did.
Ada didn't ask him if he wanted her to come along, just shut the car off and followed him into the winding hallways, her unrelenting glare fixed on him the whole way to the elevators.
And of course, Kay would be waiting when they got out of the elevators.
"I already got the lecture," House said, before she could say anything. "I'm a bad person, I'm very sorry, it'll never happen again."
"That was the most insincere, bullshit excuse for an apology I've ever heard," Kay countered, walking beside him down the tiled hall.
The morgue assistant, who House didn't recognize, was reading a magazine when they came in. Ada went over to talk to him, while Kay continued talking in a menacing, low voice.
"Do you remember dying, House?"
"This is either a rhetorical question, or just an incredibly stupid one. Either way, it doesn't deserve an answer-"
Kay kicked him in the shin.
"Ow! Listen, we talked about that-"
"I'm talking about actually dying, House. Do you remember the moment when the car blew up behind you, and that James Taylor CD came flying out? Do you remember the feeling of it cutting through most of your neck? Do you remember bleeding out five pints of blood in less than a minute?"
"No." He didn't. He just remembered standing next to the bike, looking at the Texaco burning merry hell in front of him.
"That's because you were reaped. That's what we do. It's a pretty easy job, all things considered, but the consequences of fucking it up are pretty immense."
Ada finished talking to the assistant, and waved them over to one of the cabinets.
"Correct me if I'm wrong, but we're in the morgue. Thus, this person still died. I couldn't have fucked up too bad," House said, walking over. Kay matched his steps.
"You're wrong. That was me correcting you. You fucked up bigtime." she said, giving a friendly nod to the assistant. He nodded back, then went back to reading his magazine.
Ada opened up the drawer with the body in it. There was a girl in there, young, probably not much more than fourteen. There was nothing wrong with her above the shoulders, so House peered under the sheet to see how she could have died.
Oh. That was pretty gross.
"Her ride-on mower exploded. While she was riding it," Ada added unnecessarily.
House started to put the sheet back down, but Kay caught his hand.
"She's still in there, House."
House blinked. "She..."
"Is still in there," Ada said, carefully pronouncing the words. "Now shut your mouth and get her out."
Kay released his hand. House gingerly put the sheet back down, then touched the girl (whose name was D. Aramark, he suddenly remembered) lightly on the shoulder. There was the familiar tingling rush of a soul leaving the body at his touch. The girl's eyes flew open, and she started screaming.
He, Ada, and Kay all flinched back at the ear-piercing shriek that flew out of the mouth of D. Aramark and echoed off the white walls and tiled ceiling. The morgue assistant didn't even look up, just turned a page in his magazine.
She kept screaming. House wondered how her lungs didn't give out, how her vocal cords didn't tear from the strain, then remembered that she had no lungs or vocal cords. He cut himself off from wondering how come she could still scream; better not to think about it, or his brain might explode from the impossibility of it all.
Finally, the scream tapered off into a series of short, barking sobs. The soul of the dead girl sat up, and House averted his gaze from her body, most of the skin burned off, her lower torso a charred ruin below her sternum, her legs like burnt sticks.
D. Aramark was trying to speak beyond the sobs. House really didn't want to hear what she had to say, but his selective hearing didn't seem to be working.
"Thank.... thank you," the girl said eventually. "It was... I..." She started to shake all over, sobs wracking her thin body. The eternally detached, clinical part of House's brain diagnoses her with acute post traumatic stress, before it was told to shut the hell up and crawl back under its rock.
"I thought I'd be stuck in there forever," she finally said. Ada slung a friendly arm around her shoulders, determinedly ignoring the damage done to the lower half of the girl as she helped her off the table.
"You're out of there now, honey. It'll be okay."
Kay turned to House, her expression cold and hard as a marble. "Apologize to her," she said in a low tone.
House swallowed. "I'm sorry," he said. It was the first completely sincere apology he could remember making in... he didn't remember how long.
D. Aramark looked at him in confusion. It was obvious she had no idea what he talking about. "It's okay," she said.
Kay nodded to Ada, who started moving the girl away from her earthly remains. "I'm going to show you the way to a good place..." he heard her murmuring.
House looked away, and covered up the girl's face and shoulders with the sheet again, before shutting the drawer.
"Do you want to stay here?" Kay asked suddenly.
"It's a morgue," he said, his sarcasm running on autopilot. "Not the cheeriest place in the world to spend an afternoon."
"You know that's not what I mean."
House looked at her. "What are you talking about?"
"Do you want to leave? Move on? Shuffle off the undead coil and into your afterlife? Because, honestly, I'm not sure what else to think, House. You spent a week trying to see if you could kill yourself. That didn't work, so now you're fucking up your reap and hoping, what, I'm gonna fire you?"
"I didn't mean to-"
"I'm not interested in why you didn't make your appointment," Kay said dismissively. Thank god. House thought she was going to demand to know where he'd been, and he still hadn't figured out how to lie to her with a 100% success rate.
"All I want to know is, do you want to stay here?"
House glared at her. "I was under the impression that I didn't have a choice."
"Everything's a choice. Free will isn't quantum physics or trigonometry, it's a relatively simple concept."
"Oh right. To be or not to be. Like that's a real choice. Hamlet was just being overly dramatic," House said.
"I didn't say the options had to be appealing. But it's still a choice."
There was a change in the room. House and Kay both looked over to see the soul of D. Aramark (and it occurred to House that he still didn't know her first name) begin to walk towards a city on the sea, seagulls wheeling in the air above the white, curved buildings and plazas. Their cries could be heard faintly in the still morgue. It looked like Italy, or maybe Greece, to House's eyes. He could smell the ocean, the clean salt scent momentarily washing out the smells of death and disinfectant.
It would be the easiest thing in the world, to follow the girl into it. One foot in front of the other, and he'd be in paradise. Relatively simple, as Kay had said.
He didn't move. He stuck his hands into the pockets of his coat, fingers brushing against a stiff paper, right next to his fake driver's license. It was Wilson's card, his cell phone number written on the back of it in a hasty scrawl.
"I'll stay."
Kay nodded, and they watched the vision of the city and the sea fold in itself, and then fade away.
Fandom: House MD/Dead Like Me crossover
Author: Starling
Rating: R overall
Characters/pairings: House/Wilson, original characters
Warnings: Afterlife!Fic. Thus, by necessity, also a death!fic, but not depressing. Also, this chapter has some gross and graphic descriptions.
Summary: "Free will isn't quantum physics or trigonometry, it's a relatively simple concept."
Obligatory Disclaimer: I don't own, write for, or produce either of these fabulous shows. I'm just a geek with too much time on her hands.
A/N: I finished moving, and I'm unemployed. I'll probably start updating this more often.
A/N 2: This chapter draws heavily on the plot from episode 1x2 "Curious George" of DLM. The exchange "Correct me if I'm wrong..." exchange between House and Kay was taken and modified from actual dialogue in the episode.
Unbeta'd. All mistakes are mine.
Concrit feedback gives me warm fuzzies.
x-posted to housefic and house_wilson.
Previous Chapters
"I don't know exactly what makes people cross over. I mean, souls. I think they see light where others cannot. I think they see a chance to become something else. Someone else." From Dead Like Me, episode unknown.
"What the FUCK do you think you're doing?" Ada shouted.
"I'm working on a new dance routine for my Rockettes audition, what does it look like? Here, it goes like this: Step, kick, step, kick-ball-change, pirouette-" he started, demonstrating.
"You think this is some kind of joke?" Ada yelled, then seized his hand and started dragging him away. Her manicured nails dug into his skin.
"Ow! Let go of my wrist, you-"
Ada whirled around, some of her tinted and braided extensions hitting him in the face. "You think you can live without consequences? You think what you do doesn't matter? You better wake the fuck up, asshole."
House couldn't recall ever seeing Ada this angry. Or just angry, period. So far, she'd expressed only two emotions in front of him; mild annoyance, and slightly daffy amusement.
"Look-" House started, with no idea of what he was going to say. He was almost relieved when Ada steamrolled over him without noticing.
"Maybe you could get away with all kinds of shit when you were alive, but you are a goddam Reaper now, and you cannot shirk your responsibilities when it suits you. This isn't some fucking game we're playing here."
He'd never even heard Ada say "damn" before, yet here she was, swearing like Samuel L. Jackson with a hangover. Her hands were on her hips, and her head was swinging back and forth like an cobra about to strike.
Something was wrong here. She couldn't be that pissed off because he'd talked to Wilson. And how would she even know who he was? She'd never met him before. Unless Kay had passed around a picture of him, telling the other Reapers to rip House a new asshole if he was seen associating with the man. He certainly wouldn't put it past her.
Meanwhile, Ada was still shouting at him. "I know you don't want to be here, but you are stuck. Do you hear me? You are here to do a job, and while it ain't real glorious and or anything, you still have to do it."
Ada paused to take a breath, and flipped a couple of braids out of her face. "Now tell me why you missed your appointment."
"My appointment?" He hadn't made an... oh. "Oh."
"Fuckin' right, 'oh,'" Ada spat. "Now get in my motherfucking car and I'll drive you to the morgue."
******
Of course the body would be at his hospital. At least he knew how to get to the morgue without raising any suspicions. He kept expecting somebody to stand up, point at him, and start screaming for somebody to get a stake and some holy water. Of course, nobody did.
Ada didn't ask him if he wanted her to come along, just shut the car off and followed him into the winding hallways, her unrelenting glare fixed on him the whole way to the elevators.
And of course, Kay would be waiting when they got out of the elevators.
"I already got the lecture," House said, before she could say anything. "I'm a bad person, I'm very sorry, it'll never happen again."
"That was the most insincere, bullshit excuse for an apology I've ever heard," Kay countered, walking beside him down the tiled hall.
The morgue assistant, who House didn't recognize, was reading a magazine when they came in. Ada went over to talk to him, while Kay continued talking in a menacing, low voice.
"Do you remember dying, House?"
"This is either a rhetorical question, or just an incredibly stupid one. Either way, it doesn't deserve an answer-"
Kay kicked him in the shin.
"Ow! Listen, we talked about that-"
"I'm talking about actually dying, House. Do you remember the moment when the car blew up behind you, and that James Taylor CD came flying out? Do you remember the feeling of it cutting through most of your neck? Do you remember bleeding out five pints of blood in less than a minute?"
"No." He didn't. He just remembered standing next to the bike, looking at the Texaco burning merry hell in front of him.
"That's because you were reaped. That's what we do. It's a pretty easy job, all things considered, but the consequences of fucking it up are pretty immense."
Ada finished talking to the assistant, and waved them over to one of the cabinets.
"Correct me if I'm wrong, but we're in the morgue. Thus, this person still died. I couldn't have fucked up too bad," House said, walking over. Kay matched his steps.
"You're wrong. That was me correcting you. You fucked up bigtime." she said, giving a friendly nod to the assistant. He nodded back, then went back to reading his magazine.
Ada opened up the drawer with the body in it. There was a girl in there, young, probably not much more than fourteen. There was nothing wrong with her above the shoulders, so House peered under the sheet to see how she could have died.
Oh. That was pretty gross.
"Her ride-on mower exploded. While she was riding it," Ada added unnecessarily.
House started to put the sheet back down, but Kay caught his hand.
"She's still in there, House."
House blinked. "She..."
"Is still in there," Ada said, carefully pronouncing the words. "Now shut your mouth and get her out."
Kay released his hand. House gingerly put the sheet back down, then touched the girl (whose name was D. Aramark, he suddenly remembered) lightly on the shoulder. There was the familiar tingling rush of a soul leaving the body at his touch. The girl's eyes flew open, and she started screaming.
He, Ada, and Kay all flinched back at the ear-piercing shriek that flew out of the mouth of D. Aramark and echoed off the white walls and tiled ceiling. The morgue assistant didn't even look up, just turned a page in his magazine.
She kept screaming. House wondered how her lungs didn't give out, how her vocal cords didn't tear from the strain, then remembered that she had no lungs or vocal cords. He cut himself off from wondering how come she could still scream; better not to think about it, or his brain might explode from the impossibility of it all.
Finally, the scream tapered off into a series of short, barking sobs. The soul of the dead girl sat up, and House averted his gaze from her body, most of the skin burned off, her lower torso a charred ruin below her sternum, her legs like burnt sticks.
D. Aramark was trying to speak beyond the sobs. House really didn't want to hear what she had to say, but his selective hearing didn't seem to be working.
"Thank.... thank you," the girl said eventually. "It was... I..." She started to shake all over, sobs wracking her thin body. The eternally detached, clinical part of House's brain diagnoses her with acute post traumatic stress, before it was told to shut the hell up and crawl back under its rock.
"I thought I'd be stuck in there forever," she finally said. Ada slung a friendly arm around her shoulders, determinedly ignoring the damage done to the lower half of the girl as she helped her off the table.
"You're out of there now, honey. It'll be okay."
Kay turned to House, her expression cold and hard as a marble. "Apologize to her," she said in a low tone.
House swallowed. "I'm sorry," he said. It was the first completely sincere apology he could remember making in... he didn't remember how long.
D. Aramark looked at him in confusion. It was obvious she had no idea what he talking about. "It's okay," she said.
Kay nodded to Ada, who started moving the girl away from her earthly remains. "I'm going to show you the way to a good place..." he heard her murmuring.
House looked away, and covered up the girl's face and shoulders with the sheet again, before shutting the drawer.
"Do you want to stay here?" Kay asked suddenly.
"It's a morgue," he said, his sarcasm running on autopilot. "Not the cheeriest place in the world to spend an afternoon."
"You know that's not what I mean."
House looked at her. "What are you talking about?"
"Do you want to leave? Move on? Shuffle off the undead coil and into your afterlife? Because, honestly, I'm not sure what else to think, House. You spent a week trying to see if you could kill yourself. That didn't work, so now you're fucking up your reap and hoping, what, I'm gonna fire you?"
"I didn't mean to-"
"I'm not interested in why you didn't make your appointment," Kay said dismissively. Thank god. House thought she was going to demand to know where he'd been, and he still hadn't figured out how to lie to her with a 100% success rate.
"All I want to know is, do you want to stay here?"
House glared at her. "I was under the impression that I didn't have a choice."
"Everything's a choice. Free will isn't quantum physics or trigonometry, it's a relatively simple concept."
"Oh right. To be or not to be. Like that's a real choice. Hamlet was just being overly dramatic," House said.
"I didn't say the options had to be appealing. But it's still a choice."
There was a change in the room. House and Kay both looked over to see the soul of D. Aramark (and it occurred to House that he still didn't know her first name) begin to walk towards a city on the sea, seagulls wheeling in the air above the white, curved buildings and plazas. Their cries could be heard faintly in the still morgue. It looked like Italy, or maybe Greece, to House's eyes. He could smell the ocean, the clean salt scent momentarily washing out the smells of death and disinfectant.
It would be the easiest thing in the world, to follow the girl into it. One foot in front of the other, and he'd be in paradise. Relatively simple, as Kay had said.
He didn't move. He stuck his hands into the pockets of his coat, fingers brushing against a stiff paper, right next to his fake driver's license. It was Wilson's card, his cell phone number written on the back of it in a hasty scrawl.
"I'll stay."
Kay nodded, and they watched the vision of the city and the sea fold in itself, and then fade away.