An Opening Door 8/?
Title: An Opening Door 8/?
Words: Approx 2700
Rating : PG-13
Characters : House & Wilson, Cuddy
Contains : Slavery concepts
Summary : Slave AU. Wilson encounters a disabled cleaning slave at PPTH called Greg and becomes intrigued with him. An unlikely friendship forms between the two as Wilson tries to secure a better life for Greg.
Link to story on AO3 .
Previous Chapter
Wilson had never enjoyed clothes shopping with any of his wives, and he enjoyed it even less with Greg in tow. As it had been for the trip to the apartment Greg's attention during the drive was focused on the activity in the busy Princeton streets. His eyes were wide as he looked around them, at the buildings, at the people, at the other cars. Wilson guessed he hadn't really seen much the last few years outside of the Rent A Slave headquarters and the various places he'd worked. From his reaction all this was new to him.
When they parked at the mall and walked to the stores Greg visibly tensed. He was moving more easily with the cane but they still attracted attention. Private slaves weren't common in this part of Princeton and the cane and limp made Greg even more conspicuous. People stared, and then looked away. Wilson wasn't sure how much Greg was taking in but he noticed that as they entered the more crowded parts of the mall, packed with Saturday afternoon shoppers, that Greg moved closer to him, practically brushing shoulders as they walked. His head went down and he stared steadfastly at the ground.
"Hey, watch out!" Wilson turned and saw Greg stumbling and a young man standing staring at him. "Get out of the way, slave."
Wilson reached out and steadied Greg, who had shrunk in on himself, and then turned to the youth. "Is there a problem?"
"Your fucking slave got in my way. Maybe you should put him on a leash. Woof! Woof!" The man's friends laughed and Wilson struggled to control his temper.
He spread his hands. "Well, I'm sorry, but there's no harm done." He turned to Greg. "Come on, Greg." They moved off rapidly, although Wilson kept a corner of his eye on the youth. He heard a mocking 'come on, Greg' behind him and more laughter and barking but didn't turn around.
"You okay?" He asked Greg as they neared the clothing store Wilson had in mind.
"Yes, sir. I'm sorry, sir."
"Don't be. It wasn't your fault and you didn't hurt him." Greg didn't seem convinced, he still stared anxiously at the ground and Wilson decided to get on with this and get out of here. He entered the store, a place where he bought almost all of his own casual clothes.
When he entered a sales assistant looked up and then hurried over. "I'm sorry, sir, but you can't bring the slave in - company policy." He pointed at a small sign by the counter - 'No drinks, no food, no pets, no slaves'. "You need to leave him outside." Wilson considered for a moment going in and grabbing some clothes for Greg - he could always estimate his size - but the idea of leaving Greg sitting on a bench outside the shop alone didn't appeal after the encounter they'd just had.
He tried another three stores with the same result. He was getting steadily more frustrated. Surely there had to a way to buy a slave new clothes?
In the end they went to Walmart. It wasn't a place that Wilson usually enjoyed visiting and he didn't this time. They made it in the door unhindered by security but Wilson could still see that people were watching them. That damned collar was so conspicuous that everyone in the store could instantly tell Greg was a slave. Parents moved their small children out of the way as they approached.
Greg made no verbal protest but his eyes remained steadfastly fixed on the ground and when Wilson stopped in the men's section and began asking him what he wanted to wear he answered monosyllabically with the general gist being that whatever Wilson wanted to buy was fine with him.
Eventually Wilson began buying things more or less at random, guessing at Greg's size - he was not going to try and take a slave into the fitting room - being refused entry to the fitting rooms at Walmart would be a new low. He reasoned that anything would be better than the clothes Greg had on now. He'd get Greg to try them on at home, and once he had a good idea of his size he'd go to one of his usual shops by himself and get him some better clothes.
He picked out some jeans, and a variety of tee shirts and some button down shirts which would be useful when he took Greg out places, they could be used to make his collar a little bit less obvious. Hiding it totally with a rolltop was tempting but was against regulations according to the course he'd attended. Greg was pushing the cart, and he looked surprised as Wilson began dumping more clothes into it.
"I'm not making another trip any time soon, so we'd better stock up," Wilson explained, adding some underwear and socks to the pile. He threw in a lightweight jacket - he'd get Greg a better one and a coat when it was closer to winter. "Can you think of anything else?"
Greg looked up at him and then back at the ground. "No, sir," came the expected reply and Wilson resisted the temptation to roll his eyes.
"Well, shoes would be a good bet don't you think?"
Luckily the shoe department had one of those measure yourself devices and he got Greg to do that. Two pairs of sneakers joined the growing pile. He hoped they would fit, but he doubted Greg would ever admit if they didn't.
At the checkout Greg stood close to him, hiding behind him - if you could call it hiding when he was a couple of inches taller than Wilson. On impulse Wilson grabbed a stack of candy bars from the handy display and added them to his purchase. He watched as Greg's eyes followed them and smiled. Greg might not be very interested in clothes shopping but apparently candy bars were a different matter.
Wilson breathed a sigh of relief when he got back in the car.
"At least you'll have something to put in your closet now," he said, head turning towards his silent companion. "When we get back you can throw those old clothes away and change into your new ones."
There was the usual pause and then Greg answered, predictably, 'yes, sir'.
Wilson was tempted to bang his head against the steering wheel but reasoned that wouldn't be very productive - besides being likely to scare Greg - so instead he put the car into gear and drove off.
Greg went to his room as ordered when they returned to the apartment with his arms full of clothes. Doctor Wilson had spent a lot of money buying them, and the shoes. Greg wasn't sure why he needed so many clothes - for years he'd had one set at a time. When it was time for those to be washed they'd be given another set out of the store of clothes. If you were lucky the size wasn't too far off yours. The shorts and tee he was wearing didn't fit too badly, and he'd only been wearing them a couple of days so they still smelled okay. Still, Doctor Wilson had told him to change out of them so he stripped down.
He was glad to be back in the apartment. The car journey had been enthralling but the crowds in the mall, and the hostility of some of the people had frightened him. He wasn't used to having this much contact with free people, or the free world. He hadn't recognised many of the things in the stores, and the clothes had been a bewildering array to choose from. He had been glad when Doctor Wilson had taken over the selection and relieved when he hadn't been ordered to strip down and try the clothes on in the middle of the crowded store.
After donning a pair of boxer shorts he reached for the jeans. They fitted well enough, except for being a little loose around the waist. Greg reached for the belt and with some fiddling managed to get it threaded through the loops. The new denim was stiff and a little uncomfortable against his scar but he'd get used to that. He pulled the first t-shirt over his head, again a little loose but not too bad and after some hesitation selected one of the button down shirts.
There was a mirror in his room and he moved over to it. He was surprised how different he looked in these clothes. Smarter. The shirt even went up over his collar a little bit, not hiding it but making it less conspicuous. If he did up the top button and pulled it up maybe it would hide it completely. His fingers drifted in that direction. The small light on the collar was glowing - a sign that it was receiving a signal from the unit that Doctor Wilson possessed. The doctor hadn't used it once on Greg so far, not even to call him out of this room.
He left his shirt the way it was and picked up his discarded clothes. Doctor Wilson had said to throw them away but Greg was reluctant. They still had a lot of wear in them, and they weren't his of course. They belonged to Rent A Slave. Unless Doctor Wilson had been gifted them when he bought Greg.
"Hey, you look good." Doctor Wilson poked his head through the open doorway - Greg must have been taking too long. "Those your old clothes? Here, give them to me."
Greg handed them over and the doctor took them with an expression of distaste.
"Everything fit okay? Have you tried the shoes on?"
"Yes, sir. No, sir." Greg sat on the bed to pull socks and shoes on, he couldn't manage to do it while standing. As his owner waited he put both on, fumbling with the fastening on the sneakers.
"Walk around in them, make sure they fit." Wilson ordered and Greg obediently walked around the room, holding his cane tightly. They felt strange but at the same time the sneakers seemed to give more support to his leg. Between them and the cane Greg was walking far better than he had for a long time and the pain wasn't too bad.
Doctor Wilson looked pleased. "You look much more respectable. Hang the rest of the clothes up and I'll get rid of the old ones. There's a game on if you want to come watch it. We'll get some takeout for dinner; pizza, Thai or Chinese - your choice."
He disappeared without waiting for an answer and Greg obediently hung up the rest of his new clothes. He looked at himself in the mirror again. At the beginning of the day he'd been expecting to go to the hospital and spend a long day cleaning. Then he would have returned to his dorm, had showers and evening meal and slept in a cramped room with twenty other slaves. Now he was here, in the apartment of a doctor from the hospital. He'd been taken out shopping, and supplied with clothes, and he was to go and watch a 'game' with his new owner and then choose what they should have for dinner. So far he hadn't been put to work at all. He felt lost, confused about what his function here was.
He'd seen slaves in the past given special treatment by their owners. Wherever he'd been kept there had usually been supervisors who would supply a slave with treats and better treatment in return for what Greg presumed to be sex - although the slaves never talked about it when they returned from being taken. Nobody had ever selected him to be a 'special slave', even when he was fit, it seemed highly unlikely that Doctor Wilson had a preference for middle aged, crippled, broken down slaves.
A couple of slaves he'd met had been owned by an individual, and then sold to a company when they were no longer required. They hadn't talked much about what their lives had been like, or what they had done, but neither of them had boasted about having their own bathrooms and bedrooms. Greg suspected that this arrangement was highly unusual.
Doctor Wilson had said that he bought Greg to keep the apartment clean, and so that Greg could get pain medication and help for his leg. It seemed strange to Greg - this apartment wasn't big enough that he would spend all his time cleaning it - but so far Doctor Wilson had indeed done things to help his leg and hadn't asked anything of Greg. Even if it did turn out that he had bought Greg for sex, that didn't seem to be a bad trade-off for what he was providing. Greg could live with that - he'd endured far worse.
Wilson found the afternoon and evening surprisingly enjoyable. Greg was still mostly silent but appeared fascinated by the baseball game in the afternoon, and a couple of movies Wilson put on in the evening. He sat stiffly in a chair to start with but gradually relaxed a little, although he was still attentive to anything Wilson said, and any move he made.
Choosing what to have for dinner appeared to be beyond Greg and Wilson took pity on him quickly and settled on pizza. He wondered when the last time Greg had pizza was. Probably years. After some hesitation he gave Greg a beer to have with dinner - it wasn't like anyone would know and one beer wouldn't hurt him - even if he had been abstinent for a long time. Greg had seemed to enjoy it after some initial hesitation. They'd broken out the candy bars Wilson had grabbed at Walmart for dessert.
Wilson found himself enjoying the company - he'd been alone in the apartment for months now, and having Greg around was at least better than the echoing silence. If he could just get Greg to relax a little it would be even better. He would normally ask a new friend about their family, and their background but he knew that any questions like that triggered an unpleasant response in Greg. He'd have to find out if there was a way to reverse that, and how involved it would be. Greg might be a slave now, but once he had been free, and he had a right to remember those times - even if they were painful. Besides, Wilson was curious about what he could have done to earn such a long sentence. He couldn't imagine the timid, withdrawn man ever being violent.
He noticed that Greg appeared to be getting tired relatively early in the evening and wondered how long he'd been up, and what time he usually slept. He figured that the slaves probably started their work day early - they'd always been at the hospital by the time he arrived in the morning. And today had been a big day for Greg - no wonder he was tired. At his suggestion Greg went off to bed before ten and when he passed his open door later that evening he was sound asleep. The bedroom was still as neat and clean as when Greg first entered it, the clothing all hung away, and the only addition that could be seen was the walking cane which was propped up next to Greg's bed.
Fairly happy with the way the first day had gone Wilson went to bed himself.
Words: Approx 2700
Rating : PG-13
Characters : House & Wilson, Cuddy
Contains : Slavery concepts
Summary : Slave AU. Wilson encounters a disabled cleaning slave at PPTH called Greg and becomes intrigued with him. An unlikely friendship forms between the two as Wilson tries to secure a better life for Greg.
Link to story on AO3 .
Previous Chapter
Wilson had never enjoyed clothes shopping with any of his wives, and he enjoyed it even less with Greg in tow. As it had been for the trip to the apartment Greg's attention during the drive was focused on the activity in the busy Princeton streets. His eyes were wide as he looked around them, at the buildings, at the people, at the other cars. Wilson guessed he hadn't really seen much the last few years outside of the Rent A Slave headquarters and the various places he'd worked. From his reaction all this was new to him.
When they parked at the mall and walked to the stores Greg visibly tensed. He was moving more easily with the cane but they still attracted attention. Private slaves weren't common in this part of Princeton and the cane and limp made Greg even more conspicuous. People stared, and then looked away. Wilson wasn't sure how much Greg was taking in but he noticed that as they entered the more crowded parts of the mall, packed with Saturday afternoon shoppers, that Greg moved closer to him, practically brushing shoulders as they walked. His head went down and he stared steadfastly at the ground.
"Hey, watch out!" Wilson turned and saw Greg stumbling and a young man standing staring at him. "Get out of the way, slave."
Wilson reached out and steadied Greg, who had shrunk in on himself, and then turned to the youth. "Is there a problem?"
"Your fucking slave got in my way. Maybe you should put him on a leash. Woof! Woof!" The man's friends laughed and Wilson struggled to control his temper.
He spread his hands. "Well, I'm sorry, but there's no harm done." He turned to Greg. "Come on, Greg." They moved off rapidly, although Wilson kept a corner of his eye on the youth. He heard a mocking 'come on, Greg' behind him and more laughter and barking but didn't turn around.
"You okay?" He asked Greg as they neared the clothing store Wilson had in mind.
"Yes, sir. I'm sorry, sir."
"Don't be. It wasn't your fault and you didn't hurt him." Greg didn't seem convinced, he still stared anxiously at the ground and Wilson decided to get on with this and get out of here. He entered the store, a place where he bought almost all of his own casual clothes.
When he entered a sales assistant looked up and then hurried over. "I'm sorry, sir, but you can't bring the slave in - company policy." He pointed at a small sign by the counter - 'No drinks, no food, no pets, no slaves'. "You need to leave him outside." Wilson considered for a moment going in and grabbing some clothes for Greg - he could always estimate his size - but the idea of leaving Greg sitting on a bench outside the shop alone didn't appeal after the encounter they'd just had.
He tried another three stores with the same result. He was getting steadily more frustrated. Surely there had to a way to buy a slave new clothes?
In the end they went to Walmart. It wasn't a place that Wilson usually enjoyed visiting and he didn't this time. They made it in the door unhindered by security but Wilson could still see that people were watching them. That damned collar was so conspicuous that everyone in the store could instantly tell Greg was a slave. Parents moved their small children out of the way as they approached.
Greg made no verbal protest but his eyes remained steadfastly fixed on the ground and when Wilson stopped in the men's section and began asking him what he wanted to wear he answered monosyllabically with the general gist being that whatever Wilson wanted to buy was fine with him.
Eventually Wilson began buying things more or less at random, guessing at Greg's size - he was not going to try and take a slave into the fitting room - being refused entry to the fitting rooms at Walmart would be a new low. He reasoned that anything would be better than the clothes Greg had on now. He'd get Greg to try them on at home, and once he had a good idea of his size he'd go to one of his usual shops by himself and get him some better clothes.
He picked out some jeans, and a variety of tee shirts and some button down shirts which would be useful when he took Greg out places, they could be used to make his collar a little bit less obvious. Hiding it totally with a rolltop was tempting but was against regulations according to the course he'd attended. Greg was pushing the cart, and he looked surprised as Wilson began dumping more clothes into it.
"I'm not making another trip any time soon, so we'd better stock up," Wilson explained, adding some underwear and socks to the pile. He threw in a lightweight jacket - he'd get Greg a better one and a coat when it was closer to winter. "Can you think of anything else?"
Greg looked up at him and then back at the ground. "No, sir," came the expected reply and Wilson resisted the temptation to roll his eyes.
"Well, shoes would be a good bet don't you think?"
Luckily the shoe department had one of those measure yourself devices and he got Greg to do that. Two pairs of sneakers joined the growing pile. He hoped they would fit, but he doubted Greg would ever admit if they didn't.
At the checkout Greg stood close to him, hiding behind him - if you could call it hiding when he was a couple of inches taller than Wilson. On impulse Wilson grabbed a stack of candy bars from the handy display and added them to his purchase. He watched as Greg's eyes followed them and smiled. Greg might not be very interested in clothes shopping but apparently candy bars were a different matter.
Wilson breathed a sigh of relief when he got back in the car.
"At least you'll have something to put in your closet now," he said, head turning towards his silent companion. "When we get back you can throw those old clothes away and change into your new ones."
There was the usual pause and then Greg answered, predictably, 'yes, sir'.
Wilson was tempted to bang his head against the steering wheel but reasoned that wouldn't be very productive - besides being likely to scare Greg - so instead he put the car into gear and drove off.
Greg went to his room as ordered when they returned to the apartment with his arms full of clothes. Doctor Wilson had spent a lot of money buying them, and the shoes. Greg wasn't sure why he needed so many clothes - for years he'd had one set at a time. When it was time for those to be washed they'd be given another set out of the store of clothes. If you were lucky the size wasn't too far off yours. The shorts and tee he was wearing didn't fit too badly, and he'd only been wearing them a couple of days so they still smelled okay. Still, Doctor Wilson had told him to change out of them so he stripped down.
He was glad to be back in the apartment. The car journey had been enthralling but the crowds in the mall, and the hostility of some of the people had frightened him. He wasn't used to having this much contact with free people, or the free world. He hadn't recognised many of the things in the stores, and the clothes had been a bewildering array to choose from. He had been glad when Doctor Wilson had taken over the selection and relieved when he hadn't been ordered to strip down and try the clothes on in the middle of the crowded store.
After donning a pair of boxer shorts he reached for the jeans. They fitted well enough, except for being a little loose around the waist. Greg reached for the belt and with some fiddling managed to get it threaded through the loops. The new denim was stiff and a little uncomfortable against his scar but he'd get used to that. He pulled the first t-shirt over his head, again a little loose but not too bad and after some hesitation selected one of the button down shirts.
There was a mirror in his room and he moved over to it. He was surprised how different he looked in these clothes. Smarter. The shirt even went up over his collar a little bit, not hiding it but making it less conspicuous. If he did up the top button and pulled it up maybe it would hide it completely. His fingers drifted in that direction. The small light on the collar was glowing - a sign that it was receiving a signal from the unit that Doctor Wilson possessed. The doctor hadn't used it once on Greg so far, not even to call him out of this room.
He left his shirt the way it was and picked up his discarded clothes. Doctor Wilson had said to throw them away but Greg was reluctant. They still had a lot of wear in them, and they weren't his of course. They belonged to Rent A Slave. Unless Doctor Wilson had been gifted them when he bought Greg.
"Hey, you look good." Doctor Wilson poked his head through the open doorway - Greg must have been taking too long. "Those your old clothes? Here, give them to me."
Greg handed them over and the doctor took them with an expression of distaste.
"Everything fit okay? Have you tried the shoes on?"
"Yes, sir. No, sir." Greg sat on the bed to pull socks and shoes on, he couldn't manage to do it while standing. As his owner waited he put both on, fumbling with the fastening on the sneakers.
"Walk around in them, make sure they fit." Wilson ordered and Greg obediently walked around the room, holding his cane tightly. They felt strange but at the same time the sneakers seemed to give more support to his leg. Between them and the cane Greg was walking far better than he had for a long time and the pain wasn't too bad.
Doctor Wilson looked pleased. "You look much more respectable. Hang the rest of the clothes up and I'll get rid of the old ones. There's a game on if you want to come watch it. We'll get some takeout for dinner; pizza, Thai or Chinese - your choice."
He disappeared without waiting for an answer and Greg obediently hung up the rest of his new clothes. He looked at himself in the mirror again. At the beginning of the day he'd been expecting to go to the hospital and spend a long day cleaning. Then he would have returned to his dorm, had showers and evening meal and slept in a cramped room with twenty other slaves. Now he was here, in the apartment of a doctor from the hospital. He'd been taken out shopping, and supplied with clothes, and he was to go and watch a 'game' with his new owner and then choose what they should have for dinner. So far he hadn't been put to work at all. He felt lost, confused about what his function here was.
He'd seen slaves in the past given special treatment by their owners. Wherever he'd been kept there had usually been supervisors who would supply a slave with treats and better treatment in return for what Greg presumed to be sex - although the slaves never talked about it when they returned from being taken. Nobody had ever selected him to be a 'special slave', even when he was fit, it seemed highly unlikely that Doctor Wilson had a preference for middle aged, crippled, broken down slaves.
A couple of slaves he'd met had been owned by an individual, and then sold to a company when they were no longer required. They hadn't talked much about what their lives had been like, or what they had done, but neither of them had boasted about having their own bathrooms and bedrooms. Greg suspected that this arrangement was highly unusual.
Doctor Wilson had said that he bought Greg to keep the apartment clean, and so that Greg could get pain medication and help for his leg. It seemed strange to Greg - this apartment wasn't big enough that he would spend all his time cleaning it - but so far Doctor Wilson had indeed done things to help his leg and hadn't asked anything of Greg. Even if it did turn out that he had bought Greg for sex, that didn't seem to be a bad trade-off for what he was providing. Greg could live with that - he'd endured far worse.
Wilson found the afternoon and evening surprisingly enjoyable. Greg was still mostly silent but appeared fascinated by the baseball game in the afternoon, and a couple of movies Wilson put on in the evening. He sat stiffly in a chair to start with but gradually relaxed a little, although he was still attentive to anything Wilson said, and any move he made.
Choosing what to have for dinner appeared to be beyond Greg and Wilson took pity on him quickly and settled on pizza. He wondered when the last time Greg had pizza was. Probably years. After some hesitation he gave Greg a beer to have with dinner - it wasn't like anyone would know and one beer wouldn't hurt him - even if he had been abstinent for a long time. Greg had seemed to enjoy it after some initial hesitation. They'd broken out the candy bars Wilson had grabbed at Walmart for dessert.
Wilson found himself enjoying the company - he'd been alone in the apartment for months now, and having Greg around was at least better than the echoing silence. If he could just get Greg to relax a little it would be even better. He would normally ask a new friend about their family, and their background but he knew that any questions like that triggered an unpleasant response in Greg. He'd have to find out if there was a way to reverse that, and how involved it would be. Greg might be a slave now, but once he had been free, and he had a right to remember those times - even if they were painful. Besides, Wilson was curious about what he could have done to earn such a long sentence. He couldn't imagine the timid, withdrawn man ever being violent.
He noticed that Greg appeared to be getting tired relatively early in the evening and wondered how long he'd been up, and what time he usually slept. He figured that the slaves probably started their work day early - they'd always been at the hospital by the time he arrived in the morning. And today had been a big day for Greg - no wonder he was tired. At his suggestion Greg went off to bed before ten and when he passed his open door later that evening he was sound asleep. The bedroom was still as neat and clean as when Greg first entered it, the clothing all hung away, and the only addition that could be seen was the walking cane which was propped up next to Greg's bed.
Fairly happy with the way the first day had gone Wilson went to bed himself.