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Defective
by pslim
There was nobody waiting at home when House got there. He recalled how glad he should be of that. The lights were off, and at two AM it was quiet enough to hear the refrigerator running.
"Is your refrigerator running?" House asked the dark nothing, tossing his helmet into the empty seat on the end of the couch near the kitchen. "Maybe its friend has Maniac Cop on his ass and it's afraid of getting caught in a well-publicized crossfire."
Wilson had looked pathetic, sitting there in the drizzle waiting for a bus. The humidity made a mockery of the hairdo that had already been the first casualty of his having to leave an hour and a half early for work just so he could get there half an hour late. His pretty, ruined silk tie had looked like a noose. Or an albatross. But it would have to wait in line if it aspired to that exalted role. Or would have, the day before. Now it was looking like there might be a last-minute opening.
House stood motionless in the dark of his living room, for lack of the drive to do anything else. It took some time to work out, but he eventually decided that he wasn't hungry despite having missed dinner and staring head-on into the early breakfast hours. It was the gnawing that confused him, but that wasn't important. Just one more nagging voice in a riotous crowd, one thing out of the hundreds that demanded his attention and would be subsequently and purposefully forgotten.
There wasn't much to do but polish off that bottle of Johnnie Walker Black. It would be hard to get the Johnnie in prison. Not that he would be going to prison. Except that it wasn't impossible, and the not-quite-impossible happened pretty damn often, from where he was sitting. House pulled back just short of filling the sticky glass that lived on the liquor cabinet and never got washed because everything he poured into it tasted like shit anyway.
Even knowing that he was insured against Wilson's betrayal under all but the most extreme duress, he had found his backup policy more reassuring. Ratting House out now would, at the least, lead to a revocation of Wilson's medical license. Permanent relocation to Cansville, USA. El muerte de la carrera.
So tonight didn't change anything. He wasn't going to have to find a nail polish that complimented day-glo orange. Wilson would protect himself, and protecting himself would protect House. Whether he liked it or not. Which was funny, because usually...
Irritated, House intercepted that thought before it could get any further and relegated his brain to simple motor control. From there it was easy, all things considered, to make it to the couch with the whiskey, and to retrieve the remote from under his ass. He hadn't intended to watch TV, but his ass had had other ideas, and the stinging light flashed on. The mute button instantly found itself mashed under an affronted thumb, but the power button nestled, safe for the moment, out of immediate reach.
The last thing House wanted right now was to watch people make idiots of themselves in front of a camera for money, varied though the methods of self-exploitation were in the post-industrial age. Usually you could find some recreation in the sheer ingenuity of people who would rather get bad press than no press at all. Nobodies, has-beens, drug-addicted pre-teens, self-styled ringmasters--you could really put your feet up and get settled in for the human circus. Usually.
Sometimes being right just wasn't so much fun.
And publicity wasn't the only thing people climbed over each other to prostitute themselves for, he mused silently, drinking straight from the bottle and staring on as a haggard, emphatic woman with smudgy mascara gesticulated in a little from satellite box on the right side of the screen.
MELINDA COMBS --- ACCUSED OF NEGLIGENT HOMICIDE IN DEATH OF 3 YEAR OLD SON, the ticker tape read, as Melinda brandished blurry polaroids of the imbecilic, cross-eyed cherub taken, presumably, prior to his demise.
No, sometimes it was baser, even, than the need to be noticed. People would do almost anything to anyone if it supported their fantasy of being more than just a fancy carbon dioxide machine. Sure, Melinda regretted leaving little Jordan alone in the bath, but she was blaming it on God and Satan and the liberal media, and not even because she didn't want to spend the next seven years dodging the advances of a bull dyke prison guard with nowhere else to be. She just didn't want to accept that she was defective.
What she didn't seem to realize was that being defective didn't make her special, or even uncommon. Using her dead son--the son she'd killed--as a prop in her one-woman rationalization spectacular was just one more thing a person would do if they had half a chance. That much was obvious, and people who refused to believe it, refused to even look at it, deserved what they got.
Take Wilson. House had spent seven years proclaiming to him, at any opportunity and in no uncertain terms, what human beings were capable of, what House himself was capable of. To Wilson's credit, he was, by and large, unsurprised when events bore up House's assessment. But then along would come a speed bump just that much higher than the others and Wilson would be thrown. He was an armchair skeptic--when the going got tough he cried foul and threatened to pick up his toys and go home.
Except that he never actually had picked up his toys, House realized, mouthing the smooth, rounded lip of the whiskey bottle and staring glassily into the dark corner between the TV and the kitchen. Until now. Tonight had had a distinctly toy-picking-up feel to it.
The light from the television screen flickered unpleasantly in the corner of his eye, and he looked down at the bottle in his hand. It was less than half full, and he realized with a deeply inordinate sense of loss that he wanted to be hammered in a way that that meager amount could never hope to make him.
The gnawing came back, in spite of the bereft numbness imparted by the whiskey, and he didn't know whether he wanted to gorge or throw up. It felt like the difference between running toward and away from something so terrifying you couldn't conceive of it directly. Skirting around the edge and coming at it from oblique angles produced one thing and one thing only: a stark mental snapshot of a pathetic figure hunched on a bench, reversed, and receding into nothing in the rearview of a Ninja motorcycle.
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Legal Disclaimer: The authors published here make no claims on the ownership of Dr. Gregory House and the other fictional residents of Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital. Like the television show House (and quite possibly Dr. Wilson's pocket protector), they are the property of NBC/Universal, David Shore and undoubtedly other individuals of whom I am only peripherally aware. The fan fiction authors published here receive no monetary benefit from their work and intend no copyright infringement nor slight to the actual owners. We love the characters and we love the show, otherwise we wouldn't be here.
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