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The Writing on the Wall - Part Four
by Evilida
House woke up early the next morning in more pain than usual. An evening of rummaging around his ransacked apartment had not done his leg any favours. House took a couple of Vicodin and waited for the pain to diminish. He pulled open the curtain and groaned. It was pouring outside. House had taken his motorcycle to the hotel; his car was still parked near his apartment. He hadn't thought to bring any rain gear. Unless he wanted to pay for a taxi, he'd have to get a ride with Wilson. House pulled on a pair of pants over the boxers and t-shirt he'd been sleeping in and limped painfully to the elevator. He popped another Vicodin on the trip up to Wilson's room.
Outside the room he could hear the sound of Wilson's hairdryer, which meant that the oncologist was about halfway through his fussy morning grooming rituals. He knocked loudly on Wilson's door. The hairdryer continued to drone. House was beginning to think that Wilson was taking a bit of petty revenge for House's refusal to talk to him the previous evening by ignoring House now. However, the door opened and a woman, whom House immediately classified as a "soccer mom", put out her head.
"You're not room service," she said.
"Hello. I'm Wilson's friend House. Did he mention me to you? Oh, don't worry; we're in an open relationship. Sometimes Wilson wants to explore his masculine side."
"Is that the waiter?" Wilson called out over the noise of his hairdryer.
"It's someone called House. He says he's a friend of yours."
Wilson stepped out of the bathroom. He was adjusting a hideous purple and green tie around his neck. It looked like the old school tie of the Institute for the Colour Blind.
"What do you want, House?"
"I need a ride to work."
"Fine. Meet me back here in about forty five minutes."
"Can't I join you for breakfast? I hear you ordered room service."
"Go away. Come back in forty five minutes. You might think about combing your hair and brushing your teeth in the meantime."
"He's so strict," House said to Joanna. Just then the waiter came to the door with the room service cart, and House stopped to steal a slice of bacon from what was probably the soccer mom's plate (Wilson's would be the whole grain toast and fruit cup) before going back to his room.
------
"What did you say to her?" They were stopped at a red light, so Wilson took his eyes off the road to glare at House.
House was nonchalant. "I said hello, of course. What else would I say? If you don't want me to meet your girlfriends, we need a signal for when you're busy. How about a sock on the door knob?"
"You obviously said something," Wilson refused to be deflected.
"What does it matter? You're not going to ever see her again, are you? Are you afraid she's going to spread malicious rumours about you back in Poughkeepsie?"
"Malicious rumours! So you did say something. What did you say?"
"I said that you and I were very good friends, but that I was willing to share if she was."
"As if there weren't enough `Wilson is gay' rumours floating around already!"
"Those rumours started because you blow-dry your hair," House said. "People see a head of blow-dried hair and they think `poofter'."
They had reached the parking lot of the hospital. Wilson pulled into his spot which was a long wet walk from the entrance. House and Wilson got out of the car. Wilson took a large golf umbrella and held it over their heads.
"We should talk," Wilson said urgently, "about what Tritter said about my brother. He's got to be wrong about him."
Every time that Wilson mentioned his brother, House could hear the insincerity in his friend's voice. He didn't want to listen to Wilson lie, even though he suspected Wilson was lying to himself just as much as he was to House.
"I'm sure that your brother has a perfectly fine explanation for letting you think he was dead for the past ten years. I'm sure he has absolutely terrific reasons for violating his parole conditions and for spying on your ex-wife. I do, however, have difficulty understanding why such a wonderful person would want to write "Die in Pain" on my living room wall."
"There's no proof whatsoever that that was him."
"The proof," House said, "is that you think he did it. That makes me wonder why."
-----
House's team was waiting for him. Cameron and Foreman were both carrying the files of prospective patients, ready to present them to their boss. Chase was slumped in one of the chairs with a martyred air, a damp washcloth draped ostentatiously over his eyes. House pledged never to tell Chase any "your mother is so fat" jokes. They'd probably give him a nervous breakdown.
"Chase," he barked.
The washcloth fell from his face as Chase sat upright. The Australian still looked unwell. The meeting room was brightly lit, which was obviously causing him pain. There was a barely perceptible tremor in his hands. House's insults alone should not have caused this strong a physical reaction. House speculated that there had to be other stressors in the young man's life, stressors that he did not know about - something about his father's death perhaps, or his one-sided infatuation with Allison Cameron?
"If you don't have any cases to present, I don't need you. Cameron can drive you home. I know which case you're going to present," he said to Cameron, "and it's Churg-Strauss syndrome. Foreman, unless your case involves a Victoria's Secret model who's going to die in the next twenty minutes, I don't want to hear about it. You can do Chase's clinic hours for him."
When his three underlings had left the room, House telephoned Michael Wilson.
-----
Mike Wilson was working on the Lee file, the estate of a multi-millionaire with a vast web of wives, ex-wives, mistresses, children, stepchildren and devoted friends. Mr. Lee's hobby in his declining years had been revising his will, over and over again, until the final document rivalled the Tax Code in its byzantine complexity. Although Lee's estate was likely to provide for a very significant portion of Mike's income for decades to come, the work itself was tedious in the extreme, and he welcomed any interruption, even one from Gregory House.
Mike had met Gregory House at least twice before. He hadn't made a favourable impression. They'd met at his brother's wedding to Julie. House had recently broken up with his girlfriend Stacey, and he was morose and drunk. Mike had driven him home, and they'd had to stop twice on the way so that House could be sick. Their next encounter was more memorable. It was one of Julie's dinner parties. Julie was a perfectionist, so that her parties were never easy, relaxed affairs at the best of times. This one had been a disaster. House made nasty little jokes at Julie's expense all evening, to which she was unable to reply because she lacked a sense of humour. The final straw was when he suggested that her husband was a better cook than she was. Though this was true, no one else would say such a thing to Julie, since her fragile self esteem was dependent upon her being a perfect wife and hostess. Julie lost her temper entirely and threw a wineglass at his head. Unfortunately, she had excellent aim. Jimmy ended up practising first aid on House and consoling his distraught wife while everyone else hurriedly gathered up their coats and left.
Mike had made no impression on House at all.
"I want to talk to you about your brother Roy."
"What about him?"
"According to Wilson, he used to spend all his spare time rescuing kittens and helping little old ladies across the street until he became addicted to drugs."
"That's what Jimmy thinks."
"But not what you think."
"Jimmy was a sweet naive kid. He idolized his big brother. My parents didn't want to disillusion him, so they let him think the best of Roy. I thought he should know the real Roy, but I was overruled. "
"Who's the real Roy?"
"I don't see any reason to air all my family's dirty laundry in front of you."
"Roy's back. He was talking to one of Wilson's exes, trying to find out about him."
"They haven't caught him yet?"
"You already know that Roy is wanted by the police. You should have told Wilson. "
"Yeah, I knew. We hadn't heard from him for years when my parents got a call from his parole officer. He'd missed his scheduled session and he wanted to know if he was there. We decided not to tell Jimmy for his own good. He would have wanted to help Roy, but it was better for him not to get involved."
"Wilson thought he was dead. He thought he'd left his drug-addicted brother to die on the streets."
"Jimmy, call him Jimmy like everybody else," Mike said. "You sound like you're in god-damned prep school, or something."
"Okay, `Jimmy' if you insist. I think Roy's after me and I think he's after `Jimmy'. What do I need to know about him?"
"All right. I'll tell you about Roy. Even before the drugs, Roy wasn't what he appeared to be. He could be really charming. He was popular and athletic. He always had a lot of girlfriends. They thought he was wonderful and their parents liked him too. He always seemed so polite and well-spoken and he got good grades.
Once he got one of his girlfriends pregnant. Her name was Paula. She wanted to keep the baby, and Roy was furious. All he could see was a lifetime of child support payments. Nothing he could say would convince her to change her mind. That was when he started threatening her and her parents. He said he'd burn down their house when they were all asleep. She came home from school one day and found her cat had been killed. It was garrotted with fishing line. She knew Roy did it.
Paula came to see my parents to get their help; she even went to the police. Roy just denied everything. The harassment didn't stop. He only let up when Paula promised to sign a document saying that Roy wasn't the father. She even promised to put the child up for adoption, if he would just leave them both alone.
Jimmy probably thinks I'm jealous because Roy never had any use for me. Jimmy was Roy's mascot. Roy kept him around because he was a cute kid and he'd amuse Roy's friends. Jimmy absolutely refused to see Roy's bad side, no matter what Roy did. He came home with a broken arm once. Roy said it was an accident. Jimmy didn't say anything, but my parents and I knew Roy broke it. Jimmy probably got on his nerves that day. Ask Jimmy about that.
I always thought the drugs didn't change Roy at all; they just made the real Roy easier to see - brought him closer to the surface. My mother cried when Roy left home, and I know that Jimmy was really upset. Jimmy really loved Roy. Personally, I thought it was the best thing that could have happened."
House took a few seconds to absorb Michael Wilson's words.
"You said that Wilson really loves Roy. Does Roy love Wilson?"
Mike laughed. "Roy hates his whole family. He blames us for everything that's ever gone wrong in his life. He probably hates Jimmy the worst, because Jimmy tried the hardest to help him. "
------
Roy lived in a furnished apartment over a tanning salon. The place was miserably hot and stuffy on summer nights, and if he opened one of the tiny windows, the traffic noise kept him awake. He'd gone through his everything he owned twice, making sure that nothing he owned had come from one of burglaries. Still, there might be invisible fibres or some other tiny bit of evidence that could connect him to his crimes. He'd watched CSI once. At the time, he'd thought the show was crap - a fantasy for all the law-and-order types who wanted to believe that the justice system was in control and that every criminal could be caught. Now, he wasn't sure what a forensics team might be able to find. Tritter had scared him. Worse yet, even if he managed to remove every trace that linked him to the locations of his burglaries, Tritter and his pals could still plant something on him and get him that way.
The easiest thing to do was to leave the state all together. He could go to California or New Mexico - some place far enough away so that even if he were found no one would want to spend the money to extradite him back to New Jersey. That would be logical. The problem was that his heart was in conflict with his head. His heart wanted to see his brother humbled.
Lying in bed, Roy imagined Jimmy coming to him, begging Roy to save him from prison. Jimmy was soft; prison would kill him for sure. In his imagination, it was entirely up to Roy to decide his brother's fate, like a Roman emperor deciding whether a gladiator would live or die. No one could call Roy a vindictive person, but he did have a high regard for justice. Would it really be just for his brother to get off scot free? Wasn't he endangering people's lives by helping this drug addict doctor? Roy had a sudden vision of his soft baby brother facing a pride of hungry lions in the Coliseum. The image was so comical he had to laugh. Smiling, he drifted off to sleep.
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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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