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The Falls - Chapter 2
by menme
(AN: Please check out "The Falls - Chapter 1" under "menme" before reading this)
The Falls
Chapter 2 (The Forest for the Trees)
The disease had progressed.
She curled her toes into the sheets and tried to think of nothing. It didn't help. She should have been saddened the past two days by Laura Palmer's death, even worried if someone was preying on women in the town, and she was, on both counts, grieving and on edge with the rest of them. Yet behind the shock of the news still echoing in her bones other thoughts swirled and wouldn't stop. The germ surging through her blood, the disease that had filled her with joy for the past few months. His face, his hands on her. She was sick with love.
She had needed a diagnostician for a patient. Her first impulse when Hayward recommended House was to consider calling Seattle and looking for one there, but Dr. Hayward assured her he was good and so she had sought out Greg House's office near the back of the hospital, his desk littered with files, which she thought might give her a chance to back out if he was busy. "This is all for show," he told her, and flipped open empty files to demonstrate. As she sat and described her case he gave her the stare she had seen him level on obtuse patients in the clinic, as though what the speaker was saying was in a foreign language he was only slightly curious to decipher, but when she mentioned the dystonia, something clicked.
"You said torticollis."
"That's what I thought the first time his father brought him in. The next time it wasn't just neck jerks. It had moved into his hands and legs. It's task-specific -"
"How do you know that?"
Her nine-year old patient's leg cramps only struck him when he walked down stairs, she told him. "So far."
He had stood and grabbed his cane so rabidly she'd thought for a second he was going to hit her with it. "Show me this kid."
The boy's father had left his son to work the night shift. They got the boy out of his hospital bed in his pyjamas and House made him walk down the stairs, intent on the spasming legs that almost made the kid fall, while the evening nurse across the way gawped. "Now walk down backwards."
"Am I gonna have to use a cane like you?"
"For the rest of your miserable life if you don't do what I say. Turn around and go down backwards."
Which used a different set of muscles, she knew. The sudden spasm that pitched her patient down the stairs might have broken his neck if she hadn't thrown herself in front of House to catch him. The doctor hadn't moved.
"Not task-specific," he said, with a hint of know-it-all glee, and then a quick glance away. Which told her - surprisingly - that he was trying to impress her. Not the best way to go about it, she wanted to say.
And yet the case was solved. DYT1 dystonia, he deduced, a potentially fatal disorder that would have the boy in literal knots within months and which was confirmed by genetic testing. They discussed and rejected pallidotomy and he helped her - with a few impressively professional calls to the health-care company - to get coverage for deep-brain stimulation. She didn't see him for a week. When she did, she told him the DBS was not going to happen because the father, a radically rightist nut from the backwoods, refused to have his son outfitted with a brain chip. His stare - at her and then beyond her, contemplating, as though the world's insanity were a crossword puzzle he solved every day - made her start to like him.
"This daddy hasn't met me, has he?"
"Please, Dr. House. Making trouble won't do any good."
He told her to bring the father, alone, to a certain room on the third floor in one hour.
There were people who could surprise you, and others who left you flabbergasted. He lay in the bed, in a hospital gown. He'd rubbed ash under his eyes, she guessed, to give himself that hollowed look. The father stared. "This the guy with the son got the same cussing thing I do?" House asked. The accent mimicked perfectly the flat northwestern tone of the locals. "'Cause I don't like people brought in just to stare, so close your mouth, sir. Only said I'd talk to you `cause the doc here is so pretty."
The most amazing thing about his act was his arms and hands. DYT1 dystonia contracted the muscles, pulling limbs that should have extended away from one another into tight knots. He held his arms crossed on his chest in a painful-looking tangle, every finger clawed to a different angle. Muscle control that almost went beyond belief. Even his legs below the thin sheet looked bent halfway backward which, with the amount of debridement in his thigh someone had told her about, had to be excruciating. The sweat standing out on his forehead, she realized, was real.
The father was still staring. "My boy gonna look like that?"
"Hell no - he'll be worse. I was a square knot only a month ago. I'm getting better, thanks to this wire in my head. The doctors say I'll be whittling again by next week." He caught her eye, and the slight spasm of his cheek, she saw, was him trying not to laugh. "God, I miss that whittling."
As the father turned to her she had just enough time to put her hand over her mouth, pushing her own laugh into pressure that made tears stand out in her eyes, so that it looked, she supposed, as though she were moved by the severity of it all.
"You gotta get your boy what he needs," House told him.
"I guess I'll - think about it," he said.
And as the father walked out the door, she had turned back. He was already relaxed again, panting slightly, with his hands nerveless at his sides. "You..." she had murmured, then realized she had no idea what to say.
He had shrugged. "When else do I get to lie in bed at work?"
The sheets were growing cold. She stirred, and tugged the pillow up under her head.
Then Greg House had surprised her again - by being so nervous at asking her out that he had practically stammered. Men are in awe of you, he had told her afterward, meaning that he was, and had kissed her, so hesitantly there in the car, not assuming he had the right to, approaching it with such...reverence, that she had felt some room of ice thaw inside her. Not once putting his hands on her. Only letting her know what he wanted by lifting her palm and placing it there, waiting. So different. She had forgotten what it felt like not to have ownership of her body assumed, taken for granted and taken from her in a rush of seeking hands and lips. Respect. Such a cliche word. That hesitancy had made her not talk to him for a week, frightened by her own response, until the day he had come to her defence against snide Benny Wright and she had told him to meet her in the operating room.
Every moment since had fueled her disease. Until today, when she had realized what was happening to him and it had shocked her.
They had attended Laura Palmer's funeral in the morning, arriving in separate cars, greeting each other like casual acquaintances from the hospital, though she saw how it hurt him. She made a point of standing next to him, a small concession, noting glances from some of the nurses present, throughout the farce that they called a funeral. Everyone eyeing everyone, wondering if their neighbor was only faking the grief they really felt, the thought Murderer like a fog seeping between them from the gray headstones, until Laura's father had fallen on the coffin sobbing and her boyfriend Bobby, apparently released from jail, had screamed that they were all Laura's murderer for having ignored her problems. Which was true. More insight than she would have credited the kid with. They all knew so little of what had gone on in Laura's life. She had known probably more about her than the rest, sharing, as the two of them had, one very dark secret. Greg had bent near to ask who the man standing apart from the crowd was and she had guessed it to be the FBI agent. A boyish face, regulation haircut, who watched the crowd with wide, perceptive eyes, noticed them staring, and came over afterward to introduce himself. Dale Cooper was an oddball, a parody of a G-man straight out of 1940, though she realized part of the act was in order to make people underestimate him. He had heard of Greg's skills and asked a few questions about Ronette Pulaski, though Greg had not been called in on the case of the girl who had not awoken from her coma yet. People started to leave the gravesite, under the weight of a cold drizzle just starting, and as she headed toward her car, Greg had caught up with her and whispered, "Meet me at my place." She hadn't had to ask why. She felt it too.
They had screwed like the world was ending. Holding onto each other in the face of death. "Are we normal?" she groaned somewhere in the middle. "Is there something wrong with us?" but he hadn't answered.
He sat naked at the kitchen table afterward and told her he wanted to show her something. She wrapped herself in a blanket and studied the tox screen he unfolded. She felt as though the top of her head had been taken off.
"Chloral hydrate."
"Laura's mother was pumped full of it. Given to her in the evenings. In cocoa or a bedtime cup of tea. Enough to keep her under all night. She complained she could hardly wake up in the mornings. And no, I do not think it was Laura. Laura's the one who brought her in to see me."
"Greg, did you have this in your pocket at the funeral?" He didn't answer. "If you think Laura's father was involved in her murder, why didn't you show this to Dale Cooper?"
"It doesn't prove anything." He was looking away. "I could be wrong."
Yes, the disease was progressing. Because she had wanted to slap him.
It was the town, sapping his confidence. More than the failed case he was running from, more than his leg or his pills, it was the cold flat wraith of apathy below them in the ground, in the roots of the trees, that deadened them all. It turned them into different people, made them do unthinkable things, she knew well, or fail to do things. He couldn't have fallen prey to that. Not Greg House. Not the provocative, confident man she loved. She had wanted to cry.
Very cold, the sheets. She should have been warmed by the body pressed to her back, pulling out of her now. He was nuzzling her hair, lips against her neck, whispering "So pretty."
She shifted. "Now that tickles, Gr-" And froze. Praying he hadn't noticed. Cursing herself for letting the disease get so far.
Because she had almost called the man beside her Greg.
****
He thought about Leland Palmer.
He had seen grief before - numb grief and screaming drop-to-the-floor grief, even a man who had walked calmly out of the Princeton hospital when told his daughter was dead and had shot himself with the gun he kept in his car - and he believed Leland Palmer's grief was real. The pulse in his hands and behind his face as he had watched the man try to hug his daughter's coffin told him so. Eagle eyes in a smart lawyer face, the look turned inward on horror. A man who had gotten by in life by being smooth, likeable probably while he stabbed you in the back, and who found now that death wasn't fooled by unctuous. A broken, devastated man beside his broken stupid wife. Which left him with a tox screen report and theories he couldn't make fit.
Rumors paced the halls of the hospital. Agent Cooper was uncovering good leads and had found out nothing at all. Agent Cooper had made several arrests and had no clues whatsoever. Amalie, visibly distracted, filled him in with the straight stuff now and then. FBI Agent Dale Cooper was apparently a strong proponent of Buddhist spiritualism and was assessing the likelihood of suspects based on how well tin cans with their names on them could be hit by the local sheriff throwing stones. She assured him it was true and - after ensuring no nurses were looking - closed his mouth for him with a fingertip under his chin. He hadn't liked the guy at the funeral and now he had a reason. No, Agent Cooper didn't have a clue.
She was watching him with an odd slant to her head. "Have you spoken to Cooper?"
"No." The tox screen in his jacket pocket burned against his chest.
"When are you going to?" The disappointment in her eyes made him turn away. "Greg?"
Cooper came to the hospital. It had been a week and a half since the funeral. He paused on his way from the lab to study the FBI agent's unnaturally erect posture, reminding him of those Victorian gentlemen who had worn trusses to appear more streamlined, and Cooper motioned him over. The agent stood talking to a group of Ronette Pulaski's doctors. The girl who had been beaten and tortured the same night Laura was murdered had not awoken.
"Dr. House." Cooper smiled broadly. "I'd like to get your opinion on when Miss Pulaski might be expected to wake up from her coma."
The other doctors rolled their eyes, one even turning away in disgust. Standard response. It left the field open for him.
"It's not a coma," he informed Cooper.
General snorts of disbelief. Cooper smiled back and forth between them as though privy to a particularly interesting tennis match.
Dr. Krumberg - he of the walrus moustache, as though all the hair from his bald pate had wandered south - piped up. "She's only what? - a three or four on the Glasgow scale. If that's not a coma, what is it? And since when do you go examining a patient, Dr. House? Especially one that's not yours."
"It's something not seen before," he told them. "There was never any reason for her to have fallen into a coma in the first place -"
"Oh, head injury from a brutal beating doesn't count?"
"She walked out of the damn woods by herself. She's a headcase all right, but not from the injury. Psychological trauma pushed our Babe-in-the-Woods into some undocumented state between coma and catatonia, a kind of akinetic mutism. Resembles encephalitis lethargica."
"A disease not seen since the 1920's." Cooper's head tilted like a bird's. The other doctors stared at him. "Very interesting, Dr. House. And yet, as Dr. Krumberg here points out, her Glasgow tells us there is no consciousness present. No eye movement, for instance, if I read the report correctly."
He tried to stare Cooper down. So the man knew his stuff. "Her Glasgow is only as good as the doctor who examined and rated her on it. Her face looks like an overused punching bag. The swelling around the eyes makes it easy to miss minimal eye movement." He took an inner breath. "I could wake her up."
Guffaws all around. "L-dopa and naxolone," he added. "Add ice and you've got one bitching cocktail."
"To my knowledge L-dopa is only used in hepatic comas." Cooper again, usurping the doctors' lines. He had to admit admiration at what the agent knew. "I don't believe she's been diagnosed with hepatitis. That would make levadopa a non-indicated therapy and illegal without the informed consent of the parents, doctor. Plus any arousal would only last as long as the effects."
"It's a load of crap anyway," Krumberg broke in. "It could be dangerous. Remember that little promise you made around twenty years ago, House? Something called the Hippocratic oath?"
"I don't think Dr. House has ever understood that oath in the same way others do." Agent Cooper eyed him. "Have you, Dr. House?" So the guy had researched his past better than the hospital that hired him. Good to know. A little scary.
He stared Krumberg down. "Seeing as you don't have any ideas on how to wake her up. Sort of the problem you have with your wife during sex, isn't it?"
The walrus moustache twitched. Krumberg walked away. After a moment the younger doctors followed.
Dale Cooper sighed. "Dr. House, I believe you are right about this being primarily psychological." The agent's face took on a holy sheen. "Ronette Pulaski is on the Path of No." The Path of No? "Her spirit is wandering, unable to face what happened to her. It has to be brought back gently."
He felt that tight knot in his stomach, the one that said he was going to explode. "Tell me, Agent Cooper, what does FBI stand for nowadays? Federal Bureau of Idiocies? Foolish Buddhist Ideas? While you're throwing rocks at cans and meditating, someone with a grudge against women and what looks like the peen end of a hammer is probably stalking his next victim."
"My Buddhist ideas have been of assistance to me in the past, Dr. House. I've solved several cases after experiencing dreams in which I was given clues by a sadag. Foolish, perhaps, but there's no better source of wisdom than a fool sometimes." He frowned away in thought. "Though in this case I've had no such inspiration. Some spirit in the town seems to be acting as a block." He turned back. "Yes, I often encounter opposition to my beliefs -"
"Because they're not evidence-based." It came out loud. He saw Amalie turn from a conversation at the end of the hall to watch him.
"Neither is your suggested use of L-dopa."
"Well, why don't we just have the Dalai Lama come and burn a candle in Ronette's ear?" Very loud.
"I'm not personally acquainted with the Dalai Lama, plus I doubt he would travel that far -"
"You're not getting anywhere on this case, are you?"
Cooper smiled. "I have to go, Dr. House." He turned to leave.
Amalie had approached. The brush of her sleeve against his made him call out to Cooper: "Have you looked into the family at all?"
The agent glanced back. "We're working all the angles."
"What angles?" he muttered once they stood alone. "The ones on Tarot cards? The Tibetan Connection?"
"He's finding out a lot," Amalie said. "I mean, with normal cop methods. I think he's good at what he does." She looked almost worried.
"Ah, you're the murderer."
"Not funny, Greg. Besides, you're my alibi."
"And you're mine."
She watched Cooper as he went out the door. "He knows more about this town after a week than some of the Neanderthals who have lived here since the dawn of time. Scary in a way. I mean about the townspeople. That people can be so ignorant about others around them." She suddenly wasn't meeting his eyes. "Why didn't you show him the tox screen?"
"I'm not sure it means anything anymore." She looked tense. Beautiful, her face locked in winter cold, topped by its red-gold sun of hair, with a crinkle of frown around her eyes. "Hey, needing some down time in the closet, Dr. Parker?"
"I'm busy." A nurse approached and she strode away.
Some spirit in the town acting as a block. He touched the tox screen in his pocket again. Felt the ghost hands holding him back. There had been disappointment in her eyes. Disdain at the man who was stopped in the middle of his life, going nowhere.
He thought of Laura Palmer's eyes saying Please don't.
****
The Great Northern Hotel was an airy coffin of high redwood beams and polished lights. Outside the bay windows of the bar, mist rising from the falls fogged the night. He studied his scotch and watched the bar's inhabitants imbibe. A sampling of the town's upper echelon. The mayor, the Haywards who gave him a nodding wave. Past the lobby doors he saw a flock of foreigners surge by, small and blond, tittering something Scandinavian, and then Leland Palmer. The woman he had chatted up earlier behind the front desk came into the bar. "Dale Cooper's just gone up to his room now, Dr. House," she told him. He thanked her, ignoring her interested smile, and touched the paper in his pocket.
He found the upstairs hall. A subtle smell pinched his nostrils. The door to Cooper's room stood wide open. Dale Cooper lay on the floor of his hotel room in an S-curve of blood that seeped from a fresh wound in his side. The smell was cordite, he realized.
Ten thoughts whipped his head, what to do, hide because the shooter was possibly near, hadn't he heard that somewhere, just leave, call for help. No doctorly thoughts. A light in the room was alive, a membrane of pressure that was not cordite attenuating his senses. Do what you came to do and show him the tox screen. Would he listen now? Cooper lay on his back. The agent's eyes were open, pupils dilated, huge with knowledge, then they snapped back from whatever dark room he contemplated. They looked at each other. Cooper opened his mouth, shifted and more blood lavaed from his side. "I've been shot," he mumbled.
"I know."
The spell broke. The light in the room was normal. He kneeled. A shirt near the chair became a bandage and he applied pressure. No exit wound. Cooper's skin was cold. He was shouting for help, a maid screamed, then the room was filled with people who - mercifully - followed his instructions, a sudden onslaught of noise and faces. "A giant," Cooper whispered. "Call me Dr. House," he said, and told him not to speak.
The sound of sirens spilled EMTs into the room. Then he was left alone, perched on the bed, while Sheriff Truman and an ancient busboy with a hot toddy on a tray gazed at him oddly from the door. He had blood on his hands. "Damn waiter spilled my bloody-mary again," he informed them and sought the bathroom.
****
"Stumped." Hayward glanced back at the knot of cops and doctors around Cooper's hospital bed.
"Seems to be the motto of this town."
Will Hayward's haggard look from the morning of Laura's murder had set in at some point, a dusting of age across his forehead. "No one has any idea who might have shot Cooper before you found him last night. He only remembers opening the door, seeing a ski mask. He must have been getting close to who killed Laura. Did you hear him just now? He was telling the sheriff about a vision he almost had lying there on the floor of his room. A spirit in the form of a giant was going to reveal everything to him. You apparently interrupted the process, Dr. House, when you came in and started working on him."
He clicked his tongue. "Damn. If I'd just let him die, we'd know who killed Laura."
The group around Cooper dissolved and exited the room. "He's sleeping peacefully," a doctor informed them as they left.
"Sweet dreams," House tossed out. Hayward gave him a dark glance and left with them.
He turned to find Amalie behind him. "My scepticism is disrupting Agent Cooper's ch'i or ka or whatever," he told her. "Pick your mantra. Think giving him Viagra would get his inner flow going again?"
"You saved his life, Greg. Right place, right time."
"From the looks Sheriff Truman gave me, you'd think I wasn't there by coincidence." They gazed back at the sleeping Cooper. "It was Leland Palmer." He meant the murderer of Laura and she shifted beside him. "I believe that now, Am."
"You said yourself there's no real evidence."
He shrugged. "It's always the father." He felt her sharp look on him. "Cooper hasn't even questioned the guy about the night of her death, has he? Looked into the family relationship at all? Busy chasing his visions. Why show him anything that looks like evidence? He'd believe a dream more than he would facts." A sliver of thought curled out of his backbrain, the familiar warmth spreading through his bones that heralded a gloriously stupid idea. He loved that feeling. Hadn't had it in a while. "He would believe a dream, wouldn't he? Am -" He turned to her. That look, he didn't know how he'd gone without it so long back home. Her green eyes gazed up at him in trust, and to hell with the nurse coming down the hall, she kept her eyes on his. A lover's look. A belief that the insane things he did were right. He wanted to keep that look, wanted to pull her body to him right there, and he turned it into a hand on her arm. "Come with me to my office."
The bottom drawer of his desk was filled with unlabelled bottles and vials, but he knew the one he wanted. "Years ago," he told her as he searched, "a group studying sleep and dreaming did a brilliantly simple experiment. They went to sleep labs and whispered words in people's ears - calf, sailboat, boot - then woke them and asked what they'd been dreaming. Every one of them had incorporated the word into their dreams through the subconscious. Ah -" He lifted an ampoule with a brownish liquid. "Dreams are always half inside, half what's going on outside." She was shaking her head. "We're going to supersize Dale Cooper's supernatural dreams for him."
"By - what? Whispering in his ear that Leland Palmer killed his daughter?"
"Why not?" He glanced at her. Whatever look he had latched onto moments before was gone. She looked incredulous. "What better chance, Am? He's sleeping, still half-drugged from the surgery. We have motive, access - and means." He juggled the ampoule, fighting down his sick feeling. "This little dandy is called a CREB enhancer - it's a binding protein for cyclic AMP in the brain. Basically tweaks short-term memories over into being stored as long-term. Ought to help Cooper remember his `dream' when he wakes up."
"Something like that has to be highly experimental, Greg. Where in the hell did you get it?"
"Friends in low places. Well, okay, enemies in high places. The kind of pharmaceutical creeps not averse to an off-the-record test of their new drug. I collect things like this when they come my way. This little beauty is just the latest in nootropic smart drugs. It's the future, Am. We'll all learn in our sleep and everyone will be as brilliant as I am."
"Has this ever even been put in a human?"
He blinked at her. "It's been put in a rat."
"Greg - "
"Not that far removed from an FBI agent." Then more seriously: "Coming with me or are you going to stand there being indignant all night?" Please come with me.
They waited until night had emptied the hospital of visitors. She kept watch at the door of Cooper's room while he pushed the enhancer. Within seconds the monitor registered a spike in Cooper's heart rate, not enough, he hoped, to call the sleepy night nurse from her own monitor at the end of the hall, just delta waves clicking around into theta, the agent's brain turning over to wallow in the great mudslick of memory retrieval. The half-awake state identical to hypnosis and which he had been hoping for. Dale Cooper's face in sleep looked boyish again, as it had the first time he had seen him at the funeral. A man who seemed to have never known trouble, or never let it break him. At one with the world. They were opposites, he thought, light and dark.
He knelt and whispered, "The daddy did it," felt Cooper stir, then some sense took him, a knowledge that he had to be Laura and he whispered, in a higher voice: "My daddy did it to me, Agent Cooper" - did what? " - these sick things to me." Until I was dead. Terrifying because daddies were supposed to love you, weren't they, but they had hammers for hearts, or belts, flying up and down, cigarettes to burn you with. A hand, holding an object, lifting and falling. A mist of blood before your eyes, through the gray of pain. Things that made you want to be dead and so you died inside. Until you were dead, inside. And they still called your name...
Greg. It came from outside. "Greg...!"
He had his forehead on the edge of a hospital bed. Amalie was shaking his shoulder. "You've been in here ten minutes," she whispered. "What are you doing - reading Moby Dick to him?"
Horror flooded him. "I haven't been here ten minutes."
She looked ready to cry. "You were mumbling into the bed." He realized he knelt near the middle of the bed, Cooper's head feet away. He felt too weak to stand, acid threading his blood. The agent slept on, snoring softly. She had her hand over her mouth, and he stumbled out with her, grabbing his cane at the last moment.
They pretended not to hurry down deserted halls. In his office she spun. "What is wrong with you, Greg?" Behind her the late sky, obscured by clouds, pressed against the long windows. The place was a tomb at night. I saw a sacrifice, he wanted to say. A child... "Did the Indians throw children's bodies over the falls?" he asked her. "Was that their burial?" He wanted to tell her something, about the blood hammering behind his eyes, because she was the only one who could ever know. Her hair was undone on one side, a strand near her frowning mouth. He wanted to brush it away. "Did they wrap them in hides?" Instead of plastic. She only stared at him.
"I had to shake you, Greg. You looked like you were in a trance."
"Not me - don't do mysticism." She approached and touched his forehead where he was sweating. "Revelations, yes. Putting two and two together. More than Cooper does."
"Did you even do what you went to do? Your little whispering act?"
"I...don't know." He swallowed his sudden panic. "I can't remember."
"I'm going home. Before you come up with some other kooky stunt. Greg. I'm going home, and you can keep your evidence in your pocket and your CREB enhancer..." The sweat on him had turned cold. She looked so impenetrable. He wanted her to stay and warm him, unbutton her blouse for him or just hold him, and as she turned away he took her arm. They stood that way, like children facing off on a playground. He had felt a cry, some dream of children hurt, and he had to tell her but it was already fading. She looked down at his hand on her arm. No, he couldn't order her around.
"Let go of me, Greg."
He let go of her.
****
"He called the sheriff as soon as he woke up, doll." Sheila was a local, with a hard smile and keen eyes, the best nurse in the place though close to retiring, and she liked him. He had never known a woman who called him doll. She motioned him near. "Says he had a dream and now he knows who killed poor Laura."
Beyond Sheriff Truman's black cowboy hat he could see Dale Cooper moving back and forth in his hospital room, getting dressed. No truss, but his torso was wrapped tightly in white swathes against the bullet wound. He was talking to the sheriff with animated gestures.
Amalie waited for Sheila to turn away. "Sounds like you did it," she muttered to him.
"So much for the supernatural. Comes down to an unshaven jerk whispering in your ear."
Cooper eased into the hall and saw them. "You shouldn't be leaving," Amalie told him.
"Oh, but he puts the `Cooper' in `recuperate', doesn't he?"
"Ah, Dr. House. I wanted to see you. You may not need to wake Ronette after all." Cooper took his coat and pistol holster from the sheriff who had followed him out.
"That a fact?"
"I've had a dream in which Laura Palmer whispered the name of her murderer in my ear."
Pray tell. "You remember your dreams that well then, Agent?"
"I do this one. Only because I woke up directly afterwards. It was some time early in the morning. A long time after you and Dr. Parker here came into my room and left again."
He felt his hand pressed into the head of his cane, his tongue probing his teeth, wanting to speak. Dale Cooper's eyes, he saw, were not boyish; they were changeable, shading from light to dark.
"And what did dream Laura tell you?"
A smile, light again. "Well, that's the problem. I don't remember." He handed Sheila the release form. "Until it occurs to me, I'll just have to continue my investigation of events in the town." Behind him, Sheriff Truman was staring at them.
His words felt like rocks in his mouth. "Then you don't...really remember the dream at all."
"I remember - a midget." It was spoken softly. Cooper gazed away. "A midget who - in some way I didn't understand - was...actually a tall man. A giant almost. Or vice versa. He held the key to everything." He shrugged, puzzled. "I do have to be going. Dr. House - Dr. Parker - " He gave them a slight nod and left with Truman.
"Presque vu," he muttered. "The almost-seen. The feeling you're about to grasp the meaning of it all just before it slips away. God sends you an e-mail and someone pushes the delete button just as you're about to read it."
"And perfectly common." Amalie watched him. "From brain disorders to anyone who just had the right word on the tip of their tongue."
"The pharmaceutical company will be interested to hear their CREB enhancer has that effect. Even if it didn't enhance any CREBs."
"Or maybe you picked up the placebo by mistake, Greg. Maybe this is what happens when you try a stupid trick instead of just telling him what you know."
"Think so? But it was so much more fun."
She turned and walked away.
A midget who was a tall man. Or vice-versa. He sighed and tapped his cane on the floor. Sheila was watching him. Damn the town, with its diners full of the oblivious, and damn Cooper. "Sheila, do you think you could get hold of that file on Ronette Pulaski for me again and make some copies?"
"Sure, doll."
****
And the sea of trees in the night knocking tap tap against his back window coalesced into a command; he couldn't sit in his apartment and pluck his guitar, the music too disjointed, a few strings missing, or all of them. He found his car keys, the engine roar like a gun in the preternatural dark, and took the first turn that led down to the center of town. Her apartment building was a sleeping animal; as he watched a light went on and then off on the fourth floor, an eye opening up only to close again, but she lived on the second floor, he knew, third from the left. That black square. It was three a.m., he realized, noting the green dial on his dash with a slight shock. He was an idiot. It was his heart that wouldn't go to sleep without her tonight, without this glimpse of just a pane of glass that belonged to her. Take a pill, dammit. Through the trees far off at the end of the thoroughfare lights flashed, tiny dancing beams. Kids with flashlights perhaps. He had seen that kind of light before in the town, always at the edge of the dark woods, from his upstairs window or on his walks, a hint of blue, never seeming to bounce naturally. This light grew and he realized it was the headlamps of a car. So he was not alone at three in his closet of a world of a town. Murderous sleeping town. As the car drew near, he saw it was a silver Prius exactly like Amalie's. It pulled into a space directly in front of Amalie's building. Amalie got out.
She was alone, moving tiredly. Fumbling in her coat pocket for her doorkey. She had her hair down.
He watched her disappear through the door, a glance back (he had parked instinctively in the dark between two streetlamps, he realized). Too far to make out her face, only the red gleam of tangled hair at her shoulders, then she was gone.
He could see his hands on the cold steering wheel. Useless hands. His breath was beginning to fog the glass. Go ring her bell, yell, smash things. He would do nothing, he knew. There was no answer to his throat turning to stone like this. Because the answer had been given. The question that had driven him crazy for months, why she was hot then cold with him.
She was parking around the corner for someone else.
Then the pain shot through him. He was crazy; the ennui of the town - that had bled out into the murder of Laura Palmer - curled inside him. He had blacked out with his head on Cooper's bed. He wandered the streets at night to check up on his faithless lover. He was poisoned.
And there was an answer to his pain.
He had his own tox screen in his head and it told him it was time to detox, just get her out of his system - get all of it out - by the best method there was: abstinence. Removal, distance. Cold turkey. Yes, there was a solution to it all. It had worked in Princeton and it would work here. Just leave.
He would run away.
****
End of Chapter 2
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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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