Standard Disclaimer
wanderingwidget has, is, and does not plan in the future to make any money on any of the fics here archived. They were written and are provided for pure entertainment purposes.
Rating: NC-17
Pairing: Incredibly disturbing, and then some H/W-ish ness in don'tkickmycane‘s half.
Word Count: ~1944
Warnings: The first half of the following is incredibly disturbing, and by incredibly disturbing I mean incredibly disturbing.
Author’s Notes: I wrote this after reading this post by don'tkickmycane and then having trouble getting to class. Also, I don’t own any of the characters of House, M.D. and am not making any money off of this, I am simply using them to alleviate some tension.
Authors: wanderingwidget above the
don'tkickmycane below the
Winter sucked, and that was Greg House’s official medical opinion. It sucked. Winter - with the freezing cold temperatures, the ice on the roads, and the stuffed noses - Sucked. It sucked even more when you had a convertible and a motorcycle, neither of which you could actually use to get to work on time. Not that he really wanted to get to work on time. He didn’t. He just didn’t feel particularly like dealing with Cuddy - in full holiday regalia - as she berated him for being late and then slapped him with more clinic hours as punishment.
Winter sucked. December sucked. The first of December sucked. Greg continued the litany as he limped his way to the bus stop. The bus stop, empty of so much as an irate yuppy in a two thousand dollar wool coat, sucked. But at least it had a roof and three walls to keep most of the wind off of him. Still sucked though.
A particularly strong blast of wind hit then, rattling the little plastic shelter of suckitude and then whipping around the front to pummel Greg flat in the face. Once it passed Greg scowled, rubbed at his watering eyes, and threw a silent “You suck!” after it. It was silent because he was wary of pissing it off enough to come back for a round two. Winter weather, he’d found, had a tendency to take everything personally. That was one of the reasons it sucked.
The public transportation system was never very good. It suffered biblical setbacks once the county had to start throwing salt on the roads. For one thing, the busses were all at least twenty years old. One of them was even rounded at the edges, Greg had noticed. For another thing, there only seemed to be one bus driver. Now, Greg knew that there could not possibly be only one bus driver, because he’d seen more than one bus on the road at the same time, and there was more than one route, and he didn’t believe in alien clones. Still, it seemed to Greg - and his freakishly good memory (mostly freakishly good, names - he figured - didn’t count, especially not when they belonged to patients) - that all of the bus drivers he’d seen were small wrinkled old men with squinty eyes, white hair, and liver spots over their hands. Also, he’d noticed, they all smelled like Orange Listerine.
So he had to wait an unbelievably long time for the bus to show, so long in fact that by the time it pulled up in a shuddering screeching halt, he was already late. The bus sucked. The driver sucked. Getting up into the sucky bus sucked. It sucked a lot.
Thankfully he could look as awkward hopping up the steps as he had to, except for the driver there was nobody else on board. Thankfully he dropped into the front row seat and thought - rather charitably - that at least the seats on the bus didn’t suck, too much. The bus rumbled to a start and he closed his eyes, leaned his head back, and tried to remember what having toes and a non-drippy nose felt like.
Probably, he fell asleep.
He woke with a jerk, blinking around blearily, and realized that he must have gotten on the wrong bus. Except for the fact that he very clearly remembered getting on the right bus. But they weren’t anywhere near the hospital, or anywhere else in Princeton that he was familiar with. The bus had jolted to a stop in the middle of what looked like a movie-set warehouse district, all empty buildings and ominous barbed wire. He blinked through his reflection in the window and then turned towards the driver, set to bitch the old geezer out for being an idiot.
But the driver wasn’t sitting at the front of the bus. At least, not the driver he remembered. No, what was sitting up there looked very much like something out of Japanese animated porn.
Greg realized that he was probably having a really sucky dream. He hoped he was having a really sucky dream. He really really hoped. Because if he wasn’t dreaming then that really was a man-sized violently purple-red squid slithering around in front of him on tentacles that ended with very - very - phallic looking appendages.
“Right.” Greg said. “I knew I shouldn’t have downloaded that last one. It infected my brain and I’m passed out on my floor in a pool of my own vomit.” He’d meant it as a statement, but it came out more as a wish. Shit. He tried to dive away from the thing.
The squid driver moved faster than Greg would have thought possible, one tentacle wrapping around his wrist and another knocking his cane away. It took no time at all for him to be enveloped in hot, wet, throbbing flesh. Pain shot through his leg as yet another tentacle wrapped around it, tugged him further into hell. Tentacles pushed at his coat, pulled him out of his clothes, and he wondered if this was how a crab felt being pulled from its shell. Except all that happened to the crab was that it was eaten. He was pulled to the floor of the bus and - numbly - part of his mind noted that if it weren’t for being wrapped in squid he’d be freezing. Freezing, he thought, would be a nice way to go.
He tried to turn his brain off. He mostly succeeded. But the damn squid kept finding the on switch.
He was numb. Then he’d feel one of those tentacles pressing into his body. He’d scream.
He was numb. Then there was a tentacle fucking his mouth, thrusting down his throat. He couldn’t scream.
He was numb. Then there would be the rough ridges of the bus floor grating against his cheek.
Finally, finally the squid pulled away, left him lying on the floor empty and used and oozing blood and worse things. Greg lay still, in shock, his eyes staring unseeingly across the floor until, with an almost audible ‘pop’ they focused on his cane. It was lying just out of reach.
Everything hurt. He moved, groaned in pain and kept moving. He grabbed his cane and suddenly the pain washed away. Everything washed away. Everything except for the monster behind him. He pushed to his feet, whirled and brought his cane up above his head.
It didn’t hardly even put up a fight. Or maybe Greg’s rage had been too strong for even a demonic Martian squid. By the time he was done it was a quivering gelatinous mass of blood and vascular tissue. The rage drained out of him just like that.
Getting dressed proved harder than killing the damn thing, but he managed, barely. Surprisingly his clothes were mostly intact, but he couldn’t seem to get his left hand to work. Too much pain. The bottle of vicodin rattled comfortingly in his coat pocket and - without even thinking - he popped three in his mouth. Then he stumbled over the squid’s corpse and forced the doors open.
The next thing he knew he was collapsing on the sidewalk in front of some kind of store.
A large man, dressed in plaid and denim, with bright red hair stormed out through the door. “Hey buddy. This ain’t the fuckin’ homeless shelter.”
You suck, Greg thought. Then he tried to laugh and ended up throwing up on the guy’s shoes.
“Oh, dammit!” He growled. Then he blinked. “Hey buddy, is that blood?” He demanded, peering closer.
Greg just sneered, and then he passed out again.
He'd been out of his mind waiting. Now he was unsure about opening the door. He hesitated, palm flat on the smooth grain. Every day, a hundred times a day, he went in and out of these doors, never noting the cold of the brushed chrome handles or the unyielding polish of the wood. He had to swallow a few times, brace himself, before going in.
Greg did not look up. He sat on the edge of the gurney, left wrist immobilized in a metal brace, cane leaning beside him. There was a hole in the knee of his jeans, and a band-aid, of all things, stuck to the skin underneath, like he was ten again. James stood just inside, felt the pressure of air on his back as the door swung closed. He waited, watched. Greg did not look up.
Finally, James took the few steps to the gurney and the blue eyes peered at him, though the head did not lift. The eyes were oddly dark. James saw the scratches high on Greg's cheekbone and the blood congealing in his hair where it had not been wiped away. There was a bruised aura around him, a heavy space, difficult to wade through. It was his carefully maintained distance, but it was damaged. The edges were too sharp, too fragile.
Carefully maintained distance. Until recently, those three words defined James' relationship with this man. What else was there with someone as miserly with affection as Greg? But self-sufficiency, and all that space, led here, to him sitting, pale, bruised, bleeding, and James needed redefinition. He reached a hand up towards Greg's face. Predictably, Greg's head turned away, a solid space of air between his skin and James'. James did not withdraw. He'd been withdrawing for years. His hand followed Greg's face. At the end of the arch, Greg's lips twitched, James shifted forward, and everything sharp and brittle shattered.
Greg's head turned, back this time, until James felt the clotting, sticky blood against his fingertips. A little more, and stubble pricked his palm, breath warmed his wrist. He let his thumb trace down Greg's cheekbone, touch the corner of his lips, and the breath hitched. Greg's head turned again, his lips suddenly pressed into James' palm.
A sound James did not recognize rasped up through his own throat and past his lips, and he was moving, wrapping his arms around Greg, standing so Greg's knees pressed into his thighs. One arm circled his waist, the other, metal-bound, heavy, rested on his hip. Greg's head pushed into his shoulder, and James allowed himself to breath in the scent of coppery blood, faint shampoo and hospital antiseptic and the peculiar Gregness he would recognize in the dark. Holding him like that was not odd, was not unforeseen, was not anticipated. It just was. Greg's back rose and fell under his hands, the rhythm growing deeper, steadier, until something changed. Greg's legs shifted minutely, his arm tightened an increment and James felt himself press his lips into the graying hair.
"Come on," he said, something thick bubbling up, making his voice come out heavy. "Let's get you home," all said with the corner of his lips still tickled by Greg's hair. He felt a nod against his shoulder.
"Home's good." Greg snuffled a little closer. "I want a good, sturdy SUV. SUV's don't suck."
James pulled away a little bit. "What?"
"Nothing. Home, James."
THE END
