Chapter Text
“House. Have you seen Wilson?”
“Children’s ward is on the first floor,” House replied without looking up. He was intently doodling spirals over the medical history of someone named Roy Jordan.
“What does that have to do with…”
“It has to do with the fact that you apparently think me his nanny, which I am not, and him a helpless child. Or vice versa. I don’t know which is worse. Did you check his office? He’s bound to be in there, up to his neck in all this paperwork.” He pushed the scribbled sheets aside and stood up, grabbing the cane that was leaned against the desk. Cuddy shot him a strange look.
“He hasn’t shown up at the hospital for three days. Without warning. His wife has no idea where he might be either.”
“Even the wifey doesn’t know, but somehow I’m supposed to.” House rolled his eyes. “Then you can check under my bed. There wasn’t enough room on the bed for him: my two Chinese mistresses have already taken over. But I couldn’t turn away a lover too!”
Cuddy sighed and pressed his fingers to his temples. The worst migraine didn’t cause him as much trouble as Gregory House did.
“I swear, you get more unbearable by the day. The situation is a nightmare. We’re short-handed. Nurses are working themselves to exhaustion, doctors go missing, and what exactly are you doing, if I may ask?”
House limped toward the door, as if purposefully putting more weight on his bad leg, and stopped beside Cuddy.
“You know what I want. Give it to me, and I’ll work for two, day and night.”
They stared each other down for a long time, until Cuddy finally pulled a key from his pocket with a resigned sigh. When House reached for it, he jerked his hand back with a pointed look.
“Know your limits, Greg. I’m only doing this because people are dying. Don’t make me regret it.”
“Of course. Who do you take me for?” House replied, narrowing his eyes like an impatient cat, and the key finally migrated into his lab coat. With exaggerated politeness, he nodded and gestured toward the door.
“After you, Mr. Lawrence.”
Cuddy shot him another unimpressed look and instead opened the door, holding it for House.
To anyone with a functioning pair of eyes and at least one intact cerebral hemisphere, it became quite obvious fairly soon that Dr. Lawrence Cuddy was a woman. But such people (in a hospital, no less!) were terrifyingly rare. As an administrator, she was neither worse nor better than a man would be; under her leadership, the hospital ran like clockwork, as much as possible under the current circumstances. So what did it matter how she rose to leadership or what she had in her pants? Besides, they had been tied together since their student days, and it would be foolish to ruin the life of a superior who was willing to tolerate his antics. If one sinks, they both sink. Therefore, Gregory House reserved his double-edged jokes exclusively for when they were alone.
Today, however, it took considerable effort to hold back—effort that Cuddy did not deserve. The morphine supplies, you see, were disappearing at a record pace. As if the patients, of which there were more than the hospital could handle, didn't need it! As if House were the only one using it for something other than its intended purpose! He was the only one using morphine for its intended purpose, if anything. The grueling pain in his leg made life unbearable, and now a headache had joined in, and if Cuddy hadn’t finally stopped playing jailer, he would... anyway, as he inserted the key into the lock of the cabinet containing the coveted drug, House suppressed his impulses toward vandalism.
Half an hour later, House appeared in the ward, hardly limping anymore and with a satisfied glint in his eyes.
“Which one of you is Roy Jordan?”
“Over here, Dr. House,” Nurse Cameron called him over. Dr. Chase, standing nearby, rolled his eyes despondently and attempted to hide it with a yawn. That was a mistake.
“Strange business. I’ve never caught you working the night shift, yet now it’s clear to me that you’re very busy at night, seeing how tired you are,” House noted, looking him critically up and down. “Moonlighting as a nurse? So that’s who the new blonde is!”
Cameron took a deep breath (though the corners of her lips twitched upward) and pointed to the patient, diverting House’s attention from a sulking Chase.
“This is Mr. Jordan, Doctor. He can’t respond for himself; we can’t wake him up. He was delirious when he was first admitted, and then he lapsed into unconsciousness.”
“I see. ‘Choking, she’s choking me, I’m burning, she’s come for me, Satan, the devil in the flesh’...” House quoted. “It’s a pity, I missed the best part. What do you say, Dr. Chase?”
“Anemia,” Chase muttered. “And delirium.”
“Cause?”
House checked the temperature. It didn’t look like Mr. Jordan was burning. Rather, he was barely warm enough to be alive.
“There has to be a cause?..”
House stared at Chase in sheer admiration. It was a fascinating sight: it seemed that in some colleagues, his presence triggered a severe allergic reaction, the swelling from which, in turn, cut off blood flow to the brain. There was no other way to explain such stubborn idiocy in the otherwise not-so-stupid Chase.
“The only thing we found were marks on his neck,” Cameron rescued the situation again. House had to walk around the bed to take a closer look. Curious. Two rather large punctures with jagged edges.
“Looks like one big bite.” House measured the distance with his thumb and forefinger. Roughly the distance between human canines, though a human bite would look quite different. He withdrew his hand. “Or two small ones.”
“Could it be bats?”
“Blood-sucking bats are found in the south,” Chase chimed in. “We only have insectivorous ones here. And in any case, it doesn’t look anything like a bat bite: a little more and a chunk of flesh would be missing. Our bat would have to be the size of an elephant.”
“Well, let’s say, not an elephant, but a person...” House murmured thoughtfully. “Was there blood on his clothes?”
“No.”
It was getting more interesting.
“Here’s what: we’ll give him a blood transfusion. We’ve dealt with the anemia, now let’s move on to the delirium. You two, how do you imagine the devil?”
Chase and Cameron exchanged puzzled glances. House sighed impatiently.
“Man or woman?”
“A man,” they replied in a hesitant duet.
“With a mustache,” Cameron added.
“Exactly,” House said meaningfully, pointing his cane at the patient. “And this one saw a she-devil.”
“Excuse me, Dr. House, what difference does it make? You’re looking for logic in delirium.”
“And I find that there is often more of it there than in the statements of my esteemed colleagues.”
Mr. Jordan’s case remained the only exciting event of the entire day. The rest of the patients blended into one coughing, wheezing, infirm mass manageable only by reminding oneself of civic duty and occasionally feeling for the newly reclaimed key to a peaceful life in a pocket. And yet, Cuddy was right. Wilson was nowhere to be found: not in his office, not among his beloved dying patients. No one had seen him for three days. The thought that Wilson might, at that very moment, be lying in some alleyway with a fractured skull and turned-out pockets made even House uneasy. But what could he do? His wife had surely gone to the police immediately, and considering that it wasn't just some wretched factory immigrant who had gone missing, one could hope that the law enforcement officers would do their jobs properly.