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“What is that?”
Wilson held up the stuffed toy and wiggled its…tentacles around. The UFO shaped ball of pink fluff with bright beaded eyes and ear-to-ear smile sat nestled in his palm.
“It’s a reversible plushie. Look,” he stuck the toy on House’s desk. “When you’re happy, you show the smiling octopus.” House rolled his eyes as Wilson made the toy dance around. Then he flipped the octopus inside out to show a blue octopus with a comically pathetic frowny face and a tear sewn in one eye. “And when you’re sad or upset, you flip it over and show the sad octopus.”
“Wow, kindergarten-level facial recognition has nothing on you. Your talents are being wasted in oncology. Let’s get you down to paediatrics.”
Wilson sighed. “It’s not just for kids. Adults can use it too for helping to express their emotions.” He gave House a reassuring smile and tucked the toy between his pen holder and his stapler.
“Wait a minute, you’re giving this to me?”
At least Wilson had the decency to look a little embarrassed. “Yeah. They had a buy one, get one half-price sort of deal so I’ve already got one for myself.”
“Why do you have one? You’ve got more emotions than Cameron does for a destructive, middle-aged man.”
“Very funny. I bought it for my patients. Some of the kids aren’t so good at speaking their feelings and I thought this might help them express themselves.”
House poked at the octopus. It was squishy and soft. It reminded him a bit of the stuffed monkey he used to carry around with him as a kid. “Let me get this straight. You bought a children’s toy for dying children and thought ‘hang on, my emotionally unavailable, adult friend could really use one of these for himself at his job, as a doctor, in the real world’?”
“You don’t exclusively have to use it at the hospital.”
“The location wasn’t the issue,” House deadpanned.
Wilson shrugged. “What, you’re embarrassed of a toy?”
House picked up the octopus and waved it around. “I’m embarrassed at the implication of what this toy represents. I know what emotions are. I just choose not to share them because I don’t care.”
Wilson plucked it out of his hands. “Should I be leaving this on the sad octopus…or…?”
House snatched it back and reversed it to the happy face. “There, I’m overjoyed with gratitude. Get out of here.”
Wilson scurried away with a smile on his face.
***
House boinked the octopus over the head with his cane. The cane indented its skull in for just a moment before it bounced back up into its perfectly spherical shape.
He glared at its ridiculously smiley face. “Why are you so happy?” he grumbled. “You’re stuck here and you’re not even getting paid.”
The toy just stared back at him.
“Fine, for something that’s meant to be happy, you sure know how to give out the silent treatment.”
“Why are you talking to a stuffed toy?” Cuddy asked from the doorway.
“Why are you listening in on my conversations? Is there no such thing as patient-confidentiality anymore. Because I really want to tell you about this guy I saw the other day. He had dick the size of Tex-”
“You have a patient.”
“You mean, you have a patient and you need a real doctor to solve the case for you.”
“A real doctor would do his mandatory clinic hours instead of playing hide and seek and making up imaginary friends.”
House patted the octopus. “Much like your boobs, my new friend is very real.”
Cuddy slammed the case file on his desk. House made an effort to stare down her shirt. “Make yourself useful and solve it or else your little friend is going to be getting a pay rise out of your salary.”
“I’m sure he’s very generous and won’t mind me borrowing a few dollars.”
“Fine, do the job I pay you to do, or Tentacles here will end up in the shredder eating his own stuffing.”
“Don’t listen to the scary lady.” House pretended to block the toy’s ears. “How dare you threaten him. And that’s Mr Tentacles to you. Don’t show your face again until you offer him an apology.”
Cuddy let out a long-suffering sigh and walked away, calling out behind her, “Do your job!”
***
The grey of the carpet fizzled like static, contorting into a spotty mess of jagged colours and shapes. House rolled his cane between his palms and watched the tip distort the fuzziness and swirl the grain like a hypnotic spiral.
His leg hurt. His head spun around and around and around.
Everything had gone to shit.
It was meant to be simple. The patient came in with minor symptoms. Muscle weakness. Cramping. Arrhythmia. She could walk her way around her hospital room. It wasn’t meant to be serious.
Things got worse.
As usual, the patient wasn’t very helpful. She had been experiencing the symptoms for several months, maybe even longer, without seeing a doctor. Her medical history gave away virtually nothing aside from some vaccinations, a broken leg, and some antibiotics for an infection five years earlier.
All the signs of a reasonably healthy, yet idiotic patient.
If only he had more time.
House knew something was wrong as soon as the parents arrived. He couldn’t put his finger on it, but as soon as he saw them, a switch flipped in his brain. House made Cameron talk to them. He figured they would be more responsive to her empathetic stance. When that didn’t work, he cornered them and demanded they confess to whatever they were hiding for the sake of their daughter.
Cuddy kicked him out with a scolding.
He should have stayed. They were on the verge of talking. He saw it in their eyes.
Then the patient died.
One moment the fellows were standing outside her hospital room talking to the parents before they came in to share lunch with their daughter. The next time they came back to check on the patient she was lying on her stomach unresponsive.
She had been suffocated by her own pillow.
Suddenly, everything fit into place.
Once her parents came back in to say their goodbyes, the truth hit House like a bat to the head. The patient's smooth cheeks and her parent’s dimples, her cleft chin despite both of her parents not having one, the shape of her nose, the colour of her eyes. It could have been a coincidence. Just the luck of the genetic draw. But the diagnosis fit.
She was adopted.
Her parents selfishly refused to tell him because they couldn’t bear the thought of their adult child knowing they didn’t conceive her on their own. If they had told her, or thought for one second to at least look at the medical history of her biological parents, they would have found out her family carried the gene for hyperkalemic periodic paralysis.
House remembered being exiled from the patient’s room by Cuddy and peeking through a window at the parents talking to his fellows. They were holding a cardboard cup holder of smoothies. A quick rummage through the trash revealed the empty packaging and the receipt; banana, spinach, yoghurt. High potassium foods that caused her symptoms to flare. It only took a moment to move past muscle weaknesses into paralysis. A blood test confirmed her potassium levels. The autopsy confirmed her cause of death.
House sent her parents home with a diagnosis. Not that it mattered. An answer couldn’t save her now.
His cane fell to the ground. House clutched his thigh and knocked back a handful of Vicodin.
He should have pushed harder, noticed the inconsistencies sooner. If Cuddy let him do the job she paid him to do (make a diagnosis by any means necessary), then sure, they might have gotten a lawsuit for inappropriate patient conduct but at least their daughter would be alive.
House's stomach curdled. He took another Vicodin.
He kneaded at his thigh and stared his soul into the floor at a loss of what to do.
Everything hurt, and not in that numbed, absent sort of way life did when the Vicodin dulled the edges of his perception, but in a vibrant battering of senses, like he had been standing on a beach in the middle of winter with his nerves frozen by the rain and ice when an army rose from the sea and bullets and shrapnel starting flying.
House's ears rang with the wails of his patient’s mother as she pulled her daughter into her chest, and the gasp of her father as he tried to hold it all back. The failings of time broke into shards, each second he didn’t save her raining down on him in waves of deadly points. They sliced through muscle and carved out the grit of his bone. Every time he thought of her blue lips and white face, the coldness hiding three layers under his skin left him shivering.
House had enough sense left in him to remember the blanket in his desk drawer. He rose up on unsteady legs. His cane took the brunt of his weight as he slowly hobbled across the room. It was only a few steps really, from his chair to his desk, but by the time he got there his leg was wobbling like jelly and he couldn’t hold his eyes open.
Everybody lies, he thought to himself. But he was meant to catch the lie. He failed, and somebody died.
House wrapped the blanket around himself and slumped into his desk chair. Even with the extra layer- and this blanket had an insulating lining of wool- House kept shaking. When he exhaled, he swore he saw the puff of his breath like a smoking chimney. He couldn’t have been as cold as his patient though. At least he would warm back up eventually.
House tightened the blanket around himself, shimmying his hands underneath like he used to do as a kid after a night out in the cold.
A file sat on his desk, open. House’s falsified signature, perfected by Cameron, was scrawled at the bottom of the page. Chase’s chicken scratch made up most of the notes. They listed the symptoms, their poor attempts at treatment, and the patient’s final diagnosis.
House skimmed across it in a daze until his eyes landed on her name.
He blinked. Something foreign and long-forgotten pressed against the back of his throat. It expanded like a balloon and cut off the air to his lungs. The lack of circulation caused his eyes to water and his heart to beat and his chest to contract. House didn’t understand.
He hadn’t felt this way since he was a kid, before he learnt to gulp back down the panic and the pain. Young Greg had let the balloon burst once. He had banged on his front door, crying out for his mum and begging for his father to let him back inside as the darkness and the cold crept closer. His punishment for disturbing his father wasn’t worth the outburst.
House just hoped that this time, he had grown a thick enough skin around the balloon to keep it from exploding.
It was irrational and senseless because patients had died under his care before. It sucked, but he moved on after a couple of beers and a marathon run of General Hospital.
But for some reason, this time felt different.
Most of his patient fatalities had nothing to do with his inability to diagnose and rather the diagnoses itself; terminal illnesses and incurable degenerative diseases or medically necessary surgeries with low odds.
This time, he let someone die who could have lived a full life.
House stared at the ink on the page and cursed himself out for never learning her name.
Shouldn’t he have known her name? Out of all the people in the world, she chose House to save her life and he failed her. Her death was on his conscience. His responsibility. If he let go of her name, then he would lose the story of guilt stopping him from making the same mistake again.
Any other patient got a stupid nickname or dismissed completely. House usually didn’t care because most of his patients survived. Living people didn’t need their names to be remembered. They had friends and family and coworkers for that.
If this had been any other situation where his patient survived, he would have called her something stupid too; ‘Banana Smoothie’ ‘Auto-asphyxiator’, ‘What’s Her Name?’. His fellows would roll their eyes and call him out for his disrespect, but it wouldn’t have mattered, because she would have been out the hospital doors before she heard it.
Governments named Bills after the people who fought for their causes. Communities put up memorials of those who died for them. They reminded people not to repeat history’s mistakes. If House forgot her name and her pale, lifeless face, then he set himself up for losing another life to his incompetence.
Her name blurred into nothing on the paper, but it echoed in his mind.
House stuck his hand out from his cocoon and closed the file.
Just as he went to bring his hand back into the safety of the blanket, House caught Tentacles’s smiling face beaming up at him. He thought of Wilson sitting it on his desk over a week ago and how absurd it seemed at the time to expect him to rely on a stuffed toy to express his emotions.
Now, with his throat closed up and frostbite on his toes, he couldn’t imagine a world where he looked someone in the eye and told them he felt eight-years-old and ripped apart over a patient whose name he didn’t know until two minutes ago. That the sight of her death made that same fear of missing his mum and freezing to death on his doorstep come bubbling back over like a bottle of Coke with a whole pack of Mentos stuffed down the mouth.
House flipped Tentacles to his frowny face and shoved his hands back under his blanket.
There. He did it. Now what?
House focused on the ground away from Tentacles's mocking and came face to face with the file again. The sticky, gross emotion clinging to the mucus in his oesophagus barely reacted to his attempts at swallowing it down. The thickness rose up behind his eyes, heavy and wet.
Worst of all, House couldn't stop quivering. A cold front swept down his body. It picked up the warmth hidden beneath his blanket and pulled it away into the mass of storm clouds fogging up his thoughts. His skin hardened like frozen dirt and cracked like ice.
Young Greg used to bring his knees up to his chest and stuff his face between his legs to keep the cold at bay. Old Greg’s stiff thigh gave him no such refuge.
Something warm clamped down on his shoulder.
House drifted like an astronaut in low gravity before meeting Wilson’s worried expression.
“Are you with me?”
House nodded.
“Don’t get lost inside your head for five minutes. It’s dangerous enough in there on a good day. I’ll be right back.”
Wilson let out a weak laugh and House managed a half-assed smile. Then, Wilson was gone.
True to his word, before House could fully fall back into his thoughts, Wilson nudged him into the clarity of the real world. He held out a coffee, steam wafting off the top and thawing out the tip of House's nose. When he stuck his hand out to grab it, the heat of the room came spilling through the gap in his blanket, up his sleeves and down his collar, and seeped through his pores. The low whirring of Wilson’s heater blasted next to House's desk.
House’s insides fluttered, but that had to be the ice melting and his organs coming back to life. Nothing to do with Wilson fluffing around the room, closing curtains to keep the heat in and the world out.
He curled his hands around the mug with a soft groan. The hot porcelain spread across his palms. It hurt. Stung. The way sticking snow-bitten fingers under scalding water brought pins and needles back from the dead.
House tucked it into his chest.
Wilson smiled and pulled a chair around to sit next to him.
House sipped on his coffee and tried to unravel how he deserved a friend like Wilson. House still hadn’t told him about his father and how he used to give him ice baths or lock him outside in the cold, and Wilson never asked. But after fifteen years of friendship, Wilson could take one look at House and just know that something unspeakable made him cold to his core.
Somehow, Wilson always knew the best way to bundle House up until it went away.
“It wasn’t your fault,” Wilson said.
House shivered. “She died.”
“You’re a brilliant doctor. But even you can’t solve a case when half the data is skewed and the evidence is unreliable. You can’t make something out of nothing. Her death isn’t your fault. You shouldn't punish yourself over it.”
Maybe it was Wilson’s affinity for doing his hair, but House imagined Wilson’s words taking the form of a hairdryer melting away the ice of his thoughts and drowning them in their own muddy slush.
House let the blanket drop from his shoulders. Blew on his coffee.
Maybe that stupid toy octopus was worth its weight in stuffing after all.