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  Dancers - Chapter 7 
 by menme  

 (A/N: Rating warning - This chapter contains some dark adult imagery
based on mature sexual and violence situations, starting at about the
second half of the chapter.)

Dancers - Chapter 7 (The Blood Beneath Your Skin)

"It happened. I saw it."

"What we could do is send you a kit the two of you can use to test
yourselves at home. It wouldn't be laboratory conditions. It would be best
if you could persuade him to come in with you and we'll -"

"He won't do that."

She would turn while doing some innocuous thing, putting her hair up or
closing a window, and catch him looking at her as though she were crazy.

Trauma made them zombies the first few days after the hospital. They
stayed in her apartment, speaking little, doing less, and yet they would
fall into bed at night exhausted as though they had run for miles, and
wake up in the morning still in their clothes. Nights in which she woke
often, panic making her heart race, and would bend near him in the dark to
check his breathing, one time to find him staring back as his eyes were
illuminated by a passing car. She dreamed she was back in college, walking
past that dark tree-lined corner of the campus everyone always said
something bad would happen on one night, and through the bushes she saw a
fight, Greg and a hooded assailant, locked in a silent clench she caught
only flashes of while the moonlight veered drunkenly, a glint off a knife;
when she reached the clearing Greg lay stiff in a pool of blood, eyes wide
and dead, his murderer a rustle moving away through the trees, and she
woke with a gasp. Unable to sleep again, she sat in the dark kitchen until
it permeated her senses that there was something outside on the balcony, a
hint of animal movement, perhaps just a cat, though she could hear
nothing, and she returned to bed and huddled against his warm back.

That dark corner of the campus.

On the third day of being zombies Georg came looking for her. She had told
Cyndi to announce she was sick and had told her what really happened. She
was the only one in the company who would ever hear it, the best kind of
friend that way, never leaking information, but Georg had grown
suspicious. He stood in her apartment haranguing her in German because she
was patently not sick when Greg walked through from the bedroom, uncaring,
wearing only shorts on his way to the kitchen, and Georg (whose restraint,
she knew, was usually commendable) stared at his scar. Greg noticed.

"Oh, get those German baby-blues back in your head," he said. The
bitterness in his voice hurt her. "Yeah, it's ugly. Become a doctor and
you'll see a lot worse."

She asked Georg for two more days and he nodded. At the door he turned to
her. "I don't know what's wrong with him or what's going on between you,"
he told her, "but please don't let it affect you like this." He looked
sickened, as though he wanted to bundle her away from there and never let
her back. "You have a life, Dani, even if he doesn't."

She found Greg in the kitchen and sat across from him. "It's time to get
past this," she said. "We've got to go over there some time." He shrugged.
"You can't pretend forever that it didn't happen."

"I'm not. I'm - wishing it hadn't happened. That's different."

"No, it's not."

"I'd truly give an arm and a leg for it not to have happened, Dani." His
eyes were wide and honest. "And that's from someone who doesn't have a leg
to spare." He watched her for a moment, then went to put his clothes on.

His apartment seemed to breathe bad air, as though the dust raised by such
emotions would never settle. They waded through debris to the middle,
holding hands. The panic rose in her throat; in a rush she felt it all
again - the sharp stench of bile, voices crying incomprehensible
instructions. The bluish tinge his skin had had. The piano, with its white
line of pill-less keys, frightened her. Perhaps it really was too soon. He
stood staring down with such a sad expression at the acoustic guitar - or
rather the pieces of it - scattered near the piano, that she took his arm
and said, "It's just a thing, dammit." He looked up. "It can be replaced.
You could never be." She tried not to raise her voice. He seemed as
breakable as thin glass. "You're here and that's all that matters." He
nodded. "I suppose Wilson can help us clean up. Maybe Foreman too."

"No." He shook his head emphatically. "The ducklings can't be allowed to
see this." Then, as if it had just occurred to him: "I'm calling Foreman
tomorrow to arrange for your PET scan."

He refused to accompany her to the test two days later. She knew she'd
spouted some crazy things to him in the hospital room; her vision (that
rent in the gauze of reality), and the fear of having almost lost him, had
for a while shriveled her to a moaning heap of cryptic pleas, something
about never leaving each other's sight again. ("It was the Xanax Wilson
gave you," he'd assured her several times since. "A paradoxical effect can
cause aggression, panic, even hallucinations." Completely ignoring the
fact that her only hallucination had come before she'd swallowed
anything.) His hard look as he wrote out her appointment with Foreman said
she shouldn't push it.

The hospital overflowed with normalcy. As Foreman waited with her for the
PET tracer to take effect, he asked questions. Would she describe herself
as very religious? No, the opposite. Had she had the experience more than
once? (The New Year's party would remain her secret, she decided). Finally
she interrupted. "What does this have to do with religion? What did Greg
tell you?"

"Temporal-lobe epilepsy is associated with over-religiosity. Joan of Arc,
that kind of thing." His dark eyes were as penetrating as Greg's. "He told
me you'd had some...experience, a vision, that made you believe you're
meant to stay with him, that the two of you belong together on some mystic
spiritual level." She nodded and bit her lip. "I asked him if he was sure
he wanted to debunk that. He said he didn't want you staying with him for
that kind of reason - he wanted to know you were staying with him because
of him." It startled her that Greg would have revealed his inner self like
that and her face must have shown it. "Yeah, he sort of realized he'd said
too much. He clammed up after that."

She asked him if the test was expensive. "You could say that. Cuddy's only
letting him do it because he's promised to go to psych counseling. Come
on, the tracer should be decaying by now. Let's do the test."

The results were negative. She watched Greg's face later, as he spoke to
Foreman on the phone. She tried to tease apart the jargon. She heard the
German word geschwind. "What?" she asked, alarmed. "What's `fast'? What's
`rapid'?"

"Geschwind was a German doctor," he told her. He hung up on Foreman
without saying goodbye. "There's a Geschwind syndrome associated with
epilepsy, with certain symptoms, none of which you exhibit."

She tried to quiet her breathing. "Then what do I have, Greg?"

"I don't know what you have."

"Why can't you accept it was something real? I saw something, I still get
this panicky feeling when you're out of my sight, but there's a reason for
it. It's probably going to go away after a while -"

"It's going to go away now. Wanna know why? Because I am." He stood,
looking for his keys, and grimaced at the wall behind which his apartment
lay. "That is, if I can find some clothes in ground zero over there. I'm
leaving and I'll be back in exactly three days."

She begged him not to. "I'm not sick in the head, Greg. You don't need to
do this."

"I know you're not and yes I do. What you have is called eremophobia, a
fear of being alone, and we're getting rid of it with a little shock
therapy."

He took the bike and left. Didn't even tell Cuddy, apparently, who had
expected him to start his therapy sessions and be back at work that week,
and who called frantically several times a day to ask whether he'd shown
up again. Curt with her, as though she assumed Dani had set off this new
crisis. She went to bed on the third night and was awoken by him at
midnight, from where he sat on the edge of the bed. He took her hands,
placed them on his cheeks and said, "See?" as though it were a discussion
broken off minutes ago rather than days. "See, we're still here, the world
is still here." And he took her hands from his face and slapped them down
on the nightstand hard enough to hurt, to show her.

No, it was nonsense and he wasn't having any of it, but the grief of what
they'd gone through remained.

They moved through the kitchen in their old patterns in the evenings, when
she didn't have to dance (and her moves when she did go to work were so
viscous, the spring gone out of them, that she knew the whole company
noticed). It was almost easy again. The three days away had released some
tension in him. She told him about Cuddy calling - "Her voice sounded so
strained I thought she must have gotten that turkey baster you're always
telling me about stuck up in there" - and he laughed. Her legs suddenly
felt weak, and she sat down with a little "Oh."

"What is it?"

"It's just so - good to see you smile." More than good; she felt warm all
over. "I didn't know if you could anymore."

He looked disconcerted. "Of course I can still smile. It wasn't botox
injections I tried to kill myself with."

Her fingers played with his on the table. "We're going to be all right
after all, aren't we?" He nodded.

But of course they weren't all right. He went to the therapist Cuddy
ordered up, in Greg's words a very accommodating person who, according to
him, happily accepted his refusal in the first session to get into
anything personal and thereafter spent twice a week talking ice-hockey
with him. She didn't know if she believed that.

It took some time to admit to herself that he had stopped touching her.

During the day she might take his hand or run a finger along his hip, only
to find that his eyes glanced away. At night in bed she sought his body,
turned to press herself to him, lips and chest and further down, all the
places on them that had always responded in parallel, looking for that
affirmation of life, wanting it so much she thought she might burst with
it, but it was no longer forthcoming. Where she had always felt his
urgency it was as though he were shrinking from her.

Kiss him. Lips on lips, his beard soft, his own good smell below the whiff
of disinfectant from his day at the hospital. If she could do the things
she used to do for him; when she moved down and took him into her mouth,
her mouth felt like a stranger's; how long since the last time? His drives
had always been enormous, and now here he was staying impossibly soft,
shameful and confusing, the rest of his body tense, as though he didn't
want to know it was happening. She had her eyes closed. It was an inept
whore who couldn't get a man hard with her mouth; she wanted to cry, then
he pulled her up to him, acknowledging that it was useless. "I need more
time," he mumbled. His voice sounded the way she felt. She let it go for a
week, and then another.

The weeks were soon two months. Wilson visited often. They were left alone
once, when Greg was called back late to the hospital on a case, and they
began talking about the suicide attempt. Her friend Cyndi, she informed
Wilson, had called it psychological blackmail, and he shook his head. No,
he was convinced Greg had wanted to die. He told her about a conversation
they'd had several years back. A patient of Wilson's had put his deer
rifle in his mouth and pulled the trigger with his toes instead of waiting
for his inoperable brain cancer to kill him, and Greg had seemed very
affected by it.

"He said it must be the ultimate power trip - to extinguish yourself along
with all you knew of yourself, all the memories and dreams back to day
one. Worse than murder, he said, because a person who kills another is
never really aware of all that is being lost." Wilson looked troubled.
"The idea seemed to fascinate him." She felt chilled.

Routines were reestablished. She met Greg for lunch often, and greeted the
ducklings, and Cuddy, who seemed cold toward her. One October noon she
turned the corner and saw an older couple sitting in Greg's office with
him, some kind of patient trouble, she presumed, since he looked
displeased. She started to turn away, but he waved her in.

"Dani, meet my mom and dad."

She was used to nerves - after all, she was a stage performer - yet she
knew the shock made her appear flustered. They had surprised him too,
apparently, just popping in on their way to Timbuktu. They were normal
enough. His mother hugged her. His father had flashes of the same wit, so
she could see where Greg got it, that and his height. No one acknowledged
it might be odd she'd been his most intimate partner for over a year and
had never met them. They wanted to do lunch. He made neck-slashing motions
to her behind their backs and said an urgent case had come up. The
alternative, of course, was dinner.

"You're dancing, aren't you?" Greg said with a warning look.

It was a tipping point. "No," she answered truthfully, after a moment's
hesitation. "We can do dinner." She couldn't meet his eyes.

At home she put on a skirt and a high-neck sweater from the back of her
closet. They were due at the restaurant in an hour. Greg stared. "What the
hell is that? You look like my grandmother - after she died." The argument
was inevitable. She wanted to get to know his parents; he wanted to keep
her away from them, if necessary, by entombing her in a brick wall.

"So you're going to impress them with your homemade-jam wholesomeness." He
indicated the skirt. "Look, if my dad ends up liking you, I'll start to
wonder about you."

"Okay, you can't stand to be with your dad." She had noticed in the office
how he always maneuvered to keep someone else between him and his father,
which had led to contortions as they were all leaving together, that he
looked at the older man's forehead or shirtfront when he spoke to him.
Never at his eyes. So the hate apparently was not just hate; it was
abhorrence. "I'll meet them for dinner by myself."

His frightened look said he believed her. "Oh right. Just a cozy chat
about me behind my back. My father will be his usual charming self and
I'll have to forever listen to you saying, `I don't know what's wrong with
you, Greg - he's nice'." There it was again, his inability to let her make
up her own mind about things. He sighed. "It's just a waste of time."

"Time you would spend doing what? Watching TV? Screwing me?" His pitiful
look made her feel like kicking herself.

She went and changed into her jeans.

The restaurant was packed. And they really were boring. She knew Greg
hadn't told them about the overdose and she steered clear of anything that
might lead to it, which left her with little to say and, she realized,
made her seem stuck-up. When she went to the restroom, his mom trailed
along, and at the sinks she started talking about Stacy. "When she left
him it was so bad." She didn't seem to realize it was crass talking about
the old girlfriend to the new one. "I...was really scared for him for a
while." She whispered the word scared as though it were dirty.

"You don't have to be scared for him anymore," she told her.

"I don't think so either." Thanks a lot. "You just don't know how relieved
we are that he's found someone."

It made them conspirators and at the table his mother chatted away to them
about his childhood.

"Greg believed in Santa Claus for the longest time. He must have been nine
before -"

"Eight and a half, Mom."

"Believing the world owed him a favor," his father chimed in. She felt
Greg's hand below the table clench and unclench. "You know, he was a
favorite with the teachers for a long time too. Always something special
-"

"Well, he was smart and funny - " his mother began.

"Funny? He was the class clown. Which is fine in first and second grade.
You can get by in life with that for a while." Several of his comments had
been of the same tenor: his son the morning glory, who had amounted to
nothing. As though no one had ever told him what his son did for a living.
Or as if only the traits he disapproved of counted in the weighing. "He
grew up and found out you can't get by on being the joker all the time."
Greg's face was pale with suppressed rage.

"It is a shame," she agreed. She smiled at Greg. "Now he has to get by
with just being brilliant at what he does."

He stared at her for so long, so grateful, while the waiter cleared their
plates, that she had to look away.

At home she showered, the residue of his father's stupidity soaped away,
then put on her robe and stood on the balcony. The air was brisk. Down the
street jack-o'lanterns dotted the stoops of apartment buildings. Greg
joined her and put his arms around her from behind. It surprised her. His
lips moved through her hair, down to her neck. He undid the sash of her
robe, keeping the top closed to the view of the street, and smoothed his
hands up - and down - on her still-moist skin and there it was, the
urgency. She wanted to cry out to the stars. She bent forward across the
rail and he lifted the back of her robe. They held each other's mouths,
laughing silently, when the door to the balcony over theirs opened and
steps shuffled out just feet above their heads, but no hand of hers
reaching back could silence him, he couldn't be quiet when he came if his
life depended on it, she'd once told him, his thrusts nailing her against
the rail, until he yelled out, a deep-throated shriek. The steps above
them retreated quickly and then they were laughing out loud. The second
time was on the reclining deck chair, slow and sweaty-sweet, while she
straddled him. His cock inside her was fire; her chest felt full, as
though he were impossibly long, prodding her heart. "I love you so much,"
he whispered. The air was warm and they lay still, forehead on forehead.
"Let's go away," he said. She nodded.

****

They drove to Vermont for a weekend to see the leaves turn, or as he put
it, "to stay in the B and screw for two days." The sun was with them. The
tiny town they had chosen sported a touristy central square, through which
they strolled the first day until his leg hurt, stopping to watch a busker
play a dulcimer, an instrument he studied for two minutes and then sat
down and played a ditty on. Climbing the stairs to their room in the
evening (the B having screwed up her ground-floor reservation), he smiled
and told her to go on ahead of him, then frowned at the water running into
the lion's-paw tub when he got there. "The reason you ran on ahead was to
get ready for me," he informed her.

"I'm not going to miss taking a bath in this thing. You can wait."

He hooked the head of his cane under her shirt and pulled her slowly to
him. "I don't want to wait."

The bed was an old-fashioned monstrosity. Its iron headboard banged
against the wall with every thrust. Pillows didn't help. She made him get
on the floor, laughing at his astonished look. "This is a family-run place
and they'll hear," she told him. "I don't want them staring at us at
breakfast." "Oh god, my girlfriend's a prude." Afterward, from where they
lay exhausted on the braided rug, he pulled a piccolo champagne from the
mini-bar. "Makes a better celebration than ice-cream." He nudged her onto
her back and poured a prickling drop into the hollow of her throat -
"Cold," she gasped - and sipped it away, then a splash in her navel, then
on her clit, too swollen by his thrusts from before to feel much as he
kissed it away there. "Your turn," she told him. He was already laughing
as he stretched out on his back: Adam's-apple, his outy navel - nothing
held. She gave up, laughing with him. "Men don't have hollows." She drew a
champagne line with her finger across his softening cock. "Need more
time?" she teased. "Give me half an hour, woman." No hollows. An idea
occurred to her. "Turn on your side," she told him.

And felt him go tense as she poured champagne in his scar.

Since their fight at New Year's she had not touched it, other than to
brush against it in their lovemaking. She had never stroked it like she
did now - possessive, attentive to the degree she might have been with his
lips, his chest, his cock. There had always been the knowledge that she
had to hold back from that one small place, a sense that had only grown
worse after the scene on New Year's Eve. After all they had been through
it seemed insane.

A little of the champagne held in the dented skin. He had told her the
nerves were dead there on the surface. His eyes were closed. An animal
playing dead, waiting for it to be over. "I know what you think," she
murmured.

"No, you don't." His voice sounded tortured. "You're not telepathic and
you have no idea what I think."

"It's just - as if it were a black hole. As if your body stops here -" her
finger touched the top of the scar - "and starts back up down here. I want
all of your body. All of you."

"That's not me, dammit. It's a patch of dead skin."

"Show me exactly. I want to know."

After a long hesitation, his hand came up to trace a path along the edges,
outlining where the nerves started up again, and her lips followed it. His
mouth opened in a groan of pleasure, then he turned on his back and pulled
her up to him. "You have all of me," he whispered. "Everything I can give.
That's the truth."

No, she thought. Not the truth. Not the way he had all of her, but a step
closer. She thought of his face as he had knelt begging her to stay. There
was a knot there inside him that went beyond the leg, a scar he wouldn't
let her touch.

She nodded. A step closer.

And driving back the next day he slipped into one of the moods she so
loved, playful without the sharp edge of the pills. She found a
classic-rock station and propped her feet on the dash while he belted out
the songs along with the radio (he had a strong voice), pushing the car up
to ninety, passing the turnoffs to small towns in a blur. He was playing
air piano with both hands all the way out the window to My Woman from
Tokyo, making her laugh, driving with his knees (making her more than a
little scared), when a state trooper pulled them over. "Wow," he whispered
as they watched the cop approach the car, "I must have been going fast
enough to blow him out of his donut shop."

The man was middle-aged, with a paunch, courteous in a cop-cliche way. He
studied Greg's license and then his face. "Sir, your eyes look a little
red. Have you been drinking?"

"Your eyes look a little glazed. Have you been eating donuts?"

She groaned inwardly. It was old and the guy had set himself up for it,
but his cop face went very cold.

"Okay, you caught me," Greg told him. "Been imbibing fun." He grew
conspiratorial. "Might have been some lust mixed in there too. I mean, get
a load of her. She's on the prohibited-substance list herself -"

"Step out of your vehicle, sir."

The trooper's exhortation to walk a line to the patrol car and back got a
"Not going to happen." Greg shrugged. "Not without that big stick on the
back seat there." From what she could see of the cop's face he was already
imagining what Greg would look like in handcuffs. "Come on, Occifer," Greg
sighed. "Just let me give you a blow job and we can both be on our merry
ways. In your case merry but vigilant, of course."

The 150-dollar ticket on top of the breathalyzer test didn't seem to faze
him. They pulled away, slower. The rock station had faded out. "You have a
problem with authority," she told him.

"I have a problem with people who've been given authority for no reason."

"Oh, the fact that someone's gone through rigorous training for a very
hard job and does that job well doesn't earn him respect?"

He glanced at her. "Could it be you just described me? What kind of
respect do I get?"

"The respect you get is that you haven't been fired yet." She flipped
through stations. "One day that mouth of yours is going to get you in real
trouble."

"Something it luckily hasn't done yet. No, wait. It got me you."

It was prophetic.

Leaves turned to sails on the wind. An early snow fell. In November she
answered a knock on Greg's door while he was away, and stood before a tall
white-haired man with baby-fat cheeks, who looked as if he'd swallowed his
pacifier when he saw her and checked the number on the door. The policemen
behind him came into view. She felt breathless, felt the soles of her bare
feet against the floor.

"I have a search warrant for the residence of Gregory House." Baby-fat was
looking her up and down now. He actually hitched his pants, male posturing
as if you had a chance blubberdoll. Her thoughts were scattering. Greg was
in trouble. Get control, she couldn't remember who had told her that once,
someone who'd been in it with the cops a lot.

She made him show her his badge, knowing her voice sounded shaky. M.
Tritter, Detective. She insisted on reading every word of the warrant
before watching them spread through the apartment, crashing open drawers
and upturning cushions. She picked up the phone to call Greg and then put
it down. Baby-fat's eyes, she saw, slid to her when she wasn't looking.
Detective M. Tritter was trying to figure something out. Pills were coming
out of the woodwork, as she knew they would. In the kitchen one of the
searchers retrieved the never-used flashlight from under the sink and
screwed open the compartment. Where batteries should have been, a bag of
pills spilled out. She had never been ashamed for Greg, but now she wanted
to melt into the floor. Detective Baby was grinning, but he grew serious
and came to stand in front of her, so close they were almost touching. He
smelled of indigestion and too much coffee. She thought of what the
warrant had said. "Greg House is not a drug trafficker," she told him.

"He must get his money from somewhere if he can buy something like you."
Her hand twitched, one of those genetic urges Greg had once talked about,
Tourette or Lesch-Nyhan, she would slap the guy in a minute. "You don't
look like you come cheap."

She looked up at him. "You couldn't buy me for all the money in the
world."

When they were gone, she tried to straighten things and then gave up.
Greg's shock when he walked in lasted two seconds. He knew.

Tritter was an ass, he explained. He refused to take it seriously. An
apartment search couldn't scare him any more than a night in jail had and
oops - he'd told her he'd spent that night the week before at the hospital
on an urgent case, but there you go. He kept shrugging, his own little
Tourette syndrome.

"It's a drug-peddling charge, Greg!"

"It's a small-fry cop on a revenge roll."

Tritter hadn't acted small-fry, she wanted to say. More like a crocodile,
one that could bide its time and drink too much coffee, nurturing that
evil smile at the corners of its mouth, before snapping its jaws shut.

Or closing them slowly, which was worse. The shakes started the next
night. Wilson wasn't picking up his phone, prevented from writing
prescriptions, Greg growled, by the pressure being put on him. Freed from
writing them, she thought. He took the bike to the office at midnight,
telling her openly that he was going to plunder his stashes there, not
even pretending to her anymore, and then called her at two to pick him up,
smart enough to know he was too high to operate a motorcycle. His eyes
were glassy. He startled the nurses by laughing, hyena-like, at nothing.
"Those were my last ones," he whispered as they went out the door, and the
desperation in his voice chilled her.

He kept going to work, Cuddy apparently parceling out sweets to him based
on how he behaved. She went to the hospital to join him for lunch, turned
the corner and saw Tritter at the end of the hall. The bastard stared for
a moment, then nodded, as though they shared some secret, before
disappearing through a door. Wilson stood in Greg's office, arguing about
Cameron of all things; though she tried to follow the gist of it, she felt
left behind again, as she had ever since Tritter had stood at the
apartment door, a feeling as though she were zapping through TV channels,
always coming in on the middle of programs that were all just fights
anyway, all the same vacuous broadcaster. The Conflict Channel.

"It's a fishing expedition!" Greg was yelling. "The jackleg is fumbling
around in the dark hoping to find something and everyone is supporting
him."

"Exactly what you do in your diagnoses," Wilson pointed out. "Admit it,
the guy's just doing his job."

"The guy's job is to get meth-heads off the street. Keep the world safe
from nuts and wackos."

"Hence - his hammering of you. Need I say more?"

"The guy's an ass. Wouldn't know a real crime if it gave him a rectal
exam." He turned to her. "Cuddy's given him a data-room. Who needs a
data-room to investigate one person?"

"This is your fault," Wilson insisted. "You were rude once too often. One
insult too many."

"You should have thrown a spear at him instead," Dani said. It stopped
them both.

Wilson sighed. "You're going to have to apologize," he summed up. Greg
looked like he might remove him bodily from the room, but Wilson was
already leaving. At the door he turned. "If you kick the world, all you'll
ever do is break your own foot. Over and over."

The truth was - no truth. Or the simple truth, the one he'd told her their
very first night, as they lay warm and drugged with sex - that he was an
addict. She decided to call Wilson for the whole story (Greg had refused
to tell her every time she asked what kind of proof the detective thought
he had for drug-peddling, only looking at her and saying `I love you' in a
desperate, tossed-out way that turned her cold.) The story made her sick
with hate for Tritter. Forged prescriptions were a crime, oh yes and
wanting release from pain, wanting to feel good, but what punishment was
fitting? Not the man she loved reduced to this, a shaking heap of limbs
dry-retching over the sink. She came in unexpectedly on Monday night and
found him standing over the ironing board in his shirtsleeves with the
iron plugged in, an appliance she had seen him use exactly once, and for a
second her mind cried, Yes, he was finally managing to pull it together,
before she realized there were no clothes to be ironed anywhere near, that
he had been ironing his arm.

"Greg."

The two small triangles on his forearm where he had pressed the very tip
of the iron were red-fresh and glistening. He wouldn't look at her. She
tried to hold him.

"All those people who cut themselves are stupid," he told the wall. "Burns
can always be explained away as an accident. Plus, they hurt a lot
longer." He was smiling now, insanely. He lifted the iron again.

"No!" She jerked it from him, easy because he was suddenly weak. "You've
got to do something, Greg! You've got to apologize."

"I did." It stunned her. "I went to the precinct today and talked to him.
Like a real person would. Man to Robocop. It didn't make a bit of
difference." His eyes behind their red rims were frightened. "I'm going to
go to prison. They'll take all my pills away, unless Cuddy can arrange
those conjugal visits to sneak me some, and men very much larger than I am
will take offense at my mouthing off, or just at the set of my eyes, and
I'll wake up with a shiv between my ribs. Or I won't wake up because I'll
be in a coma from the worst beating I ever had. I've had my lights punched
out before. I hate it." His chuckle sounded like an animal in a trap. "And
there's not one thing left I can do about it. Tritter had more staying
power after all."

Pit-bull, she thought. Obsessive. Both of them so alike, but only one
about to lose the game because of his physical addiction. If Tritter had
any such weak spot they might have exploited they would likely never know.

"I'm scared," Greg said. She was seeing something new, she understood. All
his strength gone. Even when he had tried to walk on his leg that time,
stripped to nothing but bitter jealousy, it had been the strength of rage
that pushed him. Not giving in. Even getting down on his knees,
acknowledging that he had to do that very last thing to try and keep her.
That had been strength too. Now he stood fumbling with the edge of the
ironing board. "I know something," she whispered and led him to the bed,
took his clothes off, feeling stupid because she didn't know enough about
the big bad world to solve this problem, didn't know from addiction and
cops' dirty tricks, only able to offer this one thing. She did everything
to him they had ever done before and some things they hadn't. He went with
her, forgetting where he was, forgetting everything, mouth and hands
everywhere on her, wild with happiness for a while. She melted through his
skin and forced the pain out, displaced it with herself, and he was
beautiful inside, gentle and wonderful. They fit inside each other
flawlessly. She turned to look out through his eyes, felt the bed sway as
though they were out at sea, alone together in calm weather.

In the morning he went to work. She went to her rehearsal in the
afternoon, left at five under the shadow of Georg's frown, and found the
address she had looked up. The precinct hallways were busy. A cop showed
her, with an odd smile, to a corner office. Tritter was alone.

His desk boasted neat stacks of reports and pens lined up. Obsessive. He
hid his surprise with a smile. "Ms. Sieger." Of course he would have found
out all he could about her. She sat. She didn't know how to start; she'd
forced herself not to rehearse anything, just be natural, and then it
came, the insight she'd had, why the punishment, aside from the fact that
Greg wasn't peddling drugs, could never fit the crime. She tried to be
objective, while he sat very still listening. If she could only make him
see the real man, the good one, he would understand. How prison - prison -
for such a pathetic little failing as addiction was monstrous. For someone
already cursed with hellish pain to be dropped into that pit.

Something in the word pit wiped the smile from Tritter's face.

Someone for whom the good he did outweighed any bad. Greg occasionally got
letters, she told him, that he didn't open, addressed in handwriting; they
lay around so long she had finally opened one in secret and it had been a
profuse thank-you note, from a couple whose child he'd saved, a confused
meandering text that made her realize they were trying to express
something impossible to say, that he had saved their lives as well.

"Maybe Greg will kill someone someday by making a mistake," she told him,
"but every doctor in a branch like his runs that risk. Maybe it will even
be because his brain's addled that day from the Vicodin. But you weigh
that against all the ones he will have saved -" She knew the tears stood
out in her eyes. She had steeled herself not to cry, sensing it would have
the wrong effect on this anal-retentive adding machine. "Weigh it against
the ones out here who will die while he's in a cell, just because you
don't like him."

"What is it?" Tritter asked. As though she had just stepped through the
door, as though she hadn't even begun yet - hadn't he even listened? His
eyes roamed her face, her neckline. "What is it that could make a woman
like you love him that much?" He chewed his gum, waiting.

She wanted to throw his paperweight at his face, stop his piggy eyes from
moving on her. "Everything I just said." He nodded, unbelieving. It was
time. "I would do anything in the world if it would persuade you to drop
the charges, Detective Tritter."

And it had his full attention, the dirty, squirmy attention of a stray dog
that's been thrown a bone. Shocked him perhaps. Eyes curving into a new
shape. They sat in silence, the hum of the detail room penetrating to
them.

"Mike -" A cop stuck his head in the door, stopped when he saw her, and
glanced between them.

"Be right there," Tritter countered and the head withdrew. Another lengthy
silence, then he was standing. "We should talk about this over dinner, Ms.
Sieger."

He named an upscale restaurant across town, asked her if she could be
there at seven, and she slung her knapsack over her shoulder without
answering.

****

When she arrived, he already had a table. He had changed his clothes. She
tried to listen, as the waiter lit their candles and brought wine. "Say
Mike," he told her, after she'd said Detective Tritter for the third time.
He was divorced, a grown son somewhere, he did his work well, had received
commendations often, and liked the respect his job got him.

"Is that why you react the way you do to Greg? Because he doesn't give you
respect automatically?"

"Let's not make it a therapy session, Danielle."

"We're here to talk about the charges."

You know we're not. She saw the words move in his slack mouth, in the tiny
sickening smile, but they didn't come out.

He had done street busts for years, he explained, and had grown tired of
the uselessness of it, of watching crackheads leave almost as soon as the
arrest paperwork was finished. He was convinced it was the movers he had
to target. "Hasn't he ever offered you anything? It's in the nature of a
junkie to want to convert others."

No, she told him, but she had taken a Vicodin on her own once, snuck it
from a bottle when Greg was gone, because she had to know what it was he
felt. Her zero tolerance for anything stronger than aspirin had probably
heightened the effect, scaring her: brain wrapped in cotton, her fingers
far away. She'd called Wilson, who told her not to worry and that it would
wear off fast.

Tritter watched her. As the meal progressed, his eyes had seemed to
change, softening to smoke as though the candlelight seeped in, his face
slightly flushed. The wine, she told herself (he'd had three full
glasses), but she knew it wasn't that. She knew men's looks. The heat of
real interest, hooking on and going past the pretty face. The hope of
finding the same interest coming back at them. He leaned forward, his
hands playing with a napkin. An idiot as well as a bastard. She realized
she ought to get up and walk out. It was too dangerous a game.

"Proves you don't tell each other everything," he pointed out. "Not as
intimate as you let on. You don't think he could keep things from you?"

"I'm sure he does."

"And your examination by Dr. Foreman? Does he know about that?"

The hospital files, of course. Anything with her or Greg's name on it
would be fodder for him. "Greg ordered the test," she told him. "I -
fainted and he wanted me checked."

"The file used the word `seizure'. A word I encounter in my line of work
maybe as much as Dr. House does."

"It wasn't drug-related, if that's what you're suggesting." Across the
restaurant, a man in a turquoise baseball cap had turned to watch them
from where he perched on a barstool. He was too far away for her to see
his expression. It was the second time she'd caught his stare, directed at
Tritter more than at her. Whenever it seemed she was looking, he twisted
away. Tritter hadn't noticed him.

"And your past?" Tritter played with the candle flame, then looked up at
her. "How much of it have you told your doctor-lover?"

She had no past, she informed him, fighting the sudden clench in her
throat.

"The wonderful thing about being a law enforcement officer is the access
to information, Danielle. Put in a name and any case it may have ever been
connected with pops right up. Seems like the kind of thing that would have
come up, if the two of you are that close."

"Please." A dangerous game, when one side held all the cards against you.
"Please." She was pleading. "Greg thinks I got an abortion because I was
careless with a boyfriend. He doesn't know the truth." Tritter's mouth
hung barely open; he was eating it up. "Please don't tell him. Mike."

Then he was relaxing back in his seat and she knew it was over, the first
moves in the game at least. She pushed her plate away. "Would you get me a
taxi? I need to be getting home." She tried to emphasize home. His look
darkened for a second, then he stood to retrieve her coat.

Behind him she saw the man in the turquoise cap stand at the same time,
fling a bill on the bar and vanish out the door.

****

"Stop here."

"What?" She was driving Greg to Cherry Hill; he'd said he knew of a clinic
that might prescribe him Vicodin without questions. She felt like the
quintessential enabler. It was better than letting him drive himself, with
his shakes and nausea.

She'd noticed him checking the side mirror. "We're being followed," he
explained. "Pull over here, just before the exit." She did as he said,
though it was the most dangerous place she could imagine. "Pop the hood."

In the afternoon sun, the restaurant from the evening before seemed like a
bad and stupid dream. She hadn't told Greg about it. Now the dread
returned. Cops following them, reporting back to Tritter, who could easily
check any clinic for what might get prescribed. A trap they would have
fallen into if Greg hadn't been observant.

"They'll have to pass us now," he said. "They'll have to decide whether to
take the exit just ahead or stay on the highway, and when they're past,
we'll do the opposite. With the hood popped, they won't even be sure we
made them - we could really have had engine trouble. There -" he directed
her gaze to the left. "Don't turn your head. The red Kia with the crushed
bumper."

She glanced and a chill coursed through her. Only one person sat in the
car. The man in the turquoise baseball cap. He kept his eyes ahead as he
drove past. He stayed on the highway.

Greg got out and closed the hood. "Take the exit. We'll find another way
to Cherry Hill."

"Please, Greg. Let's just go home - please. We can beg Cuddy to give you
some more, just to get through the day." He was studying her face,
puzzled. "I can't." With a sigh he nodded.

In the evening she met Tritter in a bar on Palmer Square. It was their
second set of moves. He seemed beyond games, chatting happily. She
wondered if he was really stupid enough to be falling in love with her, to
think he was doing anything else but buying her company with the held-out
promise of dropping the charges against Greg. She watched for the
turquoise cap and saw nothing. "You and Greg are alike," she told Tritter.
"Maybe that's it - like repelling like. You both see terrible things,
people at their weakest. You both get down in the grit of it, you have to
be strong and it makes you stubborn. It's something I couldn't do."

"I used to work homicide. In my experience, it was always the women who
could take things. Certainly the physical side, the blood and bugs and
shit, when the men were turning away to puke. Women are always stronger
than anyone expects." He grimaced at having said it.

She took the bus home, telling him outright that she didn't want him
driving her. Her skin prickled, the thought of lying to Greg when she got
home or the breeze from the open bus window. Sensing someone watching her,
she turned to study the heads in the rows of seats behind her. She saw
nothing.

After the stop she had to walk two blocks. The sensation returned, and
there he was, a shadow in her peripheral vision. On the other side of the
deserted street, about twenty feet behind. He was matching her pace. The
streetlights turned his cap greenish. She sped up and he was suddenly
ahead of her, crossing diagonally to cut her off. She stood frozen, until
he stopped a few feet away.

"Why are you following me?" she said in a voice that carried, praying for
a light in a building to go on. "What do you want from me?"

"I wanna know what you are to Detective Tritter." The man was younger than
he had seemed from afar, maybe twenty-five, but with the air of someone
older. Hardened. A long scar ran from his eyebrow to his straw-blond
hairline. Now that she saw him up close, she felt she'd seen him before
the restaurant. Maybe at the precinct.

"You're undercover, aren't you?" she said. "Internal affairs, something
like that. Tritter's done something wrong, hasn't he?"

"And what if he has?" It came a beat too late. She felt confused, as
though they were talking about two different things.

"I'm Greg House's girlfriend." No reaction. "The doctor he's investigating
on drug-peddling." If this man could get Tritter in trouble, she had to
play it for all it was worth. "Tritter's opening himself up to sexual
favors." Lie. "He's promised to drop the charges if I'll sleep with him."

"Does he love you?" The question was so odd she stepped back. Her eyes
sought the street for a passerby. Was he even a cop? If he was undercover,
the clothes were the perfect street cred - ragged jeans, oily t-shirt. The
slight stink that said missed showers.

"I don't even know what that's supposed to mean," she answered. "We'd
never spoken more than two words to each other before yesterday. How the
hell should I know what he feels?"

"The way he looks at you." He seemed to have answered his own question.
Down the street a laughing couple climbed out of a taxi and headed toward
them. Like a spooked animal he turned to go.

"Wait," she called. "Tell me what Tritter's being investigated for. What
has he done?"

He looked back over his shoulder and the cap shadowed his eyes. "Something
bad."

****

You try very hard, you make a bust and discover there's enough evidence to
seek charges. Doing your job, just that sweet when it dovetails so
smoothly with your hate. You create a data room, lovingly, where you keep
neat stacks of everything you need to exert pressure: on the black guy, on
the Australian, who is soft as a used and snotty tissue. Your resolve
means your motives are pure. You keep your ears open and you overhear
things. For instance, outside the second-floor restroom at the hospital.

He stepped closer to the door to listen.

The Australian had it in him: "So, tell me, what was Dani doing with
Tritter in the A last night?"

A gruff silence, then the voice, so hated: "What are you talking about?"

"I was there with a date. I saw them across the room."

"Skipping your opthamologist appointments again, Dr. Chase? Dani went out
with her dance troupe last night."

"Then her dance troupe is...the pudgy middle-aged guy who arrested you?"
Yes, the Australian had it in him.

The reply was inaudible, the low rumble before an explosion; the cane
scraped the floor.

"Hey, I have met Tritter, you know. I sat across from him in his little
room and he asked me about my drug bust back in Australia. I wouldn't
mistake someone else for him. He was there and he was with Dani." A
scrape, feet walking away.

He took his time washing his hands.

When he entered his data room his opponent was already there, crossing to
him so fast it occurred to him for the first time that the man was as tall
as he was, though rangier, that the cane could be a problem, and his
defensive training flashed through his mind, ten ways to disarm a drug
fiend. House stopped close to him.

"Here to apologize again, Dr. House?"

"Why don't you take a flying fuck at an MRI tube. You've been harassing my
girlfriend."

"Oh, she came to me." He moved away casually, got the table between them.
You keep your voice even. The dead calm that infuriates them. "A very
beautiful woman. We had a pleasant talk in my office that ended in
dinner."

"Keep away from her." House's voice was beyond dead calm.

"You know what she calls your addiction, Dr. House? A `pathetic failing'.
She's convinced you're going to make a mistake and kill someone someday.
Yet she's still willing to make a huge sacrifice to keep you out of
prison. How did she put it? `I'd do anything to persuade you to drop the
charges, Detective Tritter.'"

House's face went blank. The sheer numbness of understanding. He could see
his chest move up and down.

"Such loyalty on Danielle's part. Willing to make that sacrifice. Or why
else has she met me twice now? Come to think of it, we hardly talked about
you at all both times. Maybe it wouldn't be such a sacrifice for her after
all. I'm not so fucked in the head that I'm puking on her shoes. That must
be attractive after something like you, Dr. House." Up the ante. "I've got
two good legs."

It was like being hit by lightning, the pure and clean slice through his
brain of revenge well-rendered. House looked like he'd been
stomach-punched. It shouldn't feel that good. He was just doing his job,
any means fair if it meant the suspect would break. It wasn't about the
revenge and never had been.

But his suspect wasn't breaking, not yet anyway. The silence was the
silence of profound deafness, of the void. Then House said, "It won't
work." He almost smiled. "You really think you're gonna get your banana
peeled, don't you? Danielle wouldn't wipe her shoes on you. I believe the
term of art is `stringing you along.'" He turned and left.

No, it shouldn't feel good, but there it was. Schadenfreude, the Germans
called it, joy at someone else's pain. Perhaps he could work the word into
a conversation and impress her. House didn't know everything (stringing
you along). She had looked straight at him. She had told him things about
herself she didn't have to. "She called prison a pit," he whispered to the
door. Well then it was a cleansing pit. And it was her boyfriend who
needed cleansing, like they all did - the addicts, the fuckheads. The
weak.

The ones with the broken eyes. Eyes so hurt and vulnerable. Hating you for
doing your job.

You rub your own eyes, quelling the pressure behind them, and you get back
to work.

****

She waited outside the studio for Greg to pick her up so he wouldn't have
to come inside. So they wouldn't see the shadows under his eyes. He was
capable of driving, he'd assured her on the phone, Cuddy having been at
the right time of the month to take pity on him and prescribe him a few
more pills. He was late. The young bum who seemed to live on the corner
below the studio and whom Cyndi had nicknamed Boy Harmless asked her for
money, standing close. She was smiling and shaking her head at him when
Greg honked the horn.

As she got in the car, Greg kept his eyes on Harmless. "You'd come on to
anything in pants, wouldn't you?" he muttered.

The shock settled into her bones. She stared out the windshield on the way
home, hardly daring to move.

In the kitchen he went straight for a beer. "Greg." His movements were
jerky; the beer cap flew to the floor. Finally he turned.

"Did you tell Tritter you'd sleep with him?"

So he knew. Tritter must have goaded him with it. She was shaking her
head.

"But you let him think it. Held it out. Said something specific."

He was so tense with rage she expected smoke to rise off him any second.
She was lost again.

"It's for you," she told him. Surely he knew that. "If he can be
implicated in something like this, it will help you. There's a man -"

"Stay out of my affairs!" The shout filled the kitchen. "You don't know
what the fuck you're doing. You think Tritter's stupid?" Yes. "He's smart
as a snake, Dani. You think your puny pollyanna tricks will work on
someone who's been in the snow business that long - just wiggle that
prize-winning butt at him and -"

"No. Greg, I think he's being investigated by his department -"

"You think? You didn't think. Or rather, you thought with your cunt as
usual."

Like a slap. It was the stress, she would tell herself that until she
believed it, while her arms hugged herself as if to ward off his shouts.
He was pushed to his limits by the withdrawal, the fear of prison. An
image flashed, his palms stroking her stomach, gentle-sweet, his lips
there, had it only been the night before? Mood swings, Wilson always
called it, an innocuous title for something so colossal.

He was close now, towering over her. "All you've done is probably ensure
that he won't drop the charges, Dani. Did anyone see you go in his
office?" Yes. "If he drops the case now, they'll say it was just because
of you. You've practically forced him to keep pursuing it so he won't look
like he's being influenced." Her small gasp got his attention. He was
right. She'd never thought of that, her simple intrigue, once started,
creating trapdoors behind trapdoors. Turquoise-Cap. "He'll probably even
file a report now on how I sent my girlfriend to spread her legs for me,
just one more thing he'll have in his hand against me."

Get control. She'd tried something, for his sake, that was all. He had no
right to shout. She would match his rage. "You're the one who did
something stupid," she told him. "You insulted the wrong person, you
wouldn't apologize for so long -"

It was the wrong ploy. It made him almost gleeful, she could see, to bring
all his guns to bear. "I'm stupid? Who's the one here with the college
degree in dance?" She wanted to put her hands over her ears. Don't go
there, please. "Is it a `pathetic failing' when your hardest course load
is Waltzing 101 and Advanced Ballet-Shoe Tying? Who's the stupid one?
Huh?"

"Please stop." She didn't know if she'd spoken out loud. He knew what
having respect from him meant to her, had to know it. So easy for him to
throw it away, that respect. As though his voice pushed her, she was
suddenly sitting in the chair behind her. His words broke over her in
waves.

"I always knew you were dumb, Dani, but this takes the moron cake. You
couldn't think in any language but ditsy if my life depended on it, could
you? Which it does. Oh yeah, I'm going to prison now thanks to your
meddling. You can come visit me. Maybe you can pull a Midnight Express and
rub your tits on the window."

"I didn't offer - they can't prove -" Her breath wouldn't form sentences.
Don't cry. Too late. "I didn't say anything specific to him. His word
against mine. And I wouldn't have slept with him -"

"Yes, you would have." He looked like he would throw up. She saw that he
didn't know whether to believe it or not either.

For you, maybe. I don't know anymore. For him, for his body there in front
of her, hardened with anger now, and yet vulnerable in her imagination,
wracked with pain in a prison cell. The strange expression on Tritter's
face when she had called prison a pit.

He was shouting again. "Oh don't start with the tears!" Tears - no, she
was sobbing now, gasping, but he didn't care. "Everyone's going to love
this one around the water-cooler. Chase won't keep his mouth shut. Half
the place thinks I buy you anyway -" (that was supposed to be a joke, she
wanted say, couldn't say for the jerking cries coming from her) - "now
they'll figure someone just came along who could pay you a little more! Or
maybe they'll believe the sexual-favor line." His voice went babyish -
"She was going to save me!" - then grew in immensity, until it shook the
air in the kitchen - "Either way I'll go to prison comforted by the
thought that everyone in the world knows the truth, that my girlfriend's
not just stupid - she's a slut!"

For a moment he was silent and in the silence her sobs finally became
words, forced out, breathless. "It's - it's not Tritter." From far away
she sensed his confusion, but she was beyond communication, just crying
out to herself, the knowledge: "It's not me. It's not - not even you."
Sobs beating their way to the truth. "It's the drug. It's the - damn -
pills. It's why you can be so wonderful one day and so - so awful the
next!" He seemed to freeze at the word awful. His hand came up as though
to touch her hair. "It's going to kill every - everything we have and
there's nothing I can do about it." The knowledge filled her lungs and her
heart; she couldn't breathe. "It's going to happen. It will be the end one
day." This won't go on forever.

There were no more words, she realized, the despair of that knowledge
inexpressible. That what she felt went beyond the love of a woman for a
man, that when she saw the burns on his arm she knew what a lioness felt,
that if a Mack truck were bearing down on him she would step in front of
him without a thought. Despair because it would not be enough, that even
that fierce, fierce loyalty meant nothing in the equation - simply nothing
at all to the pills that shrugged their shoulders and laughed.

Her throat felt crushed by sobs. She kept trying to breathe, but there was
no more room, breaths turned to steel gasps. "You're hyperventilating,"
someone said. She felt fingers in her hair, hesitant, then he crouched in
front of her "Breathe out, dammit." There was a black picture hanging on
the wall behind him, growing larger and blacker.

She came to, hot. He held her in his arms on the floor, staring down, his
face not alarmed, just numb with spent emotion. "You passed out for a
second," he told her.

Her hands tingled. Acid flooded her mouth. "I'm going to be sick," she
muttered and stood.

"Don't sta -"

She was already at the sink. Nothing came.

"This is because you haven't eaten anything." He stood beside her, opened
the fridge, not looking at her.

"I had something."

"What was lunch?" She didn't answer. Louder: "What was lunch?"

"An apple."

"Thought so."

She might have been a patient, symptoms boring, but his voice, so clipped,
held layers of emotion. His hands shook and a package of cold-cuts fell on
the floor. He slapped a sandwich together, sloppy with things she never
ate, and pushed it at her.

Over for now, she realized. It was his way of asking forgiveness. Love in
a horrible sandwich.

Although her own hands shook she pulled off a thumbnail-sized chunk of
bread and shoved it around in her mouth without getting it down.

Separate rooms for the evening (what else did you say after that?), and
when she went through the bedroom later, the open window letting in the
cold, she found him stretched out on the bed, lost in zombie thought.
Their fights were like sex, she realized. They lost themselves in the
fighting, slumped exhausted afterward. She lay beside him, both of them
still, her head on his chest, and he put his arm around her. She couldn't
remember all she'd said; it was already fading. She'd called him awful,
she felt. She could hear his heart. It was right there, she thought, that
hard knot, pain or sorrow, that made him the way he was. There below where
her head rested. If she could just reach in and untwist it, slide her hand
into his heart, feeling along blind until she found it (careful not to
change anything else), she would loosen that knot. Not for herself or
because she wanted him different, but for him - because it was killing
him. If she could only find it she would cut it out, a quick little
surgery, no blood.

And then he did it for her.

"I want to tell you that memory now," he said. It took a moment for her to
remember. They hadn't been together long; she'd wanted to get to know him,
just pillow talk, and she'd said, Tell me one good memory and one bad
memory from your childhood. He'd simply refused, telling her to come up
with a different question. She'd locked the moment away ever since, as
meaning nothing or everything.

"When I was five, maybe six," he began, "my dad brought me home a pet from
the pet shop." She wondered if this was the good memory, but something in
his voice told her it wasn't. "It was a tarantula. It had its own little
terrarium and fact booklet and everything. The point of the exercise was
that I'd been frightened by a spider in the house the day before. Couldn't
go near it, a real panic attack, tears and all, and he'd had to kill it
for me. This pet tarantula was going to teach me to get over my fears."
Beyond the window evening voices floated up. She felt strangely light. She
couldn't see his face. "So he made me take all my clothes off and he tied
me to the bed and let the tarantula crawl all over me."

The voices on the street passed by, children calling to one another.

"It probably lasted an hour. I wasn't supposed to scream, but I did, until
it got to my face and I had to keep my lips and my eyes shut. It got in my
hair and in my crotch. Whenever it crawled off, he'd use these tongs that
had come with it to put it back on me." Their bodies were like stones
pressed against one another; she could see her hand on his chest but
couldn't move it. Only their hearts moved, then his little shrug. "I was
never scared of spiders again."

There was the boiling-water incident, he told her. He'd cried a lot up to
a certain age, and when he was three and couldn't stop bawling about
something, his dad had boiled water in the kettle on the stove, held him
bent backward over his knee and told him he was going to pour the water in
his eyes to burn the tear ducts away. It was his earliest memory of such
incidents, and he'd come to realize later that it was probably because of
the tangible sight of that single drop that had never fallen, brimming at
the edge of the spout above his face, while he begged and swore to be
good. He still saw it sometimes, hypnagogic, when he was about to go to
sleep.

His voice droned on, ghost talk, the words of the dead some people claimed
to hear in white noise, babbling things her mind could not take in;
ice-baths when the four-year old said the bathwater wasn't warm enough,
being locked in a trunk after he tried to run away - building up a picture
of abuse, over years, that had been carefully calibrated not to leave
physical marks, while mom stood by helpless, and which transformed - once
he got older and more at risk of telling an outsider - into pure mind
games, psychological beatings: for his ninth birthday, in the presence of
other kids, he opened his dad's gift to him to find it was diapers and a
rattle (because he'd been such a baby the past year). (The reason he hated
getting gifts now, the ghost voice said, with a ghost chuckle). When he
was seven, he was driven to the orphanage outside of town, a flat grey
building behind a gate, that had always terrified him with its implication
of sorrow, and was told to get out and go in, his dad assuring him he'd
called already and they were willing to take him (the misdemeanor that had
precipitated this incident long forgotten). He'd stood outside the gate in
the cold rain for two hours while his dad presumably drove around, simply
standing there freezing, holding his little bit of hope that it was just
another trick, praying for the Buick to come back around the corner and
not wanting it to, until it finally did, his father's face through the
windshield hard, to pick him up.

It had grown dark, she realized, as Greg spoke; objects in the room had
gone away, only his disembodied voice still there, so low and simple,
though the words were like little earthquakes: she felt as though she rode
on his chest while the earth shattered beneath them, that she had to hold
on or they would both fall. His chest moved in an odd rhythm, sharp peaks
of breath quickly gasped out, and she realized he was crying.

"How could he do those things?" he whispered, moaned. "One of the two
people in the world who're supposed to love you when no one else does, no
- no matter what. Someone explain that to me." She crawled all the way on
top of him, her arms around him. She wanted to cover him. "How?" Why
doesn't he love me?"

Doesn't. She thought of the gray-haired man in the restaurant, so
harmlessly frail, and yet forty years back a young broad-shouldered Marine
with an intelligent, sensitive son he couldn't understand and stupid
stupid theories about making a man out of him. How he would have towered
over a kid of three, or four or nine. The little wisp of a soul being
twisted day after day. She took Greg's wet face in her hands. "Why?" he
asked her. "Why?"

Words came to her, roaring inside her, the lioness. She had to hold on to
him. "It wasn't you," she told him. She was crying too. "It wasn't your
fault, Greg. He would have done that to his son no matter how perfect the
kid was - you could have done everything exactly the way he wanted and he
would have found something else wrong - Greg, Greg, listen to me!" He was
shaking his head, shielding his face from her with his arm. She fought him
until he unclenched. Fight this, cut the knot. She tried to smooth his
face with her hands. "There were no standards you didn't live up to -
those weren't standards, just insane expectations! You didn't fail some
test of love. You couldn't have been a better kid or more lovable. Please
listen, Greg, you didn't fail!" He wouldn't look at her, eyes toward the
ceiling as tears ran down his face, holding his breath as though she
plunged a needle in him again and again, seeking the tumor. "He happened
to be your father and he happened to be incapable of love. You weren't a
bad son. It was random, random that you were born to someone like him!"
Make him see. "As random as what happened to your leg." He went very
still. "You might as well be mad at God, if you want to believe in him,
for sending you the infarction. You've always thought that was punishment
for something too, haven't you? Greg, you weren't being punished for being
a certain way. Not by your dad and not by God." Her own voice had become a
child's, pleading. "Don't you see? It doesn't mean you're unlovable." My
darling.

His eyes found hers and for a long time he stared at her, while the
tension seeped away from him and his stabbing breaths stilled. He put his
hands in her hair. "I love you," she told him. "Let me. I have enough." He
held her close, her head on his chest again.

"You've got to forget him," she whispered.

"I've tried to for a long time," he whispered back. "I don't know if I
can."

When she awoke in the morning he had left for work. She felt fragile as
she moved about the apartment, as though she'd woken up to a different
world, one in which things made sense.

There were children who went through much worse things, she knew, and came
out untouched, while others - the sensitive souls, probably the
intelligent ones - curled up and died on the inside in the brunt of love
withheld, the merest harsh word. She understood him so well now. Where
other adults had a core of strength to draw on, values about themselves
they had been given, a trust that they were loved and that the world was
workable, he had no such thing - hollow in the middle where it counted,
but putting all his strength in keeping himself upright. A tower of flesh
and bone and psyche held up by sheer will, and which probably took more
strength than others could muster who had that inner cushion to fall on.
At times the tower would crumble in one place - the infarction, being
deserted by Stacy - and would have to be shored up, but that was all it
was - shored up, never fixed, until it started to crumble again.

No wonder he needed love like food. No wonder he was addicted.

She tried to get him on his phone and left messages. When he hadn't called
by noon, she phoned Wilson to ask if Greg was busy on a case.

"You really did it, didn't you?" Wilson said.

Her heart missed a beat. "What?"

"I didn't think there was one thing in the world that would get him to
check into rehab like this. What did you say to him?"

She had to sit down.

Greg had checked himself in that morning, Wilson told her, surprised once
he realized she knew nothing about it. She listened to herself ask inane
questions, how long it would be and if she should take him his toothbrush,
while her hands smoothed a corner of the kitchen towel in front of her.
She didn't know how to think about it, what the degree of honesty behind
it might be. Too true to be good, as he might have said. She only knew she
was happy that he had had the strength for this last perfect chess move
against Tritter. She thought about the detective and how she would present
it to him, how his pig-eyes would widen. Yes, things made sense.

There was a way out.

****

And then he'd pushed the third-floor button and told them where he was
going and it was that simple. Don't think, banish all thought, which would
make it easier, but their faces wouldn't let him. Six eyes on him, blank
stares, looking more than ever like ruffled ducklings. Mouths open.
Gratifying and a little disquieting because, in spite of how often he'd
been on the receiving end of those stares, it told him how unhimself-like
his little announcement really was. Mommy Duck won't see you for a while,
he felt like saying. You'll have to paddle on alone. The elevator doors
closed on the thought.

The McDaniel Center was run by Jeremy Baxter, a man he hated, and he had
to stand the psychiatrist's assessing look as he went through the ritual
of signing in, talking about the whys, his new resolve, making it all up,
while he could practically hear the other man's mind chanting tro-hu-ble
with the co-ps. Looking at the list of replacement therapies they offered
and which he, being a doctor, might choose in consultation with them.
Vigabatrin? - he did realize that was an anticonvulsant, didn't he, Dr.
House. Yes, some studies showed it curbed addiction, no, they weren't up
for experiments. Well maybe they should try something new sometime - not
everyone's will was as hard-tempered as their attendants' steel-tipped
boots. So, buprinorphine. Yes, they might as well tell him to take two
aspirin and call them in the morning. A smile and a shrug.

Then the real check-in, peeling off the layers of his privacy, as he moved
deeper in, from reception to rec to the tiny room he would share with
someone hopefully worse off than he was, because it would make the guy
leave him alone. Becoming entombed.

Another first session, with the therapist assigned to him, who
unquestionably was not going to talk hockey with him every day, poking
around in his brain, then Wilson stood before him in the rec room, looking
like he might slap himself to wake himself up. More faces, Cuddy looking
simply relieved, then his babies again, all cooing-quacking lost without
him. He tried to concentrate on the case they brought. Alone again, he
looked up and Dani stood there.

It was as though he woke up, reality rushing back in. The way her hair
curled, the tip of her nose still red from the cold. How he loved that.
The rec room rushed in, shiny and yet shabby with the chrome smell of
despair. The immensity of what he'd just done.

He'd pulled a table to the window and sat on it (it was going to be his
spot, he could tell) and she sat across from him cross-legged. She didn't
have much time, had to get to work, because it had been late when she
called Wilson and found out. No accusation in her voice.

"I didn't know whether to come," she told him. "Whether you wanted me
here."

"Dani, this is going to get ugly." He saw her almost smile. "Go ahead and
say it. You've gotten used to ugly in the past year."

"I've gotten used to feeling things I never felt before." Her finger
stroked his bare foot stretched out on the table. Miles between them to be
bridged. "I just have to know if it will help or hurt if I come see you."

"It will help." Oh god, please come see me.

She told him more about Tritter, things he felt pretty sure she'd tried to
tell him the night before and which he had been too busy making an ass of
himself to pay attention to. He didn't want to think about that, the
things he'd yelled at her. He listened to her story about the man in the
baseball cap. Alarm bells went off in his head.

"Doesn't sound like a cop. If he is, he needs to hit the books on
undercover work again. He didn't know how to follow our car without being
seen. And a turquoise cap when you're trying to stay inconspicuous - now,
that says world-class bumbler if anything does."

"He must be Internal Affairs, Greg. He says Tritter's done something bad."

"Damn tootin'."

"I'm pretty sure he means before you came along. If he's not Internal
Affairs, what is he?"

"Who knows what Tritter's messed up in?" The irony of it made him want to
throw his cane across the room. It was all more complicated than he'd
thought - maybe even dangerous - and he'd locked himself up in a little
set of rooms, pledged not to leave for weeks, while she faced
god-knew-what out there alone.

"I'm going to see Tritter again," she told him. She had her stubborn face
on, the one that said she dreaded his response but wasn't going to back
down. "You going into rehab changes everything and I have to make him see
that." At his expression she added: "Not to - sleep with him. He likes my
company. I'm going to talk him around." So wonderfully naive.

"Just be careful." He had to make her hear the alarm bells. "Look,
if...something happens, some situation comes up - you do what Tritter
tells you to." He ignored her stare. "I may hate him, but I assume he's
good at what he does. He can protect you physically." She nodded.

Then she was leaving. He took her hand and pulled her back. "There's one
more thing." He didn't know how to start. "You're the fourth person to
ever - know, Dani." She knew instantly what he meant. "I've never told
anyone about my childhood. Not Wilson, not even Stacy, and it has to stay
that way." She hugged him. "Please."

"Black hole," she whispered in his ear. It was their half-serious code for
things he'd told her that had to stay secret, usually concerning matters
that would get his medical license revoked.

When she was gone, he took out his cell phone, called the main Princeton
police department and asked for Internal Affairs. No, a voice told him,
they would certainly not divulge any information on the phone as to
whether a particular officer was under investigation. A woman's voice,
which softened when he turned on the charm. Michael Tritter? She couldn't
hide the hint of surprise. Did he want to report an irregularity? Would he
like to leave his name? He hung up.

So Turquoise-Cap likely had nothing to do with the department. He stared
down through the window onto the back parking lot.

Be careful.

****

Then the days stretched before him, nauseating group sessions and
nauseating time alone. Dani came as often as she could, numb sympathy
replacing the shock, he knew, once she saw how bad real detox was. On the
third visit she found him in bed in the middle of the day, in his shorts
and unwashed, and he caught the look of dismay she quickly hid. He needed
a spy. He had always taken care to keep a few nurses in reserve whom he
had never been mean to, ones who would do him favors when he needed them -
rescheduling an operation or just covering for him when he left clinic
duty early (they formed a microcosm of dissent among the other nurses when
he overheard conversations: "I don't know what you're all talking about -
he's so nice"). He tapped one of them now, a twenty-something in
reception, whose smiles had always been warmer than their little
pleasantries called for, and who promised to call him back on his cell
phone whenever she saw Dani come in. It gave him time, while she rode up
in the elevator, to get ready for her: throw on clothes that were clothes
by definition and not underwear (sixty seconds), comb his hair and brush
his teeth (twenty seconds each), hobble - gasping and pushing aside anyone
who got in his way - to his table by the window, where he would lounge as
though he'd been there for hours, all timed to the moment she stood before
him, as she did now, and smiled.

"You look like you're feeling better."

"It's washing out of the system." Repressing the shakes was killing him.

They talked about nothing when she visited. He'd told her about his call
to Internal Affairs; she'd told him Tritter refused to accept that the
rehab meant anything, that she'd responded by telling the bastard they
didn't need any more `talks', though he'd called her twice since. The
subject of Tritter required strength he didn't have. And so they talked
about intrigues in her dance troupe, who was sleeping with who, things the
ducklings had said.

She leaned her head on the window frame (she had shadows under her own
eyes, he realized, the strain of worry showing). "You have a grand view of
the back parking lot."

"I watch the contents of the dumpsters wax and wane. Actually it gets
interesting. `Rear window' a la Hitchcock. I'm getting to see who smooches
who before getting in separate cars and driving home to separate spouses.
And, boy, if anyone dumps a body in one of those dumpsters, I'll be the
first to know." He was trying to light a cigarette, but the lighter had
grown to ten times its normal size or his fingers had shrunk. The lighter
clattered to the table and when he twisted for it, he knocked the
overflowing ashtray to the floor. Others in the room turned.

The shadows under her eyes deepened. "Greg."

"I'm having a - bad hand day." She saw the shakes then; he couldn't hold
them back.

He explained to her that it wasn't going as well as she thought. "The
nights are bad." She was rubbing his hands, massaging them, as though that
would help. "I wish so much you could be here then." He sounded pathetic
even to himself. He hadn't wanted her to know that truth, how bad it was
when she left each day.

She looked straight at him. "Let's go to your room."

She was worried about his roommate coming in. Not a problem, he assured
her, rich white kid who stayed at the computer in the media room all day,
a kind of rasta geek with a booze problem and parents paying a fortune in
rehab to prove their son hadn't inherited their weak-character genes.
Locks? Not on these doors, babe. He propped a chair under the handle for
her; wouldn't keep out the big guys, he said, and when he turned she was
already undressing. Always a rush, the way she pulled her top over her
head in one smooth motion and there they were, nipples standing out half
an inch, so dark against the pale skin. The way she lifted his shirt to
kiss his chest and drew his swelling cock out of his loose pants. The way
she took it inside her, already wet. The bed might as well have been an
army cot, as shabby as the rest of the place. It creaked alarmingly. She
held her hand over his mouth again and he wanted to tease her, to say
Prude, but he could only gasp Oh god oh jesus why was it always so strong
with her when he came, as though his groin could never hold it. He came in
his fingertips and in the top of his head. All the pain went away, the
despairing surroundings, everything except her eyes and lips there below
him.

Afterward he leaned against the wall behind the bed and watched her dress.
There was something he had been putting off telling her.

"I didn't mean what I said."

She turned. He saw she knew what he was referring to, as though she really
did read his mind. It had lain between them, it lay between them there now
on the bed: the fact that he'd made her cry so hard she'd passed out.

"Yes you did," she replied. "People always say what they really think when
they lose control."

"No." Barely a whisper.

She tried to smile. "I'm not smart, Greg." He was shaking his head.
"Dancing doesn't call for a lot of brains. Actually that's - one good
thing about your leg." The little look she gave him was frightening. His
words had hurt her worse than he thought, he realized. "It makes us equals
- you're the intellectual one, and I'm - the physical one. Superior to you
in that way at least, because you're a cripple." She'd never used the word
before. It sounded like it hurt her mouth. It occurred to him what she was
trying to do. "Not that I like the leg. I hate it. It's ugly as hell. I
hate having to wait for you on stairs, I hate the way people look at us
when we walk in a place." (Yes, that was what she was doing.) "The time we
got caught in that downpour, I thought hell I'm going to get soaked just
because of him, and then you told me to run on ahead for cover and when I
did, I had to feel bad about that too." Another half-glance his way.
"Sometimes I wish you had let them cut it off back then. At least with a
prosthesis you could dance with me."

What she was doing was trying to hurt him, as deeply as he had hurt her.
The attempt was pitiful and endearing. She was so bad at it she couldn't
even look him in the eyes while she said it. It made him want to cry.

She was standing. "I have a costuming appointment in the morning. I'll be
by in the afternoon. Okay?" He nodded. She kissed him again, not looking
at him, and then she was gone.

****

"He says I remind him of his ex-wife."

"I'd like to see that wife - as if Tritter could ever have rated anything
like you."

She leaned back against the metal cabinet they'd drawn to the foot of the
bed to block the view, geek roommate having almost walked in on them the
day before. She'd put her sweater back on and it formed a cave around her
hips. He could look straight up it, to where her thighs rested slightly
apart, the bush of her hair still glistening with their fluids. He felt
like he could have another go.

"Not sure what exactly reminds him," Dani mused. She shifted her legs and
he felt warm. "She didn't sound like me from the description - more like a
blond bitch."

"But he's getting mushy-sentimental with you. Ex-wife reminiscing is a
good sign. I think." He still wasn't sure how he felt about Dani
continuing her quicksand game with the cop. They'd been out again twice,
she'd told him. She thought Tritter might be opening up to the idea of
coming to see him in rehab. Right, he'd answered, just as soon as he'd
finished arranging the evidence hearing.

"I have to go." She stood and pulled her panties on. In the harsh light
she seemed thin and he wondered if she'd lost a little weight. He'd
noticed the fingerprint-size bruises on her upper arms she often got from
the male dancers' holds. She bruised so easily that he'd done it himself
sometimes, had lain beside her after sex and noted with shame the prints
just starting to darken from where his own hands had clutched her in the
flush of orgasm. And yet they seemed so many now. As though she were
bruising more easily, her body showing the toll that circumstances were
taking on her mind. He felt bile in his throat from the trap he was in,
his little set of rooms.

"You're being careful, aren't you?" he asked. She glanced at him. "Have
you seen Turquoise Cap again?"

"Last night. He was watching from down the street when I left the
restaurant with Tritter. He didn't have the cap on. Maybe he's realized it
makes him stand out." She paused. "I'm starting to think you're right,
Greg, that he's not a cop. He seemed so - young when I talked to him.
Hard, but...unprofessional. If he didn't look so ragged, he could just be
some blond kid in college somewhere..." Her voice trailed off. She was
staring away, with a far-off frown. "Oh my god."

"What?"

"I thought he was familiar the first time I saw him." She turned to him.
"Oh god, Greg. I just realized where I've seen Turquoise Cap before."

****

Rasta geek was happy to help. Hacking into police records took a single
call to a friend for a list of codes and five minutes with the computer in
the media room. Roommates could be helpful after all, he thought. When
Rasta - Josh in the real world - was finished they stared over his
shoulder at the mug shot on the screen.

"The resemblance is so obvious once you know," Dani muttered.

"So this is - like - the guy you're in rehab about?" Josh asked.

"No," he told him. "That would be his dad. This -" he indicated the mug
shot, its blond baby-round face staring terrified into the camera - "is
the son the bastard sent to prison for drug dealing."

"Oh cool." Josh called up more screens. Blake Tritter, arrests since the
age of sixteen, always minor possession, until the day he was caught in
college being generous - for a small fee - with his personal supply of
ecstasy and GHB.

Dani's hand on his arm tightened. "Tritter pursued the drug-dealing
charge, Greg. His name is on all the reports."

The taste in his mouth was worse than bile. Dull leaden hate.

"Looks like he pushed for the five-year sentence too," Josh added. "Little
thing like this - just sharing around the love - might get you six months,
but look at this court transcript." They all read in silence how Detective
Michael Tritter had introduced evidence that one of the college students
being sold the drugs was only seventeen. "Delivery to a minor. Made the
sentence go up." Rasta Josh seemed to know a lot about it.

"Why would he do that to his own son?" she whispered.

He flashed on an image of the kid as a teenager, fights with cop-dad, for
whom snorting toking Blakey represented nothing but failure. Tritter would
have been sick of the whole thing or he might have had some idea of
turning his son's life around by consigning him to hell for five years.
The son's bitterness had to be tremendous.

Josh was pointing to a date. "He just got out two months ago."

In which time he had caught up with daddy. A daddy who was too caught up
in the pretty woman at his side the last few days to notice he was being
watched.

He turned to Dani. "Don't see Tritter again," he commanded.

She was still staring at the screen. "I have to," she muttered. "He said
he might come here with me tomorrow to talk to you."

"Dani, listen to me." She finally looked at him. "We're dealing with two
fucked-up people here. The daddy's so play-it-straight he could have the
Empire State Building up his ass and never notice. Does this to his kid
and thinks he's the good guy. Which is so divorced from reality it borders
on deranged. And the son - who knows how twisted his head got in prison? I
need to know you're staying out of their way."

"You're the one who might go to prison, Greg. If I can get him to drop the
charges -"

"Tritter's not going to drop the charges against me! For one reason." Josh
and Dani were both staring at him. "Because I'm his son."

"What?"

"I'm his ersatz Blake Tritter, dammit. There's a reason he latched onto my
drug problem just about the time he knows his son is getting out of jail.
A son that doesn't contact him, so he figures whatever he was trying to do
failed. I'm Tritter's new project. He wouldn't back down on this thing
even if you slept with him, Dani."

Josh's eyes were wide. "So cool," he muttered.

"Oh, shut up. And thanks for your help. Now get that off the screen before
someone comes in."

She wouldn't listen to reason, though he argued for ten more minutes. At
the door she turned. "I can take care of myself, Greg."

"No you can't." 

His blunt assertion didn't bother her. She gave him her almost-smile.
"I've survived you for a year."

Not the same thing. He was shaking again and she held his hands in hers.
"I can't be your hero," he murmured. "If anything happened to you..."

"You're doing something heroic right now." She indicated the rehab center.
"I'll call you in the morning. Okay?"

****

Fog curled along the streets the next day, wisps of white blanketing the
cars that pulled in and out of the back parking lot. He could feel the
chill in his bones, as though the fog had seeped under the door of the
center, though he only sat gazing out at it all day from his high window.
Dani had called to say she was bringing Tritter by to talk to him, that
the cop had finally agreed it might change things. That she hadn't
mentioned to him what they'd discovered. He could still hear her
admonishment to keep his uncivil tongue in his head when they got there.
Which would be hard. If the jackass acted possessive with her in any way -
put his hand on her arm or called her Danielle in that gummy voice - he
knew he wouldn't be able to contain himself.

He gazed back down at the strands of fog growing dark. It was six. She'd
promised they would be there by five.

A car pulled in to the lot and he tensed. Dani and Tritter. He watched
them get out and head toward the door below him. The back door provided a
quicker way up to the rehab center and Dani had started to use it, though
it took her past ER, which she hated, she said, with its rows of
traumatized or dull-eyed patients waiting their turn. He bent closer to
the window to watch the two of them.

From the fog behind them a figure stepped from another car and slipped
after them. A man in a turquoise baseball cap, moving like an animal,
closing the distance between them fast though they hadn't noticed him,
until all three vanished from view almost at the same time below the
protruding arch of the door.

For a second he couldn't move. Then he was off the table. He had his cane
and was lunging through reception, the too-young male nurse on duty
shouting, "Dr House, if you've decided to leave rehab, you have to sign -"
but he only tossed back a shouted curse about signing the guy's ass, then
he was at the elevator, the door blessedly just closing, and he forced
himself through. The elderly couple inside shrank against the far wall
while he pushed wildly at the ground-floor button and yelled, "Come on!"
His cell phone rang.

It was his spy nurse. "Dr. House, there's something going on over in ER! I
can see that cop you told me to watch out for and everyone's shouting -"
She blathered something senseless. He wanted to scream at her that she was
a trained nurse, that she ought to be able to give precise information,
but his throat wouldn't work. "I can't see anything -"

Then the door opened on the bottom floor.

A crowd stood with their backs to him. Beyond them a man's voice shouted,
harsh, almost girlish. He shoved through.

Blake Tritter held Dani pinned to him, at her throat a blade. A scalpel,
he saw, he must have picked it up in an empty ER room as he slinked in
behind them. His thoughts felt sluggish. His heart beat too fast. Along
the wall patients crouched out of the line of fire of two security guards
who held guns pointed at Dani's assailant, afraid to shoot because they
might hit the victim. Dani's eyes were huge. He could see her gasping
breaths, her neck taut against the scalpel.

"You love her, don't you!" Blake Tritter's scream sounded unnatural, as
though he were coughing up trash. Yes I do oh god please. He realized the
guy was talking to his father. "She means something to you, doesn't she?
You wanna lose her? Will that hurt?"

He saw Tritter then. The detective had collapsed into a waiting-room chair
at the edge of the crowd. His eyes gazed at his raving son without seeing
him. The guy had just crumpled at the shock, as rotting-soft on the inside
as the marshmallow he looked like on the outside. So much for the cop
skills that he'd told Dani would protect her. Which left the two security
bozos, leveling their guns at her assailant and her. One moved closer.

"No!" He lunged from the crowd. "Put the damn guns down!"

Blake Tritter spun to stare, twisting Dani with him. The blade came closer
to her throat. Her eyes widened when she saw him.

"She doesn't mean anything to your dad," he shouted, then realized he
could speak in a normal tone, that the room around him was silent, holding
its breath. "He hardly knows her. It won't mean anything if you hurt her,
Blake." If you kill her. He took two steps and the guy tensed, his eyes
going to his cane. He let it clatter to the floor and lurched forward
another step. "It would be useless."

Confusion lay in Blake's face at this stranger who knew his name, who
risked approaching him, then he was yelling at him, at his father and the
crowd. "Useless? You wanna know what useless is? It's going to prison for
nothing!" He turned to his father now. "I begged you not to send me to
that pit - do you remember me saying that? I begged!" He seemed about to
cry. "You didn't care. They raped me so bad in there I almost bled to
death. I had to be put in the infirmary. It was the only way to keep `em
off me!" His hand tightened on the scalpel. "You think that was a useless
five years? Well, I want blood back now. There has to be blood! Do you
hear me?"

"You're in the ER." The kid's head jerked back to him. "Plenty of blood
here. All fresh and siphoned off into little bags." He was babbling; he
could hear his dad saying, Being the joker will only get you so far. "I
could go get you some."

It was the wrong tack. Blake Tritter's face turned pale with rage. "Oh,
no," he murmured. His voice was calm, entirely insane. His hand tightened.
"There has to be blood."

"No." Think of something. He tried not to look at Dani - he would lose it
if he did - but she was telling him something with her eyes, to stop
horsing around maybe - no, that she was planning to do something.

She stuck her thumb in her mouth.

Going infantile, his first thought, then he realized she was remembering
the night a week ago. She was trying to faint, puffing out her cheeks. If
she slipped down in a real faint, not faked, her attacker might not be
able to hold her, exposing him to the guns. The thumb trick, tried by
children everywhere, who were always shocked when it worked. What fainters
didn't know was that they were not out for minutes as they assumed, more
like five seconds, not enough time to even slump to the floor, just going
weak-kneed like she did now. Blake felt her slide and locked his grip, and
she was back.

"Don't try that again!" He brought the blade to her skin and a drop of red
appeared.

Angled chisel blade, reusable. Right there on her carotid triangle. His
eyes were playing tricks on him. The scalpel had grown. As though he
looked through a lens the world had shrunk to nothing except the tip of
steel nestled there in that bead of red. Impossibly large because he was
feet away so why did he think he could see the pulse of her blood there
too, as though he bent near to kiss it -

- he would wish the blade away he would stop time, anything -

He limped closer, ignoring Blake's warning hiss, the growing stunned
silence in the room, until he was close enough to reach out his hand,
slowly. "I'm going to take it," he said. Don't look at Dani. His
fingertips closed on the back of the blade and Blake yelled, "No!" He drew
his hand back. He could smell the street stink from him.

"Blake, it's him you want to do this to." He gestured at Tritter, who
looked like a blanched vegetable now. There was nothing there in the cop's
face anymore. He'd seen more expression on corpses.

"No!" Blake screamed. "Blood! I want him to see it!"

Blood. That was it, an answer. He held up his hand, palm open in a
traffic-stopping gesture. Simple enough. No shakes. The kid understood.
His eyes were wild with disbelief. He had to nod Go on. Then the scalpel
came up and slashed his palm from top to bottom. The pain lanced through
his head. Dani's body flinched as though the guy'd done it to her, her
eyes wide on the cut he couldn't see. He felt his warm blood dribble down
his wrist.

"Not enough?" He extended his other hand.

Her wordless breaths in and out were saying please no. Blake lifted the
scalpel again and sliced his other palm, deeper this time, a burn of
carbon-steel through the volar, flexor. It caught at his throat and made
him gasp. When he made a fist blood seeped through the back of his
fingers, he could probably write the hand off but what the hell, at least
the kid's hand with the blade was away from her neck, pointed down at the
floor for a second. They might shoot now, he wouldn't care about the kid -
or he would because the guy still held Dani pressed to him, and the
security guards, he knew, had their jobs because they were no good at
police work, the kind who shot themselves in the foot when they went for a
leak. He prayed they would not try for a shot now.

Then the scalpel thudded to the floor. Blake Tritter was looking at his
father. At useless cop, useless dad, who didn't need to be broken by
anything his son did because he was already broken on the inside and
always had been. Blake understood it, he saw. The kid slumped, released
Dani and the guards moved in, pushing him to the floor.

She was in his arms. She was crying over his hands. Cameron appeared out
of nowhere (had the whole hospital come for the thrill?), wearing the
alarmed look you learn in med school a doctor should never show, and
called for bandages. The cuts were bad (she was trying to hold him and not
hold him, afraid of getting in Cameron's way, she was whiter looking at
his wounds than she'd been with a scalpel at her neck). With the right
suture the hands would be fine, he was telling someone. He was down on his
knees; he didn't know when that had happened. Behind him a guard shouted
at Blake Tritter - "You're going to jail for this!" - and the kid broke
into loud sobs, screaming that he couldn't go back to that place. Begging.
He didn't want to look. It reminded him too much of something.

Then different shouts rose. People were ducking. He spun, then threw
himself over Dani.

Blake Tritter held a gun. Because the dumbass guard had handcuffed him in
front - no, police work definitely not your thing, idiot - the kid had
managed to snatch the guy's gun from his holster. He waved the gun - more
screams from the crowd - then twisted it in spite of the cuffs, put it in
his mouth and pulled the trigger.

She was pressing her face to his chest, screaming that he'd been shot, but
he told her No. He told her not to look. She did anyway. The doctors
running to the body were only pro forma, he knew. "Is he still alive?" she
moaned. Not with that much brain matter on the floor, he wanted to say.

Beyond the hub gathered at the body he could see Mike Tritter. The man had
sagged to the floor in a twisted heap. Where there had been nothing in his
expression before, just the Cop Without a Face, there was everything now,
all the things you never wanted to encounter on a human face. He'd seen a
lot of despair, but none so bad that it sickened him the way Tritter's
face did. He turned away and held her close.

****

She kept seeing it.

They stitched up his hands and she saw again the way the blood had gushed
toward her from his upraised palms, so sudden and sure of itself. A
policeman questioned them and she saw again how Tritter had stared, his
eyes like running sores, at his dead son's body. Flashes, like heat
lightning, behind her sight, while they accompanied the cop to the station
to sign witness reports, and listened to a man with a sad voice, Tritter's
partner, she thought someone said, telling them the investigation against
Greg would probably be dropped without Tritter's impetus behind it.
Tritter, who would be leaving work for a rest. Then home, not even
stopping to pick up Greg's things from rehab. They stood in the living
room and another flash made her jerk, the feel of cold steel on her neck.
She fingered the bandage there, then the thicker bandages on his hands,
and he wrapped her in his arms, locked his arms around her so tightly she
could hardly breathe, but she wanted to stay that way.

"I keep seeing it," she told him.

"It will be that way for a while," he whispered.

"I keep hearing the things he said. The way he called prison a pit." She
felt sick. "I think that's probably the one thing that had gotten to
Tritter back when he sent him to prison - he knew what kind of pit he was
dropping his son into."

"But he did it anyway." Greg's face was hard. He seemed to have aged. "A
snake pit. His dad locked him up in a little room with snakes. Might as
well have turned the key himself." For a moment he seemed reminded of
something. "A little room. With pythons worse than any real python could
ever be." He suddenly shook himself, then he was muttering and crossing to
the phone. "What's Kerstin's number?" he asked.

"What? Greg, it's almost midnight."

"Your sister's number, dammit." She told him and watched him punch in the
number. His hands were shaking again. "Kerstin, this is Greg. Put Kevin on
the phone...well, wake him up."

Then he was talking to the little voice she could barely hear from where
she stood, its replies sleepy-confused, almost frightened. He was
apologizing.

"...and I couldn't have known you were that scared of snakes, you see
that, don't you?" A hesitant reply from the voice on the phone. "I would
never have done that if I'd known you had a phobia. For all I knew you
might have enjoyed it, you might have walked out of there with the thing
wrapped around your shoulders." Another question from the phone. "I just
want to know that you understand that, Kevin." With dismay she saw that he
had tears in his eyes. From Kevin's inaudible reply she could tell her
nephew was still confused. She wished she could take the phone from Greg
and just explain - Look, its simple, Kevin, he needs to know he's not a
sadistic bastard like his own dad - but he held the phone pressed hard to
his ear, intent on Kevin's answer. His eyes were closed. "I want to know
you forgive me," he said.

She remembered that Kerstin and Dan knew nothing about the snake incident.
She would have to call Kerstin back the next day and explain why a grown
man was calling a boy at midnight to apologize for scaring him with some
snake. But it didn't matter. Kevin's answer, which she couldn't hear,
seemed to satisfy him. He looked younger again, the tension around his
eyes ebbing. She eased the phone from him and told Kevin to go back to
bed, then hung up.

"He never thought badly of you for that," she told him.

"The pythons are everywhere, aren't they?" He gazed down at his bandaged
hands. "In me. In everyone."

Yes, she wanted to answer. We fight it and it comes back and we fight it
again. It's what people do.

It was what they would do together, always.

********

End of Chapter 7

Thank you all for reading this far. This was originally planned as 3 (!)
chapters and has become seven. There are still 2-3 chapters to go, but - I
never thought I'd say this - I'm getting a little burned out on Greg and
Dani's story, so the next thing I'll be posting is the start of a new
series, tentatively titled "The Falls" , a House/OFC crossover. It will be
a lot of fun, so please tune in. Thanks again!

  
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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.