Title Better Than Any Drug
Rating PG-13
Pairing House/Wilson; Wilson/Cuddy and House/Cuddy if you squint
Word Count 1,779
Spoilers This is written as a pseudo-alternate version of season three (only because I'm too impatient to wait for the season to end and start from there), and some events occur in the story, although a little jumbled up, so yes and no to there being spoilers.
Summary House is running out of vicodin and Wilson notices him limping again. Then House is forced to bond with a rape victim, drudging up bad memories and more pain.
A/N Well, here's chapter 4, which kind of took it's own direction. It feels a bit...off, but I did some tweaking that seemed to make it worse, so I left it alone.



House wakes up craving – no, needing, he tells himself – a vicodin, but Wilson is lying next to him; they've gotten over whatever they were fighting about. More accurately, they just didn't bring it up again. House tries to go back to sleep.

After several minutes, he can't stand it any longer and rises, hoping that Wilson won't wake up. He walks down the hallway, opens the closet, and rifles through the pockets of a winter coat, procuring a bottle of the white pills – there's four left. House rubs his leg and takes one; he has a feeling this isn't going to be a good day.

At breakfast, Wilson says, “You're favoring your right leg.”

“I like it better.”

“Is the pain coming back?” Wilson asks, almost as much for himself as for House.

“Don't you think I would tell you if it is?” House isn't sure what the answer to the question is himself. Wilson gives him a questioning look, then nods slightly and drops the topic.



It's a boring day at the hospital; somehow, God decided to give mortals a break and not deal out any interesting and deadly diseases, which House just knows is a way to punish him, because Cuddy ends up putting him in the clinic all day.

First, he tries to hide in Coma Guy's room, but Cuddy finds him and practically drags him back to the clinic. Then he attempts to keep an exam room occupied with just him and his Game Boy, but Brenda forces more patients on him.

If there is a God, he must really be mad, House thinks, because the clinic patients are exceedingly boring today – everyone either has a cold or an STD. He ends up taking two more vicodin to work through the monotony before lunch.

And then he meets Eve.



Cuddy already sees House making his way to her office; what could he possibly want now? But the terror is temporarily stopped in his tracks when Wilson goes over to him, and she has a hard time taking her eyes away from the scene. There has always been some special bond between the two men that was very apparent, but even from a distance and behind glass doors, Cuddy can tell there has been some kind of shift in their relationship.

Before he is stopped, House is very clearly bothered by something. Wilson puts a hand on his shoulder when he comes over, and that's the first hint. The naked worry on Wilson's face is nothing new, and neither is the silent exchange with their eyes. House breaks away, leaving Wilson behind with a hand on a hip and the other rubbing his neck.

“No, House, you're not getting off clinic duty, for the millionth time,” Cuddy says when he finally makes it to her office.

“I need someone to cover a patient,” he says completely seriously, capturing Cuddy's full attention. “She was raped. I'm not the right doctor for her.”



“Now, why, exactly, do you want me?” House asks the patient, Eve; after Dr. Stone had been sent to work with her, she took a bottle of pills, had her stomach pumped, and was put under suicide watch. House removed the restraints shortly after entering the room, because he knew she wouldn't do it again, at least as long as he was here, fulfilling her strange request.

“I don't know,” she replies after a long silence.

“Great.” House winces at the sudden shooting pain in his leg and rubs it; he took his last vicodin right after lunch, when Eve made the suicide attempt, and all he wants now is to go home and get some more pills.

“What's wrong with your leg?” She asks.

“You were raped and tried to kill yourself...but you want to talk about my leg?”

“Why not?” She answers with a shrug.



Wilson, under the guise of checking some files, watches House talk to the patient; he eventually notices Cuddy is there too, leaning against the wall across the room with her arms crossed and a deep frown, not making the slightest attempt to pretend she isn't staring at House. Wilson closes the file and walks over to her and neither of them speak for a few minutes.

He notices that House rubs his leg with an amount of force that suggests his pain level to Wilson. Wilson sighs; he hopes the ketamine isn't wearing off. He wants to optimistic, but House has a way of kicking the bright side out of a person, and knows that broaching the topic will just trigger another fight.

But why would he be trying to hide it?

“The pain's coming back, isn't it?” Cuddy says with a sigh.

“I – he...he says he's fine...” Wilson begins, but also resigns himself to a sigh. “But, yeah, I think it is.”

“Why now? After six months?”

“I wish I knew.”



House has just finished telling Eve about how he became crippled – almost every damn detail, she's so insistent. The memory of the event seems to irritate even his leg, and House wonders how he can get ahold of more vicodin, or maybe even some morphine. He pushes the rest of that train of thought away; he may need the vicodin, but doesn't and refuses to need morphine.

Eve sits, quiet, for a long stretch of time, and finally says, “I take it you're used to being betrayed by people you love.”

“Sure, go with that theory, if you want.”

“If that was the only time you've been betrayed, you would be over it, wouldn't you?” House rubs his leg so that he doesn't have to look up at her just now, not when so many memories are beginning to rise to the surface. “Do you think you can?”

“How did this turn into being about me?” He asks a little too sharply, then lowers and softens his voice. “Let's go with your idea. You're betrayed once, you'll get over it. If you talk about it, you'll get over it.”

She looks down at her hands, and House hears her breathe in and out slowly. Eve looks back up at him. “Who else betrayed you?”



At the end of the day, House sits in his office, blinds drawn, doors locked. Cuddy comes by, but changes her mind on doing whatever she originally planned once she sees the subtly pained look in House's eyes, and leaves. Wilson and Cameron both come, but House doesn't bother talking to them.

The first task House takes up is looking around the usual stashes for vicodin. Anything, something, even one, the pain is driving him crazy. He gives up and sits on the cushioned chair and closes his eyes, hoping he can drift off and leave the pain behind by sleeping.

Eve finally tells House her story, after wheedling more information from him and bringing up all kinds of unwanted memories. She had been raped by her boyfriend and a friend of his while at a party. Then she tells House that she had been molested by a relative when she was very young, and never told anyone until now.

And of all the people in the world, she chooses House to look at in that moment and ask how she can trust again.

House asks her why would she want to.

Sleep doesn't come to him; God is indeed pissed or non-existent, as House had decided earlier in the day. He goes back to rubbing his leg, although he knows he won't be enough for relief. If the pain went away long enough for him to ride the motorcycle back home...

People are untrustworthy; House learned that lesson well in his life. He stopped putting faith into anyone a long time ago – not in his father, mother, friends, and especially not lovers. House tells Eve exactly that, and she listens to every word of the secret and not so secret memories.

She nods slowly when he finishes, and says it would be nice to trust. He can't argue with that.

House makes his way to the door, treating his right leg with care, but not enough to cause anyone concern, and he is careful to avoid running into Wilson on the way.

As House sits on the motorcycle, another wave of pain goes through him, and wishes there were something that could make it stop.



When House returns home, he stops downplaying his limp and slowly makes his way to the closet, supporting himself on the wall. He grips the door's handle and hesitates for a moment, even though he already knows it doesn't matter. Before he takes out the cane, House again goes through the pockets of the coats, finding plenty of bottles, but no pills.

For the next hour, House paces around the living room, then up and down the hallway, and around the bedroom. Returning to the living room, House stops, looking at one of the shelves. It's still there, he tells himself. He just needs to get to it.

He brings over the ladder and climbs up with some effort. House panics momentarily as he feels around, finding only books he hasn't read for years, but not the box. In a fit of rage, he knocks several of the books over, resulting in a satisfying crash, and he finally finds it. House holds onto the box like it's a lifeline and makes his way down the ladder with even less grace than on the way up.

Once on the floor, House unlocks the box impatiently, and there lies his prize – one final shot of morphine; House reminds himself mentally to replenish the supply for the next time. He ties the tourniquet with far too-practiced ease, and prepares the syringe, almost feeling the relief already.

And it's when House is sitting there, looking like a crazed animal in the wrecked corner of the living room with a needle of morphine in his arm, that Wilson walks in.



“In order to
Say thank you to you
I must do it intentionally
But tonight with every breath
I can feel my death
As sure as I can feel my knees

You were my modulation
So that's what you will always be
We took each other higher
We set each other free

Course, neither of us were wearing helmets
And our blood was just everywhere
And when the morphine kicked in later
The censors threw their hands up in despair
And that's when the truth came marching in
And promptly pulled the plug
But you were better than any drug
You were better than any drug...”

Modulation
~ Ani DiFranco