this hurts me more than it hurts you.

Title: The Pain Chronicles (or Three Pain Management Programs that Didn’t Work)
Fandom: House, MD
Characters: House/Stacy; House, Wilson; House, Cuddy.
Rating: T?

A/N: This is not quite finished—there’s one more section to go, but I hope that posting it will force me to actually finish that last section. I have now missed more episodes of House, MD than I've actually seen, so concrit would be brilliant: which section did you like best?  Which least?  Why?  Loyal readers may remember Diprofaxon from another story, but as always, all medical information is completely and totally fabricated.

The Pain Chronicles

"Pain hardens, and great pain hardens greatly, whatever the comforters say,

and suffering does not ennoble, though it may led a certain rigid dignity of manner to the suffering frame"

Diprofaxon: (Hurts So Good)
"If  pain could have cured us, we would have long ago been saved"

House is drawn to Diprofaxon for all the same reasons he’d be drawn to a new sports car: it’s small, brightly-colored, German, and dangerous. The newest model in every sense, it’s featured in the Experimental Treatment column in the European Journal of Pharmaceutical Compounding that House is reading when Stacy walks into the kitchen one morning.  She recognizes the distinctive green cover.  All through his long recuperation, she’d ferried his many subscriptions to the hospital and then brought them home again, unread. Now he reads them at night, plowing through hundreds of closely-spaced pages in the wee hours. Physical therapy wipes him out—he comes home exhausted, picks at dinner, and falls asleep by 10:00 PM without saying goodnight.  Later, Stacy will slowly, gently ease herself down next to him, daring herself to reach across the five-inch ocean of rumpled sheet that separates them.  She falls asleep listening to his breathing and wakes up in the middle of the night to find him gone.  Insomnia is a well-documented side-effect of vicodin, and Greg was never a sound sleeper at the best of times.

“Reading anything good?”  she asks, more to fill the silence than in hopes of getting an answer. But instead of the grunt she expects, House marks his place with his thumb and launches into an animated lecture on Pfizer’s research division and a new non-opiate analgesic. 

Stacy is stunned by the sudden flood of words. Since returning from the hospital, House has been virtually monosyllabic. He’s even refused to take calls from his mother; Stacy’s nearly run out of lies to tell the poor woman.  And now she’s standing in the kitchen, a cup of coffee forgotten in her hand, and he’s talking faster than she can follow.  Her ears start to ring with the pressure of swallowed tears: in the weeks of tense silence, she’s forgotten how much she missed this excitable, curious, know-it-all Greg.

“So, that’s a resounding yes, then?”  he says suddenly, and she realizes hasn’t the faintest idea what he’s talking about.  “You—take me—to the li-brar-reee?” he repeats, obnoxiously slowly, like she doesn’t speak English. His hair is all spiky and he looks so thin in the scrub pants and t-shirt that have virtually become a uniform since he’s returned from the hospital.  Stacy can’t talk around the lump that suddenly forms in her throat, but she nods her agreement: she can deny him nothing now.

The public library isn’t good enough—he wants to go to the university. He commandeers a carrel from some undergrad and sends her off into the stacks with a list of call numbers.  Then he gets impatient, follows her into the stacks and sits on the floor, which is bad for his leg, taking notes on the backs of receipts he pulls from her purse.  Stacy excuses herself to go move the car; she’d double-parked because he’s still touchy about using handicapped spaces.  When she comes back, he’s covered a dozen slips of paper with intricate whirligigs that devolve into carbon rings and isopropyl groups.  The chemistry is so elegant that this treatment has to work.  It’s the closest thing to optimism that she’s ever seen in him. He bullies the work/study student at the checkout desk into letting him take the books, even though he doesn’t have borrowing privileges.

Stacy will never know how House cons his way into the Diprofaxon study.  Someone who suffers a rare-site infarction in early middle age despite the absence of risk indicators certainly can’t be an ideal candidate.  Moreover, the sort of people who run drug trials are exactly the sort of people Greg’s made a career of infuriating.  Nevertheless, within three weeks, there are pill bottles marked FDA SAMPLE, NOT FOR PRESCRIPTION added to the large collection in the kitchen.  The tablets themselves are about the size of the fingernail on her pinkie finger, colored a violent tangerine orange.  To be taken with food every eight hours, by mouth. For once, House doesn’t have to be coaxed into taking them: he’s religious about it, and will take any opportunity to explain the intricate details of the chemistry—why this medicine is better than any of the other medicines.  Stacy listens, but really, the only difference she notices is that he’s happier than he’s been in six months.  And then the night terrors start.

The first time it happens, she thinks he’s seizing.  Or, more accurately, being a California girl, she thinks earthquake!: his thrashing nearly spills her out of bed.  The third or fourth time, she gets too close and one flailing fist connects sharply with her cheekbone, snapping her head back.  Stunned, she sits on her heels with her hand pressed to her face, blood and adrenaline metallic on her tongue, until he shakes himself free of the dream.  He stares wild-eyed around the room, and she can actually see his eyes focus when they reach her and he connects the shock on her face with the smarting pain in his hand.  

“Did I hit you?” he asks quietly, and Stacy, too shaken to lie, simply nods.   He opens his arms and she crawls into them, pressing her burning face into his sweat-damp t-shirt.  “Shhhh,” he whispers, as though she was the one with the nightmares, “it was just a bad dream.” She can feel him shaking, his heart pounding under her hands.

The study is discontinued after a month or two; the drugs taken off the market when the patent fails to get FDA approval.  By that time, House has started sleeping on the couch so as not to wake her up: it’s a stranger’s courtesy. “Need your sleep.  Work in the morning,” he says, short and bitter, reminding her that he has nowhere to be tomorrow or the next day or the day after.  He never tells her what he dreamed about, nothing beyond "I was falling" or "I was drowning."

Years later, Stacy will run into a friend, a medical malpractice lawyer, at a legal conference and ask him whatever happened to those trials.

 “Diprofaxon? Too many side effects.  And then subjects started dying,” Andy shrugs, sipping his complimentary merlot, “The FDA’ll ignore dry mouth and nightsweats, but once you kill off your subjects, the jig is up.”

“People died? It was a pain-killer!  What happened?!”

“I don’t really know the medical term,” Andy shrugged.  “Long story short, their hearts..uhm…exploded.”

Someone else wanders over to ask Andy about his new vacation home and the conversation turns away.  Stacy finds herself alone, standing by the cheese platter, feeling sick. 

Overdose: (Permanent Solution, Temporary Problem)
"The worst pain a man can suffer: to have insight into much and power over nothing."

Wilson rushes to the hospital so quickly that he leaves the house with nothing but his wallet and his car keys stuffed into the pocket of his winter coat.  For three hours, he has nothing to occupy himself with except a Styrofoam cup of truly atrocious coffee from the machine down the hall.   He doesn’t even know it’s three hours because he didn’t stop to put on his wristwatch. Half a dozen times, he gets up to find a trash can and dump the coffee, but he always turns back at the door: he doesn’t want House waking to an empty room. And then, finally (at 4:27 AM, though Wilson doesn't know that) House does come to. The scariest part of the whole night—worse than the phone call, worse than the subsequent argument with Anna, worse than finding his friend back in a hospital bed—is that first moment when House opened his eyes.  Blank, cloudy blue, they track past Wilson without a hint of recognition and continue around the bland hospital room.   Wilson will always believe it's the well-known clinical surroundings rather than any familiar face that bring House back into himself.

 “Hey,” House observes, finally, sounding thin and frayed. “It’s you.”

Wilson suddenly feels a thousand years old; he’s so tired, he has to remind himself to breathe.  “Yeah, it’s me.”

Clumsily, House rubs the sleep from his eyes, a childish motion somewhat impeded by the IV tapped into the back of his hand. “Well…you’re here…guess this isn’t heaven after all.”

“That’s not funny.”

“Y’okay,” House mumbles, hoarse and far too agreeable, his eyes already drifting shut again.

“Hey!” Wilson snaps, leaning over to give House a sharp shake.

“Nnnn?” his friend surfaces again, swimming up from his drugged sleep.

“You’re at the West Windsor Township Hospital.  You overdosed,” Wilson says bluntly.  That’s enough to bring House into bleary wakefulness. 

“Huh?”

“The tox screen showed alcohol, dextromethorphan, and at least two corticosteroids,” Wilson continues in the calm, measured tones that he used with all of his patients.

House looks at him as though he were speaking a totally foreign language. He opens and closed his mouth a few times, either confused into speechlessness or suddenly aware of the burning in his throat.  Getting your stomach pumped with do that to you, Wilson thinks unsympathetically. 

“How…here?” House manages at last.

“You tried to call 911,” Wilson says—and for the first time all night, House looks startled rather than simply confused. “Or at least, you dialed and then dropped the phone, which is enough to have the dispatcher send someone to check on you.  You don’t remember?”

House shakes his head mutely.

“Any of it?”

Head shake.

“The EMTs didn’t have enough time to bring you to Princeton-Plainsboro, so you ended up here.”  Wilson hopes that means something to House: West Windsor borders Plainsboro Township—if you’re too far gone to travel from one to another...well, then you’re pretty far gone. 

House drops back onto his pillows, staring up at the sound-muffling industrial tiles on the ceiling.  Wilson watches his profile, watches him blink, swallow, wince.  “Water?” he relents, offering a cup of half-melted ice chips, but House simply shakes his head again.

The room stays silent and Wilson meditates on the surprise that had flashed across his friend’s face when he’d mentioned 911.  “I’m gonna find the shift nurse, let her know you’re conscious.”  Wilson stands up and attempts ineffectively to straighten the wrinkles out of the day-old shirt he’d grabbed off the floor when the call came through. One last time, he pauses in the doorway.  “I want you to tell me it was an accident,” he says, businesslike and unemotional.

Startled, House turns to look at him. “What—?”

“Tell me,” Wilson instructs slowly, “that it was an accident.”

House’s eyes skip back to the ceiling.  “It was an accident,” he says, his shredded voice equally impassive.

Morphine:  (Mr. Blue)
"There is no coming to consciousness without pain."

House is too tall for her to do this sitting down, so Lisa Cuddy has him stand, braced with his palms flat on the paint.  She keeps waiting for him to make a joke—something about how she has him up against the wall, right where she’s always wanted him—but her office is silent.  There’s just a faint, dry click in his throat when he swallows and, far away, the sound of someone paging Dr. Miller, Dr. Miller to Admitting, please.

She folds up his shirt, pinning it with one hand while the other hand busies itself with prepping the injection site and arranging the morphine booster. It would be easier to have him take it off completely, but she’s not going to have Greg House standing shirtless in her office. She'd never hear the end of it.

“Not allergic to iodine?”

“No.”

More silence.

Years of walking with a cane have left the muscles on the right side of House's back over-developed, the left side compressed, his shoulders no longer perfectly level.   It used to be the other way around, she remembers: he came to Michigan after a few semesters of rowing with the Hopkins varsity and had to correct a decided port lean. He’d finished his residency by then, gotten a summer gig TAing for Dr. Nahral while he completed the coursework for his second board certification.   Which is to say, ‘Gregory House, MD’ was listed as the TA on the course syllabus.  Naturally, he never attended lectures and his attitude toward office hours then was like his attitude toward clinic hours now.  Cuddy remembers going to the tiny office shared by the med school TAs; she found TAs for three genetics classes, but no Greg House.  She’d left him a note asking when he’d be in; she had questions about the June 10^th lecture. 

A week later, having received no response, she returned to the office.  “He’s not here,” one of the other TAs said, pointing to an envelope on House’s empty desk, “but he left you a note!”  The note was written on the back of her own: Top left-hand drawer, it said. She opened the drawer and found the course textbook with a sticky note: Read the book.

She’d complained to Dr. Nahral, but the only response was that now House left ‘out-of-office’ messages on his abandoned desk: “in the Immunology Lab,” or “in Marshall Hall.”  Lisa would go to the lab, only to be told that House had just left for the library.  She got to the library and found a note on his reserved carrel saying that he’d gone to lunch.  Furious, she went to the dining hall—and then realized that, having never actually seen Greg House, she literally couldn’t pick him out of a crowd

After that, she’d given up, formed a study group, figured out Dr. Nahral’s arcane lectures on her own. Then, one day halfway through the semester, she heard a from one of the TAs who shared House’s office that someone else had heard that Gregory House had been spotted down by the rowing team’s boathouse down on Lake Shore Drive. Everyone seemed to know about him, though no one actually knew him.

Lisa had gone down to the splintery dock and waited in the July sun, determined to catch the elusive Dr. House.  It was a hot and empty afternoon: even the rowing team didn’t practice here, the lake notorious for treacherous eddies that would pull you under and never let you go.  She’d just about decided that this was another wild goose chase when she saw, far out on the water, a tiny smudge that grew into a blot that grew into an impossibly narrow rowing shell.

She waited until the tall sculler piloted it back against the dock; with one oar on the dock and the other in the water, he started tossing stuff at her feet—water bottle, balled-up t-shirt, baseball cap with the Hopkins blue jay logo.  “Are you Greg House?” she demanded when it became evident that he planned to ignore her.

He added his sunglasses to the pile and looked up at her, his eyes the same electric blue as the summer sky. “Laura Cuddy, I presume?”

“Lisa,” Cuddy corrected.  “How did you know?”  she asked, before she could stop herself.

House looked like he got that question a lot.  “My fellow academic helots.  They remembered your hair.  And, uhm, other…” one eyebrow quirked up, “endowments.”

Cuddy crossed her arms over her chest and glared. 

“Hey,” House held up the hand not balancing his oars. “Geneticists are pigs, what more can I say?  C'mere.”  He waved her closer and she walked to the edge of the dock. 

“Closer.”

She leaned in.  Before she knew what was happening, he’d dunked a hand into the water sent a glittering arc of cold Lake Belleville splashing onto her.

Lisa stumbled back, sputtering.

“Better,” House said approvingly.  Which is when she remembered she was wearing a white T-shirt.

“It’s 3:30,” Lisa growled sourly, hunching her shoulders.

“Oh, goodness. How time flies!”

“You’re supposed to have office hours from 2:00 until 5:00,” she explained between gritted teeth.  “What are you doing here?!”

“I’m fixing my port-side lean, Laurel,” House said, sighing like this should be obvious to anyone with two brain cells to rub together

She didn’t have the faintest idea of what he was talking about, so she just stared at him, tapping her foot. 

House sighed again, exasperated at her stupidity. “During my callow youth, back in the Land of Pleasant Living, I used to row on the port side.” When he saw this meant nothing, he elaborated: “So I tend to lean left when sculling.” He sat up straight, miming a few strokes, “Makes it hard to steer.”  Lisa found she was watching despite herself.  It was true: he did pull slightly harder with the left-hand oar, the muscles tighter along that half of his back.  It was, she found herself thinking, a nice back.  Nice back flowing into a nice….suddenly, she realized he was looking at her.

“Well, you’re supposed to be in your office,” she snapped, a little flustered.  Those eyes looked like they could read her thoughts.  “In case students have questions.”

“Lisa,” he said, so seriously that she suspects he’s known her name the whole time.

“What?” she demanded, already defensive, but he didn’t seem to be teasing.

“A lot of the time—as a doctor, most of the time—information is not going to walk right up an introduce itself.  You’ll have to track it down on your own. And it’ll be a lot harder than following me from campus to the lake.” He scrubbed a hand through his hair. “Now, what was your question?”

Again, she stared, unsure of what he meant.

“You came all the way down here—you do have a question, right?” House asked, and the annoyance returned to his voice like it had never left. 

Suddenly, Lisa was annoyed, too.  Annoyed and very aware of her soaking shirt and her incipient sunburn and all the time she’s wasted trying to find this condescending jerk.  She stepped closer to the water, edging one foot between the dock and the blade of his oar.  “I was wondering,” she said sweetly, “how well you can swim.”

Greg House thinks fast, she’ll give him that—almost before she’d finished the sentence, he’s thrown out a hand to catch the dock.  But he’s not quite fast enough: before he can get any purchase, she’d kicked the oar up, unbalancing the fragile rowing shell and sending House and his smirk into the lake.

“Any day now,” House says snidely to the wall of her office.

“That’s really not a tone you want to take when someone’s got a needle an inch from your spine,” Cuddy retorts, but there’s no heat in it.  She’s distracted, wondering if he remembers the day in Ann Arbor when she followed him down to the dock.

“Ready?” she asks, realizing that she can count each vertebra and all of his ribs. She’ll have to get Wilson to make sure House eats more at lunch.

“Born ready,” House mutters and for a minute, he sounds like his old self.  The Greg House she knew back when she was still a student, idealistic and brave and practicing injections on oranges.

“This won’t hurt, but you may feel a little pressure,” Cuddy warns.  And—Goddamnit, she thinks—if I don’t sound just like a doctor!