Work Text:
If you were to ask Dr. Gregory House, head of the diagnostics department at the Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital, what case had stumped him most, he would laugh and say there was no such case.
Press him a bit further, and he might mention the case of the man who was all but brain dead.
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One seeming normal Thursday afternoon, a body was wheeled into the ER. Bruised, battered and burned all over: the skin on one hand half melted, a long, pale scar on his neck, another on his shoulder, still more pockmarked skin all over. All faded and apparently healed- only some of the scrapes seemed recent.
Except the man’s heart sat still in his chest. His body was cold and unresponsive, and were it not for the distraught man who brought him in, they would have dismissed him as a corpse. But Lisa Cuddy was not one to turn away an employee of the Magnus Institute; not only were they some of the hospital’s largest donors, she had heard the stories that came out of there. Lisa Cuddy was a sensible woman, she told herself, but she found herself not wanting to take any risks when it came to the Institute.
“Oh, come on, House! It’s one EEG!” she begged.
“And a waste of hospital resources!”
She scoffed. “You can’t tell me you honestly care about preserving hospital resources! Just listen to me, and do your damn job! If the EEG turns up nothing, I’ll… I’ll cut your clinic duty for a month!”
House perked up. “I’m holding you to that,” he told her, and whipped around, barking at a bemused Foreman to wheel the man into the machine.
Unfortunately for House, his clinic duty remained on.
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Months passed, and the man remained unresponsive. Every day, the other man- tall, freckled and harried, would come in and sit with him for hours. Reading to him, telling him about what happened at the Archives where the Not-Coma Guy (as the ducklings had dubbed him) had once worked, or just stared at him as he lay dead in his bed. Occasionally, he would be accompanied by a brown skinned woman in a hijab. Aside from them, the man had one visitor- a short young woman with a nose ring clad in leather, who would talk to him a little, or watch him.
The young man became a familiar presence at the hospital. For the first month he would beg the doctors to tell him there was a change in the patient’s condition. His face would fall every time they gently told him they were doing all they could. By month two, he had stopped asking, but would still talk to the ducklings as they went about their other patients. Cameron developed a particular fondness for the gentle young man (Martin, she discovered his name was) who was clearly enamoured with his not-quite-dead-but-also-not-alive boss.
The section of the whiteboard with the patient’s symptoms was never erased, even as they moved onto other cases. Cuddy had prevented word of the strange man getting out- she was close-lipped as to why, but there was a sneaking suspicion it had to do with a man by the name of Bouchard- or he would have been swarmed by researchers. As it stood, the man had his three visitors, and that was all.
Till all of a sudden, Martin stopped visiting. Basira, the young woman who accompanied him, would show every few weeks, but the soft-spoken young man seemed to have abandoned the patient completely. Basira’s visits dwindled out too, till finally, only Georgie remained.
The appearance of a new visitor set the ducklings (and House, despite pretending not to care), abuzz. The dark skinned young man came in and talked to their patient non-stop, though no one went in to hear what.
And then, a beep.
And another.
And once more.
The patient’s heart monitor had lit up. A wobbly line, but better than the straight one that had previously been there. A weak beeping began, and as Georgie walked in and shouted for the doctors, the mysterious visitor left.
And Jonathan Sims took his first gasp of breath in six months.