Work Text:
Third month on the job and already Brant was bitter down to his bone marrow, pointlessly wishing that he'd taken the diagnostics fellowship in Hartford instead. Yeah, yeah, Greg House had once been a genius -- a legend, one of the greatest scientists of his generation -- and working for him even now would be a great way to kick-start a successful career. Everyone had read Allison Cameron's editorials in the NEJM, and from what Brant had heard, Eric Foreman was fast on track to becoming Dean of Medicine at Vanderbilt. It seemed that a few years of working under House was a sure ticket to prestige, or at least that had been the case years ago. But Jesus, was it really worth it?
He wasn't used to being pushed around. He wasn't used to being disrespected. Admittedly, Brant was pretty well spoiled: accustomed to the lifelong admiration and support of his family, teachers, classmates, and colleagues. People listened to him, people loved him. He'd been near the top of his classes all the way back to high school and hadn't even had to work that hard for it. Life had been easy -- even med school had been easy. Getting this fellowship had been easy enough; it was getting through it that might kill him.
Maybe having been Homecoming King wasn't so much of an asset when it came to working here.
Dr. Chase had sent Brant on a search-and-recovery mission at noon. He wouldn't have thought a loud, obnoxious cripple would be that hard to find in a hospital; between bellowing at nurses and destroying hospital equipment, House should have been easy to track. But thirty minutes later, Brant realized that House had been at Princeton-Plainsboro a lot longer than he had, and he obviously knew a few nooks and crannies Brant hadn't yet discovered.
He was about to go back to the diagnostics conference room and tell Chase to find House himself if his opinion was so damn important when he happened to glance into the coma ward. He stopped, stared, and then stuck his incredulous head through the door.
"Seriously?" House didn't even look up from his sandwich. "You eat lunch here?"
House raised his jaundiced eyes and looked Brant over. "Go away."
He'd never thought to wonder where House went for lunch each day. He'd just assumed House left the hospital. "They ban you from the cafeteria or something?"
House put the sandwich down and stared at him for a moment, his face oddly blank. Not as fast or as sharp as he used to be, not even as fast or as sharp as he was three months ago when Brant had started. He almost felt sorry for the old guy, but House's prickly demeanor made it hard to muster up sufficient sympathy.
"What do you want?"
"Chase sent me to get you. You weren't answering your pager --"
"And you jumped like the little lapdog you are. Why did I hire you again?"
Brant bristled. House hadn't hired him, probably hadn't even looked at his resume -- in fact, Brant was fairly sure House hadn't even known his name for the first two weeks he'd worked there. Chase was the one who'd called him in, interviewed him, shook his hand gravely and offered him the position, and now Chase was the one who did most of the work of leading the diagnostics department -- nearly all the work, actually -- while House sat in his adjacent office, playing computer games. What was Brant supposed to have done, just ignored Chase's request? Not only had the guy hired him, he'd been there forever. Dr. Cuddy was evasive but Brant had talked to some of the nurses, and Chase had lasted through at least five other fellows. The guy was like a barnacle; he just couldn't be removed from House's side.
And anyway, if things kept going the way they seemed to be going, Brant doubted that Dr. House would even be around much longer to write any fabulous recommendation letters to help him build his career. Currying favor with the next-in-command was a good career move.
"There are some x-rays you need to look at," Brant said, ignoring the question.
House looked back at his lunch. "I'm eating. He wants me to look at them, he can either wait till I'm done or bring them down here."
Or you could say goodbye to the stiffs and eat lunch where the x-rays are, in your office, Brant thought meanly. "Fine. I'll relay the message."
"Good boy," House half-crooned as he left.
Brant took the stairs two at a time.
"Did you find him?" Chase asked when he was halfway through the door.
"Yeah," he said, settling into a chair next to Jamison. She'd been there only a few months longer than he had. "He's in the coma ward, having lunch with the vegetables."
Chase dropped a stack of manila file folders onto the table and leaned heavily against it. Next to him, Jamison sucked in a breath through her teeth as if bracing for something, but Chase didn't say a word.
Brant looked around the room, then asked, "... What? Did I say something?"
Chase sighed, hung his head, and began straightening the pile of papers. "Just have some respect," he said in a low voice. "Those people are human beings. They're ... patients. Like any other kind of patients."
"Okay," Brant said slowly, his voice as pacifying as he could make it. "I'm sorry."
"You wouldn't talk that way about the maternity ward, would you?" Chase grabbed the set of films and thrust them into Brant's hand. "Take these down to him." Before Brant could offer another apology, Chase was out the door and out of sight.
"Would I talk that way about the maternity ward," Brant scoffed. "What's with him?"
Jamison raised her eyebrows but didn't look up from her Sudoku book. "I don't know. He's Catholic," she said. "Went to seminary school and everything. I think he still takes it pretty seriously -- respecting the comatose or vegetative or whatever." She glanced at Brant and then back at the puzzle. "What the hell House does down there every day, I don't know. Probably switches their tubes around or something, messes with them because nobody else ever goes down there and no one cares. The guy's like Dr. Frankenstein. It's creepy."
"You're telling me," Brant agreed, and then straightened the files in his hands and headed back downstairs.
House had finished eating by the time Brant reached the coma ward for the second time. He'd dumped his sandwich wrapper in a trash can and set up a small portable television on one of the occupied beds. From the tinny sound of jeering and shouting, he seemed to be watching some kind of daytime trash tabloid show.
"The x-rays," Brant said, unceremoniously dropping them into House's lap.
House's expression didn't change as he held each image up against the pale fluorescent lights of the room. "Sarcoidosis."
"Shouldn't we ask someone in Oncology?"
House tossed the films back at Brant like they were frisbees and turned back to the tiny television. "Oncology is staffed by idiots."
"Right," Brant drawled. Forget this crap. House ate lunch in the coma ward, for pete's sake. In a few months or years, he'd probably be joining them 24-7, at least for the short time it would take him to move from the coma ward to the morgue. Brant didn't need hospital gossip to tell him House's liver was shot. Respect for the dying, like respect for the vegetative, was overrated. "I'm sure none of the oncologists on staff know any more about sarcoidosis and not-sarcoidosis than you do. If it's all the same, though, I'm going to get a second opinion."
He turned to go, stopped himself, and then turned around to face the old doctor again. "And you know what? I don't even know why I bothered coming down here to ask you. You're supposed to be a hot-shot diagnostician, but you're losing it, House. I heard about you all through med school, even back in college. You were a legend then. You were someone to look up to, even with all the crazy stuff you did. Now you're just reckless and lazy. You don't give a damn about your patients anymore, if you ever really did."
In the silence that followed, he felt suddenly stupid. House wasn't responding; he sat quietly in his chair, feet kicked up onto an occupied bed, staring intently at Brant through yellow eyes. He seemed to be enjoying the criticism, which indicated that Brant had miscalculated somewhere. Was he too plaintive, too pathetic? Or was House just contemplating the best way to fire him?
Creepy. Jamison had been dead-on.
Maybe he'd lose his job over this by the end of the day, but if House was too lazy to hire anymore, chances were good he was too lazy to fire, too. At the moment, Brant didn't really care. Hartford would take him, he was sure of it. Maybe he'd even resign. He was starting to feel like this place was sucking the life out of him.
He turned to leave, but not before casting a glance at the chart attached to the bed on which House's TV sat. James Wilson was the name at the top. It was naggingly familiar, but not enough to ring any bells.
"I'm going to talk to Oncology," Brant muttered. "Have fun hanging with your pal Jimmy and the other veggies."
All the way out the door, up the stairs, and back to diagnostics, he couldn't shake the eerie feeling that House had been smiling at him.
He dropped the films onto the glass table in the conference room and heard them slide across the smooth surface. When he shuddered, Jamison looked up and frowned with bemused humor.
"What happened?"
"Nothing," Brant said. "He says it's sarcoidosis. He barely even looked at them. Then he told me Oncology is full of idiots and went back to watching Jerry Springer with the coma guys. Jesus," he swore, sitting down and turning plaintively to Jamison. "Doesn't this guy have any friends?"