Christmas fiction.......

Damn, this is harder than I thought. I love A Christmas Carol but writing in Dicken's style is fairly time consuming!!!!!

A Dickens of a Christmas



Naomi Randolph was dead, to begin with. Her death and the fight for her unborn son’s life had been waged in a battle that elevated no clear winner but ensured his survival, after that it was all up to him. Still, Naomi was dead and this must be understood or nothing wonderful can come of the night, the story, or the magic.

Gregory House was a solitary creature, his time spent with himself, the hours of being his own companion, keeping his own council, made him wary of others. He was tall and thin, his features sharp as his tongue, his step as uneven as his temper and his frame, like his soul, canted from bearing his weight upon a cane for more years than he cared to count. He liked to edge around the world, observe it from the sidelines, keep an eye on it from afar. Most were happy to leave him to it, glad they didn’t have to deal with him but some looked after him with sadness in their gazes and the lone friend he possessed often despaired of every seeing House happy.

Christmas Eve had come to Princeton-Plainsboro teaching Hospital for the seventh time since Gregory House joined the staff. The first three times he had hung back in the shadows, watching party goers make merry, storing away sights, sounds and emotions like a hermit. The fourth year he lay on his back listening to James Wilson read The Fall of the House of Usher and wishing he could wall himself up as Roderick had done his sister. The last three years House had spent sunk in a vat of his own indifferent morass, fending off Wilson’s compassion and his co-worker’s pity with the weapons he had forged and mastered in the solitude of his own bitterness. Kindness waged battle with sarcasm, leaving the field bloodied and limping, concern fell victim to ridicule and slunk away in heavy silence, while despair – that last cousin of love – met its match in House’s disdain, its death rending the light from Wilson’s eyes.

Tonight Wilson, those shuttered eyes lowered and mouth bowed as if the weight of his words had crumpled him, made halting attempts to explain his lack of invitation on this usual field of celebratory battle. He wrapped his excuse around him, clothed in halting verse, speaking of family obligation compelling his attendance. House could tell his friend honestly did not wish to depart but couldn’t escape any more than House could escape the cloak of bitterness he wore. “So, anyway,” Wilson said, “Julie’s sister is in town and we’re suppose to go over.”

“You’re Jewish.” House felt compelled by some small sense of betrayal, some deep longing that Wilson would just try one more assault on his resistance, to point out the flaw in Wilson’s plan.

“I am, she’s not,” Wilson pointed out. His dark eyes lifted, meeting House’s in a plea for understanding, filled with regret and hope and a little bit of fear. “I don’t have to be Gentile to appreciate the idea behind the season,” Wilson pointed out. “It’s a time for sharing, for us to realize that other people are fellow travelers on the journey through life and not a completely alien specious to be ignored. House,” he sighed, “Christmas isn’t just one day a year, it’s a feeling we should all carry every day of our lives.”

“I believe the traditional response is “humbug”,” House growled. He hated sentiment, it stuck in his heart, festering until it oozed out in cruel words and unkind gestures. House knew people, he had observed and studied and watched and knew that no one was that good, everyone mouthed the platitudes of the season but when it came down to putting others first, it rarely happened and when it did there were ulterior motives involved. Wilson nodded, the sigh he couldn’t contain escaping like a prayer. He turned, shoulders slumped and House almost called to him, almost. But then Wilson was gone and House knew the clock would be his only companion and it would circle the dark hours brining him back here soon enough.

He glanced into the Diagnostic conference room. His three young doctors were gathered close together, their voices low but their spirits high. He could see the flush of color on Cameron’s cheek, the grin stretching Chase’s mouth and the warmth in Foreman’s eyes. They had a small feast laid before them, the bounty of grateful patients and small tokens of friendship each had presented to the others. House watched in his silent way, tempted to scatter them with his cane like three white birds, but they would leave soon enough, he knew. They had whispered their plans, the night out, the buzzing promise which danced in their shoulders and rang in their voices. He didn’t envy them the camaraderie, it had never been his way, but something in the easy manner in which they spoke reminded him of Wilson reading page after page as he drifted in a half world of pain.

“Dr. House,” Cameron’s quiet voice inched its way into the room, heralding her timid presence. “We were just leaving.”

“And yet you’re lingering,” House observed. “Afraid to be in the hall without a pass? I can write you a note to show to Cuddy.”

She made a faint sound, not unlike Wilson’s sigh, but shook her head and squared her shoulders, maybe not a warrior but willing to fight for her cause. “I just wanted to wish you a Merry Christmas.” The phrase echoed around the sharp confines of his office, bouncing off the chrome and glass, sliding along the blade of his cane, and lodging in the wintry blue of his eyes. House kept his silence, his icy response twisting inside out managing to suggest she be boiled with her pudding and buried with a stake of holly through her heart without uttering a word. “Good night,” she whispered and he watched her retreat to her companions, their gazes knowing but sympathetic, she one of them and he the enemy. They left in a flurry of coats and the rustle of paper and the joyous youth of expectation. House sighed with the fading of their footsteps and the return of stillness.

His own footsteps, the uneven cadence of cane and shoe, beat like a faltering heart down the empty hallway some time later. Home, it neither called nor answered, merely reflected the void inside him. It was just the place he could be as he wanted, the space he had carved from a hard world and lined with his music and his books, secured with his solitude and barred the world from with his bitterness. House avoided the trickle of staff assigned for this festive night, keeping to himself as he limped his painful way out of the building, refusing to meet eyes that might, if he had bothered to look, hold no pity or anger, but a certain respect. He crossed the pavement, his progress slowed by snow and the inane dread of falling he carried like added weight on his thin frame, curling him further over his stick. House hated the fragile state within which he existed, the weakness of his ruined leg that had defined the limits of his life. Never before had he granted one limb dominion over his life but now his crippled leg ruled as if by God’s right and he the supplicant begging for what it would permit.

His car, a sleek sedan bought his first year at Princeton-Plainsboro, bastardized by necessity and hand controls less than four years ago, sat gleaming under the salty yellow glare of the lot light. Frost glazed its windows and created a lacy pattern on the door handle making House swear, his utterances wreathing his pate like a halo before darting off as if too embarrassed to pass the time any longer. He ignored the scraper Wilson had placed on the dashboard and started the engine, heater revved all the way as CCR trumpeted the pleasures of lost summers. House traced the delicate rime’s fade with a weary eye, watching it wither like days already done. As he stared, gaze unfocused and thoughts drifting down by the river, a face seemed to form itself upon the glass, a gossamer countenance of pale oval and dark ringed eyes. Startled, House jerked back in his seat, his wooden companion toppled against the far window with a sound like teeth chattering.

“What the hell?” His heart thundered, quivering in his throat before slipping back into the embrace of ribs. House pulled himself from the car, balancing on his sound leg. “Hey! Who’s there?” He shouted but the salutation skittered away without return and he stumbled back inside, chilled and shaking from the cold and the strangeness. House drove, the tires crunching and the music no longer providing the lazy refuge it had but it kept him company the two miles he went. His condo loomed out of the dark, a darker unlit shadow among the merrily burning lights of his neighbors. House’s pride hobbled him as much as his bad leg and he climbed the stairs every night cursing the world and his taste in women. He reached his door, an unremarkable stop against the elements that battered for entry, be they natural or merely uninformed on the nature of the occupant. And as was fitting such an unremarkable barrier there hung an unremarkable knocker, an object he had seen every day since unlocking the door for the first time. This time, the mundane aspect no longer applied for the face he had glimpsed in icy reflection adhered itself to the metal and stared back unblinking.

Naomi Randolph, a woman whose death had allowed her son to live, had not crossed the awareness of House’s mind since the night he demanded the choice be made. It wasn’t that House did not remember the faces of all his patients, those who went to the grave as well as those who went home, but that his mind could not dwell on the loses to the detriment of those still in the game. The face which appeared in the mirror of the knocker was that of Naomi to be sure and House knew every curve and every angle of it though it was pale and the eyes fixed, unmoving as if at the moment of her death. Her long brown hair fluttered in an unfelt breeze, making the sight unnerving even to a man like House who doubted all but his own reason. He reached up, fingers questioning but reluctant and in that instant the face was gone, replaced by the sheen of streetlight on brass once again. “I must be more tired than I thought,” House murmured, shaking his head.

He let himself into the dim room, slipping into the familiar surroundings with a sigh, his cane thumping on the hardwood floor a moment before he dropped his bag and limped to the couch. It had been a long week, the never ending pain in his leg radiating upward into his back and shoulders until even the slightest movement made his breath catch. House reached into his pocket extracting his Vicodin, relaxing as the warmth that amber bottle had absorbed from his body clasped his hand like an old friend. He welcomed it with a gentle kiss, letting it slide down his throat and numb him with chemical arms. It had become his mistress, his companion, his champion against the pain which tried daily to overwhelm him. Wilson looked at the pills as a rival, his brown eyes wary and hooded every time he watched House’s ritual release and in truth Wilson had been usurped, the comfort he could give no match for that seductive embrace, those tendrils of oblivion Vicodin granted him. Wilson’s quiet desperation warned, spoke of treachery and the fickle nature of House’s new lover. House knew he flirted with disaster, but the dance felt so good, the relief hummed so loudly in his ear that it was all he could do to hear Wilson’s objections much less to act on them.

House sprawled on his couch in the boneless grace his tall thin body still possessed, blood carrying the drug to his brain, drowning out the incessant ache, his eyes closed against the lone lamp. Something, some slight disturbance not so bold to be called a sound but not so slight as to be called fancy, made itself known in the way things like that often did when a person was alone at night. At first he thought it no more than his imagination, the conjuring of tired body and exhausted mind but second by second it grew, impinging on reality and his ear with equal force. He sat, straining to make out the wispy pulse which now vibrated the air around him. It was a step, the sound determined yet airy, a faint moth wing beat against the surrounding silence. House held himself still, the sluggish relief his pill promised not yet materialized, and listened with a distracted interest.

He believed in things he could not see, but not in things unseen. Hippocrates’ son, he saw the effects, the body’s reaction to disease and pain and poison and death, he studied and read and knew all he could know but there was no way to study the soul’s existence even with precision instruments of measurement. House could not say one way or the other for his own death had been mercifully quick, a dropping away of pain and care, and the visions he had seen after were not ones he believed, at least not when he returned to his flesh and blood. So if spirits lingered, and ghosts walked, it was not in the realm of House’s understanding and he can not be held accountable for his not believing. And yet as he sat, half in numb embrace and half in agony some part of House knew – knew as even those who refuse to believe can know – that the thing which approached was no thing he had ever encountered before.

Step by step, the delicate sound changed, grew denser and more solid as it neared. A presence made its way up the steps as he had done only moments before, its thread lighter, more even than his own, but just as certain. It crossed the landing, not pausing to check the number or read the name printed above the doorbell, not hesitating to be sure it had reached its destination, just continuing on its way. House pushed himself up straighter, the breath in his lungs held captive by anxious muscles, his heart racing as if it wanted to fly to the door and bar the way. The step did not falter, its owner made no effort to press the buzzer or lift the traitorous knocker, it crossed the threshold and entered the room without permission from the man who stared in wonder at its arrival.

“Naomi!” House’s escaped breath rushed out, forming the name, declaring the identity, as if it knew and had known all along who drew nearer even before House consciously realized who he faced. Pale, her features the same icy shade they had been on the windshield, her dark eyes unmoving, looking neither left nor right but staring straight at House, Naomi advanced. Man of science that he was, House thought up two dozen reasons why he wasn’t seeing what he was seeing and then wished Wilson had been there to add another twelve. The apparition, if ghost it was and not tumor or lesion or symptom of slow insanity, moved inside, passing the bookshelves and piano without slightest show of interest to stand before House. He studied the sight for a full minute, his eyes taking in details even as he rejected their helpful attempt. She did not move, her chest did not rise and fall with the breath of life and she stared unblinking but for all her inactivity the garment she wore, that same thin gown she had been clothed in the last moments of her life, billowed and shimmered as stirred by the gentlest of summer winds. Her dark locks, too, fanned this way and that with charming effect though the fact he could see through her, read the titles of the books he had purchased a week before and tossed on a shelf to peruse at his leisure, caused House some disquiet.