Part Ten B:

Cooper's phone cheeped, gave Wilson an excuse to blink, to break the seizured stare between Hananda's quiet boldness and his own resentful recoil. He shifted his attention to watch her fish in the pocket of the scarlet hoody she'd thrown over her clothes, retrieve her cell and excuse herself. She hopped up onto the seat and climbed over into the empty booth beside them to avoid dislodging the injured Ben or House.

Wilson followed her progress, forcing a reprieve while she paced habitually back and forth across a patch of sunshine-tiled floor between the nearby tables. Her eyes flicked once toward their booth and once up at the large clock on the adjacent wall. Instead of numbers, there were inspirational words on its face: hope, pray, love, trust.

Would that I could…

Great. He was imagining being lectured at by a clock. A tickless clock, now he was listening for the sound of the mechanisms. Either the low-grade hubbub of the canteen overwhelmed it or its countdown to his imminent confession was silent. Only the hands moved inch by inch across his body – its body – its face – not his, not his! Jerking in a breath and hugging his cast to his chest to squash the slithering skin-recollection, Wilson stared hard at Cooper's black loafers. He tried not to visualise the suede growing damp in the puddles of sunlight.

Not again. Not again. Please…

"Ha!" The tail end of her conversation mercifully truncated the inexorable tilting of reality. In spite of the exclamation, authentic amusement warmed her voice. Her lips curled in a competitive smile. "You'd better believe we're on for next week, sister. I'm going to kick your peg-legged ass!"

A jingling laugh, louder than good manners encouraged, more contained than friendship required, closed the call.

"Was that Sam?" The wet white memory fog receded as Wilson swiftly searched over his shoulder for the buoyant blonde curls of his ex-wife approaching. "Is she—?"

"Not here." Cooper pocketed her cell and mountaineered over the booth-back to resume her seat with a light bump. "We," her gesture included Ben and Hananda, "Usually all play tennis on Saturdays. When you said you were coming I figured we could get the old college team back together for a couple of games. Then you turned up like this and I forgot about cancelling the court."

A fleeting recollection of friendly sparring in tennis-whites, sharing the scorekeeping and sports bottles of water, jibed with the thought of Cyclone Sam at his bedside. A small part of him wished she would come. He could breathe out, let her take over, subside into his shock and hurt, just sleep until he felt better. But whatever rights he had left to his own body, his choices, would be gone until she had fussed herself out.

He exclaimed rather harshly: "Does she know I'm here?"

"Not now." The cheer that had briefly infused Cooper's voice faded. "I said you'd cancelled for a patient and I had a hangover. Do I make a habit of dropping you in it?"

The reproach was as black and white as a film's flashback: the cops, the EMTs, Sam crying, Cooper lying for him…. Wilson dropped her gaze sheepishly.

"Sorry," he murmured, added: "I just don't think I could cope with—I mean, did you give her my love?"

Cooper half-circled her eyes toward the glass ceiling at determination to maintain the careful friendliness he and his ex-wife had crafted some years after the initial blame-game of the divorce had played itself out.

"Obviously." She reached for her spiked orange juice and took a sip, sought his eyes again. "And I picked your side, remember? You know you can say anything to me."

"To us," Hananda seconded.

Right. Wilson dropped his gaze to the white plastic cutlery haphazardly laid out in the centre of the pine table. Surrounded by curious eyes, he knew he'd been steered back to the moment where he had to dissect himself, to expose more pieces of his disaster case. It was almost worse than having to disrobe for the SART.

"Talk to us, Jim."

Ben's half-glance at House allowed for his inclusion in their closed college clique, but Wilson scarcely registered it. Cloistered between them, the canteen shrank to the size of a car.

The twins' rusty white Nova idled in the police station parking lot. Ben knelt on the back seat, gown bunched up around his legs. The low roof had knocked his mortarboard askew. He dug around in the Walmart carrier stuffed between two sets of black graduation robes folded up on the parcel shelf. He extracted a popper pack of aspirin, two bottles of coloured vitamin water, a packet of wet wipes and sat back down.

"Talk to us," he demanded, handing the wipes to James and the water to Meg. As she grit her teeth against a bad case of the shakes, he added: "Jim, what happened?"

"What did you do to her?" One hand on the steering wheel, the other clasped around his sister's wrist to monitor her rattling pulse, Kit apprehended James's worried eyes via the rear-view mirror.

His stomach lurched. As he mopped at the dried blood on his split lip, conflicting snapshots exploded through his head. The synchronous dive into soft pillows and hungry kisses. The head-spinning punch to his jaw – one – and – two – the sapphire ring that slammed into his eye, filled his vision with a blaze of blue that became the starched dark shirt of the detective. The man's voice was glacial: "So, you like to take advantage of vulnerable women, do you?"

James shook his head helplessly and felt the whole world slosh. He was still drunk, far too drunk, to make sense of this. He didn't know what had happened. What he had done.

Just as she had when she knocked on the door of the interrogation room, Meg offered a save.

"Wrong questions," she croaked from the front seat.

She seemed about to say more but had to double over, vomited into an old MacDonald's carton.

"Forget it." Ben leaned over the passenger seat. Kit had scooped his sister's hair back from her face; Ben took it from him, banded it loosely with his own hand. "And forget graduation. Let's just get them to a hospital."

"No!" Meg bolted upright, hair flying free in sweaty black rats' tails. She dragged the sleeve of the paper jumpsuit the cops had given her across her mouth. "No way."

"Meg, I know you don't trust other doctors, but you do not look well. Neither of you do." Hands on her shoulders, Ben included James in his troubled glance. "You can't show up to graduation looking like this."

"He's right." Kit looked as though he wanted to be sick too. "Dad's—I mean Jed's—going to be there. Don't give him an excuse to try out one of his pills on you."

Meg grabbed the stick to stop her twin shifting into gear.

"It isn't Jed who gives me the funny pills," she muttered.

Kit blinked at her, frowned.

"What?"

"Nothing." She avoided his eyes to fidget with the blue EMT blanket that was still draped around her shoulders. "I meant it's you he gives them to, remember? And I know I can't show up like this. That's why you," she rapped Ben's knuckles lightly until he sat back, "are going to give me the shirt, skirt and shoes you brought from the house. And you," she let go of the stick shift at last, "are going to drive to the nearest store so I can grab some make-up for me and an icepack for Jim's face. We're not going to the hospital."

"Meg," James started, certain that she, at least, should; but Kit cut him off curtly.

"Shut up. Please don't talk to her right now."

James met his chilly glance in the mirror again, was the first to look away. Hating himself for drinking too much, for losing his pants, for whatever he'd done thereafter to put that look on his friend's face, he reached for the door handle.

"Maybe I should get a cab."

"Maybe you should."

"Kit!"

Meg folded over again, swore, and retched into the takeaway carton. Not sure if it was shock or dehydration, his fault or hers, James shoved open the door into the sodden morning air.

"Jim, hang on."

Ben uncapped Meg's water for her. She golloped it gratefully.

"It's okay." James unbuckled his belt with hands that wouldn't stay steady. "I'll, um, I'll go call from the station—"

"Don't be so fucking stupid!" Meg wheeled in her seat and grabbed the ripped sleeve of his bloody shirt. Water slopped over the centre console. Glaring at her twin, she didn't notice. "Either of you."

Ben took the water from her, nodded reassuringly at Kit. He put the bottle in the cup holder and turned to Wilson, reached across him to pull the door closed again.

"Stay in the car," he said calmly, grasping Wilson's shoulder gently before he sat back. "No one's telling anyone to take a walk down the highway. We just need to know what happened to you two last night. There's a half-dozen rumours flying around from what the girls think happened, to what Sam's crying over, to what the scene cops said, and the campus police. We're freaking out here. Talk to us."

"Please," Kit agreed, his voice as sharp and fragile as a dropped mirror. "Jim, I've trusted you. I want to trust you. I don't want to believe what Heather and Tess told me a few hours ago. But it's ten after nine in the morning, we're sitting outside a fucking jail and they took away your shoes and keys and my sister's hurt – and I need not to imagine what went on between you, I need to know."

So do I, James thought, his brow bowing miserably under Kit's painful scrutiny. One minute he was being booked and accused of the unthinkable, the next let go with a warning about house parties and a dropped charge. The dusty dash and garish pink dice dangling from the mirror blurred and he passed a hand over his face, fishing for comprehension in a world that was still swimming in punch and endorphins.

He remembered glass after glass after glass; then lips and hands and realising it wasn't Sam; that someone, somewhere, had said over and over: no, don't and stop. Had it been don't stop? Or stop, don't?

Oh G*d, he couldn't remember…

Feeling ill, he darted shot a trembling look across the car. Could Meg? Worse, would she tell him? Because the police had had one account and then, as both she and he began to sober up, there'd been another. Had she lied for him? She must have done. Would she do it again?

"Kit, chill," she said, as James struggled to beg her to…or not to…or to undo what he feared he might have done. "I'm not hurt; I'm hungover. And Tess and Heather don't know what they think they know."

"Then tell me your side of it!" Kit shut off the ignition, startled everyone with an uncharacteristic smack to the steering wheel. "Because they're saying that you were too drunk to know what you were doing and that Jim knew that and that he…"

He broke off to stare at James, his expression torn between strained faith and livid disbelief. He wet his lips and confronted his sister, forcing the words out: "They're saying that he slept with you anyway."

His roiling eyes flicked to James once more in the mirror.

"They're saying that you did it on purpose."

"I didn't," Wilson answered at last, quietly. "Kit, I didn't do this to myself. But…I created the circumstances for it to happen. After my second patient died, Tania, one of her relatives asked to see her medical file."

"You didn't," Cooper groaned, though she'd guessed that he had.

Wilson nodded, began to arrange his cups and cutlery for something to occupy the part of his brain that wanted to spiral him back to that moment, rewrite it, relive it.

"I thought it would help her make sense of what had happened," he sighed. "So I said yes. I went downstairs to change my clothes – it wasn't the cleanest death – and to get the file. I asked her to meet me outside the staff room. She didn't."

Ben touched his upper back, curried his hand soothingly across Wilson's scapula.

"Go on," he urged gently.

Wilson stared at the pale surface of the table. Paper plates and cartons became locker blocks and benches, swathed in steam.

"I-I got caught off-guard in the shower room by her and by Tania's widow," he continued, his voice stuttering with the quickening beat of his heart. "They—"

In his head, the innocuous snap of the opening door cut him off. He had to clench his fists to stop himself reaching for House's hand, wishing upon false hope that he had been the one coming in.

"They—" Sweat broke out under his hair; the sauna-like heat of the shower rolled over his skin. He changed tack quickly, refusing to replay the events aloud. "It was like something out of a horror movie. That kind of anger, well, the last time anyone hated me that much, I swear it was graduation day."

Hananda tilted his head and studied him across the table with growing unease.

"Wilson," he said in a warning voice. "Tell me the only thing that you did was to give her that file?"

He was back in the car again, Kit staring at him. The accusation that he'd coerced Meg dangled in the air like a hangman's noose.

"I didn't. Kit, Ben," his horrified eyes swerved between them, "I wouldn't. Not on purpose – I swear—"

He faltered, realised he sounded as confused and unconvincing as he had before the cops. He palmed his pounding forehead again; his hand came away slick with sweat. How much had he drunk? And if he was simply drunk, how could he have done anything at all? It didn't work when he was just drunk…

Meg's voice dropped like the trapdoor below.

"Okay, so they're sort of right," she admitted grudgingly. "I had drunk way too much to know what I was doing. And, yeah, Jim probably knew that." She pressed her fingers to her brother's lips as Kit paled and opened his mouth. "But let's be honest for a moment here: the only person who never knows I've drunk too much is me."

The pause was sudden; the ever-present pachyderm in the room, pointed out, squirmed. Meg continued, voice soft and hollow, hesitating like she was realising something for the first time:

"I drink too much, Kit. I drink too much and I do it a lot. And yeah, Tess and Heather are going to be on my side. But when Sam's calmed down about being cheated on she won't be. Because she's going to ask me what the hell I put in that punch."

She cast a guilty glance toward James that he was too dazed to interpret, though a hot flash of panic burned across his skin as Ben muttered: "Oh Jesus Christ." Meg turned back to her twin, took his hand and squeezed it tightly.

"Trust me, okay? If you don't want to believe this, you really won't want to believe that either. We need not to talk about this, because that conversation's not going to end well for anyone."

She swept unsettled eyes toward the police station behind them.

"We should get out of here. If we don't let this one go as a stupid drunken mistake, someone's going to get their medical license pulled on the day it's supposed to be handed out. Last night was a fucking mess, but it's not worth our careers. So let's just go graduate, okay?"

Ben and Kit exchanged looks in a long silent debate. Finally, reluctantly, Kit nodded. He turned the engine over and put the car into gear.

"Okay," he said and glanced up into the rear-view to give James a slow nod of acceptance. "Okay."

Ben reached over his shoulder for the bag of Meg's clothes and passed them to her.

"Okay," he agreed too. "As long as no one is actually hurt…?"

"I'm fine," Meg promised, voice still squashed under the weight of her own revelation. She shook herself and twisted in her seat, sought James's blackened eyes with her bloodshot ones. "We're fine, right?"

Her expression was that steely blank one she used to bury the memories of being a white rat in a cage, a home science project that hadn't finished until the twins moved out. He knew she wasn't asking about his injuries.

He hesitated, not sure that they were, that they would be, if they even should be; but he figured he owed it to her to let her choose, just in case.

"Yeah," he agreed, voice a little too light to be quite honest, but not so much that he couldn't pass it off as such. "Yeah, we're okay. I'm not hurt either, just cuts and bruises."

That stirred an unexpected smile from her, half-admiration for their friends, half-sympathy for him.

"You were lucky," she observed. "For a woman who cares that much about French manicures, Heather has a wicked right hook."

"I screwed up," Wilson told Hananda flatly. "She was vulnerable and upset and angry and I wanted too much to reassure her. I misjudged how I could help her and it didn't work. The consequences…"

He hitched one shoulder, let the sentence hang unfinished. The consequences were written all over him.

Hananda continued to stare. Ben, however, whistled softly.

"Your patients' family did this to you because they didn't like the medicine?"

A passing doctor – a youngish redhead that Wilson didn't know – cast a startled look over at their table. He smiled tightly, waited until the man had moved on.

"Not a word, but a blow," House misquoted in a strangely soothing undertone. "A plague o'both these houses."

The words put the events back on the screen he'd first experienced replaying them in the exam room, briefly distanced Wilson from his battered body and precarious profession. It restored him to a mere actor or author, Thursday to mordant make-believe instead of reality.

Ben shook his head, let out a long breath when Wilson didn't deny it.

"I hope you're suing!"

The taste of his own blood refreshed itself on Wilson's tongue and with it the bitter promise he'd made: I won't tell.

"They are."

He felt House look at him, hard and sudden and accusatory, dodged his gaze in favour of Cooper's. She, after all, knew how to kill a conversation.

But to his surprise, she wrinkled one corner of her mouth grimly and said: "You'll have to counter-sue. Or the hospital will." She gestured to a poster affixed to the wall a few feet away. "The family will prosecute for malpractice, no doubt, and the hospital will counter for assault on a staff member. It's going to be lawyer palooza."

Damnit! Wilson studied the glossy array of a politically correct doctors, nurses and administrators flanked by burly policemen, all smiling sternly above scarlet capitals warning that abuse of staff would not be tolerated. PPTH had identical ones plastered in every waiting room and hallway. She was right. And he hadn't the first idea what he was going to do about it.

"You should." To his rising disbelief, that came from Hananda. Whatever doubts his friend seemed to have about Wilson's equivocations, he was pushing them aside. "Look, everyone at this table has probably been on the business side of someone's fist over an unpleasant diagnosis. It's a risk of the job and, for the most part, we give benefit of the doubt. But this isn't one of those times. Whether or not you choose to blame yourself for the deaths of your patients, Jim, you did not deserve this for it."

"Of course he did!" House interrupted loudly. He'd withdrawn so far into his watchful silence that his sudden grandiose arm-sweep toward Wilson startled everyone within five feet of him. "Don't you get it? James Wilson getting pummelled into spinach is exactly what it takes to make the whole universe a better place! Fewer people die. E.T. never goes home. All those little bundles of sugar and spice live healthily ever after. Oh brave new world, that has no Wilson in it!"

His hand came to rest with a thud on Wilson's uninjured shoulder. Nonetheless, a jag of muscular soreness zipped through the back of his neck, jolted the breath out of him and morphed any riposte he might've thought of into a tongue-biting hiss. It hurt, but not quite as much as the implication that House thought Wilson so shaken up that he didn't know that what he'd admitted to wasn't enough to excuse this much rough justice. He dodged the challenging blue stare and rubbed his throbbing shoulder when House removed his hand.

"You missed your calling as a stand-up comedian," Cooper observed dryly.

Her expression suggested one was currently surplus to requirements.

"You're not suggesting he doesn't press charges, are you?" Ben frowned across the table, his buckled brows masking the curiosity in his grey-blue eyes as he tried to work out what House was thinking.

House studied Wilson until he was forced to tuck his chin to his chest to avoid giving away any more than his profile, prayed his partner wouldn't read any hope into his own expression.

Finally, House shrugged expansively. "You sue your four-legged patients for every crushed toe and rope-burned palm, do you?"

Ben circled his eyes to the glass-clad sky, recognising the flippant remark for what it was.

"No, but I won't get sued for countering with a short sharp reprimand either. Horses have a better sense of fair play than most people." He motioned discreetly to Wilson's knuckles, where the swelling from striking the nightstand had already faded. "Even you."

Wilson drew his good arm against his body, folding it over his cast, and tucked both his hands down in the narrow gaps between his chest and biceps to hide them.

"Nothing about the situation was fair," he said, certain of this at least. "The family had already lost a sister and a niece, a wife and a daughter. I couldn't've done them much more harm than I already had."

Cooper swallowed a mouthful of her cocktail rather suddenly.

"And what about what they did to you?" She glanced around to ascertain that there was no one too close by and lowered her voice. "Jim, just promise me that all of the damage is what we can see. Because you keep talking about films as though it's some sort of metaphor and there are two things that happen in horror movie showers: murder and rape."

Wilson's skin shrank in against his bones, retreating. He shook his head hard to keep the memories, ever-circling like ravens, from settling, from blowing his pupils to broad black beads that – snap, snap, snap – recaptured moments in brilliant white flashes, stored them in little envelopes inside his skull to ambush him in montages over and over again.

"You're a neurologist not a shrink, Meg. Don't quit your specialty. Since I'm not dead and I'm not your patient, you should be able to figure out that nothing went down in that room that I didn't allow."

She hooked both brows at him sharply.

"O-kay," she said. "I'm going to ignore both the uncharacteristic misogyny there and the professional insult. You're trying to tell me that you chose to let some guy whale on you? Then, for the love of everything sacred, when are you going to stand up for yourself?"

Wilson stared hard at her across the table, willed her to understand, to remember Tess and Heather, to not make him have to spell it out, compound his humiliation.

"There are some circumstances," he hedged, "in which you just don't."

Cooper crinkled her brow at him. It was Hananda who sat up slightly.

"Ah," he said, in the tone that House might have said Ahah!

A split-second later, House too bolted upright from his affected slouch in the booth.

"So that's why you wouldn't hit back!"

Cooper glanced from one to the other, her lips shaping a baffled: oh?

Ben turned toward her. "Guy code," he explained kindly. "You can't hit back if—"

"—it's not just a guy!" House exclaimed, his voice rising several decibels. "It was the sister! I should've known! Wilson, your mother's an idiot; you should withhold your phone calls. Look at where morals get you. You got your ass whupped by a woman!"

Again. Thanking Yaweh that House didn't know that, Wilson closed his eyes for a split-second and fought for composure. Small wonder, though, his genius partner hadn't got it before – it was hardly a thing that happened, was it? His stomach curled in on itself, as if it could hide beneath his other organs like a little boy shrinking from…from what? There was no such thing as a bogeywoman now was there?

Pride and shame and chivalry resorted to mental fisticuffs and he answered defensively:

"What was I supposed to do? Hit her back?"

"Yes!" House exclaimed, Cooper seconding him with a sharp nod, though whether he would ever raise a hand to a woman or she at all was as much of a question for a court as Wilson's own culpability for winding up in this disgraceful situation.

Hananda and his partner exchanged one of their wordless glances. Ben shook his head.

"No," Wilson agreed aloud, careful to leave out some further truth of the matter. "I was not going to do that."

At once, he realised he'd been too emphatic.

"Wouldn't?" House demanded with his worst degree of damned brilliant insightfulness. "Or couldn't?"

Wouldn't, Wilson wanted to insist. That much of a man he was. He was. He wouldn't, even if he could he could no more have stopped Lindsey's methodical quicksilver fists than he could now prevent House figuring out every excruciating detail of his ordeal at her, and her brother-in-law's, hands. Truth was, he couldn't.

Mustn't.

Even so, the expression on House's face turned his stomach inside out. His whole countenance was set in that stillness of a sudden eureka, all the lines smoothed from his skin and his jaded eyes shiningly alive. It was just House, just his epiphany moment, one of his rare flashes of pure excitement that came with understanding. In that few seconds, though, it looked to Wilson altogether too much like glee.

"Oh, yeah, House," he found himself saying thoughtlessly, the words dripping off his tongue to drench them both in an equal mix of sarcasm and seriousness. "I didn't just let this happen. I asked for it."

Across the table, both the twins grimaced at his tone.

"Jim," Ben began, at once castigating and comforting.

House, however, scarcely blinked. Eyes wide open, he alone saw the silent scream behind the snarl. He remembered the elevator. The begging. He slid a couple more puzzle pieces into place: knew she'd hurt him first, knew he'd made him consent, made him promise not to tell – and then that he himself had made Wilson undo most of that promise in a moment.

Terrified he'd cut his throat with his own tongue if he dared another word, Wilson forced himself up and punted his wheelchair backwards with his heel. Ignoring both Hananda's protest and the way the floor shifted like a Tilt A Whirl, he headed for the exit.

TBC…