Author's Chapter Notes:
Chapter 3 is in progress, but I have errands to run so I hope to have it posted by dinner at the latest....
Pam was too dumbfounded to be frightened by the fact a strange man was in her apartment. After all, she knew him – sort of. But he wasn't real, her mind kept telling her. She shook her head and rubbed her eyes with the back of her hand.
“Nope, still here,” he smirked as he watched her.
“What are you doing here?” It was all she could think of to say.
“That,” he replied, taking his feet off the coffee table, “is a very good question.”
“You don't know either?”
“Oh no, of course I know,” he said as he stood up. “I just didn't expect you'd have thought to question it.”
He started to pace around the small room, despite his obvious limp. “I mean,” he continued, “you don't seem capable of questioning anything.”
Pam frowned and sat up straighter. “What are you talking about?”
“What are you talking about?” he mimicked in a high falsetto. “I'm talking about how you are miserable with your life by you aren't in the least bit interested in why that might really be or what you could be doing differently.”
“That's not true,” she protested.
House stopped in his tracks and raised his eyebrow at her sceptically. “Isn't it?” He asked. “Can you sit there and honestly tell me you are doing everything in your power to stop being so damned miserable?”
Pam was sure this must be a dream, and was getting angry at the attack. “Why do you care?” She threw back. “You adore being miserable.”
House nodded. “Well, yeah – but that's me. I know how to carry off miserable. It looks good on me. But you?” He groaned in distaste. “Frankly it's just annoying.” He went to take another step but stopped and looked at her again. “And don't get me started on that boyfriend of yours.”
“What boyfriend? I don't have --”
“Oh, don't start,” he sneered, cutting her off. “You know who I mean. Halfred? Halfpint? Halfbaked?”
“Halpert?”
“Yeah,” he said, snapping his fingers. “That's it. Jim Halpert.” He let out a sarcastic laugh. “Now there's a guy who defines pathetic miserableness, emphasis on the pathetic.”
Pam was growing more confused by the minute. She shook her head firmly. “He's not my boyfriend.”
House rolled his eyes. “Okay, sure. Whatever.”
“He's dating Karen.”
“I know that,” he replied patronizingly. “Doesn't it bother you that your boyfriend is dating someone else? I'm pretty sure it would bother me. But maybe you're more of a swinger than you look.”
“He's not my boyfriend.” Pam repeated. For all her love of him in the contents of his television show, she was starting to discover that maybe this guy wasn't quite so enjoyable when he turned his attention on you.
He ignored her asserting and absent-mindedly patted the front of his blazer. “I could have sworn I had one....oh, wait.” He reached into an inside pocket and pulled out a red dry erase marker. He walked over to a bare spot on Pam's white living room wall.
“Okay,” he said, clearing his throat and uncapping the pen. “Let's start out with all the things that are wrong with you. What are your symptoms?” He paused, thinking. “And this covers him too, actually, since I'm already pretty sure that you both suffer from the same thing.”
“Wait!” Pam cried out.
“Hmm?” House barely looked back at her.
“That's my wall, not a dry erase board,” she told him.
House shrugged. “Same difference.”
He paused only a moment longer and then wrote STUPID in big capital letters on the wall.
“Now that is a given,” he explained, pointing to what he'd just written. “Catastrophic loss of the most basic logic functions.”
“Hey,” Pam grumbled, feeling more than a bit offended.
“Irritability,” he said as he added the word to the wall. “Oh, and a sense of distorted reality.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means,” he said slowly, “Neither of you see what's really going on.”
He turned his attention back to the wall and wrote down a few more things. Pam stood up and walked over to see what he'd written.
Delusional. Paranoia. Compulsive Avoidance. Lack of Self-Awareness. Irrational Fear of Water. Insomnia.
“Irrational fear of water?” She queried.
“Oops, sorry,” he said, drawing a quick line through the last two words. “That's rabies. But there's definitely irrational fear.” He took a long look over the list of symptoms, then scribbled “loss of sense of humor”.
“So,” he said, stepping back. “You're on my team. Well, I mean you are my team seeing as you're the only other one here.” He drew a large circle around all the words. “What one condition explains all these symptoms?”
Well aware of how this part of his television show played out, Pam couldn't resist her reply.
“Lupus?” She suggested, as seriously as she could.
House did a slight double take and very nearly smiled. “Funny,” he said dryly, and leaned in to add the word 'some' in front of 'loss of sense of humor'. “Any other ideas?”
“Brain tumor?”
“You would think so, wouldn't you?” He nodded. “But it's worse than that.”
“Worse?”
“Worse. There are no known pharmaceutical remedies for what we're facing if it's what I suspect it is, and I'm usually correct in my suspicions.”
“What do you think it is?”
House recapped the pen. “I think it's obvious.”
Pam looked up at him expectantly, as if for a moment this whole bizarre interaction was something she did every day.
“Okay,” she prompted. “What is it?”
“The inability to tell the truth,” he said with finality. He walked past her and sat back down in the armchair, his feet soon propped comfortably on the coffee table once more.
Pam turned around. “That's it?”
“That's it?” He scoffed. “That's everything.” He took his feet off the table and leaned forward. “Has it never occurred to you that everything can be solved by just telling him what's really going on with you?”
“I don't think he'd care,” she replied softly. “It's too late for that.”
“Is it? And you know that how exactly?”
“He has a girlfriend.”
“So you keep saying But so what? Do you know for a fact that he's happy? Does he look happy to you?”
Pam sank back down on the couch before replying. He was coming at her with questions she'd been too afraid to ask out loud for months now.
“I don't know. He barely talks to me anymore. Karen acts like things are great between them.”
House brought his cane down on the coffee table with enough force that Pam jumped. He leaned forward even further, his face serious. “Karen lies,” House declared.
He leaned back. “Everybody lies,” he said, this time with less intensity. “And you should know that better than anyone.”
