What happened

Is it supposed to burn?

That had been the departing question from the Joker. House didn’t know for sure if it was supposed to or not. He hadn’t experienced the initial treatment which had colored the man’s skin. He’d left soon after. Skin grew back and comical history showed that the Joker loved pain. So the burning meant very little to House.

His attention, between the dreary cycles of the clinic, had found its way back to his lame leg. It was throbbing. The pain had doubled since he’d arrived. The humdrum of the clinic provided only so much pills and now he’d graduated. He was taking whole rims of morphine shoots on his way out. One day he’d have to send the mayor a fruit basket because it had all started the day the bodies came in from the gas-line explosion.

But House wasn’t from a ‘verse where people actually bought into air-balloons causing mushroom clouds. House came from a very cynical world. He knew something was being covered up but there was very little he cared to do about it. What would a cripple do? Hop over there and pry? No, he was in far too much pain to just be annoying.

Though, he did like to be annoying.

It was his third shot of morphine right into the leg. His eyes were glazed over like doughnuts at a police conference. Sheets of paper lay astray across his apartment. The never-used dining table had vials of green, blue, orange and pink. Some bubbled.

House slumped back. There was sweat on his brow but he was freezing.

Everything told him that this was the cure. This time. This was it. It had to be.

Is it supposed to burn?

House poured it into a small container and stuck it behind the meatloaf.

He'd done his best to keep himself from picking at the skin under the bandage that House had placed on his hand, but in the end, curiosity and morbid obsession won out, and he'd made the bandage bloody. Thankfully, it wasn't dripping through the white, he'd just gotten the sterile plain color all prettied up with red.

In one hand he held a black bag. It could have been flung over one shoulder, but then he might have ended up looking like one of those foofy men who carried a fucking murse and got their nails done. Jack did not get his nails done. Vanity was one thing, bordering on feminine was another.

Barbra's outfit was a little worse for wear. He'd worn it all the way home, and then for some time after. He'd played with the boys in it. Not thinking about it at all. Bud had so completely enjoyed the smell of the hem that he'd left with it, and Lou had decided to sleep on it when it'd been removed from Jack's body. He hoped Babs didn't mind a little hyena drool.

All day he'd been hanging out in her usual spots, waiting for her to turn up. She hadn't shown anywhere. He'd stopped in a coffee shop and had gotten himself a giant thing consisting of caffiene, chocolate, and some other things that maybe shouldn't have been mixed in with the previous two, but he'd insisted.

He stood outside drinking it and trying to think of where to look for Babs next.
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The days following the trial had left her feeling odd, as if there was something unfinished. Maybe there was or maybe it was her own frustration of the legal system. Somethings were just not as they should be. A man like that Napier should have gone away for a good long time, not been given the chance to break free and cause what seemed like even more damage then before.

Even now as she curled up on the paisley sofa of the Starbucks and sipped the frothy overpriced mocha, she could see it. Mostly because it was front page in the City Voice in front of her. Headlines as to the atrocities committed since the inmates quite literally took over the aslyum. She sighed and flipped back to page one. Break in the gas line at City Hall, that sounded bad. The picture was vivid it captured the destruction with a skilled eye.

Gasp.

The mug rolled from her fingertips and fell to the floor shattering into white shards and foamy coffee. Eyes could not look away from the photo, or more correctly the credit line beneath it. Trembling fingers manged to pull her cell phone from her purse.

"The number for the City Voice please?"

Heart beats pause as the connection was made.

"Yes, 'Voice?"
She could not keep the tremor from her own voice.
"Could you put me through to Peter Parker?"

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