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Fic: Egyptian Sands, H/W
Fic: Egyptian Sands
Author: Nakanna Lee
Pairing: subtle H/W
Rating: PG-13ish
Summary: House thinks back to his time spent in Egypt.
Warnings: Spoilers for Season Three’s “Lines in the Sand.”
A/N: This idea struck me late last night and was coming in snippets to me all throughout today. I wrote stray paragraphs during my classes and have no idea what my homework is for tomorrow. So it goes. I’ve been wondering a lot about the gaps the show has about the characters’ pasts, so that’s where this generated from. Please let me know what you think! Thanks!
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House squinted at the figure, made of a heavy plastic posing as porcelain and glazed one too many times for its own good. Whatever it was—a dog? a mistake?—its slender, sharp-nosed snout evoked a jackal comparison. Eyes slanting shrewdly, it appeared as if some unspoken knowledge had made it ugly. It suddenly reminded House of Anubis, that Egyptian god of the dead he had read so thoroughly about when he was living in Cairo as a child.
Anubis, he recalled with startlingly clarity, judged each person by weighing his heart against a feather. If the heart was heavier, he was sent to death; lighter, and he received eternal life.
“That’s a gift from an eleven-year-old patient of mine. She and I both knew it was a piece of junk, and that’s what made her laugh.”
House tried to glare at the trinket but his flashbacks were getting in the way. Making some snide remark and ignoring Wilson’s response, he let the thing clatter into the trashcan, satisfied that even Anubis himself wasn’t as lofty as his own feather standard.
* * *
He remembered that clattering sound. Like clinking glass. Like ricocheting marbles propelled from thumbs.
The marbles he recalled were a rare gift from his father, who had gotten a weekend off from his base about an hour away and visited Cairo. There, where modern city met the sand-ridden Egypt from history books, House’s mother fretted about their strange new surroundings and House was Greg, twelve-year-old army brat.
The marbles inside the large pouch were cat’s eyes, some clear, some iridescent blue. Greg lost half of them during a game with some of the other boys on his street, who he hadn’t even wanted to play with from the start.
Defeat annoyed Greg to no end; and what he had left only reminded him of what he lost, so he dumped the remaining marbles and let them plop like drops of dew into the sand. They sat there, blinking languorously under the pebble-sized sun. It was as if the sand had forgotten how to be thirsty and didn’t quite know what to do with the gift. In a few minutes, the slightest veil began covering them as the wind picked up. Greg scampered away, indifferent, his empty pouch flopping against his boney knees and pestering for something new to fill it, something that could be his own.
He found the bird’s skeleton by mid-afternoon. It was small, smaller than a sparrow, its feathers and skin completely gone beneath glinting, buzzing flies. A broken wing arched like a wry eyebrow as if the creature were amused by its own misfortune.
Greg swatted the insects away and picked up the skeleton carefully to keep it intact, examining the bones closely. He found he could look down the wing like a straw: it was hollow. He wondered if there could be holes poked in the outside, so that when the bird flew, wind could become raveled up inside. Then the wings could sing, like the hollow flutes men played on the corners in Cairo. He’d spend stray afternoons listening to them with a strange sort of jealousy he couldn’t understand.
He carefully put the skeleton into his pouch. It continued to bang against his knee, and by the time he looked in again, he found bird’s remains had collapsed like a house of cards.
* * *
Pyramids, Greg discovered shortly after his family had uprooted to Egypt, were just as abstract in this land as they were back home. They were mere echoes of fading pharaohs eclipsed by modern society. There was grass in Cairo, trees rustling in dry wind, with downtown areas slipping out into the archaic desert haunted by mummies preserved only in textbooks. Greg was sorely disappointed to find that he and his mother wouldn’t be living in nomadic huts and riding camels.
The whole arrangement is temporary, experimental at best, his mother kept assuring herself in the guise of assuring her son. A year or so stationed here, and then your father will be transferred back to the United States. If not, we’ll head home and make do without him, until he gets an assignment back in our country.
His father, he realized as he grew older, believed in the military like some people believed in fixing the bed every morning, or bathing, or brushing teeth after meals. He believed in the military like some people, Greg heard, believed in God. And that was that. Cairo was just part of the deal, of the sacrifice, and everyone would get used to it sooner or later.
Greg really didn’t have a preference. That was the convenient thing about being twelve-years-old: The whole world seemed indiscriminately accessible. But he did expect to see those pyramids and sarcophaguses and felt a bit cheated that there were none.
Greg’s mother hired a tutor, not trusting her son to the dangerous world of foreign public schools. On days he could escape from the banality, Greg trekked off around the city, gathering pamphlets and maps and library books he never had any intention of returning. When he knew the streets well enough, he started using his allowance for bus fares and scoured the avenues for some trace of the Egypt he had been picturing in his head. Eventually, he concluded that the town had stifled it all; he’d have to leave it for the desert to find what he wanted.
* * *
House picked up the box of sand, mouth twisting to one side as he watched the grains trip over one another on the slant. A Zen Garden of all things. Why didn’t that surprise him?
The slender rake fit like a cigarette between his thumb and forefinger. He gave it a theatrical twirl, then slowly dragged parallel lines across the sand, creating ridges of shadow and light. He dipped a corner of his thumb in the box to add some divots around the outskirts. The sand was blanched, as if insulted by its mediocre attempt at using Zen to calm ruffled spirits. House wanted to grin but it surfaced as a frown.
Vaguely, he heard the door open, followed by one of Wilson’s increasingly weary lectures. There was a time when those little speeches amused House. He could remember countless instances, all chronicled neatly in his memory, when he purposely annoyed Wilson just to provoke a flabbergasted reaction. His thick eyebrows rising in inarticulate disbelief. Sputtering half a string of words before managing to construct a sentence. The glimmer of amusement in his dark, dark brown eyes, right before he almost says what House knows he’ll never admit to.
House wondered offhandedly when he stopped enjoying those reactions so much. Pre-shooting or afterwards? Or maybe Post-Humility Lesson? No, that was far too recent. If he were being honest, his couch had stopped longing for Wilson’s sleeping form several months before any of those misadventures.
He glanced up at Wilson now but only for a second.
“…you don’t share offices.”
House pressed the rake harder into the sand, forcing the lines to become more dramatic. “That is so not Zen.”
* * *
Cairo might have been modern, but still, Greg saw Egypt as an anti-Atlantis, beset by drought and desert.
Not quite a half-year into his family’s stay, he had begun wandering off into the sand-scattered regions of land outside of the city. The sand there was inordinately smooth, passing like a strange, dry liquid between his fingers. It whipped around him like aggressive gauze, and in the afternoon hours he could feel the starchiness swelling in his throat until it matched the landscape. Greg imagined turning into the ground and watching with interest as all the people walked around him, oblivious to his eavesdropping.
With a tutor at home, he had little fraternity with the other kids in school. His mother encouraged him to play games with children his age (though always in the safety of their own living room, where she could oversee things), but it was much more fascinating to listen and observe only. The game of marbles had been humiliating as well, and there was no sense in repeating that.
The further away from his house, the better. The bus would drop him off at the outskirts of the city, where he could linger outside of shops or out in public cafes or street fairs; then he could digress into the places where grass receded for sand and the world became a giant beach immune to water. His backpack contained the books and journals and pens he needed for the day, along with a rough, blue-and-white weaved towel he used to sit on when the sand grew enflamed beneath the volatile sun.
He searched for mummies in the sand but came up empty-handed. Even skimming the horizons around Cairo, there were only more towns and cities to be seen, more beige rooftops against the discolored skyline, and rolling hills that flopped pathetically when compared to his idea of the sharply peaking pyramids he’d read about and yet failed to find.
* * *
When he returned to the States in his early teens, he was puzzled by the concept of sandboxes and their ridiculously inane impersonations. They were just a fraction of the desert some child selfishly claimed for himself.
The kid the team was currently treating had a sandbox in his backyard. House felt kind of funny for holding it against him, but he did anyway.
But he did envy him, and House had admitted so to Cameron as Wilson focused the microscope and searched the slide for answers. The kid could fuss, scream, become the official poster child for the anti-social, and that was fine. Tolerated, even. This kid didn’t even have to make eye contact and it didn’t matter to people. Who else was going to get away with that and not be labeled as a misanthropic ass?
* * *
There was a boy back in Egypt who wouldn’t look directly at anyone either, but not because he was Autistic. Greg never really figured out what he was, other than a kid with spider-black eyes and eyebrows that already were trickling together in the space above his nose. His spindly frame would flex like callow tree limbs as he moved. Whenever he spoke, it was mostly Arabic and brittle, as if his throat was made of sandpaper; and while he told Greg that he was thirteen-and-a-half already Greg sensed he couldn’t have been much older than he himself was.
Greg had initiated what couldn’t very well be defined as a friendship. He needed a guide, that was all, and he preferred someone who wasn’t particularly big on being best buddies, either. Out of all the children on his street, Greg recognized that the boy was the only one who drifted from the tight-knit circle. He loitered on the edges and watched marble matches. He was picked last for soccer games, if he even showed an interest to play in the first place. But his eyes were sharp, though evasive, and Greg drifted near him out of necessity.
And since his search for ancient Egypt looking hopeless, Greg had decided to find someone who could show him the details of the land he was obviously missing. Where the mummies were. The boy would know.
Greg called after him one morning when he saw him wandering across the street. The boy’s feet were dusty in sandals and skin tone bronze, the same shade Greg secretly hoped his own could turn one day if he could just stay under the Egyptian sun a bit longer.
He had to practically chase him down, seeing as the boy pretended not to hear. Even when Greg cornered him against the façade of one of the houses, the kid picked a spot on the corner of Greg’s shoulder and kept staring. Neither knew the other’s language and so were reduced to random hand gestures and slowly pronounced words that relied more on tone than anything else to convey meaning.
After a few minutes, the boy shrugged in agreement to help Greg find what he was missing. They never even exchanged names. Didn’t have to. Greg never cared either way. He unofficially thought of the boy as “Marhaba,” which meant “Hello” in Arabic. That sparse greeting was the only time he ever came close to thinking they might be good friends.
* * *
House reviewed the differential for the Autistic kid, name irrelevant, running through possibilities in his mind as his eyes aimlessly wandered around the hospital for another room to usurp. Wilson’s office had been the most convenient so far. Cluttered with random junk, yes, but definitely workable. He considered the look of accepted resignation on Wilson’s face the second time he’d come into the office to find House and Team gathered like conspirators, his Zen Garden dethroned and spilled out across the floor with Cameron perched like Nefertiti in its place.
House used to consider a variety of Wilson’s other looks, too, but they’d since ceased being important.
Tapping his cane, he craned his neck back and tried to think, figuring that the kid had about three days left before he died.
* * *
The dead lived in Cairo, too. There was a whole city for them.
Greg found it in one of his books. There were five major cemeteries, it said, at the base of the Moqattam Hills that provided cheap residency for the poorer population. People lived right among the deceased, which was pretty damn interesting, next to mummies and pyramids of course. He referenced the maps near the back of the book and found it to be a couple miles from his dwelling in the city.
When he asked the boy, Marhaba, to show him, he squinted at the City of the Dead, Cairo text Greg pointed out to him. He shook his head until Greg impatiently flipped open to the middle of the book, where a selection of photographs interrupted endless paragraphs of type, and pointed to some of the dirt-strewn tombstones thriving among flat, brown-faced buildings. Marhaba nodded, giving Greg a slightly wary look before he agreed to the expedition.
Greg’s mother managed to sound positive that he was finally making friends, but when she asked about where exactly they were going, Greg fashioned a quick lie about a soccer game neither one of them would really be welcome to play even if they’d wanted to. Those falsities always came easier than truths, even though the shock quality was missing—even as a child, he enjoyed seeing the mix of surprised horror honesty brought forth from people.
But lies punched out room for more freedom, more interesting places, so he used them at will.
According to Greg’s grotesquely overdue library book, the City of the Dead was draped in a foreboding atmosphere for Cairenes, even though traditionally cemeteries were viewed as places of new life, not final death. The increasing population within these cemeteries chiefly was responsible because of the living—homes were much cheaper, and if someone had told Greg that by the time he was crippled and middle-aged that there would be five million people making their homes alongside tombstones, he might have even believed it.
Three buses and a foot-aching walk later, Greg and Marhaba were wandering amid the bland-colored buildings, all of which seemed to be lopsided squares—like packages damaged in the mail—with crooked windows. There were no mummies or pyramids, only Egyptians who looked no different than the ones on his street; there were tourists too, which he abhorred. Greg also saw several tombstones with lines of laundry hung between them.
His textbook had mentioned how most of the graves were for famous conquerors and heroes of Arab conquests. He wondered if they enjoyed their glory back then—when pulsing and thriving and alive and dominating—because they certainly weren’t getting any now.
* * *
When House solved the case, he’d been relieved, though it came across as indifference. Usually he gloated; this time, he didn’t feel like it. He only felt Wilson standing beside where he sat, rambling on about how Cuddy will never believe House has any form of Autism. The cane spun idly in House’s grip, around and around as Wilson’s mild annoyance did. Words settled like sand upon him, caught in indiscriminate windstorms, making his eyes itch.
Minutes later, when the kid he just saved looked at him, it seemed endless and yet House couldn't pry his eyes away either. He remembered something Marhaba once tried to convey about his gaze when House accused him of never having the nerve to look at him. Marhaba had pointed at the two dishes on Greg’s kitchen table, then gestured up beyond the ceiling. Twin bowls of sky, he’d meant. Those were Greg’s eyes, so drastically different from the dark, dark brown ones of Marhaba.
Years later, as the Autistic boy and parents walk away in tears, House wondered now what it said about himself that he still couldn’t turn his head to acknowledge Wilson standing there. When Wilson spoke, House heard that quiet, pleased smile floating in his voice; still, he didn’t stop him when he walked away and gave House his space alone.
* * *
On the way home from the City of the Dead, Greg sketched a pyramid in the white space around the paragraphs in his library book. He pointed to it impatiently, raising his hands palms-up in question. Marhaba shrugged again, nodding out into the empty landscape beyond the jiggling bus window as houses swept by on the streets.
Greg insistently asked him where, if they could go sometime to see them. After a moment of ignoring him, Marhaba plucked the book from his hands and opened up to the back of the index, where the final page was entirely blank. Clicking Greg’s pen, he started jotting down in Arabic some sort of a response.
Greg liked watching him write. The characters fell like stray eyelashes across the paper, right to left, backwards, obsessed with their own logic and no one else’s.
He enjoyed hearing Marhaba’s speech, too, rare though it was. After some time they were somewhat comfortable enough to exchange English and Arabic words, so that Greg’s own speech eventually became his own slang dialect. He nearly took five years off his mother’s life when he came home one evening with “Massa'a el-khair” on his lips. He tried to explain it was the standard greeting for the hour, but his mother was distressingly disturbed. She sent him to the living room to do his English homework, which he ignored and despised for all its tightlipped grammatical rules. He was annoyed and antsy within the walls of his house, tugged in all directions by impatient ghosts that called him back to the desert.
Marhaba finished writing and promptly returned the book and pen to Greg. The page was cluttered with lines of fervent, unreadable script, lanky and horizontal with round loops and sharp dots floating in midair. Greg couldn’t understand a word. At the bottom was a drawing of an awkward-looking winged eye, which Greg recognized from his books.
That night, Greg snuggled beneath his bedsheets and wondered what it would feel like to be a Boy King, buried beneath years of smothering sand and suffocating on history. He flicked on the flashlight he referenced when it was past his mother’s “lights out” hour. He caught strange shadows rippling across the sheet, like hieroglyphics on walls. Bending one of his narrow knees, he made the sheets tented so they peaked like a pyramid. Just like in his books, he pictured jars of preserved animals and overflowing containers of trinkets to keep him company in the afterlife. Living in Egypt—wasn’t that some kind of an afterlife too? One of floating eyes and jackal-faced myths, and cities where the dead and living lived indiscriminately, where the sun poured itself into a glimmering hole of brightness, and no one could be expected to gaze straight into it. He didn’t often try to recall the U.S., and now when he did, there was only a misty blank left.
Greg clicked off the flashlight and grinned into the darkness.
end
Except that you call him Hugh at one point. But that's minor. :)
Grr. I thought my mind switched over completely. Guess not. I'll skim for that error and fix it...
Thanks for reading, at any rate. :)
Amazing.
I just found one mistake: At the bottom was a drawing of an awkward-looking winged eye, which Hugh recognized from his books.
(I'm never gonna get over Wilson's Zen Garden. That brings me infinite happiness, lol)
ALSO eagerly awaiting your next RPS.
...
Yes, I am addicted, and NO, it's not a problem. Not for me, at least. *pokes*
awww....
"Vaguely, he heard the door open, followed by one of Wilson’s increasingly weary lectures. There was a time when those little speeches amused House. He could remember countless instances, all chronicled neatly in his memory, when he purposely annoyed Wilson just to provoke a flabbergasted reaction. His thick eyebrows rising in inarticulate disbelief. ...
"House wondered offhandedly when he stopped enjoying those reactions so much. Pre-shooting or afterwards? Or maybe Post-Humility Lesson? No, that was far too recent. If he were being honest, his couch had stopped longing for Wilson’s sleeping form several months before any of those misadventures."
This makes sense... in a way i can't really explain :(
But I am glad you liked it, on the sadder side or not. <3
This reminds me of Smallville. In the beginning, their friendship was all clexy, but now it's like... dead.
I hope they get back to the subtext too! And I hope Wilson doesn't betray House any more (in the cop/drug arch).
Thanks for posting this! It expresses how I feel about the current state of their friendship, but much more eloquently, and in fic form!
I think "House" needs another cafeteria scene, with House stealing Wilson's chips. (They'll start small.) Then House will decide he's lonely and move in with Wilson this time. And then they can...take things from there. *Anything.* I'm saddened but realistic that H/W will never really be canon, but they could at least give us that friendship and subtext we love so much!
I think the cop thing might actually give Wilson a great opportunity to switch back to House's side. At least, that's what I'm hoping! *crosses fingers*
(Anonymous)
A few minor glitches, hope you don't mind: I caught a couple places where you used "Hugh" instead of "Greg." One's mentioned already; the second was Hugh fashioned a quick lie about a soccer game.... Also, I think bowels of sky was a typo? *g*
Glad you liked it. When I first saw the episode, my mind kept tugging me back to House's random reference about living in Egypt. It wouldn't let go until I wrote it. ;)
I may be reading into it, but I enjoy my interpretation!
A couple of nitpicks: "due" should be "do" and "fair" should be "fare".
You're the first person to mention similarities between Marhaba and Wilson. Nice catch. As I was writing this, they became more comparable than I anticipated when I started, which was almost directly shown with the repeated "dark, dark brown eyes" comment that referred to them both at separate points in the fic. And yes, I'd definitley agree that House "uses" them and has that "periperal interest."
:) Thanks for reading and catching that. I love it when the details get across!
Very facinating! I love reading stories about House's past in Egypt. Much squeeing was had, and that was before I opened this to start reading!
^.^
(Btw, that squeeing reaction? I get the same thing with your rsl/ad fics. ;) The last one was just lovely!)
Aww, thanks! We do love getting feedback from you!
And, a little tip, if you go to our
Looking forward to your next fic! :D
Speaking seriously.. I never check on who writes the fics I read. But you.
It's official now!!
Your icon... "TV Boyfriend." lol, that is so indescribably perfect! :)
Thanks for sharing!
Peace,
CS WhiteWolf
But thanks for pointing out that I tend to use that often. I like to try and vary my phrasing, so I'll try to mix it up a bit more--and use it correctly. :)
It's an odd little quirk, using "reference" as "to use," so I say continue on with it if you so please.
Hope you find other stuff to enjoy on my LJ. It's basically just a fic journal. And, as you've probably noticed, I've failed horribly at LJ-cuts. ;)