House Crossover

Dick steps out of the coffee shop into the bright sunlight, balancing the tray of coffee in one hand as he pulls his sunglasses out of his pocket and almost gets run over by a teenager violating the no skateboarding on the sidewalks law. Dick smiles. On days like these he's glad he doesn't have to chase after any lawbreakers he sees anymore.

Afterward, it never feels like time had gone quickly, or slowly. Perhaps because he'd been in similar situations before. He saw the car coming, just a bit too fast for this road, which isn't unusual, and he doesn't think anything of it until the window rolls down and he sees the gun. By then it's too late to do anything but drop the coffee before bullets are flying. He memorizes the license plate number, although the family car detritus in the windows lets him know the car is stolen and it's probably futile. Then he's falling, and why is he falling? He lands on his knees and blacks out from the pain.

***

He comes to in a bed, the antiseptic smell of a hospital in his nose. He opens his eyes and stares at the ceiling for a while. After a few minutes of staring at the ceiling and seeing patterns in the dots on the ceiling tiles (and finding them way more interesting than he should), Dick realizes that he must be on painkillers. Morphine, probably. He wonders why. He must be pretty injured to need this much; Bruce has always been careful about drugs. More so after Roy. Dick giggles at the pun of Speedy on drugs. Then he remembers that he doesn't work with Bruce any more, hasn't even spoken to him in years. He's a BPD detective, why is he in the hospital drugged up to his eyeballs?

He drags his gaze down from the ceiling. It seems to take an eternity to drop it low enough to see that he's alone in the room (one wall, the one with the door, is glass, he notes), and that it's his leg which was injured. Somehow. He can't seem to concentrate for long enough to remember how.

He can't even concentrate long enough to stay awake.

***

He wakes up and a nurse is there. Maybe a doctor. Pretty, anyway. He tries to speak, but his throat is too dry and it comes out as a rasp, which is possibly a good thing because he doesn't know what he was going to say. "You're awake!" she says, and brings him a cup of water with a straw. "How do you feel?"

He sips, and the cool water is soothing on his throat. "Like you've got the morphine drip too high."

She checks the settings on the infusion pump and adjusts them. "It was just on the normal amount, but I've lowered it so if you need more just push the call button." She makes a note on his chart.

"Thanks," he mumbles and retreats into sleep again.

***

Dick opens his eyes. He's clearheaded for the first time since the drive-by shooting (he actually remembers the shooting), and he isn't in pain, although he knows that he will be once he gets off the morphine. Both Jason and Amy are in the room and he groans mentally at the thought of them interacting. He wonders how long they've been there.

"Dick!" Amy exclaims, getting up. "You're awake."

"So it would seem," Dick says. "Did you get them?"

"Unfortunately, no," Amy replies. "Nobody even noted the license plate number." She makes a noise of disgust.

"NDB 31V," Dick tells her and she checks her pockets for paper and pencil. "But it was stolen so I don't think you'll have any luck."

Jason hands her a piece of paper and a pen from his jacket pocket. "Ignore the list." She doesn't, of course, and her brows raise at Jason's shopping list for his latest heist. Dick hopes there isn't anything too incriminating on it (he knows there probably isn't; if it was, Jason would have put it in code). She doesn't say anything, though, just turns it over and writes down the license plate number.

"Where are Tim and Steph?" Dick asks Jason.

"They have regular jobs," Jason replies. "Have to arrange time off, you know."

"What, Bludhaven isn't close enough to Gotham that they can just come visit?"

Jason clears his throat and shuffles his feet. "You're in Princeton."

Dick is confused for a moment before he figures it out. "Bruce?" Jason nods in confirmation. "I thought he'd stopped doing that sort of thing, at least to me."

"Apparently you becoming a cripple is enough motivation to bring him out of retirement." Jason's eyes glint with amusement in spite of, or perhaps because of, the fact that he knows exactly what it's like to deal with Bruce when he's like that.

Dick draws in a breath. "It's bad?"

"According to Babs," Jason says. Dick closes his eyes momentarily. That means it is bad.

***

Objectively, he hasn't been in the hospital for long, but subjectively it's been an eternity. So when he wakes up to the sight of hospital food instead of Alfred's food, and crutches within reach (okay, so they would have been out of reach for anybody other than him) he takes it as an opportunity to escape from the bed where he's been confined as effectively as if he was tied up by Two-Face (more so; Two-Face had never been very good at tying him tight enough). He stops the IV drip and gingerly removes the needle from the catheter in his arm, knowing that he won't have a lot of time before he begins to really feel the pain. Still, it should be long enough to find out who stole his food, he rationalizes.

Dick's had to use crutches before, so it only takes him a few seconds before he gets the hang of things again, before he sets up an easy gait which jars his knee the least. Then he begins wandering (can you really call it wandering when it's more like purposeful covering of as much ground as possible?) throughout the hospital, looking and sniffing for his food. He decides to avoid the stairs, although he's climbed them before with crutches, because his knee's bad enough already. He doesn't want to make it worse. He realizes the irony of that statement when he's hobbling about on crutches before they've even been officially been given to him. He's pretty certain that the hospital staff would rather he stayed in bed, or in a wheelchair if he must move, but he's never been any good at staying still.

He spots his doctor at the end of the hallway he's currently in, so he heads into the closest room. "Sorry," he starts to say to the occupants (a man in a coma or asleep and another in the chair), but then his nose catches up to his brain. "You stole my food!" he accuses the man in the chair.

"Quiet," the man replies. "Can't you see Coma Guy is sleeping?" He hoists a forkful of pie.

"Don't you dare," Dick warns.

The man puts the pie into his mouth and chews with very obvious satisfaction. "Still warm."

"Of course it's still warm, that's why the container's heated," Dick snaps. He probably shouldn't be so irritated over something so small (Alfred sends food out with everybody as well as when he visits himself) but his leg is starting to ache. He closes his eyes, does some breathing exercises, and tries to think about it rationally. It's just food. He's only in here because he didn't want to get caught by Dr. Cameron. His knee hurts. He sits down in the other chair and puts his leg up. "You can't just steal people's food."

"Really? Wilson lets me do it all the time."

"I'm not Wilson," Dick says. "Whoever he is."

The man starts beeping…oh, apparently that's a beeper. "Gotta go," the man says, standing and walking out with the help of a cane. "Have fun carrying those containers with the crutches."

***

Dick doesn't have too much trouble getting back to his room with the containers, all things considered. He has a lot of experience in carrying things, and in using crutches, and somebody in the elevator is willing to hold them for him until they get to his floor.

Unfortunately, it seems that his escape has drawn some attention. A cluster of four people, three doctors and the man who'd stolen his food, is outside his room. He tries to sneak around them without getting noticed, but one of the containers falls to the floor with a clatter and they all look at him.

He clears his throat. "Uh, can you get that for me?" Dr. Cameron bends over and picks it up.

"You idiot!" the man who'd stolen his food exclaims. "You got shot in the knee two days ago and you're traipsing around the hospital to find your food? Do you know how much pain you're going to be in? That morphine takes a while to work, you know."

"I know," Dick says mildly and goes into the room to lie down on the bed. The man doesn't follow.

Dr. Cameron reattaches the IV. "Sorry about Dr. House."

"He reminds me of someone I know," Dick says. "Sort of."

"Don't get up again," she tells him, and moves the crutches over to the other side of the room.

"Hey," Dick says as she's leaving the room. "Tell Dr. House that if he wants more of my food he'll have to come get it."

"Dr. House doesn't see patients," she says automatically.

"His loss."

The next meal Alfred sends has enough for Dr. House too, and it doesn't go to waste. Dick finds it kind of comforting to know that Bruce isn't the only person who's difficult to deal with, and being around Dr. House reassures him on that score.