The Art of Subconscious Illusion: Rewritten (Death NotexHouse, MD crossover)

Knives and Pens

Full Summary: The rewritten version of the original well-loved fic, this portrays the story of the fight between House the diagnostician and the mental patient who calls himself Kira. One week is all that is allotted for him and his team to save Kira from the world and himself…and House's neck is on the line.

A/N: Are you proud of me? I have officially reached double figures with this fic, after about two years of writing it, and I for one am insanely proud of myself. To mark the occasion, I decided to buck the trend of naming chapters after Avenged Sevenfold songs just this once, and decided to name this one after a different band’s song, just for the sake of appropriateness. While they sound quite similar to Avenged Sevenfold in style, their music actually reminds me of the Scottish Highlands (but that’s down to association, more than anything, having spent the best part of a week listening to one of their albums on repeat while on Alba’s soil looking at the magical mist and graffiti-ing in public bathrooms (or just one, anyways)). Do note, if you guess the name of the band correctly and write it in your review, you’ll get a prize.

Originally, this fic was going just have the first section as a special flash-back chapter (because I really can’t see that amount of exposition coming out in a better way), but when I realised I could move the plot a little more forward, you ended up with a longer chapter. The first draft ended up being a 20-page long document, but it’s been nicely edited and what you don’t get here, you will get in the sister story, which is to be given the same name as this chapter.

That’s everything you need to know now, so please enjoy a new chapter of AoSI: R!

Chapter X

Knives and Pens

Name: Light Yagami

Age: 17 years

Date: September 9th 2006

Dr Cameron has kindly asked me to answer her questions today. She has asked me to tell her the truth, for my benefit as well as the team’s, and I was loathed to argue with her. Currently, I am in my private room at Princeton Plainsboro Teaching Hospital, being treated by Dr House, M.D. and his team of diagnosticians, along with Dr Beyondormason Morning, O.D. (who must be here with DR Cameron and I because he is still resentful for yesterday’s incident with the bleach. For months now, the better part of a year, I have been labelled as strange, unstable, dangerous, even downright crazy.

I wasn’t always like this, and yet I always was.

Dr Cameron has asked me to write it all down, to tell her and Dr House what happened in that year before the ‘April Incident’ (as my father had come to call it), to tell them why it is that I am here and not studying in Japan to get into University, where I should be by next April. She has also asked that I start wherever I feel is best, so I’m going to oblige and start before that year, at the very beginning, from when I was a young child aged six.

From this age, from even before, I was constantly learning. Before I went to school, I could already do a number of things my peers couldn’t. I could read, write, and – to some degree – act. I was always acting, having already learnt from my parents’ praises how to be the perfect son they had always seen me as. From the moment I understood the concept of ‘perfect’ I was trying to match it, trying to outdo it. You could suggest that it was my parents’ fault for pushing me in that direction, for coming to always expecting that of me, but it was actually mine: Their positive reinforcement had merely shown me what acceptance I could expect, and it was my choice alone that I acted on it. The idea that parents loved their children unconditionally never occurred to me, not until I visited the homes of my classmates and could observe this phenomenon for myself. By then, though, it was just a simple fact that I could offer my parents something that my peers couldn’t offer theirs, and I did nothing to change.