The Contract

The Contract is a House fanfic by DIYSheep which can be found on Fanfiction.net and which is the cornerstone for a shared fan multiverse.

Synopsis: House has signed a "contract" in blood which allows the other party to abuse him any time, anyhow, anywhere. This other party is expert at both physical and psychological torture. He did this because the other party would have killed Wilson, and might still kill him and others, otherwise. He isn't allowed to tell anyone that he is under this "contract" or to find out who the other party is... Anyhow, because no one knows what's going on, no one is sympathetic to him; though they can see changes in his behavior, he manages to alienate them enough that they don't want to dig deeper. (The one time Wilson seriously tries, House gets him so mad that Wilson breaks his cane.)

After a period of calm, House is forced to watch the murder of Cameron and feels forced to confess to it. Wilson immediately regrets how he had treated House, but it's too late by then. The prison is a new "tough-on-crime" prison, and the personnel have already been corrupted by the party who is torturing House, ensuring that the torture continues and intensifies. House eventually gets to meet his tormentor, but by then he's in a solitary cell in chains and is thoroughly demoralized. House survives by sheer willpower -- if he dies, so does everyone named on the kill list -- and thinking of Wilson.

Then House's tormentor is murdered in broad daylight. The FBI is on this case, as House's tormentor was very influential, and they quickly discover the "contract" and DVDs of House's torture. House is moved to the prison hospital, and Wilson is at his side ASAP. Eventually, they get the bad guys convicted and House cleared -- at which point House regresses majorly. Wilson then has to take care of him in hopes that he comes back...

Such is the original story, told in three Fanfiction.net chapters (all subdivided), of which only the first two were in the original draft. In many ways, it is an improbable cornerstone for a multiverse. The story is written mostly in Beige Prose with some Purple Prose mixed in. There is Wanton Cruelty to the Common Comma and the occasional Rouge Angles of Satin. There is some debate about whether key characters are, in fact, in character. And it is a hard M; all sorts of Gorn are present and Rape as Drama is included. The story is almost, possibly unintentionally, a demonstration of the banality of evil...

But something about this story struck a chord in readers in the House fandom. If the characters were Out of Character, it was in ways frequently seen in the fandom in House Hurt Comfort fics. And this fandom has always enjoyed wrestling with the nature of morality -- a subject that this story does deal with. And so others have asked to write in this 'verse and have been allowed to. Almost all of the other authors are technically better than DIYSheep -- which can be a mixed bag, given that many of them choose to explore the torture more-or-less directly.

There is a LiveJournal community indexing all Contractverse {K-verse] works...

Tropes:

 * Acquitted Too Late -- played with.
 * Alternate Universe: Most of the true sequels are incompatible with each other. And, on learning that one of them ("Exigencies" by Priority) had mentioned a form of torture that was threatened but never carried out, the original author wrote a piece, "Pencils Are Dangerous," in which it does happen. That one also has sequels.
 * Art Major Biology (we hope)
 * Author Tract: The descriptions of the "zero-tolerance" prison system.
 * Beige Prose
 * Black and Grey Morality
 * Burger Fool
 * But for Me It Was Tuesday -- inverted.
 * Can't Get Away with Nuthin'
 * Cuffs Off, Rub Wrists -- inverted.
 * Despair Event Horizon
 * Deus Angst Machina -- neither House nor the reader get much of a break in the main story.
 * Deus Ex Machina
 * Directors Cut -- the third chapter came well after the other two.
 * External Retcon -- some of the sequels
 * Fan Verse
 * Gambit Roulette
 * Gorn
 * Guilty Pleasures
 * Happy Place
 * Heroic BSOD
 * "I Know You're in There Somewhere" Fight -- done very slowly In-Universe, but done
 * Its Not Me Its My Enemies - House can't say this, but he thinks it.
 * Jump Off the Slippery Slope
 * Kick the Dog
 * Knight Templar
 * Moral Event Horizon
 * The Multiverse
 * Non Indicative Title -- the "contract" has the form of a contract, complete with sections and clauses, but is not legally enforceable.
 * No Sympathy
 * Out of Character
 * Purple Prose
 * Rape as Drama
 * Rouge Angles of Satin -- a few misspellings and a few Briticisms.
 * Serial Escalation-- this work deliberately tries to go there
 * Shared Universe
 * Stuffed in The Fridge -- Cameron's death is supposed to be senseless.
 * Villain Sue -- the other party of the contract
 * Wanton Cruelty to the Common Comma -- the original author had not got the hang of punctuating dialogue tags -- and this work has a lot of dialogue. There is also an occasional misplaced question mark.