Characters: Gen, with House, Wilson, Mod Squad
Rating: PG, for one slightly off-color Aussie idiom that I found online.
Warnings/Spoilers: None
Length: 1,200 words

Notes: From housefic_pens Kickstarter Number Two, prompt 2 “I’m not cleaning this thing out again. It’s somebody else’s turn.”
I wanted to write something silly and light. Call it Goofy Without Plot. Standard disclaimers apply.


Chase spat a mouthful of brownish liquid back into his mug and dropped it in the sink. "Either of you got any gum? Or a toothbrush?"

"Like I'd lend you my toothbrush," Cameron glanced over her shoulder at Chase then went back to the latest issue of International Immunology.

Foreman concentrated on the Wall Street Journal. "You know the coffee's lousy. Why don't you stop for some decent stuff on the way like I do?" He lifted his white paper cup and took a long drink. "Caramel latte, sweet and delicious."

Chase pulled the basket from its holder and sniffed at the coffee grounds. "It’s not the coffee; it's the water. Or the pumping mechanism. It could be bacterial."

"You're doing a differential on lousy coffee?" Cameron moved to join him next to the machine.

"This is beyond lousy, it's a brown-eyed mullet."

Cameron and Foreman turned to Chase with curious eyes. "What? It's a figure of speech."

Foreman shook his head as he joined his colleagues in front of the coffee pot. He stuck his finger in the grounds and sniffed the contents of the pot. "I have no idea what your figure of speech means, but the grounds are cold; that means somebody turned on yesterday's coffee to warm it up instead of making another pot; that's the problem."

"But it doesn't smell like burnt coffee; it smells like… vomit," Cameron said, leaning in to take another whiff.

"Whatever, it needs to be cleaned," Chase insisted. He glanced at Foreman; they both leaned toward Cameron.

“I’m not cleaning this thing out again. It’s somebody else’s turn,” she said. "You always expect me to do the clean-up because I'm a woman."

"No," Foreman said. "We expect you to do the cleaning because you always do it." He would have high-fived Chase, but their pagers sounded and the mystery of the bad coffee was forgotten while they checked their latest patient.


House arrived to an empty office. He considered walking across the balcony to bug Wilson, but he decided to putter around the office and wait for his fellows. The Mod Squad would turn up soon enough.

"Heath, Linc," House greeted Chase and Foreman. "What's on the burner this morning?"

"Huh? Our patient is vomiting, coffee grounds," Chase stated, eying the steaming mug as House raised it to his lips.

"Ah, here's Julie, one step behind, as usual. What do you know?"

Cameron stepped into the room a few seconds behind her colleagues and made a face at House. "I wouldn't drink that if I were you."

Foreman grumbled. "He probably has a bleeding ulcer, we need to get him into surgery ASAP."

"When did you start pronouncing acronyms as words?"

"What does that have to do with the coffeemaker?" Cameron puzzled.

"You," House addressed her, "are falling down on the job." Cameron blinked several times. "I had to make a fresh pot when I got here."

"Yeah, something's… wrong with it," Chase said. "Cameron was supposed to clean it out."

"Hey!" she said. "We got paged."

"Whatever. Hold on the surgery; order a 24-hour urine test for creatinine clearance, and do a head CT," House ordered.

"On the coffeemaker?" Foreman gaped.

"On the patient."

House wrote a few symptoms on the whiteboard and then lost interest. He wandered the few steps to Wilson's office and poked his head in the open door. "Hey, you hungry?"

"It's 9:30. Didn't you eat breakfast?" Wilson asked, not looking up from his papers.

"What can I say? I miss your pancakes."

"I'm about finished with chart review. Meet you down there in ten minutes?"

House squinted with one eye, then the other, but he made his way to the first floor alone.



"There's no chance it's renal," Chase said with a satisfied look on his face. "We ran a chem panel and his kidney function looks completely normal. Potassium, calcium and phosphorus in normal ranges." He walked toward the back of the room as House crossed "renal" from the list on the whiteboard.

"CT showed significant bleeding in the sinuses. It's probably polyps, and if one of them ruptured, that could account for the blood in his vomit," Foreman announced.

"Great, so our guy is suffering from the mother of all post-nasal drips," House said. He was about to suggest shuffling their patient to those saps in ENT when Chase spat into the sink again.

"Bloody hell! I told you something was wrong." Cameron and Foreman jumped up and the three of them examined the machine.

"Leave this to a professional." House brushed them away with his cane and sniffed at the contents of the pot, then the reservoir, then the filter. "I smell a rat, or a rat fink."

"Please tell me you didn't drown your pet in there," Cameron winced.

House rolled his eyes. "Didn't any of you take chemistry in junior high? No Child Left Behind..."

"Hey!" Chase said. "I wasn't even educated here."

House narrowed his eyes for a split second, focusing on a quirk, something that didn't fit. "I know somebody who was," House murmured as he glanced down at Chase's cup. He filled it and left the room quickly.


"Eighth grade chemistry lab," House said as he stalked toward Wilson's desk. He waved the cup under his friend's nose. "Brings back memories, doesn't it? One day after school, Dave Bryant and I broke into the lab and swiped a bottle of butyric acid. Foul smelling stuff," he reflected. "The couch in the teacher's lounge didn't smell the same for months. We never got caught."

"House, why are you telling stories about your misspent youth?" Wilson struggled to keep his face calm. He turned his head to keep House from noticing that his dimples were showing.

"Why have you been spiking the coffee in my conference room?"

Wilson looked at House and they stared at each other for a good, long minute before Wilson's resolve failed and he shrugged and sat back, finally letting a grin spread over his face. "How did you know it was me?"

House just smiled and tapped Wilson's shoulder with the head of his cane. "Come on, we can watch Divorce Court. Yesterday, Judge Mablean made a stripper pay alimony to her deadbeat ex-husband."

"Once again, the American dream is crushed under the wheels of jurisprudence," Wilson said as he pushed away from his desk.

"Sucks to be you."

"Every time."

They walked toward the elevator, elbows almost touching, each silently wondering how long House's fellows would take to figure out that there was nothing at all wrong with the coffeemaker that a good scrubbing wouldn't fix.

Pairing: House/Wilson
Rating: NC-17
Warning: Lots of sex, and House makes fun of fat people
Summary: Nights before, mornings after, and a few moments in between the days before Wilson gets married. A brief history of an on-again-off-again thing.
Author's Notes: This was originally written for Remix Redux IV. It has been significantly edited from the version that appears there. The story was remixed from Wandering Widget's "Fallback," but this (final) draft bears very little resemblance to the original work. Thanks to bibliosylph for the beta. She helped get the sappy out. Also, I had all kinds of problems with spacing when I ported this to LJ. Keeping my fingers crossed that it's legible.

---

Elm Terrace


Everything was OK, more or less, when Wilson left House the first time.

He had gone to bed alone and woke some time later to the feeling of a tongue flicking over the head of his cock and sound of a muffled grunt.

"House? What the--" a gasp, or a protest, though not much of a protest.

"My people call this a blowjob." House went back to what he was doing. Wilson could only watch House's head bobbing up and down, up and down until his heart reached the edge of its ability to beat and he came without warning.

House smoothed his hands over Wilson's chest before he got up to go back to his own bedroom. He paused at the door. "I think you should find some place else to live."

Wilson wondered if he'd breached an untold etiquette that governed coming in your roommate's mouth.

Every time Wilson tried to figure it out, he remembered the things House could do with his tongue and thought he should feel guilty because the memory always got him hard. When that happened, he showed up at the door he still thought of as theirs.


"I see that nothing has changed here," Wilson said. In roughly sixteen hours, he'd be married. His brother, Tom, would stand up with him. He'd declined the traditional bachelor party in favor of an evening with his best friend. The people who patted him on the back and called him ‘such a nice, responsible young man' obviously didn't know House very well.

"I moved most of my books into the bedroom that used to be yours," House responded.

His almost-wife's name was Lois. She was a small brunette who made a great first impression. Wilson had known her for almost four months; she wasn't the same woman he'd shacked up with after House threw him out. "Nice thing about a small girl, you won't have to worry so much about gravity," House said. "Unless she gets fat. How big is her mother?"

"House…" Wilson shook his head in dismay. "Only you—" He couldn't say any more, not with House's mouth covering his.

Wilson didn't close his eyes; he couldn't look away. This was it. He was going to be good from this day forward. He could feel House's fingers working at the buttons of his shirt, and the only thing he really knew right now was that he wanted his shirt off, so he could feel House's hands on his skin.

"You make me crazy." He leaned in and pulled House's t-shirt over his head, all the while thinking how much easier it was to separate a man from his clothing if you didn't have to mess with buttons.

"I do not." House took Wilson's face in his hands and kissed him again, slowly, a little like goodbye. Then they laughed, as if they both knew that none of this was real enough to merit a farewell.

Wilson forced details into sharp focus, to keep them: the soft thump of a pillow hitting the floor, the tingle in his feet when House sank his teeth into a nipple, the wave of heat that crashed over his skin as House pushed inside. House crushed their fingers together when he came. That was the best part about sex with House: Wilson never had to ask whether he was good enough.

He rolled over and looked at the clock. In roughly fourteen hours, he'd be married. Tom would give a toast and tell some embarrassing story from when he was eight. He'd look for House, and he would let himself remember how their bodies locked together, this one last time.

"Get some sleep," House said in a normal voice. "You have to get married tomorrow."

"It's already tomorrow. I'm getting married today." House slid an arm around his waist and spooned up against him, but he didn't say another word.

The next thing Wilson sensed was the smell of hot coffee, House's coffee. He'd remember that, too.


A little more than a year passed before he fucked up his nice little life. He wasn't quite sure how he'd ended up being unfaithful to the woman he married and the man he kept wanting to fuck in one fell swoop. He told Lois. About the only comfort he could find as he escaped her yelling and crying was the idea that he wouldn't have to tell House.

No strings pulled every bit as tight as his marriage vows, and he called House anyway. He was too drunk to say anything.

"I know it's you," House barked at the silence. "Where the hell are you?"

"Westin," Wilson slurred. "It's… nice."

"It's all the way out in the suburbs." House hung up.


By the time he heard the pounding at his door, Wilson had finished another beer and the call had conveniently slipped his mind.

"I know you're in there, you coward," House shouted. "Open the fucking door."

Wilson had little choice. House's fist hung in the air, ready to strike again. He said nothing before stumbling into the bathroom, slamming the door behind him. He didn't want to see House.

"You're an idiot," House said as soon as Wilson came back.

"I know." Wilson stared at the dresser and counted the beer bottles. One, two, three, four… eight. Damn.

"Knowing isn't enough to stop you." House had taken off his jacket and his shoes. He flung himself onto the bed and moved to turn off the lamp.

Wilson tripped over his own feet and fell forward, the mattress cushioned his landing. House slipped an arm around his waist and pulled him close. When they woke, Wilson was sober and House was calm. It was enough to get them back to House's place in one piece.


North Tenth Street

The apartment was empty when he let himself in after work, which sucked. The long, boring day made him hornier than usual. He fidgeted as he scrolled through channels in search of something that might provide the visual stimulus to inspire him to jerk off, but it was too early for soft-core porn on cable, and a random episode of Baywatch wasn't doing anything for him: too much David Hasselhoff and not enough Pam Anderson.

It was clear to Wilson that he'd been hanging out with House too long. He settled for a cold shower, which didn't help either, then he gave up went to bed early. He had no idea how long he'd been asleep when he heard shuffling in the front room.

"House?" he called out. "I'm back here…"

House appeared in the doorway and flipped the lights on. "What are you doing in bed so early?" Wilson pulled back the covers and crooked a finger.

"Waiting, not very patiently," Wilson said. "Take your clothes off and get over here."

House smiled and raised an eyebrow as he started to undress.

"About time you showed up," Wilson said as House crawled over to him.

"Sorry, I had a date," House confessed, running his fingers through Wilson's hair.

"Guess she didn't put out." Wilson felt House's teeth nipping his neck, biting his shoulder, and let a delicious shiver take him.

"Nope. You wouldn't be wrong to call it an unmitigated disaster," House said. "But never say never." He pushed Wilson into the mattress, pinning his arms over his head and straddling his hips in a series of movements so fluid that they played as one.

"Why'd you waste your time on a maybe?" Wilson muttered between breaths. "I was waiting for you."

"You don't have to get sentimental with me," House said. "We both know I'm your safety school. You'll be out of here as soon as you get a better offer." House bent his head to dart his tongue between Wilson's lips, teasing and playful.

Wilson gripped the bottom of the headboard and lost himself in the sensation of his heels rubbing and pressing against the backs of House's legs. He heard a word over and over again: harder. It slipped from his throat to his ears in the guise of a stranger's voice.
When he slept that night, Wilson dreamed of a great bird swallowing him whole.

When he woke up, he packed his things to leave before House could do it for him.


"At least you know this one's going to get fat," House said the night before Wilson's second wedding. "But I think she's got the height to pull it off, so you won't have to worry so much about a few extra pounds making her look frumpy before her time." He chewed his steak with gusto and then took up a forkful of potatoes.

The next almost Mrs. Wilson was Lily, voluptuous beauty who shone on Wilson's arm. "Give it up, House. You're not going to scare me out of getting married."

House refilled his wine glass and Wilson's. "My couch is always open if she porks out," he said with a slight chuckle. "You staying with me tonight?"

Wilson speared a couple of slender green beans with his fork. "What, and make your girlfriend sleep on the couch? Women are a lot less flexible about that kind of thing than you seem to be."

"Stacy's not the jealous type; that's part of the reason we fit so well together."

"Lily is staying at her sister's tonight. Come back to my place," Wilson suggested. He thought of his arms wrapped around House's back, their chests pressed close together, almost melting into each other. "I mean, if you want to."

"How about I stop by in the morning and make you some coffee." It wasn't a question.


As Wilson listened to the rabbi talk about duty, House caught his eye. He was smiling.


Lindsay Place


Wilson knocked on House's door with a sense that the earth had flattened out. He'd spoken to Stacy; he'd come directly from his lawyer's office. He noticed a faint black streak on his pinky, where his fingers dragged over his signature.

He stood out in the hall for what felt like a long time and wondered what he'd find if House let him in.

"What?" House said as he finally opened the door. His voice was rough, almost garbled. He had been crying, or yelling, or drinking. Maybe all three.

"I need a place to stay," Wilson told him. He dragged a modest sized suitcase into the living room and parked it next to the coat closet. "Thought I could sleep on your couch."

"It's three in the afternoon." House hadn't bothered to get dressed. He was listing dangerously to the left, leaning hard on his new cane. Wilson let his coat drop to a chair and slid an arm around House's waist.

"Perfect time for a nap," he said evenly.

"You're taking me to bed?"

"I'm putting you to bed, and then I can make us something to eat." Wilson lifted House's arm around his neck. They started across the room, a couple of steps at a time; every few seconds, Wilson shifted House's body a little straighter.
He made a few calculations in his head: four or five steps to the couch versus at least twenty to the bedroom. "Let's rest a while."

"I can make it to the bed," House snarled.

"I know you can," Wilson said. "Not so sure about me."

"She left a real mess," House said without looking up. "Everything's different now."

Wilson rubbed a hand through his hair, tried to keep himself from yelling. Dealing with House since the infarction was a real struggle, and now he was in it alone. Stacy was gone; Lily was gone. He and House remained alone together on the couch in this wreck of a room.

"Not everything," he said after a couple of minutes. He placed his left hand over House's right and figured he was deluding himself.


"Seems like it's about time you got married again," House said. "What's it been, six months? You must be sick of sleeping on my couch by now."

It was true that they no longer shared a bed, but Wilson felt like he ought to protest.

"Although my couch might be more comfortable than that skeleton you've been seeing." House made air quotes around the last word.

"Julie is a very attractive woman," Wilson said. "She works very hard to…"

"I've never seen her eat anything but lettuce," House said.

"Only you would mock somebody for sticking to a nutritious diet."

"For a rabbit, maybe." House made a childish face and Wilson shook his head as he stirred sugar into his coffee. "But at least you know she can't gain weight since she maintains a calorie deficit."

"Every time I go on a third date, it seems like you become obsessed with what she's going to look like a few years down the road. Why is that?"

"Because love is blind," House said. "Somebody has to look out for your future. Eventually one of your little liaisons is going to last. Law of averages. And I'd hate to see a nice guy like you saddled with a fat girl."

Wilson spread a second slice of toast with jam. "So if I were to ask you again, to be my best man, you'd say yes?"

House just looked at him. "Don't you know any better men than me?"


Baker Street


Wilson opened his eyes shortly after sunrise and shifted on the couch. The place was so quiet; House was still sleeping. He couldn't stop himself seeing the things that remained. House had a hard time letting go of souvenirs of his past. Wilson scanned the familiar titles on the bookshelf and thought back to the time when they'd lived together in that cramped apartment, before his first marriage. The stuff on the walls, on the shelves, they were Wilson's mementos, too, in a way.

He sat up. The wood floor was cold under his bare feet. He rose, stretched, and rubbed his hands over his arms. The last time he slept here was in House's bed, a long time ago. He picked up the blanket, wrapped it around his shoulders and walked into the kitchen.

Rain rolled in the night before he married Julie. House was almost certainly high, or low; either way, he wasn't quite himself. They ate in a diner, omelets the size of Rhode Island, and came back here.

Wilson filled the coffee pot with cold water and poured it into House's complicated German coffee machine.

He would have gone back to his own place for a responsible night's sleep, alone. But House asked him to stay, one last time, to say goodbye properly. He actually said the word: goodbye. He'd never done that before.

His kisses were slow and soft, very nearly gentle, as if House was trying to make sure they would last as long as they had to. Wilson let Stacy's shadow cross his mind as he wondered whom House was kissing, but he didn't care that much. The right to be here, in House's bed, enjoying his kisses, belonged only to Wilson now.

He found the filters in a drawer and measured out four scoops of grounds, adding a fifth for good measure.

Wilson covered House's body with his and never broke contact; they simply kept touching each other, moving against each other until Wilson rested his head on House's chest to listen to the blood moving the valves in his heart.

He took two mugs from a cabinet and filled them.

He didn't love House, and House didn't love him. Love was a baby bird screaming in the nest, struggling to leave it for the first time, not quite understanding that spreading its wings to catch the air made the difference between falling and flying. Whatever he and House had, it was something else. House was the nest he didn't want to leave, even though he let himself be pushed out when House wouldn't allow him to stay. Wilson used his shoulder to open the door to House's bedroom. House was still sleeping.

They fell asleep and woke in the same position, as if the night before had sapped the will to move from them.

"You should take a shower, Jimmy," House grumbled. "You can't get married smelling like sex."

"Why do we always end up like this when I'm about to walk down the aisle?" House shrugged and reached for his pills. "You only want me when I'm unavailable," Wilson said. "That's so fucked up."

"OK, say I asked you to stop thinking you can be Mr. Respectable Married Guy. If I asked you to, would you leave Julie standing at the altar and stay with me?"

Wilson sat down on the edge of the bed and set the mugs on the nightstand. House was no more than half a foot away.

"Is that what you want?"

"I want you to decide already," House yelled. "I couldn't make you happy for more than a couple of weeks."

"You don't know what you want."

"And you do?"

He didn't, not really, so Wilson took a shower. He went back to his apartment and changed clothes, and then he did what he thought he wanted to do. He got married again.

He felt a hand on his back, and heard a mumbled curse. "I brought you some coffee."

"Breakfast in bed? Are you feeling guilty?" House sat up and took the cup that Wilson offered. "Nothing says ‘I'm sorry' like a good blowjob."

Wilson laughed out loud, but stopped himself. "What's in it for me?"

"What if it's for your own good?" House said.

"You always think you're right." The coffee was too hot. Wilson blew over his cup and wished he'd remembered to add sugar. He set his cup back down and took House's from him before he squirmed into the narrow space between House and the edge of the bed.

"I'm one of the lucky few who can learn from experience." House shifted over enough for Wilson to stretch out. They lay there together, not touching, not looking at each other, and not speaking until the clock in the hall struck six times.

"Do you think we could fly?" Wilson asked. "If we tried?"

"You think we should jump off the roof waving our arms in the air like idiots?"

"Something like that, I guess."

"Sure, that sounds like big fun," House said. He raised himself up and looked down at Wilson's eyes. "Stay out of my pills."

Prompt: “There are worse things than this,” he said softly, and she shook her head. Fromhousefic_pens Kickstarter Number 1.
Warning: Written in about 90 minutes of working time, then edited once. Please consider this a draft. Word count is about 1,000.
Notes: I have never tried writing these characters before, but the idea that became the guts of this piece has been at the back of my mind for some time now, and it's good to get it written. Thoughts on characterization are welcome in the thread here. Comments closed.

---

"You're off tomorrow?" Foreman asked near the end of the shift one Saturday afternoon. He and Cameron were alone in the conference room finishing paperwork on their most recent case.

"I think Chase is on call," she said. "Not that it matters. The Elephant Man died and we never pick up new patients over a weekend. House wouldn't stand for it."

Foreman laughed. "Before I started working here, I'd never met anybody who could make medicine a nine-to-five job."

"Oh, that's not fair." Cameron looked at her colleague and slowly let a broad smile spread across her face. "It's more like noon-to-whenever."

Foreman smiled, too. They sat quietly, writing notes on charts, shoving stacks of paper at each other every so often, until he got up and stretched.

"I should get going," he said. "Got a date tonight."

"Is it Traci again? Go home, Foreman. Don't keep the lady waiting if you don't have to. I can finish this…"

Foreman shrugged his jacket over his arms and lightly patted Cameron's shoulder. "Leave it for Chase, something to remember us by." They looked at each other and willingly went their separate ways.


Cameron slept well and woke up early. The day that spilled through her window was bright and sunny. She pressed one hand to the glass and decided it was just warm enough to go for a run outside.

She pulled on a sports bra and a sweatshirt, laced up her shoes, locked her front door and jogged at a moderate pace for half a mile before breaking into a full run.

She loved running for the reminder that she controlled her own body, made it do what she wanted. Trees and houses passed through her peripheral vision as she went on. Seeing the distance as more than numbers on a display helped Cameron push herself that much harder. Running outside was much nicer than plodding along on the treadmill in her living room.

That was a compromise, a sacrifice she made to her career. She'd always known that medicine would cost her. On the day she proudly walked across the stage to accept the diploma that allowed her to call herself "Alison Cameron, M.D.," she didn't consider how high that cost would rise.

She stopped at a corner store to pick up a newspaper and walked the last mile back to her apartment. It was a good, responsible cool down and when she got back inside, she was ready to enjoy her old Sunday morning ritual.

It started with coffee. She poured a cup and breathed in the aroma. "I take it black, like my men," she said, snickering at the joke from an old movie she'd seen too many times. She thought about her brother, and the time since their last conversation. Maybe she'd call him later; it had been too long.

She set her cup on a table next to the couch and flopped down to read her paper. She liked the sensations of reading an actual newspaper: the crinkle of the pages as she turned them, the smell of the newsprint floating gently toward her face, the smudges on her fingers from the printer's ink.

She thought of her mother. When Cameron had a chance to settle in with the paper, she always thought about her mother, who wanted to be a reporter, but got married and raised a family instead. She was happy, wasn't she? Things are different now. Women really can have it all.

She turned to the obituary section at the back of the Metro section. This was where the ritual started to mean something to her. She scanned the written obits: Pauline Graham, 82, Public School Teacher, after complications from surgery. John Lewis Meyerson, 60, Advertising Executive, killed in a one-vehicle traffic accident. Bettye Ann Piltz, R.N., 72, of pancreatic cancer. She is survived by her husband, Rupert; a daughter, Lisa Piltz-Monroe; a son, Jason; two sisters and five grandchildren.

She often found the paid obits more satisfying. She read every word of every notice, keeping an eye out for anybody who might remind her of Mike, but today, on this day, there's nobody. There's nobody else's grief to soak up, to dilute what she still hasn't let go.

She rattled the Metro section closed and set it aside for the Arts section. Today belonged to her; she should do something.

When she looked up, the sky was twilight and she realized that she hadn't spoken aloud in almost twelve hours. "That's… really pathetic, Cameron," she lowered her voice to mimic her boss, then she coughed from the effort.


Foreman bounded into the conference room Monday morning, more cheerful than usual. "Ali C MD inna house!" he exclaimed.

"I guess somebody got lucky," Cameron said.

"You think?" Foreman was beaming.

"You always try to talk street after a good date." She sighed and began to pull her hair into a ponytail.

"Hey, what's up with you? Please tell me you didn't come in on your day off."

Cameron glanced around the room as if she was reassuring herself that they were alone. Chase wouldn’t be in before nine and House would show up when he got around to it.

"No, same old same old Sunday," she said. "But sometimes I think… I think that all I have is, you know, this." She gestured around the room: this job, this hospital, this friend she talked to every once in a while.

“There are worse things than this,” he said softly, and she shook her head.

"And there are better," she replied. She allowed herself a moment of eye contact with Foreman. He seemed so well adjusted, so balanced. She liked being around him because she hoped some of it might rub off on her. Right now, he looked happy. "So, since it's just you and me, feel free to dish about your date."

Part One (By Pitza)
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four
Part Five
Part Six
Part Seven
Part Eight
Part Nine
Part Ten
Part Eleven

Author's note: This is the end, told from House's point of view. I'll include a few acknowledgments, but there will be a longer piece on the process of writing this series on housefic_meta soon. So, thanks to namasteyoga for a very quick sort of beta on the final two chapters. She pointed out several things that weren't clear in my sixth or so draft. Thanks also to maryhatchbailey and pwcorgigirl for listening to me whine and bitch about how badly my writing was going over the last couple of months. Very special thanks to logastellus for never easing up on the questions. The ending probably would have turned out very differently without her.

My deepest thanks to pitza. She let me take over her story and blow it way beyond what I ever imagined it would be.

Thanks to all who read, waiting patiently for me to write something new, and made comments and observations. I appreciate them and felt your praise for this twisted little story very deeply. You all inspired me in different ways, and pushed me beyond what I thought I could do with borrowed characters.

---

House hears Wilson’s plaintive words through the haze of too many beers and wonders if Wilson remembers hearing them that night, before everything went to hell. He watches the sky as Wilson drives. He lets his eyes focus on the moon as stray clouds pass through his field of vision: clear, blurred, clear, and then gone. Now it’s back again.

He feels himself humming, but he doesn’t recognize the tune in his throat, it’s just there blocking his thoughts. He’s glad, even grateful. His fingers tap against his leg.

The car comes to a halt. They’re home, House thinks. Wilson gets out without a word and opens the door for him.

“Come on, House. Get up.” Wilson sounds sharp, the way he sounded while he was pushing House to walk during his recovery.

“Wait, OK.” House stands up, feels his feet under him, and leans on the cane. He feels Wilson’s arm go around his waist. “Don’t! I can walk.” Wilson follows anyway. They shuffle up the steps slowly. House looks over his shoulder. “I can’t get rid of you,” he says.

Wilson unlocks the door and pushes it open. “Whatever,” he says.

“You don’t want to come in for a nightcap?” House asks. He falters as he looks at Wilson’s face. He can’t read anything there.

“Not a chance,” Wilson says. He takes the steps quickly. House slams the door between them before Wilson reaches his car.


He calls in sick the next day, and the day after that. His problem is more than a hangover, he’s in more pain than usual. He takes Vicodin two at a time instead of one; his head feels useless and fuzzy. Cuddy is sympathetic and cuts him a little slack. He sort of wishes she’d stop doing that, but not right now, not while her bias works in his favor.

He sits in front of the television. He changes the channel every few minutes because the action keeps him from sliding into oblivion. He jumps from a news program in Chinese, to an exploration of the excesses of some washed-up rock band, to a shopping channel. He gives up when the hostess presents a ceramic clown figurine and peers at it as if the object were her child, or her lover. He can’t decide which image is more disturbing.

He pulls himself into the kitchen with his cane and spreads some peanut butter on a slice of almost stale bread. He takes two bites and leaves the rest on the counter.

He looks around his apartment at the mess. Fuck it, just go to work. Work has a whole department full of people who don’t speak much English who get paid to clean things up when they get out of hand.


The first thing he sees on his desk when he walks into his office the next morning is an envelope. He opens it, and a silvery key falls on the floor in front of him. A note has only an address with an apartment number. It might confuse House, if not for Wilson’s inimitable scrawl.

He picks up the key, holds it in front of his eyes; studies it. Apparently Wilson has moved. He slips it on the ring next to the key to his front door. He almost keeps the old one, as a souvenir, a fetish to remind him that anybody can make mistakes, but he rejects that idea and throws the key across the room. Its arc takes it to the wastebasket next to the door; it rustles the plastic liner when it falls out of the air.

His phone seems to be ringing a lot, but he doesn’t pick up. He doesn’t feel like talking about the bug any more, and he really doesn’t want to talk to Gorman today.

He manages to avoid everybody until Cuddy comes to see him.

“How’s your leg,” she asks bluntly.

“It’s fine. I’m fine, I had a bit of a cold, maybe.”

“You have to be careful, House,” she starts. He waves her off and goes back to the magazine he was reading.

“You can lay off, Cuddy,” he says. “I’ve got a fancy degree that says I’m capable of looking after myself.”

“I did have a reason for coming to see you,” she says. “Dr. Gorman faxed me a formal letter of resignation this morning.”

And? He knows all about Gorman’s plan, everybody in the department knows.

“He also asked my permission to talk to you about a permanent job with the World Health Organization. It seems that your efficiency impressed some people over there,” her tone says that she doesn’t think that’s possible.

“Well, my iron didn’t work over there, either; they must have different standards,” he says. He knows there’s more, so he waits.

“As a preemptive strike, how’d you like to run the infectious diseases department?” she offers. “I can make it worth your while…”

“I don’t think you can, not if Tucker is planning on sticking around, which he is. I couldn’t manage him, he hired all the residents we have now, and the most of the other staff. Gorman was really hands off the last couple of years.”

“He hired you then gave up,” she says. “But I’d like you to stay.”

He looks at Cuddy’s face. She means it.

“I honestly don’t want to run a big department, Cuddy,” he says. “What about Wilson?”

“Wilson’s an oncologist. I’m not going to hire him to run ID,” she says, like she’s talking to a med student.

“I’m not sure I want to work at a hospital that would let a hotshot like Wilson get away because of… personalities.” House sits back in his chair to challenge her. “Hell, his publications alone should be enough to get you fighting to keep him on staff, and you’re trying to push him out the door to find his way among the bikini babes on South Beach.”

“How did you hear about that?” Cuddy seems shocked.

“Crazy Irv Gelb and my advisor from Hopkins go way back. You know how the old boy network is,” House pauses for a moment. “Or maybe you don’t.”

“What do you want, House? Should I bring in somebody from outside? You know a new guy isn’t going to put up with your quirks the way Gorman did. Of maybe I’ll offer it to Tucker, that would be fun for you.”

He takes a moment to look thoughtful, although he knows exactly what he’s going to say. “There’s a new thing in European hospitals where they have a department to handle diagnostics. I worked with the one at Canton, and it was interesting. I’d stick around here to work on something like that,” he says.

“I’ve read a few articles about diagnostics as a specialty. Obviously you’d need to be certified before I’d seriously consider giving you a brand new department,” she begins. He thinks she’s trying to make it sound like a problem, but it won’t be.

“Greg House, M.D.—he’s certifiable,” he says. “I read something like that in the men’s room the other day.”

“As far as Wilson goes, I don’t know what to tell you,” she says. “I’m not pushing him out. Your old boy network is wrong if it’s telling you I want to lose Wilson, but it’s his decision.” And that’s the bone of contention. He can’t explain it to Cuddy, because he doesn’t fully understand it himself. There’s a feeling of guilt that he didn’t expect. He never wanted anybody’s help with this whole thing, it should have been his secret, his and Wilson’s. He let it out.

“The whole hospital loses if Wilson decides to go,” House says.

“Maybe you should tell him that,” Cuddy shoots back.

House allows his anger to surface. “It’s his choice to make.”

“Yes, this is Wilson’s decision.” Cuddy throws up her hands in frustration. “Not mine, and not yours.”

As House leaves for the day, he thinks he sees Wilson several yards ahead of him. He calls out, but the figure keeps going. It must be somebody else, somebody who looks like Wilson, walks like him, turns down the hallway that leads to Wilson’s office.


Getting home in rush hour traffic takes all of House’s energy. He leans his head against the door as he fumbles for his keys. He’s sick of the winter, sick of the darkness and the cold. Most of all he misses his old life. He misses believing he knew what would happen next; he misses knowing how he would react, no matter what.

This is what hell is like, he thinks. All he wanted was for things to go back to normal, whatever that is. He wants to have lunch with his friend, or go to a movie. He wants to sit in the same room with Wilson again, and know that if neither of them says a word for three hours, it doesn’t mean anything is wrong between them.

The rush of warm air on his face as he moves inside feels so good, and he almost can’t take it. A different sort of man would weep with joy, but he’s just vaguely relieved to be out of the cold as he shuts the door behind him.

He’s tired of feeling. He’s tired of not feeling. In his own head, he’s trapped. He knows it’s not real: he’s his own man; he has choices.

House can’t remember how he got through the months after his infarction. It must have been worse than this. Those months seem like ancient history, but Wilson was there, with him. He tells himself that made it all easier.

He sits down at the piano and pushes the cover away from the keys, white and black in staggered order. He presses three at a time to make a chord, then another The sounds he makes seem to take the chill out of House’s bones. He finds himself picking out a phrase from a Chopin etude that he learned a long time ago.

He stops in the middle and thinks about how music always makes sense, even when nothing else does. Notes fall together in a certain order to make a song; the brain tells the fingers where to go, and when. How the brain remembers how to make the fingers make songs from noise, that’s the puzzle.

The pattern lit up for House when he was about six years old. He remembers Miss Whatever Her Name Was, his first piano teacher. She had brown hair and strong, demanding fingers. He never knew her first name, or whether she had a boyfriend, or anything about her, except that she told him that “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” was really an old tune by some guy named Mozart.

He remembers how he giggled for a full five minutes when she told him the composer’s first name was Wolfgang. Now, that memory brings a peaceful smile to his face. He plays the song simply at first, to prove to himself that he can be just like everybody else. He adds a bit of Mozart’s counterpoint because he knows he’s different, and he likes that.

He begins to feel like himself again, the way he was before the leg, the pills, and everything else. House sleeps well that night and walks with something like a spring in his step the net day.


There’s no reason to think Wilson will be at home, but House makes a visit anyway. Either they’re going to settle things between them, or they’re not, and one of them will end up leaving. The situation sounds very simple when he puts it that way.

He knocks on Wilson’s door, and waits.

“Are you here?” he hollers. “I came by to see if this thing works.” House can hear some noise behind the door. Wilson opens up, he wears a bathrobe and holds a towel in one hand. His hair drips water onto his face.

“Are we still friends?” House asks.

“I’m not talking to you until I’m dry,” Wilson insists. House walks into the front room to wait for Wilson to dress.

He takes a moment to survey the place. The post-war building is on the crappy side, but it’s close to the hospital; that’s got to be why Wilson chose it, There could be no other reason.

The front room is small. Its wood floor shows signs of wear, it needed to be sanded down and sealed two or three tenants ago. The place smells of fresh paint, but renter’s flat white isn’t a very attractive color. There’s a couch, a table and two chairs, and a TV that sits on the floor. The set is much bigger than the one Wilson had at his old place, it must be a recent acquisition, like the rest of the furniture. Good for Wilson.

He pokes his head into the kitchen. The appliances are reasonably new, all shiny white. They look out of place with the old, painted cabinets.

“This place is a dump,” House yells. “How long have you lived here?”

Wilson answers through the closed door of his bedroom, but House can’t make out the words. It’s not like they matter.

There’s a bookshelf built in to one wall, but there’s nothing on the shelves. He glances at the small pile of boxes in the corner and wonders how long they will sit there.

House notices a stack of mail on the table and goes to rifle through it. Most of it is marked with yellow change of address stickers. It’s pretty much the same as his mail, bills and junk. One of the bills seems to be from a physician in New York.

Interesting. House ticks back through facts in his head; Wilson mentioned a therapist, looks like he was serious. He drops the pile as Wilson comes back from the bedroom. He is dressed casually, House recognizes the clothes. The jeans probably date back to med school, they’re a little bit tight. The sweater was a gift from his mom, maybe three years ago.

“Nice couch,” House says. “And I love your entertainment center.”

“I haven’t been here long, couple of weeks, ” Wilson says. “I sold the house--well, selling. Supposed to close on Monday unless something happens.”

House wonders if Wilson is making clean break from the past. He looks at his face for a clue, but there’s nothing to find. “It won’t. You probably made out like a bandit.”

Wilson stuffs his hands in his pockets. His elbows stick out. “Yeah, maybe. I guess.” He sits down at the table.

“You splitting it with Ellen?” House asks.

“I offered; she doesn’t want anything from me.”

House sits on the couch and beats out a rhythm with his hand on one knee. “What was the stupid thing you did?”

Ice cubes drop into a plastic bin in the freezer. The sound moves through the kitchen toward the front door. House looks up.

“Uh, I’ve done lots of stupid things,” he says. “Which one are you talking about?”

“When Ellen left, you told me you’d done something stupid. I need to know what it was.”

A siren screams outside. Wilson gets up and walks to the window to watch an ambulance pass. “You know, you know how the worst thing you can do to a woman is to call her by somebody else’s name in bed?” he says after a moment. “It was something like that. I lied to her, I told her it didn’t mean anything, but she didn’t believe me. My wife was blowing me; I was thinking about you. I wanted it to be you, your mouth on me, instead of hers.”

There’s nothing House can do to stop him from talking, so he does not try. He gets up and moves to stand next to Wilson, looking out at the street. There’s nothing happening now. “I thought it might have been something worse,” he says.

“Admitting to your wife that you have sexual fantasies about a man, a man you actually know, isn’t the worst thing that can happen in a marriage?”

House continues to stare. “I thought you might have… forced her. I was looking for some kind of pattern.”

“You and your fucking puzzles. You thought I raped my wife?”

“So I was grasping at straws,” House admits. He starts to feel like coming here was a bad idea.

Wilson turns around and heads into the kitchen. He opens a couple of cabinets and shuts them, hard enough to rattle the contents. He’s clearly annoyed, but he does come back.
“Why are you here, House?”

“I told you, I want to know if we’re still friends.”

“That’s not my decision,” Wilson shouts.

“Well, it sure as hell isn’t mine,” House shouts back. He looks at Wilson. He looks at the table, then at the couch, and stays where he is. His leg doesn’t hurt, he’s far too pissed off for that.

“You shouldn’t have to protect yourself from me.”

That’s probably true, but he won’t require Wilson to do it for him.

“Look, what happened, happened. I let it happen. It’s as much my responsibility as yours,” House says. He wants to make sure Wilson sees his point of view.

“I hurt you,” Wilson says.

“I could have stopped you.” He’s almost ashamed that he has to remind him. “You were fucked up, Wilson; I could have fought you off,” he says.

“Why did you stay with me?”

He’s about to say something alcohol poisoning, but they would both know that’s an excuse, a damned lie. He respects what they are to each other, or what they once were, too much to tell it. “You needed something from me, you wanted something that I could give you… just once.” House stops to swallow some of his self pity. “I wanted you to owe me something. You said you wanted to fuck me, so I decided I’d let you.”

Wilson sputters, almost chokes. “That’s sick,” he says. “Sure, I did want to fuck you, but when I got in your car that night, and until you took my clothes off, all I wanted was a kiss. I kept trying to kiss you, and you kept pushing me away. When you undressed me, I don’t know, something changed.”

A kiss. He wanted a kiss. House almost believes him. Wilson looks like he believes himself.

House leans his head forward and motions to Wilson. The sound of his steps is heavy on the floor; a board creaks beneath his feet. House feels it give just a little under the soles of his shoes. They make eye contact, drill into each other for the split second before House reaches out to take hold of Wilson’s sweater.

“Is this what you wanted?” he breathes. He keeps his eyes open; there’s no romance in what he’s about to do. Wilson’s eyes are closed, like he’s scared, even terrified, of what he said. If he’s lying, House will expose that lie.

House bumps his nose hard on Wilson’s as their faces smash together. A bolt of pain shoots through his eyes and down the back of his neck. He sucks Wilson’s lower lip into his mouth, hard, feels the tissue fill with blood.

He bites, and tastes.

A sound comes from Wilson’s throat as House grabs at his head. The protest spurs him on. House seals his mouth over Wilson’s, maybe to shut him up, but there’s a weird sense of jealousy, too. He craves the kind of power that Wilson had over him. Wilson can’t struggle now, not when House is giving him what he asked for.

House feels his knuckles crack as he makes a fist in Wilson’s hair. He twists his hand just enough to hurt; he knows it hurts, and he’s glad. He jerks Wilson’s head back and forces his mouth open all the way, pushes his tongue against Wilson’s teeth until his jaw releases.

Wilson clamps down on House’s tongue, and pushes back with his own. House breathes hard through his nose.

Something inside House breaks. This isn’t right. He relaxes his hand on Wilson’s skull, feeling the full weight of his head. He eases his lips back, but he can’t let them go, not yet.

When Wilson opens his eyes, House lets his close. The kiss ends by degrees: their tongues draw back, their lips separate; their spines line up and they stand away from each other.

House and Wilson look at each other without judging.

Wilson goes back to the kitchen; House sits and wishes for a table to prop up his feet. He wipes his mouth on the back of one hand and examines the red-pink streak that the motion leaves behind. He hears Wilson approach, and he reaches the other hand up and over without looking. It meets a cold, plastic bottle.

House settles it between his legs. He screws off the top and gulps; the water feels good on his throat.

Wilson sits. House picks up the remote and presses a couple of buttons. Nothing happens.

“Does this thing have cable?” House asks.

“Supposed to, the guy came last night.”

House pushes a few more buttons and begins to mutter.

“It’s the red one.”

House finds it; a picture appears. He finds an old movie and they watch it.


“You going to Miami?” House asks. He yawns and stretches his arms over his head.

“Gelb’s crazy. I had to hear that he wanted to hire me from Cuddy. I’ve never actually spoken to the man,” Wilson says. He takes a sip of water and sets his bottle down on the floor. “Taft is thinking about retiring, and I have a lot invested here..”

“That’s true,” House says. He looks over at Wilson, who’s looking at the remote. “You might get his job, but you’ll never get a better parking space than mine.”

“I was thinking I could have your spot for a couple of weeks if I sprained an ankle or something.” Wilson looks at House, and hesitates. “Does that mean you’re not moving to Switzerland?”

“I considered it, but I don’t ski,” House says. “I told Gorman thanks, but no thanks.”

“He must have been disappointed.”

“A little, but I don’t think he was surprised.”

Another movie starts. House mentions that Ginger Rogers won an Oscar for her performance; Wilson doesn’t believe him. They watch it anyway.

“So, are we still friends?” House asks a third time. Wilson looks at him again.

“Let’s get out of here, go get a cheeseburger or something, I’m starving.”

They leave the apartment together and walk down the hall to the elevator. It takes a while.

“Wait, I need to lock up,” Wilson says. He turns back, but House stops him. He moves back to Wilson’s door, slides his key into the lock and throws the bolt.

“That’s why I came over, to see if this thing works,” House says. Wilson rolls his eyes and follows House into the elevator car.

“Don’t lie,” Wilson says.

House tilts his head. He doesn’t have to say anything; Wilson already knows.

Part One (By Pitza)
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four
Part Five
Part Six
Part Seven
Part Eight
Part Nine
Part Ten

Wilson makes his way across the lawn; the grass under his feet is faded, but the ground feels squishy, as if it is starting to thaw. He won’t have to worry about the lawn any more. Bonus. There’s not much Wilson likes about being a homeowner, except maybe the tax deduction, and he doesn’t think about that much. He hasn’t done his own taxes in a long time.

Most of the stuff is gone from the old place; The estate sale people took care of that. He moved a few things to his new apartment, the rest of it will go to the Salvation Army, and that’s why he’s here today. He could have asked the sale crew to take it away, but wanted one last look.

He walks from room to room, too slowly. He feels strange as he notices a pale spot above the fireplace. A mirror used to hang there. He wonders about the person who bought it, how much they paid. He hopes they… something. He doesn’t know what he hopes. Right now, Wilson is living from one day to the next, not really caring about other people, but he still wonders about them.

It’s funny how so many people mistake impersonal interest for real concern; it’s funny how a life in medicine can kill a person’s willingness to care, but it might be that something in Wilson died along the way. He doesn’t know any more.

He walks through the dining room. The rug is gone, and the sound of his steps bounces off the walls. He knows that lots of good dinners happened there; he doesn’t need to remember them. He stretches his arms up to touch entrance to the kitchen. Now that the place is empty he notices flaws: a cracked floor tile next to the refrigerator, a stain on the countertop next to the sink, shaped like a thyroid; and a truly ugly light fixture.

A cardboard box filled with mismatched dishes and unwanted cookware sits open on the floor. His knees pop as he crouches next to it, the junk clacks together as he rummages. Apparently the etched glass mugs from the 1998 Oncology Congress were no more attractive to bargain hunters than the bright green salad spinner.

There’s a forceful knock at the front door. A big man on his porch looks down at him, and back to his clipboard. “Is this the Wilson residence?” Wilson looks past him at the red and white truck parked at the curb.

“Yes, everything is ready to go.” Wilson steps away from the door. The big man motions to the truck, and two guys get out of the cab and grab a dolley out of the back.

“Everything goes in the truck?”

“Most of the boxes are back there, and a few things upstairs,” Wilson says. He feels out of place as the men work quickly. He has nothing to do but stand and watch them as they handle the remains of his life, to haul it away, to be sold in a dingy little store somewhere, the proceeds will support a charitable network. He wonders whether the guys are recovering drug addicts, or maybe alcoholics. What happened to make them cogs in that machine? He can’t tell by looking at them.

“About the mattress upstairs, there’s a stain, we can’t take it,” the big man tells him.

Wilson chides himself for thinking that getting rid of the damned thing would be as easy as making a phone call. He grasps his wallet and pulls it out, trying not to let his desperation show “Two hundred bucks if you’ll take it to the dump for me.”

The man checks his watch and looks like he’s considering the offer. He’s good.

“Three hundred,” Wilson suggests. He counts out several bills and extends the wad of cash. The man shrugs and takes it.

Wilson doesn’t watch as they drag the mattress down the stairs. The big man waits until they are outside and hands Wilson an official Salvation Army receipt for a donation of miscellaneous household items. The line marked “value” is blank. Later that night, he laughs bitterly as he writes in $300. His accountant won’t get the joke.


He has known this day will come, but he made himself push it out of his head. Now it’s here and Wilson is scared because he is not mentally ready to face Cuddy. He wishes they had settled things before he left. He wonders if she still hates him for what he did to House.

He drives straight to the hospital. He waits in her reception area and flips through the latest JAMA. He pretends that it’s fascinating. A shrill sound comes from the intercom. Wilson looks up in time to see the assistant, or secretary, or whatever they’re called these days, gesture that he can go in now.

“Coffee?” Cuddy offers. Either she’s being polite, or she doesn’t know what to say any more than he does. They drink for a while. Wilson grows less comfortable with each passing second.

“Do you know Dr. Irwin Gelb?” she asks.

Wilson searches his memory to come up with an answer. Gelb is the director of the cancer center at the University of Miami. He’s one of the best-known oncologists in the country.

“Only by reputation,” he says.

“Well, he knows you, and he’s interested. I didn’t realize you were thinking about leaving Princeton.”

Wilson feels his head bob up and down. He’s embarrassed more than anything. “I didn’t know for sure that he had my information,” he says. “I did a little bit of networking while I was off.”

She taps her pen on the blotter for a few seconds. “I was surprised to get his call.”

Cuddy is being so reasonable about all this. “I’m as surprised as you,” Wilson tells her. “Ron, my friend from med school, said I should send my CV, but I had no idea that he gave it to his boss. I didn’t, I mean, I’m not necessarily looking to leave, but I thought....”

“Well, I gave you a good reference,” she says.

“You didn’t have to do that,” Wilson says.

“I was honest, that’s all.” She exhales and smiles for the first time since he came in. “If Gelb were to make you an offer, U Miami would be a good career move for you. You’re under no moral obligation to stay here.”

He doesn’t know how to respond. He pauses for a few beats and remembers why he wanted to see her. “Dr. Cuddy, I’d like to come back to work. You said six weeks when you suspended me, if I’m remembering right.”

“You can start back on Monday,” she says calmly. “We could use the help.”

“What about the thing with the prescription?” Asking the question makes his stomach lurch, but he does not want any more surprises. He can’t handle that right now. “Will there be a disciplinary hearing?”

She shakes her head. “No, nothing like that. Let’s just try to forget about it.” She looks at him, looks into him. “But be careful.”

“I was seeing a therapist, while I was off,” he says. “I think she helped.”

Cuddy shrugs, then goes back to her work. Wilson knows that the meeting is over.

He almost can’t feel his body as he leaves her office and makes his way out into the day. The air feels like water. He struggles to catch his breath; his head pounds for the first time in a couple of weeks. Cuddy might be right, but the reality of it, that he could leave this place… He almost wants a Xanax, but he settles for a couple of deep breaths. He read somewhere that they’re supposed to be calming.


He arrives early Monday morning, pressed , tied, and looking exactly like his old self. He feels like an impostor, but his key still opens the door to his office. It looks smaller than it did before he went away. He stares at the clean desk for what feels like an hour, as if a stack of case files and memos will appear out of thin air, as if House will limp in with some wild-assed guess about a new case, but nothing happens. He has no idea where to start.

Coffee seems like a good idea, then he walks up to the ward to let the charge nurse know that he’s back from where ever they were told he was.

“It’s good to see you, Dr. Wilson. Did you enjoy your vacation?” Nancy is on day shift. She looks exactly the same as she did the last time he saw her. “We thought you’d have a tan to show for it.”

“It wasn’t really that kind of vacation.” He studies the nurse’s face, hoping for some insight about what his colleagues said about him while he was away. He’s pretty sure that only House knows the truth. He would guard that secret like it was one of his own. Nancy’s expression is as bland and pleasant as ever.

“The duty roster says you’re on consults today, so it should be a nice, easy day for you,” Nancy says. “Get you back in work mode.”

“Believe it or not, I missed working,” he says. Nancy starts to laugh. “Well, I missed it a little.”

Wilson sits in his office until noon. Colleagues come and go with greetings and vague good wishes. He catches up on journal articles; he is lost in a treatise on blood replacement in last month’s Trauma. He might as well be reading a spy novel. When his pager chirps, he’s grateful for the distraction.

Robinson is one of the newer physicians in ID. Wilson knows her a little. She is a plain woman, and she speaks quietly. He recollects that she is married and has at least one child. She is looking at a radiograph on a light box; a file sits open on the table behind her.

“I noticed some abnormalities in the plasma on one of my patients,” she says, gesturing to the table. “And look at these lesions on the left side.”

Wilson picks up the file and scans the results of Robinson’s battery of tests. “Did you check for OAF?” he asks. “Look at the cytoplasm for immunoglobulin?”

She shakes her head and looks embarrassed.

“Did you run this by House? I’m sure he would have told you to do a bone marrow biopsy before you scare the patient any more than you have to.” He stops for a moment to look at the woman.

“Dr. House is in New York today,” she says. “I didn’t see him this morning, and I felt like this couldn’t wait any longer…”

“Well, your patient also has elevated serum calcium,” Wilson looks back at the patient’s blood work, wishing he had a slide and a microscope here so he could see the questionable cells. “What is House doing in New York?”

“Some meeting at the U.N. that Dr. Gorman set up. And he was interviewed last week after he got back from Geneva,” she says. “Some science reporter from the Times, Dr. House is the big news these days.”

House is probably more annoyed than ever, Wilson thinks. That’s a good reason to stay away from him for a few days.

“Your patient probably has multiple myeloma. I’ll take the file.” Wilson closes the folder. “In the mean time, continue to treat whatever got him admitted. He looks back at the light box. “Pneumonia, I assume.”

“Yes, he didn’t respond to a course of Zithromax, that’s when we got the case.”

Wilson thinks about it for a few seconds. “Try a second course, sometimes it works better the second time around.” He starts to leave, but Robinson’s voice stops him.

“We’re going to try to drag Dr. House out tonight, to celebrate his return. I know you and he are friends; if you’d like to join us, he might actually show up.”

Out, that means a bar. Wilson hasn’t been to a real bar since that night. “If you want to make sure House shows up, tell him somebody else is picking up the check,” he says.

“As a matter of fact, Dr. Gorman said he’d pay for it,” Robinson says, showing a hint of a smile. “It was his idea.”

“I can’t turn down free drinks any more than House can,” Wilson says. “But I’ve got a lot of catching up to do from my, ah, vacation.”

Robinson writes something on a slip of paper and hands it to him. He put it in his pocket as he walks away.

He debates going out longer than he needs to, he’s still wondering if he should be there as he pushes the door open and steps inside. On the other hand, it’s a cold night, and one drink won’t make an idiot out of him. He tells himself that he’s here for the company, but he knows that he came because he needs to see House.

Wilson spots the group from the hospital easily. There’s an empty chair across from House, who has clearly taken advantage of his boss’ generosity.

“You just missed Cuddy,” House announces.

“I saw her earlier, but I haven’t seen you in a couple of weeks,” Wilson says.

Patel returns to group carrying two pitchers of beer. They slosh as he sets them on the table. Wilson moves his arm too late, his sleeve is already wet. House is looking at him with an expression he can’t identify, then pushed his glass across the table. “When that settles down, I need a refill,” he says. Then he belches loud enough for the whole bar to hear him.

Wilson raises his eyebrows. “You going to do that again if I pour you another beer?”

They stare at each other for a second before House starts to laugh. “Pour me two more beers and I might get up on the table and dance.”

This already feels like a long night. Wilson fills House’s glass and a clean one for himself. The beer is cool and almost refreshing, but the second time he drinks, it seems to turn rancid in his mouth. He swallows hard and grimaces.

“So, Dr. House, are you going to desert us to find your fame and fortune in Switzerland with Dr. Gorman?” Patel asks.

“I haven’t really thought about it,” House says. He raises his glass and looks directly at Wilson. “Here’s to avoidance.”

Robinson’s pager hops on her belt. The table falls silent for a moment as they all look at her; the noise of the bar buzzes around them. “It’s my nanny,” she says with a small chuckle. “Nothing for the rest of you to worry about.”

Wilson’s face is hot from House’s toast. He wishes somebody would fill the void. “So, uh, House, how was Europe?” he asks.

“Full of Europeans,” House says. “I wandered around, I treated a patient, I wandered around some more, and I came home.” He shrugs and makes a face. “No big deal. Nobody would care except for the new monster bacteria, that’s science fiction shit, you know?”

He doesn’t, not really. He can read about it in the paper just like everybody else.

A few of the other doctors leave. A waitress stops to pick up an empty pitcher and a few glasses. Wilson asks for some water.

“We have to finish this pitcher before we can go home,” Patel announces as he grabs Wilson’s half full glass.

“Jimmy’s on the wagon,” House says.

Patel looks at Wilson with sympathy and pulls the beer back. “Oh God, I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”

“Shut up, House.” He turns to Patel and rolls his eyes. “He’s kidding, but I want to be able to drive myself home.”

Patel exhales and mentions calling a cab as he drinks again.

Wilson and House are alone. House drains his glass and slams it down. The table wobbles between them. They haven’t spoken in several minutes, they just look at each other over the remnants of a celebration that neither one of them cares about.

“I can drive you,” Wilson offers.

“I can drive myself.” House reaches for his cane, but he knocks a chair over instead.

“Hey, do you two need a cab?” the bartender calls to them. “It’s free if you’re drunk.” House starts to say something.

“I’m sober,” Wilson interrupts. “I’ve got this under control.” He walks around the table and rescues House’s cane from the puddle of beer where it landed. He wipes the shaft with a napkin. “This place is pretty disgusting, let’s get going.”

“Seems like your kind of crowd,” House slurs.

Wilson ignores him and stands behind him until he rises from his chair. “House, put your coat on, or I’ll put it on for you.”

He shouldn’t be angry, but he can’t deny that he is. It’s not House, it’s everything. Wilson is just plain mad as he guides House outside toward his car and opens the door. “Get in,” he mutters.

House sits down on the seat, but his feet remain on the ground.

“I’m sorry, Jimmy,” he says, looking up. He’s drunk, and he looks like he’s going to cry. “It wasn’t supposed to be like this.”

Wilson crouches in front of the door, places his hands on House’s hips and tries to force him to scoot back. “Turn,” he says. House drags his left leg into the car. Wilson reaches for House’s right leg, slips both hands under his thigh and push-pulls the leg as gently as he can until it sits next to the left, where it belongs.

Wilson shouldn’t have to move House’s leg for him. Stacy shouldn’t have left. Ellen shouldn’t have left. He shouldn’t have lost his mind that night. Damn it, damn all of it. “It wasn’t supposed to be like this at all. We’ve had a lousy….” He looks up at his friend’s face and sees deep pain written on it. House must be exhausted. He’s done too much today.

“I’ll take you home.”

Read Part Twelve

Part One (By Pitza)
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four
Part Five
Part Six
Part Seven
Part Eight
Part Nine


Notes: This was supposed to be the final chapter, but there was a change of plans because I have a couple of loose ends that need to be tied up from Wilson’s POV, and I need to let the last scenes between House and Wilson stand pretty much alone in order to make them work. This part is about 2,300 words. Parts 11 and 12 are about the same length, which is too much material for one post. I promise that I won’t take another month.


The superbug is real; the patient’s strain of Staph A does not respond to Vancomycin, or anything else. House shudders as he looks at the microbiologist’s report. On one hand, this is a bad development for medical professionals all over the world. On the other hand, it’s better to know what you’re fighting if you’re planning on beating it.

Gorman’s team at the WHO is trying to work out where and when the patient contracted the bacteria. House wishes them luck. They’ll never be able to pinpoint the source, this case involves three hospitals on two continents, and their work won’t make any difference in his, so he chooses not to care about the source. The team at Canton University Hospital hasn't helped the patient, not one bit. If House cared about professional courtesy, he'd say that he's surprised.

His plan is to go back to square one. The others have little choice but to agree. House knows that it’s a long shot, but he takes the patient off all drugs except painkillers for 48 hours while he analyzes what hasn’t worked so far.

“Tazobactam is our best shot, it’s a new penicillin derivative,” House tells a room full of doctors. “Please tell me that stuff is legal here…” he stops, knowing full well that he wouldn’t be able to prescribe the drug in New Jersey without pulling some strings and twisting some arms. He’s not sure his bullying will translate well enough to work in a country known for knives and neutrality.

“This drug is approved since six months,” one of them says in halting English. “We have not the politics in our drug approval process…”

“Spare me the commentary and write the order,” House snaps. “And somebody get me some coffee.” The white coats scatter. One of them returns with a cup. House doesn’t thank the person he suspects is a student, but he nods, and that seems to be enough.

“You don’t have to try to frighten these people,” Gorman tells him. “They’re scared enough as it is.”

“They should be,” House says, taking a sip. The coffee is smooth and strong, much better than he’d get in any American hospital. “You wouldn’t have asked me to come over here if you didn’t need this patient to survive.”


House sits alone in a lounge studying the chart, He enjoys the leisure of working on single case, which rarely happens in his regular practice. When one of the staff doctors enters the lounge, House notices, but he sees no reason to let the guy know.

“Since the change in antibiotic, the patient’s symptoms are not improved, and the culture remains positive,” the man says. House looks up at him; he’s the same one who wrote the drug order.

“Who are you?”

“Pardon,” the man says. “I am Michel Levasseur, I direct the program for diagnostic medicine here. Frederick has mentioned your name so often that I feel I know you already.”

House takes a moment to remember that Frederick is Gorman’s first name. “Gorman talks a lot, he’s a little, you know…” He makes a face and wiggles a finger in the air. “The tazobactam isn’t working…”

He falls silent for a moment. “What do we know about his treatment in Vietnam? Are we talking about some hut in the middle of a rice paddy?”

“No no, Saigon Grall Hospital is a modern facility…” Levasseur continues to sing the praises of Asian medical care. If the patient had a post-surgical line infection, the chart would say so, but there is no such notation. The high fever and vomiting that indicated an infection showed up after the patient returned to France.

The facts of the case tell him that the infection is localized, but the damned thing is hiding, and the patient’s vitals are not helping with the answer. Pressure slightly low, but acceptable. Temperature slightly elevated, controlled with acetaminophen, sats at ninety-three percent.

He wanders away from Levasseur’s monologue. He wasn’t listening, anyway. He walks around the hospital for a while wishing he had an underling to abuse. If he were back at PPTH, each aimless step would bring him closer to the answer, but every object and every person is new to him; his active mind does not shut off the way it does at home.

That he needs familiar surroundings, that he needs anything, bothers House. What he needs is to stop thinking so much.

“The trouble with a new strain of bacteria is that we don’t know how it’s supposed to behave,” House tells Gorman shortly before lunch. “Even I can’t come up with an answer unless I know the question.” He pulls his hair in frustration. “Tell somebody to get Patient Zero another chest CT and we’ll see if that gives up any clues.”

House starts to wonder whether he is going to be able to solve this one. He doesn’t care that much about patients, but doesn’t believe the adage about a losing battle being a learning experience. An honest man admits that losing always sucks, and House is an honest man.

“I’m going out,” he says. He leaves without looking back.


He ends up across the river, at the train station. Bodies move in their own language, and he figures that the comings and goings will free him up to think properly. His leg does not bother him today, it never does when his mind is engaged with something else, but he feels each step.

He walks to the front of the station and gets into a cab, tells the driver to go; he doesn’t care where. Low blood pressure, low oxygenation, and low-grade fever means the antibiotic is not working. The infection is more than the new drug can fight, but the drug was developed before VRSA was imagined, so that’s not a surprise.

The cab stops at a light. House glances out the window. A woman leans against a wall about ten feet away. She stoops to scratch her leg. House notices that her nipples show through her tight white shirt. She makes no effort to hide them.

He has heard that Geneva has a red light district; this must be it. He motions for the driver to pull over and fumbles for a verb. “Arrêtez,” he says after a moment.

He gets out and walks down the block, losing himself in the anonymity of the Rue de Berne, which looks perfectly ordinary other than the people that walk with him. It’s odd to see hookers during daylight hours. They lose a bit of their mystique in the sun, if they have any to begin with.

He notices one of them, a small, frowzy woman who looks a little too old for the street trade, yelling at a man in a leather coat. The man grabs her by the shoulders and shakes her; maybe he’s her pimp, or maybe he’s a john. It’s none of House’s business and their dispute fades out of his head as he soon as moves past them.

He chooses a shop from the block’s wide selection and goes in. At home, this kind of place is called dirty; it is a solitary building on the edge of Anytown, USA, where the parking lot is always full. Here, colored light flashes from signs in the windows, beckoning like the girls who stand outside fidgeting and teetering.

Faces stare at him from magazine covers and video cases, distorted in something that’s supposed to look like pleasure.

Every kink is covered. He slips a movie out of the rack in front of him. An unnaturally smooth man stands behind an unnaturally blonde woman. She’s bent over, her large breasts swing out from the force of her partner’s thrust; his fingers cut into the flesh of her hips, but she’s looking at House with wanton eyes and a gaping mouth. He wonders if she’s a moaner or a screamer.

He reminds himself that the blonde is looking at a camera, not at him. She wants him to wonder about her; she wants to sell him something. He likes porn, the same way he enjoys sex with hookers: it’s all on the level. It does not to pretend to involve matters of the heart. He returns the case to its place on the shelf. There’s no shame in satisfaction until you are forced to understand what gets you off.

Matters of the heart.... He takes half a step and pauses. A body shuffles past him in the aisle. He pulls his steps along with his cane, back to the street. He hears the bell on the door jangle as he leaves. He listens to the distant chatter from a couple of the girls and tells himself that he’ll come back later.


“Where’s the Vietnamese guy, the patient?” he barks. House can’t believe he’s actually saying this, but Levasseur does not question him. House is practically leading the way as they reach the patient’s room.

House approaches the bed and reaches for the man’s mouth, roughly pulling his lips away from his gums. “Nice teeth.”

“What are you doing?” Levasseur asks. Both he and the patient seem bewildered, even beyond the language barrier.

“When was the last time you had your teeth cleaned?” House demands. The patient spits out a few syllables of gibberish around House's fingers. Levasseur says something about calling a Vietnamese translator.

House rolls his eyes and tries again. “Vous avez rendu visite un dentiste récemment?”

The patient looks from one doctor to the other and nods his head.

“The bug, it’s hiding in his heart,” House says. “Get a trans-esophageal echo, which will almost certainly show vegetation on one or more of the valves.”

“Bacterial endocarditis?” Levasseur says. “You would make a good career in diagnostics, Dr. House.”

House simply shrugs. He’s got a job. He’s tired, and he needs time to let himself fall back into place. He leaves Levasseur to order the test, not caring much about the results. If the TEE is negative, he’ll think of something else, but it won’t be negative. He’s not wrong, not this time. He can feel it.


“Two valves replaced,” Gorman tells him. “Mr. Hua is recovering very nicely. You probably saved his life.”

“Great,” House says. “Make sure to put him on Zyvox when he’s released. That’s what we’d do for a MRSA case, and I’m out of better ideas. I’m sure your do-gooders can make sure he actually gets the medication and understands that he has to take them.”

“You’re not going to stay to follow the case?”

House looks at Gorman’s expectant face. He has not much reason to go home, really; but he has no reason at all to stay in Geneva. “I’m sure you can handle it.” He smiles, because he can’t think of any other response.


His nerves are shot by the time he changes planes at Heathrow. He hates flying, can’t even blame that on his leg. House has always hated being trapped in a slow-moving herd. The so-called pre-boarding process takes so long that by the time House reaches his seat, his head hurts more than his leg. He fits himself into his seat and waits. The rest of the passengers file past with aching slowness. Their wheeled bags bump into his armrest every half-minute or so. He clenches his teeth and tries to breathe through the annoyance without snapping.

The sooner the American family with its four children and the British tourist lured to New York by the promise of discounts are seated and buckled, the sooner he can have a drink. Early drink service is the one thing that makes the higher cost of first class worth every penny. The thought gets him through the rest of the boarding process.

A few minutes before takeoff, House crunches a Vicodin between his teeth because his leg doesn’t care that stewardess hasn’t come around yet. The narcotic takes about seven minutes to kick in; he timed it once out of curiosity.


House removes the last of his clothing and leaves it in a pile on the dresser. He sees himself in the mirror; behind him, he sees Wilson's nude body stretched out on top of the covers, smoothing his hands over his torso. It’s mesmerizing.

“You still want to fuck me?” House asks the mirror.

Wilson never stops moving his hands, but says nothing. House watches the image in the glass and understands that the answer is yes. The answer has always been yes; there’s no reason to think otherwise. He crawls onto the bed and settles next to Wilson because there’s no reason not to.

Wilson crawls on top of him and rears back. “I’m going to hurt you, we both know you’ll let me.”

Light from the window makes a shadow of Wilson’s erection on his right thigh; it’s huge. There’s no way.

House stays a few feet away from the bed, facing the mirror. He watches the scene behind his back unfold before his eyes.

Wilson flips him over and mounts him; the muscles in his back and shoulders tense as he pushes in and out. He sees his legs move apart and twitch. One leg kicks back through the air and bounces when it falls back to the bed. Wilson doesn’t notice; he keeps moving, pushing and grabbing until he collapses. “I thought you told me it was going to hurt,” House says to his reflection.

Wilson sucks on the skin at the back of his neck. “Can I get you anything, sir?” he murmurs.

House watches his body turn toward the bed and shuts his eyes tight. As he opens them, the dream dissolves. Wilson is gone. The plane has leveled out and a sour faced woman has come for his drink order. He struggles to focus for a moment. He has no idea how long he was asleep.

“Double Scotch, no ice,” he says automatically as presses his eyes with his hands.

By the time his drink comes, nothing remains from his dream but an undefined sense of motion.

Author's note: 01.31.2006, this story is not yet finished, but the last two parts are in progress and it should be done by 02.07.

Part One (By Pitza)
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four
Part Five
Part Six
Part Seven
Part Eight


The small room is furnished with a table and chair. Its walls are painted a non-confrontational pale yellow, and there are two inoffensive prints to break up the monotony. Wilson knows that the incandescent lighting and the décor are supposed to manipulate him into feeling comfortable. It would be working if he wasn’t aware of the desired effect. He sits in front of a stack of papers, filling in the blanks.

Name, that one’s easy. He looks at the line for his address longer than he should, there’s no good way to say “state of flux” on a form. He lets the line go in and out of focus, then writes out the address of the place that he lived with Ellen. He wonders if the doctor has somebody observing him; she might learn something from watching this exercise.

After what seems like a long time, he gives his papers to a nurse, along with his insurance card. He has no idea about the status of his health plan under his suspension. It doesn’t matter. Wilson might live beyond his means emotionally, but he’s always been sensible about money. It’s not like the divorce set him back. Ellen wanted nothing from him in the settlement; she just wanted out.

Suddenly, he knows exactly how she must have felt. The moment of kinship with the woman who was his wife disturbs him. He has barely thought of her since their divorce was final.

She would laugh if she found out he was in therapy.

When the nurse comes back, he is resting his head on the table.

“Dr. Janssen will see you now,” she says briskly. “If you’ll follow me?”

Thora Janssen seems like the ideal therapist for Wilson’s purposes: deal with this thing that happened with House, then get out. He doesn’t want to be in therapy for the next ten years; he just needs to be able to move on.

She is in her early fifties, graying, with large features crowded onto a small face. Wilson does not find her physically attractive. She has no ties to Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital: she does not have privileges there, she has no friends from med school there as far as he can tell, and only a few association memberships in common with its psych staff.

She practices in New York, which seems like another planet, one where he does not have to fear for his confidentiality. Eight million stories in the city; one of them is mine, he tells himself. Wilson sits in a chair and wishes he had something to do with his hands as the therapist looks at him for the first time.

“Why are you here?” she asks.

Wilson blinks. What kind of question is that? Janssen smiles at him, and it’s almost a smirk. He fears for a moment that his paranoia about privacy has led him to the therapist in the Tri-State area that is most like House.

“I like to start the first session with a new patient by asking that question,” she tells him. “It doesn’t get to the heart of the matter; the patient is almost always wrong, but the answer sometimes tells me what the patient thinks is his most important issue.”

Damn. He takes a deep breath, but it doesn’t help.

“A couple of weeks ago, I had a weird sexual encounter with my best friend,” he says neatly, and he continues with a bit more pertinent information. “Who’s a guy. It, uh, it didn’t go well. It shouldn’t have happened.”

“So why are you here?” the therapist repeats.

He stares at her. Therapy is weird, and this is a mistake, but he feels obligated to make it. “I forced sex on a person who trusts me, and I don’t know why,” he says, gaping a bit. “And I’m not sure I’m ever going to be able to trust myself to have sex again. This thing was so random and bizarre, and the fact that I did it scares me. I don’t…”

“That’s a rather long answer to a short question,” she cuts him off. “Now forget about that and tell me a little about yourself, whatever comes to mind first.”

He doesn’t know where to start. He pulls out random facts, a few memories and settles into an unnatural rhythm. He feels like he has barely started when he notices Janssen looking at her watch. “That’s it for today. We psychiatrists work on a fifty-minute hour.”

Either this therapist is brilliant, or she’s crazy.

She reaches to her desk and picks up a notebook. “I’ll see you twice a week.”

He feels like he ought to object, but he can’t come up with a reason to do it, and it’s not like she gave him a choice. He nods and schedules his sessions on his way out.


He sits on House’s sofa, alone. The room is quiet but for a faint, electric buzz, the ever-present sound of modern world. Life slips into the space between the whirring and whining. He leans his head back and looks up. His eyes catch a bit of a cobweb where wall meets ceiling.

House is in his bedroom. He must be sleeping by now.

Wilson blows the air from his lungs and stretches his arms over his head. He could go and check, just to make sure. He wants to take House’s pulse one more time, even though his better judgment tells him that all is well, that House’s panic was momentary. He’s fine now.

Still, he wants to know. He walks toward House’s bedroom and sees the door either half open, or half closed. He doesn’t care to philosophize. He moves to one side to look into the room, but he does not enter.

House is lying on top of the covers, flat on his back. One arm stretches toward the window. His eyes are closed, his face slack, his breathing audible in a faint, whistling snore. Wilson knows too well that when House wakes, he will not feel refreshed, but some time will have passed, and that’s all that really matters.

He can’t stay. He can’t be here when House comes to, because he’ll say something stupid. He’ll try to apologize, and House will yell at him. He can hear it happening in his mind.

He scrawls a few words on a scrap of paper and leaves it next to the saucer filled with cigarette butts. House will find it there when he gets up.

He lets himself out and locks the door behind him.


When he hears the phone ring, he wants House to be on the other end of the line so badly he can taste it. The hint of the way things used to be teases at his nerves.

“Jim, it’s Ron Granholm returning your call,” a pleasant voice says. “I haven’t talked to you in a while, what’s up?”

Wilson has to shake himself to remember that he called his friend from med school. “Not a lot,” he lies. “I’m… I’m thinking about leaving Princeton. I’d like to move to a university with a dedicated cancer center, so I wanted to ask you about Miami.”

“My boss would flip if you were available,” Granholm says. “Hell, people are impressed when they find out that I went to school with you.” There’s a note of envy in his voice. It makes Wilson deeply uncomfortable. He has never tried to impress anybody; he just does his job.

“I wouldn’t say I’m available,” Wilson says. “Let’s just say I’m following up on a New Year’s resolution to explore my options.”

“Well, I’m not a decision maker, but send me your current CV, couldn’t hurt my rep any.” Granholm chuckles. “And we’d be lucky to get you.”

They talk for a few minutes until Wilson’s nerves get to him. Thinking about leaving is one thing; taking the first step toward doing it is much more serious. He’s still thinking about House when he hangs up, and wondering whether he’ll have a job to go back to once his suspension is over. Maybe he will send his CV.


“I saw Greg the other day,” Wilson tells his therapist. “It was…” He’s searching for the right word, but it won’t come. “I ran into him at lunch.”

“Did you approach him? Did you speak to him?”

He isn’t sure how to answer, because it wasn’t like that. The thought of revealing any detail about House’s medical condition chills Wilson. He’s too well known.

“He had some trouble, and I took care of him,” he says. “It felt normal, and then I got nervous. I actually took his pulse with my thumb. Anybody who’s ever taken a CPR class knows not to do that.” He is more than a little embarrassed to admit that to another physician. “And then I took him home.”

He pauses. He needs to collect his thoughts and make them into something coherent. “It was good, but I haven’t talked to him since then.”

“Any subsequent panic attacks?” the therapist asks. Her pen is poised over her pad, as if she expects him to say yes.

“I gave him the rest of the Xanax,” he confesses. “We didn’t really talk about it.”

“How did he take that?”

Wilson almost snaps at Janssen, until he reminds himself that this is therapy; making him talk about things he’d prefer not to discuss is her job. All the same, he doubts she would understand House’s reaction; he doubts that anybody would understand, but he does. At least he thinks he does. Calm filters through his body. Greg House is his own man; he makes his own decisions without concern for how they might be received.

He’s true to himself, and that’s what makes him so attractive.

“It wasn’t a big thing.” Wilson thinks it should have been a big thing.

Janssen taps her pen against leg for a few moments. “What about you?”

Leaving House’s place felt like a breakthrough, but he doesn’t think he can say that without starting to cry. He grits his teeth and shrugs.

Janssen sighs. “Call the office if you want a new scrip.”


The real estate agent arrives to see Wilson’s house promptly at 1:30. She looks exceptionally well put together. Her earrings match her necklace; her shoes match her purse. Her coat complements her suit; her hair and lipstick are flawless. She moves around the room touching windowsills and doorframes, marking them with her scent, like an animal.

Wilson is frightened of her. She must be very good at her job.

“This is a very desirable neighborhood,” she remarks, scanning the walls and ceilings of the living room. “Are you positive you want to sell?”

He is. “I found an apartment, I’m kind of in a transition period right now.” He doesn’t know why he feels like he has to explain himself to this viper, but he does.

“How many bathrooms?” Her words are muffled as she examines the coat closet.

“Three,” he says. “One down here, two upstairs.”

“Four would be better,” she says. “Is the basement finished?” Wilson does not care, and the woman continues to poke around.

He follows her upstairs. Selling the place is the right thing to do, but the thought of leaving the past behind, getting what he wants, makes him queasy. They stop in front of a closed door.

“What’s this room here?” The agent looks at him. He reads suspicion in her eyes.

“That’s the master bedroom, “ he mumbles.

She opens the door and steps inside without hesitating. He does not follow her in.

“It’s big, very nice. Oh, and an en suite, that’s a big plus,” she says. “You don’t use it?”

“Not any more.” He barely gets the words out. He feels cold. His things are in the guest room now. He sleeps on the couch most nights. He ought to politely excuse himself, but he can’t. The viper can snoop all she wants, but he doesn’t want to watch any more. He bounds down the stairs as if he’s trying to outrun a ghost.

When he hears her car pull out of his driveway, Wilson wonders if he’ll be able to drive down this street without choking on his memories.


“When we ended our last session, you were talking about your attraction to your friend, Greg.”

He has made a point of referring to House only by his first name, but hearing another use House’s name so casually makes him shudder, as if this woman has no right. She does, of course; she calls his friend Greg because he does.

“I remember,” he says quietly.

“As far as you know, was he aware of this attraction, before the night you got drunk and raped him?” she asks, expecting an answer

“I thought he was, sometimes,” Wilson admits. “Apparently I was wrong.”

“Did you tell anybody else? Perhaps another friend?”

Wilson blushes. The idea that he would have confessed his desires and fantasies to a third party is so ridiculous that he has to stop himself from laughing at the question. He does smile, though. “The funny thing is that he’s the only person I would have told about something like that. Even my wife didn’t guess.” He’s not proud that he is so good at deception and subterfuge. He wonders if he ought to say so, but decides not to.

“Do you think he knows about it now?”

House could do the math, and he had. “He does, he kind of said he did.”

“Why did you go out drinking that night?” she asks abruptly.

“I had to get away from my fucked up life,” he says. He stops for a second, stunned that he told the truth. “I wanted to stop pretending that I’m a perfectly nice, trustworthy, likeable guy every minute of every day. I wanted to go out and be the manipulative jerk that I really am.”

“That’s good,” Janssen says. She makes a few notes. “You were drinking that night. Quite a lot, you said.”

“I drank as much as I could, as fast as I could,” he admits. “I wanted to get away from my head.” He wonders what the transcriptionist will think of the notes.

“What else do you remember?” Janssen is looking at him, not smiling. Her pen is poised over her pad.

“Not much, it’s all hazy until I woke up the next morning,” he confesses. “I’m not sure what’s real, and what’s guilt. I know that I hurt Greg, and that I wanted to hurt him because he wasn’t responding to me.”

They have already covered this.

“Something puzzles me about that, actually,” she changes gears.

Wilson shifts in his chair.

“In all the talking you’ve done about your friend, your male friend, and your sexual attraction to him, you haven’t mentioned any insecurity about your sexual identity.”

“I’m not sure what you mean,” he croaks. He realizes that if he were really attracted to House for all the reasons he’s given himself—that their bond was so tight, that House’s personal magnetism drew him in, and that he reached a point where he began to think about how those two things might lead to sex unlike anything he’d ever experienced—it ought to have bothered him.

“You were sexually attracted to a man and married to a woman. You never thought you might be gay?”

“I’m not really attracted to men in general, but,” he stops himself short. He won’t reveal House’s full identity, not for anything. “It’s just Greg. It didn’t seem to have anything to do with my sexual identity.”

“But you wanted to have sex with him,” Janssen states.

“It’s more than that!” He pinches the bridge of his nose to distract himself from the extreme discomfort. This session isn’t going well. “I know him. The things I love about him are… it’s not really a physical thing.”

“You haven’t previously denied having a physical, sexual attraction,” she says. “What’s different now?”

If he is a butterfly, she is a collector with sharp pins and a board.

Wilson stops moving, stops breathing. He sees white for an instant, a flash of rage. “You’re trying to make me say that I wanted to hurt him, and that I raped him because I knew that was the worst thing I could do, ever. You want me to say that I was trying to destroy him, but that’s not true!” Wilson wipes at his face, though there are no tears to dry.

“Is that what you think?” she asks mildly.

“I wanted something from him,” he says after a moment of silence. “I wanted to know that I wasn’t alone. I had to get away from myself, and the only way I could do it was by going through him, literally.” The tears come now, without ornamentation.

Janssen hands him a tissue. He swipes it across his cheeks and crushes it in his fist.

“I wanted to slip into somebody else’s skin for a while, forget the mess I’d made of my life. I knew Greg would let me.” Wilson hears the therapist’s pen scratching against paper.

“I wanted it to be different. I didn’t enjoy what happened, and he must have been in hell. I just kept pushing, and at some point I started punishing him because I wasn’t getting off.” Wilson wants to run all the way back to New Jersey, back to House. He wants to collapse at his friend’s feet.

The thing is, House has already forgiven him. He knows that too well. He doesn’t really want forgiveness; he wants absolution.

He rises and shoves the wad of tissue into his pants pocket.

“You told me that Greg has forgiven you.”

“He has,” he confesses. “And I don’t know why.”

“Classic guilt. So, if the situations were reversed, if he had come to you wanting sex and forced you to give in, would you have forgiven him so easily?”

Wilson looks out in the direction her desk: there’s a blank computer screen, a lamp, some vague photographs. He sees only shapes.

“It wasn’t easy,” he whispers.

Janssen is silent for a moment. “You have to stop projecting if you want to deal with your own emotions in such a way that you can move forward. You say that Greg has forgiven you. You have to let him forgive you; that’s his decision,” she says. “You have to give Greg control of his own emotions.”

The way she says it, the whole thing sounds so easy, like he should have figured it out himself. But he didn’t. Wilson’s head is stuck in the first person: all he can process comes back to I… I… I….

Janssen is right. He’s certain of that. He leaves her office not knowing if he will return for his next session. He’s pretty sure he can handle this.


He is swept up in a tide of commuters at Penn Station, trying to get home. The crowd moves past two newsstands, three bars, and a doughnut shop then down the escalator. He finds the track for the Metroliner in time to catch the 4:50 back to Trenton. He’s relieved to be back on the train; he settles into a worn but comfortable seat and breathes a sigh of relief.

As the train leaves the station and crosses the river, he looks out over the New York skyline at the gaping hole where the towers used to stand. He remembers how the present seemed to go on forever, as if time stopped along with all those lives.

The dead were the only ones at peace that day. The living remained to wring their hands and worry their heads and ask how it happened. Wilson thinks about the goodbyes that the dead never got to say, because they all woke up that morning not knowing that they should.

He is turned around in his seat, watching the city get smaller as the train moves forward. As the image fades into twilight, all that remains is the bright, empty space. He leans back when it’s gone and tries not to make a metaphor out of the whole thing.

It’s after six by the time he gets back to New Jersey. He drives to House’s place on an impulse. He won’t say anything, he tells himself; he just wants to be in the same room with his friend for a few minutes to see how that feels now.

The windows are dark as he pulls up to the curb and parks. It’s possible that House is still at the hospital. He goes to the door and knocks, but no answer comes.

Wilson stands on the steps, fidgeting with his keys in his pocket. The one that will open the door seems to burn his hand. He carefully inserts it into the lock and turns. The door catches on a pile of mail.

“House?” he calls out. “It’s me. Are you here?”

He steps over the pile and enters the quiet, stuffy room. Everything is in its place, but House hasn’t been here in several days.

“Where are you?” he wonders aloud, though there’s nobody to hear him. This doesn’t make sense. He slips away from the apartment leaving no evidence that he was ever there.

He sits in his car until he is cold. Only then does he start the engine to drive.



Wilson sorts through some of the junk that collected around him while he and Ellen were married. He doesn’t know why so much of it stuck; Ellen was a bit of a minimalist when they met, but he has always liked to have things around him. Most of the things are clearly his, souvenirs from a life that he sees differently from the perspective of a person going through what’s left behind.

He pulls out a box filled with programs and ticket stubs from things he’s seen. He pulls out a few of them. He knows that he took his parents to see Miss Saigon on Broadway several years ago, but he doesn’t remember much about it, except that he was paged about half way through, and that his mom loved the show, if only because her son made the effort to do something special.

He remembers the Sunday afternoons at the Meadowlands with House, watching the Jets lose again; he can almost taste the cheap beer and soggy nachos, even now. He can hear the crowd roaring and a band playing at halftime. He can feel House jumping out of his seat, shaking his fist in the air after an interception.

He can’t bring himself to throw away all the little bits of paper. Someday, this will be all that remains to tell the story of his life. On the other hand, he won’t have room for everything.

Ellen’s office number is no longer on speed dial. He has to call directory assistance to get the number for the agency where she works, which seems appropriate. He knows she does not want to talk to him.

“Crenshaw Group, how may I direct your call?” a crisp female voice answers.

He gives the receptionist his former wife’s name and identifies himself by his professional title, though it sounds foreign rolling off his tongue at this point. Dr. James Wilson is somebody else, but he knows the name will get his call through without question, even if the receptionist recalls that Ellen used to be married to a doctor.

He waits for a moment and thinks about the difference between his working self and the ordinary guy he’s tried to be for the past few weeks.

“I’m surprised to hear from you,” his former wife says with forced cheer. “I hope nothing’s wrong.”

It’s weird to hear her voice after all this time. It has been a while, they haven’t spoken since the day they signed the papers.

“No, everything’s OK,” he says, wishing that were the whole truth. “I, uh, was going through some things and found a couple of photo albums that are obviously not mine and…”

“I thought I got all my stuff from your place when I left.” Ellen does not sound happy about the news.

“Uh, um, well, do you want to come out here and pick them up, or I can send them.” He has a hard time completing his sentence. He doesn’t want to see her, much, but a small part of him hopes that she will make a trip to New Jersey to get her things. “There’s a box of sweaters, too,” he adds.

“What, have you been doing deep cleaning in the middle of winter?” she asks. “That’s so unlike you.”

“I’m selling the house, supposed to close March 1 and you know how much junk there is in this place,” he says. “If there’s anything you want, furniture or anything, let me know in the next couple of weeks, I guess.”

She pauses. Wilson lets his fingers curl into a tight fist to control his nerves.

“I’ve never been much for mementos,” she says. “You can send the photo albums to my office. Do you want my FedEx number?”

“I’m sending the wedding album to my mom, unless you want it,” he tells her. “She still likes you, and I’m pretty sure your mom hates me as much as you do.”

He doesn’t know what else to say. The static between them proves that his former wife has nothing to say to him, and that’s more painful than his fingers crushing into his palm. “Anyway, I’ll get the package out next week and give anything else I find to the Little Sisters of the Poor. “ He’s about to hang up when she speaks again.

“Wait, James, what’s going on? You don’t sound like yourself at all.”

That’s funny; he doesn’t feel like himself, either. Then again, Ellen is in no position to know how he ought to be right now.

“I’m, I don’t know. I kind of screwed up my life in December. I did something… bad,” he admits. He won’t say more than that. “You were right to get out when you did, you know.”

“Let me know where you’re going, if you’re leaving,” she says. There’s pity in her voice. It churns through his brain down to his gut and he can’t help but think of House.

“I don’t know,” he says. She ought to remember enough about him to understand what he’s saying. He doesn’t know where he’s going, or what he’s doing, and he’s not sure he’ll tell her when he figures it out.

“All right, then.” There’s another long pause, as if Ellen wants to say something.

“Look, James, it wasn’t all your fault, that we split up,” she says.

“Yeah, OK,” he says, but he doesn’t believe her. As he breaks the connection, Wilson is fairly sure that he’ll never speak to her again.

He lies down on the floor and looks at the ceiling. He raises his left hand and wiggles the finger where he used to wear a ring. Light spills out from a fixed point and surrounds his outstretched arm, his hand is dark against it, the same hand that pushed House over an invisible breaking point, when all he meant to do was pull himself back from it. I never wanted to hurt you, and I’m sorry that I had to, but I had to. I didn’t know what I was doing. I didn’t know what else to do.

He lets his arm drop over his eyes, then he begins to scream. No words come; the sounds are made of mangled letters. He could make words out of them; they would be lies.

He howls until the all the letters fall from the air. His throat is raw; his eyes hurt. Even his dead tissues seem to throb and ache.

When he pulls himself up to stand on two legs, he feels human.

Part Ten

Part One (By Pitza)
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four
Part Five
Part Six
Part Seven

House needs to take a second to parse what Wilson told him. Simons is dead. Simons, the cancer patient with the bacterial infection that was really a virus; the patient who got the right drug starting yesterday, is dead. Just like that, it happens sometimes, but House doesn’t have to like it.

Viruses are so much more predictable in the lab. House thinks it’s a shame that lab work bores him. His gifts have always played out best on the human body, which is also a shame, since he can’t stand most of the people that live in them.

Wilson stands in front of his desk, staring blankly. His arms hang loose at his sides, and he looks like he has lost his own name. He’s as good with people as he is with disease. House wonders sometimes if that’s a gift, or a curse.

He hears Wilson’s tone, a dark, weary timbre. The words don’t matter all that much.

“Give them some time,” House tells him. As much as House does not care about Mr. Simons and his family, he sees that Wilson is in no shape to deliver this kind of news now. He’s on the verge, he needs to wait until he can step back, or get somebody else to do it. The guy wasn’t his patient, either. He’s struck by the irony that they are friends, and the only reason they’re speaking to each other right now is a random dead guy.

He looks up at Wilson’s face and rests on his eyes. The pain he finds there is too familiar. He’s seen it in his own eyes, on waking, before the narcotics kick in. He noticed it first when he was learning how to walk again.

The silence between them is like an egg, whole and fragile, but perfect.

He could tell Wilson that he knows, that he understands, but House will not break the connection to form a simple sentence and speak it aloud. Anyway, Wilson knows. He has always known.

House has no idea how much time passes before Wilson turns and walks away without saying goodbye.


Four days ago, House would not have guessed that he wouldn’t see Wilson again. He ought to be relieved, but his friend’s absence is stranger than his presence. Being here at the hospital carries extra weight without the escape that Wilson provided. House doesn’t use it now, but the potential of some small break from routine kept him on track.

Now, that potential is missing, and he doesn’t know why. He feels like people are trying to protect him from something, and that annoys him. He’s been snapping more, his co-workers are looking at him funny, like they know something is going on. They can’t know what, but House still hates the vague pity that radiates from everybody around him.

He moves into the Infectious Diseases suite and pauses before going all the way into his office. His bad leg is worse today. His problem was vascular, not orthopedic, but the whole leg has changed. Its muscles no longer work together; its joints seem to snag. It has limits now; he has limits. Sometimes he thinks that acknowledging the limitation is what cripples him. But that’s in his head; the physical pain sucks, too.

He blames the cold. Last winter, he wasn’t really walking, and he rarely went outside. Now that his life is back to so-called normal, winter slaps him in the face every time he leaves his apartment.

“You authorized brain surgery on my meningitis patient!” A voice bellows from behind him.

“You’re welcome,” House says. He’s fully aware that Tucker is not thanking him, though he should.

“You could have killed him,” Tucker says. His face is red, but that’s normal. His hair was turning white before House went out on medical leave, but his capillaries don’t seem to know that. Tucker still flushes like the redhead he once was when he gets mad, which seems to happen a lot.

“There’s no guarantee he’s going to survive, you’re correct,” House says. “But on the off chance he does, I figured he might like to be able to wipe his own ass, tie his shoes, twist the cap off a beer bottle. You know, those little things you can’t do when you’re brain dead.”

“I’m calling Cuddy,” Tucker says.

“That will be the highlight of her day,” House says. He wanders upstairs to check out the lounges, thinking to himself that something sweet would complement his morning coffee, but really, he doesn’t want to deal with his annoyed colleague any more.


“I was just coming to find you,” Cuddy greets him in the hall.

“Did you bring me a danish?” House asks.

They make their way to the cafeteria through a crowd. Cuddy walks in front of House, to clear a path.

“So, what about this craniotomy?” She quizzes him.

“Medically necessary, standard treatment,” House says. “The kid has resistant bacterial meningitis. Brain surgery sounds very dramatic., but you know, and Tucker knows it’s not that big a deal. The real risk was not doing it.”

Cuddy shoots him a look. “House…”

“I wasn’t showboating. Tucker was home with his family,” House says. “The patient had two seizures. CT showed significant swelling, and we had to relieve the pressure. It was my call.”

House examines a blueberry muffin for a few seconds and then walks away from the line. The cafeteria does not have what he wants, and cafeteria coffee sucks, anyway. Cuddy follows him.

“Are you all right, Dr. House,” Cuddy asks. “I mean, how are you holding up?”

He is tired of the question, even though Cuddy is the only person in the hospital who actually asks. He should be grateful for that, but he’s just not that big a person. He knows that she’s expressing ordinary concern, but he still thinks of it as interference.

“Never better,” he says. He feels a little like he’s going to choke. “If I could just get Tucker off my back, my life would be perfect.”

“I was talking about your other problems,” she offers.

“You mean the ones that are none of your business?” House asks.

“I’ll talk to Tucker,” Cuddy offers. “Maybe I can get him to leave you alone.”

“I can do that myself,” House says. “I don’t want you playing him for sympathy on my behalf. He’s not concerned about this case, he’s jealous because Gorman left me in charge. It’s not your problem.”

“If you can’t resolve the issues Dr. Tucker has with you, hand it over to me,” she says. “He’s going to run to me every time you make a treatment decision, and that makes it my problem.”

House closes his eyes and shakes his head. Whatever, Cuddy. Don’t try to make things easy, I can do my job, he thinks. He’ll deal with it but he’ll do it later. Tucker will be just as pissed off after lunch.

Right now, rounds appeal to him. He’ll seem to be working, but if he can find Robinson or Patel, he won’t have to do anything more complicated than half-assed listening.


He leaves the hospital around lunchtime. He goes to a coffee place downtown and waits at the counter. He asks for a large coffee to go. The guy behind the counter has the sort of skin that makes House envy the young. The guy looks like he’s about twenty-five, maybe a grad student in something sensitive like English lit. He is untouched, almost surreal in his smoothness. House was never so young. The guy is almost unbearably attractive.

House catches himself wondering what the coffee guy looks like without the stupid apron. That sort of speculation is supposed to be reserved for flight attendants, nurses, and Cuddy. He feels self conscious, as if everybody in the world knows that he’s checking out a guy who works in a coffee shop.

“Be a few minutes, the Double A is brewing,” the guy says. “Do you want to wait?” He shows perfect white teeth and small dimples. His eyes crinkle just enough to confirm his smile. House pays for his coffee and moves to the side to wait and watch.

The guy turns around. His jeans fit entirely too well, and he’s got a nice ass.

“What the hell is wrong with me?” House whispers. He’s been looking at men differently over the past week or so, as if he’s trying to figure out what Wilson wanted from him. That makes a little bit of sense, but not much.

He jumps when something heavy knocks against his back. He follows the movement of the object and sees two girls with backpacks stuffed full slung over their shoulders. They do not apologize to him. Their packs thump against the floor as the girls sit at the bar and begin to talk.

A bell on the front door clangs as a group comes inside. They bring the cold air with them. One of them is describing a party, how she drank too much champagne and woke up the next morning in a complete stranger’s bathtub. Her voice pierces the air like a car alarm. Her companions laugh, because this sort of behavior must be typical for the loud one.

House drums his fingers on the countertop as the newcomers take a break from their conversation to order. One of them can’t decide.

“Latte or mocha, latte or mocha, what do I want?” the straggler asks his friends.

“Just order something!” The two men in the group punch each other in the arms. One of them lurches sideways and bumps into House. “Hey, sorry dude.”

House rolls his eyes.

“I’ll have the chai,” the straggler decides.

There’s a clock on the wall, above an open door that leads into a darkened room.

House freezes there. His eyes travel in record time between from the white circle to the black rectangle. His is blood races and his heart pounds. His breathing is heavy, and he can’t move. House feels like the events of a year are being sucked into right now.

“Large coffee to go.” The guy behind the counter sets a paper cup in front of him.

His cane falls to the floor as the scents of clove and cardamom waft over him. The chatter in the shop subsides to a white static. House can’t breathe.

This is it. He’s sure he’s dying. He leans over the counter for support. “Somebody call 911! I think this guy’s having a heart attack…”

He feels himself being pulled back, but he does not fall. There’s a pair of strong arms, and a chair.

“It’s OK, I’m a doctor. Give him some room, and bring me some water.” The voice is so familiar that it might not be real. Fingers on his neck and a steady hand on his head, the noise fades as the crowd moves away.

“You’re tachy at 150. Any tingling in your left arm?”

“Dunno…no.” House opens his eyes.

Wilson is not a hallucination. He is there, not six inches away, cuing House’s involuntary actions. “Breathe. You’re having a panic attack, you’ll be OK.”

How is Wilson so calm? What is he doing here? “Take this.” He hands over a white pill, more oval than his usual Vicodin.

“Take it, Greg. It’ll help.” Wilson looks at him with concern and certainty. House swallows the pill. They sit quietly for several minutes. Wilson reaches for his wrist. “I have to check your pulse again.”

House nods. Wilson feels for his radial artery and presses his thumb over it. “Better,” he says, obviously relieved. “I gave you Xanax so you don’t have another attack later.”

House sees the bottle sitting between them; his name is on the familiar hospital pharmacy label. Wilson looks guilty and contrite. House is puzzled for a moment, then the pieces fall into place.

“I was wondering what happened to these,” he says. He picks up the vial and shakes it. “I’ve been taking a lot of them.”

Wilson gets it. “Yeah, I, you... had some trouble there for a while, after…”

House understands. “Yeah, so if I needed any more of these, I would just tell you?”

“Your, uh, shrink can write for you, that would probably be best,” Wilson says slowly. “You needed it.”

“I’m… you’re right.” They look at each other. House smiles a little as he slips the bottle into his coat pocket.

It’s no surprise that Wilson is in therapy. He should be, after all that’s happened in the last year. He needs help, and House is glad he’s getting it. He wants to ask how everything’s going, but he can’t ask that simple question because he’s afraid Wilson won’t answer. He’s equally afraid that Wilson will answer. For once, he allows it to be none of his business.

“What are you doing here?” he asks.

“Everybody eats lunch,” Wilson says. “I’m not stalking you, if that’s what you’re really asking. This is my regular coffee place.”

House fidgets a little. “I guess I should get back to the hospital.”

“You can’t drive right now,” Wilson tells him, “Benzodiazepine is a sedative, and you should take it easy for once. Call your office, and tell them you’re taking the rest of the day.”

Wilson is right, but House isn’t happy about it. “I’m not leaving my car here overnight.”

“I’ll take you home then get a cab back here.”

House hesitates. Wilson isn’t going to budge on this. He knows the effects of the medication, and House could use a break, even if he doesn’t want to take one. He has pushed himself so hard because that’s the only way he knows how to stay functional at this point. Lying down might be a really good idea.

“OK,” he says. He places his keys on the table and slides them toward Wilson. This will be a good test of his nerves, a barometer on whether they’re going to be able to be friends again. If Wilson is willing to spend time in the same space with him, if he feels like he can do that…

Wilson smiles. Is that relief on his face?

Wilson parks in House’s usual space, and pulls his phone out of his bag. House hears him giving the address to a taxi service.

They get out, and Wilson hands over the keys. His fingers are cool and smooth. House has always admired Wilson’s hands; they care so much. They look at each other again. House doesn’t know what to say. Goodbye? This almost feels like the end of something, like the weight of all the things they can’t say has crushed what little they will say to each other.

The air is cold against House’s face, a gust stings, and his eyes blur.

“You can wait for your cab inside, if you want,” House says. “It’s cold out here.”

They walk to the door. House drops his stuff on the floor next to the piano. Wilson sits down at the table near the window, to watch and listen. Several minutes dribble away. As much as House tells himself that everything is going to be all right, he doesn’t believe it. He wraps his arms around his middle, to quell the urge to throw up, but it’s not working.

He opens his mouth and a horrific, almost animal noise comes out. House hears the scrape of Wilson’s chair and the hurried rush of his shoes against the floor. He arrives too late.

Wilson crouches near the brownish puddle to examine it as only a doctor would. “No coffee grounds, and no red blood, so no GI bleed,” he says. House moves to get up. He’s unhappy when anybody sees him in a weakened state.

“I don’t have an ulcer, Dr. Wilson,” House says. “I don’t have esophageal varices or gastric erosion; it’s garden variety stress.”

“Or a reaction to your meds,” Wilson suggests as unravels a length of paper towels and spritzes cleaner from a bottle. It smells of orange peel.

House watches Wilson crouch before him, cleaning up after him, wiping vomit off the floor. He looks so determined.

“No white fragments,” House says. “I haven’t taken anything in the last hour.”

“From the looks of this, you haven’t eaten anything, either.” He finishes his chore. House hears the water in the kitchen sink, and some rustling. Wilson sits down on the couch, maybe a foot away from House. “Here, crackers and ginger ale. This looks like the stuff I bought the last time you were sick.”

House doesn’t want it. He doesn’t need to be comforted or coddled; he’s not six years old. He makes a face.

“One cracker won’t kill you.”

He takes the offered food, but grumbles about it. Wilson is watching him. Neither of them is comfortable.

“I’m, uh,” House hesitates. “I don’t always know who I am these days.” He takes a sip of the ginger ale. “When I freaked out, I was looking at the guy who works at the coffee shop.”

Wilson seems surprised at his confession. He obviously wasn’t expecting it.

“Huh,” Wilson says. He nods so subtly that House wouldn’t have noticed it if Wilson were across the room. “He’s a nice looking guy, it’s perfectly normal to notice.”

“It was more than that,” House says.

“Yeah,” Wilson says. “I… I’m sorry.”

“What for?” He hopes Wilson has the good sense not to answer that. He stuffs a couple of crackers into his mouth and crushes them. “Where’s your cab?” he mumbles through the food.

“I cancelled it,” Wilson says quietly. “I guess I should…” House thinks that he’s asking if he can stay.

“I still feel pretty bad,” House admits.

“You should get some rest.”

House gets up slowly and moves toward his bedroom. He plants the cane and leans heavily into each step. Wilson doesn’t try to help him.

“Will you be here when I wake up?” House wants to know. The words sound like pleading. He feels lousy, and he’s sick of being alone.

“I can stick around for a little bit.”

As House lays down on his bed, as he lets the aches and pains of his daily life come up against the softness of his bed, he thinks that Wilson is acting the same way he did when he started physical therapy last year, doing a lousy job at pretending that there’s not a gorilla in the corner. No wonder he needed the Xanax.

He’s not like House, who nurses a grudge for a bit, then makes shrapnel of it, would shoot the gorilla and mount its head as a trophy to hang above his fireplace. They’re different, he and Wilson. One is shadow, one light. He’s no longer sure which of them is which. For some reason, this makes him laugh, though it’s not exactly funny.

His eyes shut as his head sinks into the pillow. He allows the chemicals to take him believing that Wilson will be sitting on his couch, probably reading a journal, when he comes back to life.

He is wrong. When he wakes from his long sleep, the apartment is empty. Wilson is gone. There’s a note on the table, signed with one initial. If you’re going to smoke, get a real ashtray.

The saucer is still filled with butts. House looks for his cigarettes. They’re exactly where he left them on the coffee table. He taps one out of the pack, rolls it between his thumb and forefinger until the thin white paper cracks and threads of tobacco spill out.

This is as good a time as any to quit. He places the saucer, the pack, and his disposable lighter into a plastic grocery bag and knots it at the top. He walks out his front door and throws the small bag in his garbage can.

There, that’s done. House knows he won’t need that stuff any more. He’s OK now. He feels good.

He picks up the note again; it’s exactly as it should be. Wilson never says goodbye.


Cuddy lingers at the desk in the clinic, checking the roster for the day. “Dr. House, I should schedule you for clinic duty; seeing some ordinary patients would keep you on your toes,” she suggests. She sounds almost hopeful. He smiles a little.

“My leg is the problem, not my toes,” he tells her.

“I can get you a stool.”

“Actually, I came to set the record straight. I forgot about the Xanax. I do have it, but I wasn’t taking them when you asked.”

She grabs him by the elbow and pulls him toward her office.

“What?” Cuddy demands.

“Did you fire Wilson?” House asks.

She shakes her head. “He’s not fired, not yet; he’s suspended for self prescribing a controlled substance.”

“Oh? So you tested him,” House is fairly sure he’s got Cuddy by the short hairs.

“No,” she admits. “But he confessed.”

“You have no evidence to support that confession.” House pulls the bottle from his pocket. “Should have run the tests.”

Cuddy takes the pills from House and examines the label. She looks confused, even angry. “He admitted everything, and I have pharmacy records showing that…”

“He wrote me a prescription for Xanax because he was concerned about my well being. Wilson’s a bit of a sucker for a hard-luck case.”

“Why are you trying to protect him?”

House shrugs. “What happened didn’t affect our working relationship, and that’s as far as you have any right to be concerned.”

“But he…”

“Leave it alone, Cuddy,” House insists. “Don’t be a girl about this. Call Wilson and unsuspend him. You can give him my clinic hours.”

She refuses. House glares at her and stays in his office for the rest of the day.



Gorman has been trying to reach him for two days. House owes him the courtesy of a return call, though he isn’t looking forward to the conversation. To his surprise, Gorman has an interesting case.

“A superbug?” House asks. “How did you diagnose it?”

“You’ll love this: we used the House method,” Gorman says. “Shots in the dark to exhaust the possibilities, and when we didn’t get an adequate response to any drug, we called in some crazy Italian biologists to run some molecular comparisons. It looks for all the world like Vancomycin-resistant staph A. We’ve been trying to isolate this bug for years!” Gorman sounds giddy, even through a sketchy phone connection and thousands of miles of ocean.

“OK, but how are you treating it?” House is very curious, almost to the point of envy. He hasn’t had a case this good in a long time.

“That’s why I wanted to talk to you. How would you feel about coming over to Switzerland? The guys over here are dying to meet you.”

Two days later, he boards a plane to London, where he’ll connect to Geneva. He hates to fly, but this is too good to pass up. There’s nothing for him in New Jersey, at least not right now.

He glances out the window as the plane takes off. The tarmac stays put as the plane takes flight, and gravity presses his head to the back of his seat. House wonders how long he ought to stay away.

How long before the gorilla gets tired of being ignored and leaves?

Part Nine

Part One (By Pitza)
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four
Part Five
Part Six


Wilson enters the lounge as quietly as possible. He’s trying to leave well enough alone, and if he can avoid talking to anybody, bonus. Nancy is finishing up charts from her shift. She ought to be home with her family by now. He supposes she’s getting double time and a half for working this overnight, so he doesn’t feel sorry for her.

“Merry Christmas, Dr. Wilson,” she says. “I’m glad you’re here.”

This can’t be good. “Busy shift?” he asks. “Or just the usual holiday business.”

“We had a bit of excitement earlier,” she tells him. “It probably could have been prevented, but the nurses’ station was unattended…”

Wilson heads for the coffee, pours a cup and dunks a whitish bell-shaped cookie sprinkled with shards of red sugar into it. “Go on,” he says with his mouth half full.

Nancy gives him the rundown and his hopes for an easy day fall to pieces.


“Simons died last night,” he announces as he walks into House’s office. House has his legs propped up on the desk. He looks up from whatever he’s reading, it’s too colorful to be a journal.

“Good morning to you, too,” House says. His brows close in and his forehead wrinkles. “Wait, Simons is the CMV guy? I thought his fever was coming down. He can’t die, just like that.”

Wilson shrugs. “Picked the wrong night to flat line. Cardiac arrest, skeleton staff, he was dead before the code team got to him.”

“Well, don’t beat yourself up about it,” House says. “One more casualty of the holiday season.”

“I have to let the family know.” Wilson turns his head away from House’s irritation and studies the floor. A minute or so passes in silence.

“Give them a little time,” House says quietly. He looks up at Wilson. Their eyes meet and hold steady. Wilson knows that they could be stay here, watching each other just like this, until one of them drops dead. House knows it, too.


Cuddy finds him after rounds. She walks with him and closes the door to his office behind them. It’s a bad sound. Wilson retreats to his desk and gestures that she should sit. He’s trying to remind her that he still works here.

“Alton Stewart is coming in from Philadelphia to cover for you starting tomorrow,” she says, still standing. “You’ll be on unpaid administrative leave for six weeks. I want your charts in my office before you go.”

“What’s going to happen after that?” Wilson loads several questions into one. He should ask more specifically, but the look on her face scares him. He’s almost positive he doesn’t want to hear the answers, but he’d be a fool not to ask. “Will I have a job to come back to?”

“That remains to be seen,” she says. “I have to do what’s in the best interest of this hospital.”

Wilson shivers.

His last patient of the day has chrondosarcoma and breakthrough pain; an admit from the emergency department. Despite her regular medication, despite a dose of a stronger narcotic in the ER, the woman is in agony. He has to work quickly and calmly. He has to get it right.

“I know you’ve heard this before, probably even today,” he says. “On a scale of one to ten…”

“The meds aren’t working, this is worse than being in labor.” She groans as she exhales. “Feels like knives. I wish I were dead.”

“OK,” he sits down on a stool near the bed. “Tell me about your holiday, did you have family come to visit?”

The woman seems to struggle for the first few minutes. She talks about the meal she prepared, how her daughter helped, and her father. Gradually, she settles in to an easier pattern. She relates details as they come to her. Wilson listens intently, and watches her posture. Every so often, he asks another question in a low, friendly voice. He keeps her talking.

“I made my husband do the dishes, since I put that damned bike together,” she says. They both laugh.

“How’s the pain now?” he asks.

“Better,” she says. “Does this mean I’m dying?”

“No,” he says. “This kind of pain is happens to a lot of patients. It can come at any stage of treatment, possibly due to plain, ordinary stress.”

“I feel better now. How’d you do that?”

If she were younger, he would tell her it was magic. “Distraction works for some patients, or the fentanyl may have taken a little longer than usual to kick in.”

“But I’ll have to stay tonight.”

“You’ll need to see a pain management specialist before you go home, but the nurses are pretty lax about visiting hours on holidays,” he smiles at her. “Tell somebody to bring you some leftovers.”

Wilson leaves the room. There must be some good left in him, somewhere.

He stops at House’s office again before leaving; he wants to say goodbye, but House isn’t there, and nobody has seen him. He considers leaving a note, but what would it say? None of the pithy, insincere phrases that cross his mind come close to what he really wants to tell House: I never wanted to hurt you.

Wilson makes a face as he realizes he said those same words to too many women at one time or another, but he’s almost sure he’s never meant them until right now.

He spends the first day of his suspension working around the house, keeping busy so he doesn’t go nuts. He does not leave the house, and by the end of the day, it looks like a grown-up lives there.

He spends the second day driving to nowhere; he likes to drive. The hum of the engine is louder than his thoughts as he speeds down Route 1 going south. It’s a long road, an old road, and there’s nothing much to see. Every so often he passes a strip mall. The parking lots are crowded with people who are probably waiting in line to return gifts that did not satisfy them. He thinks about his wives, and how easy it seemed for them to end an unsatisfying marriage. He’s really a lousy husband. He cares only about himself.

By the time he looks up, Wilson is in Maryland, almost to Baltimore.

He pulls off the road at a diner. His fingers unclench, and he pulls his hands away from the steering wheel. God, he’s stiff. He gets out of the car and stretches his arms into the air. He feels every muscle shifting and stretching. He fills his lungs with cool air that smells of traffic and wood smoke; he lets it out with a jumbled sound. He blinks, and blinks again, as if he thinks he’ll recognize the surroundings the next time he opens his eyes.

The flashing colors of a huge neon sign reflect in the damp pavement. Must have rained earlier. The Big Chief Diner looks like the sort of place his dad would have stopped on one of those family trips, the long summer drives with all three boys piled into the back of the station wagon on the way to visit Grandma. He has never been here, but it has the kind of basic familiarity that he needs. Warm light streams from the windows into the almost dark.

The interior is aqua blue and beige with vinyl booths and speckled tabletops. Caddies with little tubs of jam, glass bottles of ketchup, paper napkins in metal dispensers sit at the far end of each one. A case near the door has desserts, pies and cakes gleaming as the shelves rotate. All of it is perfect; this place has probably looked exactly the same since before he was born.

The waitresses, they’re all women, wear matching uniforms, the same blue as the upholstery. A man in a white shirt and a bland, dark tie waits near the door, at the cash register, and leads him to a booth that’s supposed to seat four.

He orders an open-faced turkey sandwich covered in gravy. There’s a lump of stuffing under the meat and a puddle of sweet cranberry sauce on the side, right next to the mashed potatoes.

Wilson silently thanks the road that brought him here. He can almost persuade himself that it’s 1962, that he pulled up in a giant Chevrolet rather than his sleek German driving machine, that his parents haven’t even met. That he has never hurt anybody, either by design or by accident.

“Everything all right, hon?” the waitress asks. She’s about 60. Her salt-and-pepper hair is pulled away from her face, and her face breaks into wrinkles as she smiles at him. The blue of the uniform flatters her. She’s probably somebody’s grandmother.

“Mmm, yes. It’s very good,” he says. “I didn’t realize how hungry I was.”

“Are you on your way home?” she asks. She’s just making conversation. The diner is close to empty.

“Home’s where you hang your hat, right?” He smiles and shrugs. “Though, I don’t have a hat.”

She laughs, because he made it sound like a joke. She fills his cup with coffee and reminds him to save room for dessert.

He starts to wonder when he became the kind of man who could destroy people he claimed to love, all without not realizing he was doing it.

At least he knows now, that’s got to count for something. His phone makes a sound that tells him there’s a new message.

Message received December 25 at 1:49 a.m. Hey, OK, I… I figured something out, and I was going to tell you. OK.

Two days ago? Hearing House’s voice is enough to send him spiraling back into doubt. He slept through the call, just like he slept through the page when Mr. Simons died. At this distance, there’s nothing he can do. After forty-eight hours, nothing really matters.

Over a slice of apple pie with ice cream, he decides to stay in Baltimore for the night. New Jersey can do without him.


Waking up in a real bed, with a soft pillow clinging to the side of his head, is almost a revelation. The last time he woke up in a bed, he was alone, even more alone than he is now. House was gone; House is still gone. It’s better that way, for both of them. If things had worked out differently that night, if he’d managed to kiss him in the yard instead of slipping. If what happened had been closer to the comfort he needed than the crime he committed… if. If…

He can get back in his car, keep driving south. Eventually, he will get to Florida. He can hire somebody to pack up his stuff and move it. Or he could have it all burned. Miami sounds like a good idea. He’s got a friend from med school at University of Miami Hospital, or he could get an HMO job, assuming he doesn’t lose his medical license. Cuddy will be glad to get rid of him, but she might prefer to have his head on a plate.

Assuming the worst, assuming he does lose his license, he can move to Miami and get a job teaching health to high school students. And then there will be a big expose in the newspaper about how a rapist who lost his medical license over prescription fraud is teaching in a Miami school. Everybody will know.

His thoughts move at light speed. He has to find a way to slow down. He has to be able to stop his head from running. He knows that he has to run before he can walk, walk before he can stand still. He has to stand still before he’ll be able to breathe.

He crosses to the dresser and grabs the vial. It’s nearly half empty. He sees the label: the date, and their names printed in tidy black letters.

Wilson is using Xanax as a crutch. It dulls the contrast between then and now. One more piece of ground he shares with House. He sets the vial back down. He wonders if House knows about his bloodless crime, the one that’s actually going to cost him.

He wonders what he’s going to do. Sure, he could keep driving; he could go anywhere, but sooner or later if he keeps running, he will collapse and nobody will be left to help him up.

He spends a couple of hours walking around the Baltimore Aquarium, which seems to be a popular destination for kids who are already bored with their Christmas gifts. A gang of them stands near the shark exhibit, comparing the Great Whites to their math teacher. Their words bounce between the glass tanks and dissipate into the high ceilings.

The shark moves around its tank, menacing but graceful. Wilson moves off to the side and examines the beast’s face. The shark opens its mouth, not too wide, but the kids giggle nervously. One of the girls shrieks.

His mind is blank for an instant, and then he knows something. His head is clear, and he knows; he did mean to hurt House. He intended every blow he laid down as punishment for the condescending silence. He tried to make House understand what he wanted, and when that didn’t work he took it, hurting House for what he didn’t feel, hurting himself for what he did.

House should have gone to the police. He wonders if he could turn himself in, if that would mean anything. There’s no evidence, but he’s guilty nonetheless.

He walks to the end of a pier and watches the dull gray water below him. Gulls squawk in the distance. House has always been an enigma. The things he says obscure the things he doesn’t say, ever.

“Why do you stay with me? I’m completely fucked up.” House said. Stacy had been gone for about two weeks. Wilson thought the worst was over, but he was wrong.

He pulled a napkin from a paper bag and handed it to House. “Right now, I’m staying because you’re on a pity bender. I want to be able to hold it over your head,” he said. “Usually I stick around because it’s cheaper than buying my own Scotch.” He raised his glass and glanced over at his friend’s pathetic face.

“Really?”

“No.” Wilson waited.

House leaned over to rest his head on the arm of the couch and closed his eyes. “It hurts, Jimmy. My whole body hurts. It all hurts.” His voice was flat, but he was speaking the truth.

“I know.”


The wind picks up, fluttering his coat, cooling his hot cheeks.

Maybe he can make it home by dark.

Part Eight

Part One (By Pitza)
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four
Part Five

Being in Wilson’s office makes House a little queasy. He’s not afraid, he’s not thinking about anything other than the patient, but Wilson is. It’s that obvious. His eyes are glassy, as if he’s getting plenty of sleep, but no rest. He needs a haircut. His bangs reach almost to his eyebrows, which is unusual for Wilson. He always looks so tidy.

House doesn’t sit down. He doesn’t want to be tempted to stay, to let this back and forth drift into one of those rambling conversations that they’ll carry on for days in three-minute snippets. It’s way too soon for that.

Wilson is right there, seated behind his desk. For half a second, House misses him with such power that it ought to knock him down, but it doesn’t. He stands near the couch as they talk about anti-virals and the patient’s prognosis. House grips the head of his cane so tightly that his knuckles ache.

His eyes survey the junk that clutters Wilson’s shelves: books, trophies, a few photographs. He focuses on a picture of Wilson and his father, taken on a sunny day, maybe ten years ago. It must have been about the time he got out of med school. They stand arm in arm, both holding golf clubs. Both men are smiling.

Wilson looks like his dad. House remembers the elder Wilson as a great guy, hell of a golfer. That’s why his son plays golf to win.

“I’m not wrong,” he says. He has to concentrate on the present, that’s important.

“I know.” Wilson sounds pleased, but sad. He’s about to say something else, House can feel it. He asks about dinner. House can’t say yes, but he won’t say no. He’s stuck in a spot where he knows what he ought to want, to get far away from Wilson as fast as he can. But what he does want is something else, a middle ground.

Scar tissue. House is waiting for scar tissue.

“Maybe some other time,” he says. Compromise sucks. Compromise means that everybody loses, but that’s all he can offer at this point. He hopes Wilson understands.


For House, Christmas Eve is about standing by, watching the surrounding chaos of all the things that other people want to get done so they can run off to their real lives. What they have, what they want, whatever: it’s all a bunch of noise.

House’s answering machine is flashing. He does not care who called. He’s not in the mood to talk right now. No one who would call him has anything to say that he wants to hear, just clutter that people feel like sharing in December. He has no desire to be a part of it.

He’s thinking about Wilson’s wife. He liked Ellen well enough, though he had no particular need to like her. He doesn’t need to like anybody, and he doesn’t want anybody to like him. Friends just complicate your life.

Ellen was a terrible cook, he remembers; she and Wilson ate out a lot, and House liked that about her. After the first year or so, she worked in the city. He wonders how the sex was, between them. Wilson rarely spoke of it; House supposes that means they had plain, ordinary, married people sex with lights off.

He decides to start a fire, as some kind of twisted nod to the holiday. Christmas is a pagan festival. They were all about fire. Maybe it’s just something to do.

He wads up a bunch of newspaper because he has no kindling. He kicks an ottoman toward the fireplace and sits down to get a couple of logs. They’re light and dry from sitting there the way Stacy stacked them more than a year ago, a half-assed effort to make the place look cheery. A fine layer of dust comes up from the pile as House disturbs it.

He brushes the dull powder from his hands. It leaves pale streaks on his knees in the shape of his fingers.

He finds the fireplace lighter behind the pile of wood and touches the flame to the paper, then he wonders if the flue is open. He’ll find out soon enough.

The wood begins to catch after a little while, and the room does not fill with smoke. Lucky break. He likes this fire. He should have fires more often.

He gets up and grabs a couple of catalogs from the coffee table. He rips pages and moves them over the logs, holding each one as it burns. He feels the flames lift each page and watches the glossy colors and the pretty words light up, then crumble, as they turn black. He thinks about chemistry until his face and hands are too warm too stay there.

He moves on to the couch. The chill in the air settles on his bare arms; he’s surprised at the gooseflesh. He rubs his arms with his hands in an attempt to feel warm again. It’s not working.

He pulls himself up and goes to the kitchen for a glass of water to take his evening pills. House wants to be tired enough to sleep. He’s sick of thinking. He takes two Vicodin, even though his leg isn’t bothering him that much. He hears the wood crackling in the fireplace as he opens the refrigerator. His apartment is too quiet. There’s nothing but church on TV, nothing but cheesy holiday songs on the radio, and he does not feel like making his own music. He hasn’t touched the piano in almost two weeks.

Cuddy’s note from the other night falls to the floor. The muscles in his back protest and he feels a tug in his hamstrings as he bends at the waist. The funny thing is, if she had given him her number, he might call her, just to have somebody to talk to. He is morbidly curious about the number she did give him. She seemed to have no trouble placing what happens between him and Wilson in a clearly defined box. He’s not so sure.

It’s possible that Cuddy made a valid point, talking to somebody more familiar with the basics of sexual assault might help him make up his mind. House has never been a fan of stasis.

“Hotline.” The voice belongs to a woman, young, but not girlish. She sounds somber and professionally concerned. She’s here to help. House almost loses his nerve. He was so sure as he was dialing, speaking is a little more difficult.

“Hi. This is anonymous, right?” he says. “I mean, I don’t have to give you my name and social security number.”

“No sir,” the woman says. Now, she sounds a little nervous, as if she’s talking to her father. He’s not that old. “The hotline is completely confidential, you don’t have to tell me your name unless you want to, and I can’t report anything you say. ”

“OK, good.” House exhales, and nods, as if he is sitting across from this young woman. “So, can you tell me something about how you know that you’ve been sexually assaulted?”

“The law in New Jersey says--”

“I don’t care what the law says, I want to know what you think. Do you people have some kind of checklist?”

“Sir, do you think you were sexually assaulted?”

“Are you working from a script?” he asks.

“I’ve been trained to answer calls from people who are concerned about sexual assault, sir.” The woman sounds annoyed and defensive.

“Great, that’s why I called. My boss thinks that I was sexually assaulted, but I have my doubts.” House is proud of himself for having summed up the whole thing so neatly.

The woman sighs. House wants to know what her name is, but he isn’t about to ask. She probably wouldn’t tell him, even if he did.

“The way we handle calls is that if a person claims to have been raped, we believe them,” she says. “As I was about to say, New Jersey law defines sexual assault as forcible sexual contact.”

“See, that’s where I get confused. He didn’t exactly force me. I decided to get into bed with him of my own free will,” he says. “My choice. I could have just left him there.”

“If you said ‘no’ at any time, that’s rape.”

“I didn’t,” House says. “I didn’t say anything.”

“That’s the same thing as saying no,” the woman tells him.

“Do you really believe that?” he says. “If you think about it, silence is the same thing as saying yes.”

“No, it’s not.” The woman pauses. House can almost hear her attempt to form an argument. “I’m assuming that you had a relationship with this person prior to the assault?”

He wonders how much it matters. “Not that kind of relationship, he’s my friend. I--” He was about to explain to a random stranger exactly how he feels about Wilson, and the thing is, if somebody asked that question directly, House wouldn’t know how to answer. “I don’t know if I could have got away from him, after things started to get weird.”

The issue is that he does not know if he wanted to get away. He knew that Wilson wanted to fuck him, he said as much on the drive home, but House figured he wouldn’t be in any kind of shape to follow through.

“What do you mean by ‘weird’?” she asks. “Do you want to tell me what happened?”

House doesn’t, but he tries. He’s fine until he gets to the part about Wilson pressing a knee against his bad leg, pressing down on his shoulders, smashing his face against a pillow. Wilson didn’t mean to do any of this. He was too drunk to know what he was doing. House thought he was going to suffocate.

He gulps for air.

“I’m sorry,” he pants. “I shouldn’t have called you.”

“Sir, please don’t hang up.” She sounds desperate to keep him on the line.

“Greg,” he says. “My name is Greg.”

“Greg,” she repeats. “Look, if you were physically distressed, that’s aggravated sexual assault. It’s a first degree felony,” the girl tells him. She has recovered her confidence, and she’s back on book. “I really think you should report this assault. I know that’s not an easy thing to do, but this sounds like a good case. You could make a difference.”

He looks at the stacks of mail on the table in front of him. He’s let it go too long. Maybe he should burn it. “You’re a law student, aren’t you?”

“First year, at Rutgers. How did you know that?” she says.

House smiles to keep himself from laughing. That figures. “My ex is a lawyer. You’ve got the self-righteous patter down. Congratulations.” He pauses for a second. “You think this is a case, but I think that what happened to me is nothing more than sex that shouldn’t have happened.

“Rape is not about sex!” She is emphatic about this, which makes sense. “The actor uses sex as a weapon against the victim. It didn’t happen because your friend wanted to have sex with you, it happened because he wanted to hurt you.”

“Yeah, he hurt me, but there’s a lot more to it than that,” House says. “Don’t worry, you’ll figure out that lousy sex isn’t actionable some time before you get to be a junior assistant district attorney.”


House studies the dark wood around his fireplace. His eyes move over the carvings and the screen, to the pokers and brooms in their brass stand, and he focuses on the flame. He grabs a pad of paper and a pen. At the top of the page he writes Wilson’s name in big letters, draws a thick line underneath, and writes words as they come to him.

Symptoms. He has to know the symptoms before he can identify the disease.

The last year was hard on him, and it seems like Wilson was with him every minute, going through the big setbacks and the small victories as if they were his own. That can’t have been easy. A twinge runs through his leg; it registers as guilt. He never asked for devotion, not from anybody. He never asked Wilson to stay, never expected that he would, but at the same time, he has to admit that he wouldn’t have made it without somebody.

Stacy was the one who forced him to live, but Wilson saved his life. House knows that, even if he never said so.

The effort cost Wilson, too much. House didn’t know much about his first marriage, except that it might as well have been over before it started. What he does know is that the second marriage was for love. James and Ellen were well suited, and he thought nobody would be good enough to marry his best friend. Ellen was independent, she was smart, and she was a realist. That’s why House thought she was all right.

Why did she move out in July? Suddenly, House needs to know. Was there something, some night she wasn’t in the mood and Wilson pressed the point a little too hard, and ordinary sex with the lights off turned into something savage?

Her departure came without warning: one day, about a week after House returned to work, Wilson came into his office, clearly upset. They spent an hour getting a few pieces of the story out in the open, then came back here and drank themselves blind.

Wilson passed out on the floor between the couch and the coffee table. House tossed a blanket over him; even in the middle of the summer, his apartment gets cold at night.

All Wilson would say when House asked what happened was that he did something incredibly stupid. That something, it could have been anything. It could have been a pattern that House missed.

He doesn’t know if being the only one to suffer at Wilson’s hands would be better or worse. It’s a singular moment of clarity, but it fades, leaving only trouble in its wake.

He could have looked harder, or more closely. That’s what he does: he peels away the lies until the truth comes to light. That’s how he solves his puzzles. Every word Wilson has ever said to him must be called into question.

Everybody, everybody lies. They lie to each other, and they lie to themselves. They’re human, he and Wilson both. They can’t help themselves. Maybe all of this was inevitable. House gets off the couch, he doesn’t want to sit any more. He limps back and forth around the living room. It’s not pacing, but it has the same effect.

The lingering chemicals in his bloodstream fight with the oncoming Vicodin. He needs to focus. He catches himself pinching the bridge of his nose. It’s one of Wilson’s gestures.

He curses bitterly as he lights a cigarette, and the nicotine distracts him. He’ll know it’s time to lay off the smokes when he stops feeling. His head circles rather than spins, and he knows he’s cutting it close.

He wants another hypothesis, so what if Wilson’s wife got tired of waiting for an absentee husband who spent every minute, spare or not, prodding his gimpy friend to walk with a half-dead leg. What if she decided her man wasn’t coming home and just gave up? That’s so much more likely that House wants to slap himself because he didn’t consider it first.

What if those days and hours added up to be the incredibly stupid thing? Wilson would be justified in placing blame for the breakdown of his marriage in what’s left of House’s lap.

‘If’ is the hardest word, not ‘sorry.’ If House is correct, he is sorry. He never meant for any of this to happen, but intent can’t absolve him, any more than it absolves Wilson.

House takes a deep breath and lets it out. His head feels right on his neck and shoulders. He’s right. He knows he’s right.

He’s always right. This is good. He knows what happened. Anger met guilt. Obsession met obligation. Add sexual frustration, a liberal amount of booze and a few barbs? Spontaneous combustion.

It all makes sense now. It was nobody’s fault. He wants to tell Wilson, let him know that they’re going to be OK. He’s not nervous as he makes this call. He’s fine, or at least he’s getting there.

Wilson does not respond, not even to a page. House is surprised and disappointed. This is probably better, he thinks. It’s Christmas, and even though the day signifies nothing to them…

Thinking of himself and Wilson as plural, as a one made of two, is so automatic to House that he never stops to wonder why he does it. Before now, he never had to. One is less than two. It was always easier. Two wasn’t any harder to deal with than one, really. House doesn’t need friends, but he needs somebody he doesn’t have to think about so much.

Besides, blowing off busybodies that want to help, telling them that being alone doesn’t bother him is much easier when they’re wrong, when solitary is a choice.

He turns on the TV. There’s a choir singing on PBS. A woman’s voice stands out, rich and dark. He recognizes music of Handel immediately. Fucking great. He won’t be able to do much better than that.

He wonders whether wishing or praying is more pathetic. At least when you wish, you know nothing will come of it. He’s heard about people who truly believe that their prayers will be answered.

House doesn’t know how to pray, so he wishes.

He watches the fire as it subsides. As the televised concert ends, he covers the glowing coals with a last sheet of paper.

It rests there for a minute, maybe more; crinkles from the intense heat.

The page and the words he wrote catch, flame, and die.

Part Seven

Pairing: House/Wilson
Rating: Mature Audiences, not suitable for children
Warnings: This series deals with sexual abuse and recovering it. And there’s het smut in this chapter.
Summary: Wilson has a terrible Christmas eve and a number of unfortunate encounters with women.

Part One (By Pitza)
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four


Wilson is in the car on the way to work when his phone rings. “Hi Mom, I’m driving.” Conversations with his mother do not require that much attention. He would have pulled over for any other call.

“Hello Jimmy, this is your mother.” Hearing her voice makes him happy. She’s talking about family and neighbors. Her thoughts rarely connect.

“We had a nice card from Ellen. Did you know she’s gone back to her maiden name? She signed it ‘Ellen Metzger.’”

As far as he knows, the only time Ellen was ever referred to as Mrs. James Wilson was at their wedding reception, and she wasn’t happy about it then. Mom threw a minor fit after Ellen complained to his father, who made the introduction. Mom must have forgotten about that. She has a unique ability to forget things that do not please her.

“Ellen and I are divorced, Mom. She can call herself Elizabeth Taylor if that’s what makes her happy.”

Mom laughs and keeps talking. Wilson focuses on the road through three or four lights.

“How’s Greg? Is he walking any better, the poor thing…” Her voice trails off, and Wilson can hear the pity dripping from her words. Such a young man, cut down in the prime of his life. As if House is dead and buried.

He doesn’t feel like listening any more, so he lies about the traffic and hangs up. He stops for coffee, because he’s got time. He’s thinking about his second wedding, and how House spent most of the reception flirting with his mother and her sister, and how charming they thought he was. Women are crazy. House isn’t charming, but there’s always been something about him. Wilson can’t deny that.

“Hey, are you open tomorrow?” he asks the girl at the counter as he pays for his morning boost.

“Uh, tomorrow is Christmas,” she says. She’s looking at him as if he’s from another planet.

“Some of us have to work.”

The girl rolls her eyes, as if she can’t imagine such a thing. “Sucks to be you.”

Maybe she’s right. She’s young, and in her world, Christmas is a day off. Wilson thinks about being 23 years old, going through his first divorce. That was ten years ago. He hasn’t spoken to his first wife since about a month after they signed the papers. She knocked on the door late one night and handed him a set of keys for the apartment, said she had forgotten about them.

She looked good. He asked if she wanted a drink. A thought crossed his mind that he might be able to get her to go to bed with him, for old times’ sake, but she told him that her new boyfriend was in the car, waiting for her.

And that was it.

Wilson has no clue what happened to her. He feels like he ought to know, they were married after all, but he isn’t going to make any effort to find out.

The soles of his shoes scrape against the damp pavement as he opens his car. Will House be another one of those people who move out of his life? They all seem to go with such ease, leaving nothing where a lover, or a friend, once belonged.

He’s filled up with ghosts today. ‘Tis the season, he supposes.

He spots Cuddy on the way in.

“I’ve got an inpatient who needs a lung biopsy to rule out CMV pneumonia as the cause of a persistent fever,” he says. “Any chance we could get that done, uh, yesterday?”

“Perhaps if you’d asked me yesterday,” she says. She doesn’t sound happy. It’s the season for that, too. “Stop by my office after rounds and I’ll see what I can do.”




“Thank you for coming in, Dr. Wilson,” she says. “Have a seat.”

Her manner is stiff, almost formal, which is odd. He’s the one who asked for a favor.

“I have to sit down to talk about Mr. Simons biopsy?” he says.

She puts her desk between them. She’s the boss, yes she is. She’s looking at a chair. “Have a seat, Dr. Wilson,” she repeats.

God, it’s quiet in here.

Wilson chews the inside of his lower lip; he’s pretty sure Cuddy notices.

“About the prescriptions you wrote on Sunday, the ones for Dr. House,” she says. “He’s taking the antibiotic, but he denied any knowledge of the Xanax, and his tox screen was negative for benzodiazepine.”

“So?” Wilson asks. He’s curious, and trying not to sound defensive, but he knows he’s failing, miserably, as a matter of fact.

“So I want to know what happened to the drugs after you filled the prescription." She pauses. "I know you filled it, I pulled the pharmacy records."

Oh. That. There’s no good way to respond to that, nothing that won’t make him look like a liar and a cheat, both of which he is, technically. “Are you accusing me of something?” Wilson says.

“We’re talking about a controlled substance,” she says. “If I ordered a drug test on you, right now, what are the chances that your results would be positive for benzodiazepine?”

He’s busted. “Somewhere around one hundred percent,” he admits. He can’t look at her. He really doesn’t want to be having this conversation. He’s sure his face has gone red.

“What were you thinking?”

It’s the same question he’s been asking himself for days, about so many things. He has to remind himself that he’s a doctor, a licensed physician, not a kid in the principal’s office.

“Acute stress disorder,” he says. “I experienced symptoms of classic panic attack four times over a 24-hour period.”

“Any idea what might have triggered these symptoms?” Cuddy sounds skeptical, and even that’s being generous. She sounds like she knows he’s lying and she wants him to confess.

It’s getting harder not to by the second.

“I, uh, yeah, I have an idea.”

“You committed at least two kinds of fraud, Dr. Wilson,” Cuddy announces. “That’s clear grounds for me to terminate your contract, effective immediately.”

Wilson feels the blood drop out of his head. His mouth hangs open. His ears are tense. He can’t seem to stop blinking. He has to say something.

“Does your anxiety have anything to do with what happened to Dr. House last weekend?”

The fact that she knows comes as a surprise. He supposes House admitted something during the exam. He’s grateful, it’s a kind of deliverance. He feels his upper body relax for the first time in days. “Yeah. That was a huge mistake.”

Cuddy looks like she’s been gutted. She coughs without covering her mouth. “Are we talking about the same thing?”

Wilson is completely lost. “House helped me out of a jam Friday night, things got a little out of control.”

“It was you?” She seems to have a hard time grasping what he thought was a simple statement. “You… you raped House? This can’t be happening.”

Rape? Where did she get that idea?

“It wasn’t like that! He never asked me to stop.” Wilson protests. “He didn’t say no.”

“Did you give him a chance?”

Wilson has no answer for that. House got into his bed, naked. He was so warm. House felt solid, like something to hang on to. He just wanted something to hang on to, he just wanted…

“I was drunk.”

Cuddy holds up one hand. “Stop right there. It’s bad enough that I know as much as I do.”

Wilson shuts his eyes tight and blows all the air out of his lungs. This might be the worst moment of his life. “Does this mean I’m fired?”

“I’ll put you on administrative leave,” she says. She’s looking at her desk. “Do you have any critical patients?”

“A couple, yeah.” Like the one he thought he was coming in here to discuss.

“Fine,” Cuddy says. “As soon as I can get somebody in to cover oncology, you go on leave. I will not let your phenomenal screw up jeopardize patient care.”

He nods. He gets it. This consideration is more than he deserves. Cuddy is writing now. He wonders if it’s the start of a memo for his file. He rises to go. He hesitates. “Is he, is House OK?”

Cuddy looks at him, and he can tell that she’s thinking about privacy, and hospital regulations, like any stranger couldn't see House's problems from a hundred feet away. He expects her to make a perfectly legitimate excuse and tell him she’s getting a restraining order.

“He’ll be fine,” she says, like she doesn’t believe it. Maybe Cuddy doesn’t, but Wilson has to.

He takes the long way back to his office. Cuddy’s accusations bounce around his head. She jumped to the wrong conclusion. Things just got out of hand, that’s all. He’s not proud of what he did. The memory of that night haunts him when he’s not taking the pills.

The hospital is quiet, its halls hung with tinsel garlands and crowded with plastic trees. Wilson feels none of the peace of the season. He reaches the pediatrics wing. He sees the pink and brown babies through the nursery window, those tiny, curious new people; it’s no use.

He does not remember the impulse that led him from wanting to touch his friend’s skin to wanting to tear it any way he could. He wanted a word, a sound to let him know he wasn’t alone, and that’s the one thing House didn’t surrender. Even ‘no’ would have been enough, he thinks, but he’s deluding himself. House could have said no, and Wilson would have called that a victory, but he would not have stopped.

That’s rape, isn’t it? That he did not set out to commit a crime makes no difference. He… he can’t get his head around the word. He bent House to his will, his desires.

He violated a man he once described as inviolable. No one else could get close enough. He, James Wilson, by all reports a really good guy, raped his best friend.

It’s about time for another Xanax. The pills will probably cost him his job, but right now, he can’t do without them.


House stops by his office late in the afternoon. Wilson grips the arms of his chair.

“Did you talk to Cuddy?” he asks.

"She talked to me," Wilson says, then he remembers about the patient.

“Liver function is impaired. That points to CMV,” House says. “So start him on gancyclovir right now, or we could wait for a biopsy if you prefer the extra strength certainty.”

Wilson relaxes, and in that moment, he feels like the previous week has disappeared. “I’ll order the anti-viral. Even if you’re wrong, it won’t kill him.”

“But I’m not wrong,” House protests.

“I know,” Wilson says. He hesitates. “Hey, do you want to get something to eat later?”

House appears to consider it for a bit. “Don’t think so, I’ve got a lot of cases. I’ll be here pretty late.” Wilson can’t read the look House shoots him. “Maybe some other time.”

Wilson nods. He watches House walk out of his office and feels pathetic, not so much because House turned him down, but because he asked.

Everything is closed as Wilson makes his way home. People are with their families, their loved ones. He feels like the runaway kid in that phone company ad that’s supposed to make people cry; only it’s worse, because there’s nobody to call. Who could possibly understand the terrible thing he did?

He stops at a downtown hotel because he knows the bar will be open. He hasn’t had a drink since that night. Alcohol is a depressant, but a couple of drinks will convince him that he’s at ease with himself.

He nurses bourbon on the rocks for a while. His head blurs a little and he can almost hear House cursing at the microfilm reader in the medical library on the day they met, so many years ago. He doesn’t notice the woman sitting down next to him at the bar until she addresses him directly.

“Looks like you’re missing somebody.”

She’s wearing a shiny green blouse. She isn’t particularly pretty, her face is a bit too pointy, but she has a nice body and she doesn’t seem to mind showing it off. He sees a bit of black lace under her neckline. He wonders if she’s a call girl.

“Maybe I am,” he says. He’s missing a lot of people. He finishes his drink in one swallow. “Maybe you are, too. Can I buy you a drink?”

She’s not actually a call girl. She’s a sales rep for a software company whose travel arrangements were screwed up, so she’s stuck in New Jersey until tomorrow afternoon. Her name is Bonnie, or something with a B.

Two drinks later, they’re in her room. Her shoes and skirt are on the floor, and she’s writhing underneath him, gasping and giggling as he works at the buttons of her blouse. She sits up to take off her bra.

Wilson reaches out to touch her now naked breasts, bouncing and squeezing them in his hands. She rolls her head back and forth as she tells him to keep going. He knows she’s turned on because her nipples are hard before he touches them. She squeals as he pinches one between two fingers.

She leans back, moves one hand in between her legs and pushes the fabric of her panties to the side.

Wow. He watches as she circles her fingers around the wet, pink folds of skin. He listens to her panting and moaning. He feels like he ought to be doing something, but he has never seen a woman masturbate before.

He leans down and starts sucking on one of her nipples. He likes the way it feels in his mouth.

“Bite,” she cries.

He closes his teeth around her flesh. She comes almost immediately.

He looks at her for a second. He’s not sure what to do.

She pushes him down, grabs at his zipper and… nothing. He ought to be hard as a rock after watching that.

She crouches beside him. She’s rubbing her hands up and down his torso. “Maybe this will bring you to life,” she says as she moves to take him into her mouth.

Nothing. No response, not even a twitch. “What’s your problem?”

He has no clue. There's a horny woman crawling all over him and he can't get it up.

“This… this has never happened to me before,” he says. He’s utterly humiliated.

“Right,” she says. She has enough sense to go into the bathroom while he puts himself back together.

The hotel’s elevator is lined with mirrors. Wilson imagines that his people, the ones who have left him, are staring at him from behind the glass.

House is not among them.

Part Six

Pairing: H/W Slash
Rating: R, mature audiences.
Warning: Still not suitable for children. Still very dark. Deals with sexual assault.
Summary: House goes through a period of apparent normalcy and decides to go back to work. Seeing Wilson is more difficult than he ever imagined.

Part One (By Pitza)
Part Two
Part Three

House wakes up from a dream. He touches his lips and wants to close his eyes and go back to the perfect kisses and the unseen figure that gave them, but sleep doesn’t work that way. You cycle out of a dream, and it’s done. Those kisses that felt so real just a moment earlier are lost in the journey of an electrical impulse from synapse to synapse.

His ex never gave kisses like these. She didn’t give kisses; she either took or accepted them, usually depending on some condition of feminine guile. He was always fuzzy on the details. He hasn’t seen her in nearly a year, so House is used to sleeping alone, and she was never interested in good morning kisses, anyway.

Back then, he would have looked across his bed and seen her sleeping way over on the other side. She would have been facing the window, not him. The idea that they shared a bed is ridiculous; Stacy was satisfied letting him keep to himself, and then she wasn’t. By the end of January, she was gone in body as well as spirit. Now he doesn’t think about her much, except when he does, like right now.

His eyes adjust to the darkness. He doesn’t want to stay in bed. It’s Monday: a new week, a fresh start. All told, it feels like any other day, which is more than he can say about yesterday. Staying in bed feels wrong, so he gets up.

The radio keeps him from thinking about anything. The station plays jingly noise that passes as music in between a man and a woman chatting about nothing in particular. There’s a new movie coming out that House doesn’t want to see, the malls are going to be packed, just two more shopping days before Christmas.

“It’s 5:50 in the aaayyy-emmmm. central New Jersey, time for your 101.5 morning news plus traffic and weather together!”

“Would you people shut up already?” House says. He knows the radio people aren’t listening, but he likes to tell them off.

He grabs his robe from the foot of his bed and shrugs into it. The floor is cold under his feet, but he can’t find his slippers. He touches his bad leg through his pajama bottoms, feeling the smooth, fibrous tissue that grew where the surgeon’s cuts healed, the scar that lays over what’s left of his right quadriceps. He tries not to think of the doctors as butchers. They did what they were told to do.

See, he’s been through the unthinkable before. He knows that if he tells himself often enough that he’s fine, he will be fine. None of it goes away, but House knows how to push the shit that happens to a dark, dusty corner of his head. It only hurts when—well, it always hurts, but he likes to think he deals with it.

He’s resigned to his lot, and that’s a good feeling, especially today. Mature, responsible, it’s so unlike him.

House fishes one blue and white capsule out of the bottle Wilson gave him last night. He studies it; peace offering, he guesses. Either that or one of them missed antibiotics on the list of yearly anniversary gifts somewhere between paper and wood.

House can’t stop the curious rush of affection that he feels in his cheeks as he pours a glass of water to drink with the pill. That particular effort of facial muscles is called a smile.

“Cheers,” he says. The whole thing is silly. The smile makes him feel like a fool.

It happened. He knows it happened. What he doesn’t know is how much has changed between himself and his… friend. He can’t think of Wilson as anything else, no matter how hard he tries. That doesn’t make any sense.

He hasn’t shaved in four days, so his face looks almost normal. He wants to go back to work. There’s simply nothing left to do in his apartment. He doesn’t want to think about the weekend any more, he just wants to get on with his life.

In the absence of a better idea, work will do. House chuckles as he realizes that technically, he’s running late.

He doesn’t see anybody he knows in the lobby, so he makes his way to the third floor without having to talk. So far, so good. The Infectious Diseases offices are mostly empty, which makes sense. They’re all out on rounds. House gets his mail from his box and sits at the conference table to wait for somebody to show up.

He tosses the expensive, shiny envelopes that are obviously from drug reps onto the floor without opening them, but he does read a card from his department chief. He’s in Switzerland with the World Health Organization until February, and he expects House to keep the department running. Ha.

Gorman has crossed out “Joyeux Noel” and scrawled “Happy Flu Season” as his greeting. House chuckles, and then a sweet, spicy odor from a steaming cup enters the room. That’s Patel with his horrible tea.

“I smell that nothing has changed around here,” House says as Patel sits. “What’s on the board?”

“House, didn’t know you were coming in today,” Patel says. “Staff meeting in ten, but there’s not really anything special. It’s Christmas, you know.”

“Disease takes a holiday? Sounds like a box office flop,” House says. He’s never really liked Patel, but liking the fellows is not part of his job description. Two other doctors drag in over the next few minutes.

“OK, since Tucker is out, looks like I get to run this meeting. Who wants a beer?” House says. He gets up, as if he’s looking for a drink. “Where is Tucker?”

“On call at General, he got pulled in on a VRE case this morning,” somebody says.

House rolls his eyes. “Ordinary VRE is not that difficult, any nurse who’s been paying attention should be able to treat it, unless it’s something weird, in which case he’s going to die anyway…” He stares out the window. It’s snowing, big heavy flakes, nothing like the tiny specks of ice that sparkled in the streetlights as he drove home from Trenton. They were gone by the time he pulled into Wilson’s drive.

“Dr. House?” House is safe. He’s at work. It’s Monday, and he has to run a staff meeting.

“What? I’m fine,” he says, more sharply than he wants. They’re all looking at him, and he hates them. He breathes in and out too fast. It’s possible that coming in to work is not the best idea he ever had, but he’s here, and he’s going to stay.

“You should sit down,” Patel says. He gets up and pulls out a chair. Somebody sets a cup of water on the table. House scowls, but he sits anyway. Even an idiot can be right every so often.

“OK, Robinson, what’s your caseload? Go.” He leans an elbow on the table and rests his head. He thinks his blood pressure is low. The doctors chatter back and forth for an hour, bugs and drugs. House is half listening, which is his privilege as the smartest person in the room.

He thinks about how much smarter he is than his colleagues, and how little that matters. Even he screws up, just not as a doctor. He thinks about how snow makes the whole world look pretty, unless you have to use a cane to walk.

“Patel, your drug allergy cancer guy, did you send a CMV test?” House asks.

“There’s a negative CMV on his chart,” Patel says. “I’m looking at bacteria first.”

“Sitting on your ass drinking tea does not meet my definition of ‘looking.’ If the cultures haven’t grown anything in 48 hours, it’s not going to happen. I can’t leave you people alone, can I?” House asks. “I want a new chest film, test his liver function, and he may need a lung biopsy.”

Patel gaped at him. “The guy doesn’t have pneumonia, House.”

“You mean he didn’t have pneumonia three days ago.” House gets up and grabs his cane. His legs are stiff, and his head aches. He reaches into his pocket for a Vicodin and tips it into his mouth. “Who knows what he has by now. I’ll take this one if it’s all the same to you.” He reaches out for the chart and heads up to Oncology.

He’s doing his job. He’s a doctor, he works in a hospital, and he’s doing his job. It’s good. Everything is going to be fine.


Wilson is standing with his face to the window, probably watching the snow, but he might be staring at nothing. He does that sometimes. His office is as still and silent as a graveside service. He hasn’t turned on the lights. House loiters in the doorway, as if he’s afraid to let his feet touch the carpet. He focuses on Wilson’s shoulders, they are impossibly square. His eyes let the gray winter sky, the vertical blinds, and the crisp lines of Wilson’s coat blur into a silvery white.

House just stands there, seeing Wilson and the whiteness all around him. When he dies, House will sink away on this vision. He doesn’t know what to do with that thought. He barely recalls why he came up here. Leaving is the best and easiest option for all concerned, himself and Wilson. The whole thing is their secret.

He’s torn. He can’t do it.

“How long are you planning on standing there?” Wilson asks. “What do you want?”

“Drug allergy guy,” House says finally. He sees Wilson’s face in the glass, his eyes have returned to the here and now. “Any respiratory symptoms?”

“You shouldn’t be here,” Wilson says. He turns around to face House. “I don’t know, ask his nurse.”

“You’re probably right,” House says. He walks to the nurse’s station, reviews the patient’s vital signs and orders a round of tests. He walks toward the elevator. He hears Wilson calling his name as he presses the button for his floor. He leans against the back wall and uses his cane to press a button to close the door.


Wilson catches up with him in the cafeteria. He looks contrite.

“I didn’t mean to blow you off like that,” Wilson says.

House wonders what exactly Wilson meant to do.

“You didn’t want to see me,” House answers. He wants to be comfortable here at the hospital; he needs to be able to concentrate. He needs to be able to go back to the way things were last week, but that’s not going to happen. “I didn’t want to see you, either.”

“So, Mr. Simons,” Wilson says. House doesn’t actually know drug allergy guy’s name, but he approves of Wilson’s neat skirting of their underlying issue, so he goes ahead as if he does.

“There’s very little chance that a bacterial infection is causing his fever at this point. CMV is nearly impossible to diagnose without a secondary condition like pneumonia, so I was hoping for something we could biopsy.”

“You want to put a him through a lung biopsy? Brown thought it was sinusitis before he left for his vacation.”

“The CMV test takes two weeks, ten days if we get lucky, but it’s Christmas. If we can’t bring his fever down, he’ll die.”

Wilson can’t argue with those basic truths. “We’re short on surgeons right now, but I’ll talk to Cuddy,” he says. He pauses significantly. “I’m surprised you’re back at work already.”

“Did you expect me to sit around my apartment and mope?”

“Worked well enough for you last time,” Wilson says. It’s a low blow.

“That was different,” House says. “I need to work, and I don’t want to talk about this. I just want to forget the whole thing.”

“Fine with me,” Wilson says. He sounds like he’s agreeing. He’s got to be faking; he never gives in this easily.

“Then don’t look at me like you’re about to cry.” House stands up too quickly. He still wants to put his weight on the right side first from a lifetime of walking with two strong legs. Pain shoots through his leg to his hip. He can’t bear his weight. He collapses and screams as he lands hard on the tile floor.

Wilson is right there, reaching.

“I don’t want you touching me,” House says. He feels like the leg is going to fall off. His head is spinning. “Get away from me!”

“Go ahead, House. Martyr yourself.” Wilson sounds like he’s very far away, and then he’s gone. Good.

House grabs the edge of the table and manages to hoist his body back into the chair.

He’s lying on an exam table waiting for Cuddy. Everything looks so neat and sterile from the patient’s position. The last time he did this, he was too messed up to examine his surroundings. It’s all tidy and organized, as if every person who walks through the door in a white coat is good at his job. How could a patient need anything that’s not already in this room?

A nurse comes in to check his blood pressure and temperature. Today must be his lucky day: he doesn’t know her. He does know that those lipstick pink scrubs do nothing for her complexion.

“Ninety over sixty-five,” she announces, clicking her tongue. “I’ll be back to start a line after Dr. Cuddy checks you out.”

“The hell you will!” House shouts after her. He sits up and wants to leave, but his head is still swirling. His ears are cold. It’s orthostatic hypotension, which can be a symptom of dehydration, most likely due to stress and the fact that he’s not exactly taking care of himself. It’s been two days since he had anything other than black coffee. Even he would treat his symptoms with IV fluids and a quick shot of dextrose.

Cuddy pushes into the room and brings noise with her. She’s wearing an eggplant colored tweedy suit under her lab coat; it’s awful.

“Do you want to tell me what happened, or do I have to guess?” she says with no small measure of contempt. That’s normal. House prefers her approach to the nicey-nicey bedside manner that so many doctors use.

“I fell down,” House says. He has no intention of elaborating. “Hell of a way to start your Monday.”

“Today is Tuesday,” she corrects. “What happened to your neck?” Cuddy never gives up; he has to give her that much credit.

“I got mugged.” House lies.

“By a vampire wannabe? Take off your shirt, I want to listen to your lungs.”

“I’m just light headed, OK?” The statement alone takes more effort than he wants to make.

“Take off your shirt, Dr. House, or I’ll put you in a gown.”

He hears a sharp intake of breath as she looks at his back. House understands why. He knows what’s there to see. She hasn’t touched him yet. He figures she won’t.

“Did you report this to the authorities?” she says after a moment. Her voice has changed from controlling to concerned, like she’s speaking to a victim. House hears her snapping on gloves and flinches. “I think this is infected, it’s red and a little puffy. You’re going to need antibiotics.”

“I’m taking cephalosporin, I’ll be fine.”

“Self prescribing? That’s healthy,” she says.

He could lie, and that would be easier. It wouldn’t be much of a lie, certainly not an important one. He looks around the room. The otoscope has never been more interesting.

“I’m going to call Dr. Wilson, I think you’d be more comfortable with somebody you trust,” Cuddy says. He’s a victim again.

“No!” House panics. She looks at him and gets a weird expression on her face. He was better off saying nothing.

“OK, OK, let's get you some fluids and I want to run a couple of blood tests.”

“What kind of tests,” House asks. He’s suspicious; he has every right to be.

“Blood count, chem panel,” she suggests. “And an STD panel.”

“Do it,” he says simply. He can’t win this battle, there’s no use in trying. He hurts too much.

Cuddy asks the most obvious question on her way out. Yes, his leg hurts. Of course his leg hurts. House rolls his eyes and scowls at her. “It’s making the sad, screaming red frowny face on the damned chart.”

“I’ll get you some morphine.”

Her one possible saving grace is that Cuddy always, always comes through.

He’s in his office now, feeling worlds better. Four of morphine IV might be enough to win the war on terrorism if administered to the right people at the right interval. House feels capable and carefree. He’s got Tucker on the speaker, listing symptoms.

“Your patient has VRE meningitis,” House says. “Transfer him over here, we have better lab people and more isolation rooms, not to mention that our ID department is, you know, staffed with doctors who have more than a year’s experience.”

Tucker has always reminded him of Charlie Brown’s teacher, all about the protocol, voice like a belching radiator.

“Yes, it’s your case, but if you leave him at General, you’re not here, and that makes it my problem!” House says. “I need you here, Dr. Tucker, where you actually work. Can you hold on a second?”

Cuddy is at his door. She’s looking at him as if he’s grown a third eye. He mutes the phone. “I’m trying to convince Tucker to transfer a critical patient from Princeton General so he can come back here to do his job.”

Cuddy picks up the handset and utters one sentence. “If the patient is stable enough to move, do it.” She turns back to House. “You should have told me about the Xanax.”

“So you’re here for a refresher course on psychopharmacology, I was wondering.”

“Idiot, you should have told me you’re taking it. How much?”

House looks at her blankly. He’s not taking Xanax, though it’s not a bad idea now that he thinks of it. Why does she think he is?

“Never mind,” she says before he can protest, which he would have. “If you’re ready to leave, I’ll drop you at home.”

He’s definitely not happy about that idea. Once again Cuddy cuts him off before he says anything.

“You’re not getting behind the wheel in your condition, so either you ride with me or I’d be happy to admit you for observation.”

Damn the woman and her so-called logic. Manipulation is more like it.

House calls Cuddy’s car a Big Rig, which doesn’t seem to annoy her as much as he was hoping. The snow made the streets a mess, and on the whole, he’s glad she twisted his arm into accepting the ride home. They don’t talk much on the way, just directions and a bit of idle chatter. House can’t stop himself, because he’s still a little bit high.

Cuddy has the radio tuned to one of those work-safe stations, which does not surprise House. A girl singer warbles on and on about how she lost something. You’ll know, you’ll know, you’ll know, she sings. House wants her to shut up, and she does! Miracle of miracles.

The car stops in front of House’s building. Cuddy’s hands are on her keys. House reaches for the door and is about to say good night when she interrupts him, which is getting old. She’s not coming inside, no way.

“You were sexually assaulted.” She states this as a fact. He stares at her. A small part of him wants to spill his guts, but it’s a very small part, and he won’t.

“I’m not going to discuss this with you, Dr. Cuddy.”

She hands him a sticky note with a phone number written on it. “Don’t worry, that’s not my home number, it’s the Rape Crisis Hotline. They have people trained to deal with…”

“Thanks for the lift,” House says as he pushes the door open and lets himself slide out into the snowy street: cane, right foot, left foot, again, and again, and again until he gets up the walk and the steps to his door. His right shoulder takes most of the impact of his strides. The other one has the bite.

She is still waiting when he reaches his door. He turns around and waves Cuddy away by shaking his cane in the air. House notices that she stays until she sees him unlock the door before she drives away.

He stares out a window at the black night. He takes the note from his pocket: yellow paper, black ink, lint sticking to the adhesive. It’s a local number, but Cuddy is wrong. That’s nor what happened.

He looks around for his cigarettes.


Part Five

Pairing H/W Slash
Rating: R for this chapter, for intensity
Warnings: Still not suitable for children. Alludes to a sexual assault, but no direct description. WIP.
Summary: Wilson tries to remember that fateful night with House, but he finds that forgetting would have been easier. Part three of an ongoing series. This will not make any sense if you have not read at least the second part.

Part Two

Wilson opens his eyes automatically, but getting them to focus takes more time and effort. Relentless sunlight seems to have set fire to the edges of everything in his bedroom. The brightness causes him physical pain. He rolls away from it and realizes two things: one, he’s naked; two, his head is about to implode. As he sits up, he thinks that he may still be a little drunk.

He puts his feet on the floor, feels the carpet underneath his feet. He hates the sensation of the fibers crushing under his weight as he stands. His hands pick at the film covering his skin, an unpleasant layer of slimy, sticky grime. He’s choked off from everything but the sunshine.

“Helll-oo?” he calls out, but no one answers. He’s alone, just like yesterday morning, just like every morning. The act of speaking tells him only that his tongue is thick and pasty, and that his throat hurts. Wilson is hung over. He hasn’t been so drunk that he felt it the next morning since his undergrad days, maybe fifteen years and two marriages ago. God, he feels old. He’s too young to say “fifteen years ago” and come up with things that happened when he thought of himself as a grown up.

He looks around the room. His keys, wallet, pager and phone are not in their usual spot on the nightstand, they sit in a pile on the dresser. That’s fine. He doesn’t remember much from last night, and right now, he doesn’t care to remember any more.

He examines his face in the mirror. His lower lip is red, as if he bit it at some point. He’s pale, and the shadows under his eyes are heavy. His hair needs to be washed, and his breath is foul.

Half an hour later, he’s clean and dressed, and if he’s not exactly raring to go, he knows he needs coffee. At least that’s a start.

He walks downstairs, slowly, trying not to hurt his head any more. He opens the front door and reaches into his pocket for sunglasses, because it’s far too bright for this time of year.

He turns toward the driveway, but it’s empty. His car is gone.

“Damn it!” He goes back inside and calls the police. Two officers arrive to take his statement, which consists of a description of the car, the tag number, and the last time he drove it, to the best of his recollection. His hospital ID helps him convince the officers to give him a ride downtown. He says he wants to arrange for a rental, but he knows he’s going to get coffee first.


“Rough night?” The girl at the cash register is talking to him. She’s there every morning. She must work the early shift. She smiles. A large clock on the wall tells him that morning is over. Wilson is not totally sure whether today is Saturday or Sunday.

“I, uh, maybe,” he says. He shrugs, and the girl looks sympathetic. He takes his triple espresso topped off with coffee and fills the cup to the top with cream. It’s good, better than good. He begins to feel human.

He grabs an abandoned sports section from an empty table and reads about the upcoming football playoffs. The coffee is great. He can’t make it like this at home. Honestly, he can’t make coffee at all. Sometimes he thinks that’s why he keeps getting married. How could he live without coffee?

His phone rings. He expects to hear House on the other end, but he doesn’t recognize the number. Wilson is disappointed.

On the other hand, the police have located his car in a parking lot in Trenton. There are no signs that it was ever stolen. Wilson jots the address on a napkin, thanks the officer, and hangs up.

He takes another sip. The coffee has cooled, and he realizes that he added too much cream. It’s heavy and greasy on his tongue. He considers calling House for a ride, after all, House owes him, but he decides he will be happier in the long run if House never finds out about this particular escapade, so he calls a cab instead.

When he gets to Trenton, Wilson hands the driver a hundred and tells him to keep the change. The guy has shockingly white teeth, and his smile shows every one of them. Wilson gets out of the cab. There’s his car. Seeing it, he begins to remember. He parked it here, in this very spot, about eight the night before. He went into a bar, and he drank a lot: double bourbons with beer chasers, and keep ‘em coming.

He was down, and he didn’t want to risk running into anybody he might know. He just wanted to drink, maybe find a willing somebody to drag home with him, no strings, one night only. The bar is right across the street. The place looks closed right now, but last night it was jumping.

Jesus. He hopes he paid his tab. He’s pretty sure he went home alone, despite his best efforts.

He gets in his car and starts the engine. It makes a perfect, smooth, beautiful sound. He turns right and begins the drive home.

He crosses a bridge, and a scene plays out his head.

He was in House’s car; House was driving. It was late, and he was drunk. House pushed him away. “C’mon, honey…” he said. The endearment caught Wilson’s fancy, and filled him with a strange sort of warmth. Wilson pulled House’s right hand from the steering wheel and played with the fingers, like a favorite toy.

The memory is strong, indelible. He is not the sort of man who is given to fantasy. He can’t remember the incident happening at any time during the past. Process of elimination says that it must have happened last night.

House found him in Trenton. House drove him home. He wonders if House remembers.

Wilson’s head hurts again.

He parks and gets out. The sound of the car door closing triggers another flash.

House was trying to get him out of the car, but he had trouble cooperating.

“My legs don’t want to work,” he said.

“Yeah, I feel your pain,” House said.

Wilson got his feet under him, stood up, lurched forward almost immediately. House caught him, somehow. They were upright, and Wilson tilted his head back to see House’s face. He wanted to confess. He wanted to tell House about the urges, the longing, but he was too distracted by the reality of House’s arm around his ribcage, holding him. He tried to rise up on his toes, to get close enough for a kiss, but he fell onto the grass.

“Get up, Jimmy,” House said. He looked angry and disappointed, which made two of them.

His shoes, the ones he wore yesterday, a pair of black loafers that his second former wife picked out, sit next to the stairs. The leather is wrecked, all scratched up. His suit is draped neatly over the back of a chair in the bedroom. The pants are stained with grass and dirt, and the jacket stinks.

Covers and pillows from the bed are scattered on the floor.

The sheets and some of the pillows are stained with blood. It looks like a crime scene from a TV movie.

He knows what happened. He had sex with his best friend in the world. It’s over. It’s done. He had sex with a man he’s wanted for at least three years, longer, if he’s being honest with himself. Apparently it didn’t go well. He had angry, unsatisfying sex with his best friend. House was barely there. He didn’t move, didn’t make a sound. The act itself was completely one-sided.

But what about the blood? Wilson checks himself again: no scalp wounds, no deep cuts, no abrasions. There’s nothing he can feel or see except a bruise on his knee. What the hell?

That’s House’s blood. House bled all over his sheets and his pillows.

No. No. God, no.

He leaves the bedroom quickly, slamming the door behind him, as if the room itself contains the memory of what happened there.

He sits in the dark for several hours, forcing himself not to think, and then the phone rings. It’s House. He knows that, even before he looks. He lets it ring. Of all people, House knows he’s home, or he would have called the cell.

“Yeah?” he answers. He sounds defensive, even to his own ears.

House sounds crisp and bitter, but strangely calm at first. He’s direct, as he always is. He’s asking about viruses, transmission. They didn’t talk about it last night, as far as Wilson knows, though they should have. That’s what you do, but they know each other.

Wilson is annoyed. There’s no danger. Why is House bringing this up? Wilson doesn’t want to talk about it, it’s not fair, and he says so.

They talk as if they’re having a normal conversation. It’s eerie. House’s calmness frightens Wilson more than he can say.

House stops talking, and that’s when Wilson starts to listen. There’s more than just breathing, a puff and a soft pop. He has never seen House with a cigarette, but somehow he knows that House is a former smoker. He hears the whoosh as House exhales.

He can almost feel the rush of nicotine in his own head. He listens. He asks. He listens, there’s a click. Wilson is glad to be alone again.

He didn’t ask last night. He let his hidden wounds rule his judgment. They were screaming to be shown. House just slipped into bed next to him, all the more tempting in his stillness.

House put himself within reach.

There’s no such thing as implied consent, not in the practice of medicine, and not in sex. Wilson knows that. He knows that.

He sleeps on the couch that night.

~~

Because it’s the holiday season, and because Hanukkah is over, not that he’s particularly observant these days, Wilson has a lot of hours scheduled for the end of December. All things considered, he’s glad to have something to do. Holidays are always a hard time on the oncology ward. Patients seem to feel their disease more when they ought to be home with friends and family. Loneliness and despair, the darkest days of winter, Wilson’s personal hubris does not extend to thinking he knows how they feel, not even now.

One of Brown’s patients has an infection that’s not responding to treatment. His chart lists allergies to sulfa drugs and penicillin. The patient finished a round of chemo last week. Wilson knows that he ought to page Infectious Diseases. He might be able to handle this on his own, but the man is not his patient. Protocol says that he should get a consult.

He walks to the nurses’ station. Nancy, the charge nurse, is sitting at her desk.

“I need an ID consult for 640, Mr. Simons,” Wilson says. “Who’s on call?”

Nancy checks the list. “Says Dr. House, do you want me to page him?”

Wilson mashes a hand against his face. He has to be professional about this. He and House have to work together, though he was hoping to deal with that hurdle some time in the distant future rather than today. The only reason Nancy asks is that she knows Wilson and House are friends. She probably expects him to say that he’ll find House himself.

“Yeah, I’ll leave the chart here,” he says as he walks away. “I’ll be in my office.”

Wilson works on charts until he hears a knock at the door. It startles him; House never knocks.

“I got your page,” Dr. Patel says. “What’s up?” Patel is a dark skinned, youngish guy. The nurses are fond of swooning over his thick, shiny hair and his easy smile.

Wilson stares at him. He hopes that he does not look relieved, but Patel wouldn’t know even if he did, so he lets himself relax a little. “I though House was on call today.”

“Apparently House got into some kind of trouble last night.” Patel says. “Cuddy asked me to cover for him, and I can’t…” Wilson doesn’t hear the rest over the white noise of panic and the sound of his own heartbeat. Patel grins, and looks at Wilson as if he’s supposed to agree with whatever it is he said.

Wilson can’t focus. He has to know what House told Cuddy. Does she know? Does everybody know? He starts to sweat as he wonders if House called the police. Maybe they’re on their way right now. House wouldn’t do that, though, but he did call somebody.

“Dr. Wilson?” Patel asks.

Does Patel know? Is that why he’s wearing that patronizing smirk?


“You’re hyperventilating,” Patel tells him. “If you’re sick, you shouldn’t be around immunocompromised patients, you know.”

“I’m fine, just, uh, I’m sorry. Did you pick up Mr. Simons chart?” Wilson gestures at a pile of papers on his desk. “I was in the middle of something.” He is lying. He’s about ready to jump out of his skin. He’s done something awful, and everybody knows that he is the trouble House got into last night.

Patel has the chart; he had it the whole time. “I’m going to repeat blood and urine cultures on Mr. Simons,” he says. “Let’s make absolutely sure what the bug is before we put him through anything else. I’ll take it from here.”

“Get those cultures stat. Nancy will help you if the lab can’t get anybody down here,” Wilson says. “I don’t want him to go septic because somebody fell down on the job.”

Patel nods. “I said I’ve got it.”

Wilson goes to the pharmacy to get antibiotics and Xanax. He lies to the pharmacist, saying that both prescriptions are for House, but the Xanax is for him. He’s too keyed up to scrounge around the hospital, and he doesn’t want anybody to know he needs it.

He has told so many lies in the last couple of hours. He believes in hell now.

~~

The drug helps, and he’s calmer now.

He wants to know what he managed to say last night, or the night before, whenever it happened. Plenty of words in his head, putting them together was the problem, so he tried to get his point across without them. Usually, that worked for him. He and House had been able to read each other for a long time. Part of him knew— knows—that if he said, I want you, House would not have stayed with him.

And if he said you owe me, House would have laughed. House always takes, dipping from a well that will never run dry. When House gives, he does so on an imperative that he alone understands. If Wilson said I need you to stay, if he had confessed that much, House would have stayed. One honest word might have changed what happened.

Wilson feels like his old self for a while, cool and rational. He wanted to hurt House for a thousand selfish reasons. He wanted to lash out, and he did. This time, Wilson did the taking. Now he has to make up for that.

He does not have a plan, except to deliver the pills that House is too stubborn to get on his own. The man will not ask for help. Wilson is genuinely sorry about the biting. He was out of his mind. He takes the steps to House’s door one at a time. He knows the buzzer doesn’t work. He has a key, but using it is out of the question.

He knows what he’s going to do now.

~~

Wilson met House almost five years ago. Sometimes, he thinks he knows every facet of the man, his best and his worst, but tonight, standing on House’s steps, he offered House freedom from the shadow of what happened between them, freedom from every step that brought them to that place.

Their eyes met, no longer than an instant, and Wilson was surprised to see something completely new.

Lurking among sorrow and suspicion, Wilson saw grace in House’s eyes, grace and patience. These things frighten him more than the anger and hatred he expected.

He held out his hand. All House had to do was reach out and take back the key to his front door. It would have been an easy out for both of them.

He sits in his car, in his driveway, for several minutes. Home cannot serve as a refuge when it’s the scene of the crime. He goes inside because he’s out of options. He gets a couple of black garbage bags from the kitchen and walks upstairs.

The air in the bedroom is heavy and stale. Moonlight comes in through a window; its brightness helps him see well enough to do what he must. Wilson begins with the suit he wore. The plastic rustles as he stuffs it into one of the bags. He removes the sheets from his bed. He stoops to the floor to gather up pillows and blankets, disposing of all the evidence. He knots the tops of the bags and carries them outside. He hoists them over the back fence. Out of sight, out of mind.

He takes another Xanax and stretches out on the couch. He drifts, wherever his mind goes, House is there.

If he ever thought he understood what he felt, the near obsession that he once called love, he knows now that he was lying to himself. By extension, he was lying to House, even though he never said a word.

But there was something, and that something was true. It may be the only truth Wilson has ever known. “If I didn’t love you then, I love you now because you’re better than I am,” he says bitterly, as if he’s willing House to hear him across the distance.

He sinks into a dark place that feels almost like sleep, even though he knows it’s not.

Part Four

---

Note: I changed one significant detail, which may be obvious. If it is, I meant to do that. Thanks to Pitza and Bibliosylph for their advice on this part.

Pairing: House/Wilson slash
Rating: Not suitable for children. MA, Adult, NC-17.
Warning: Describes a sexual assault in detail.
Summary: House struggles to get himself together after things go horribly wrong with a drunk Wilson. Follow up to Pitza’s Knots: Of Nuptials. Set in late 2001.

House leaves Wilson’s place before dawn. Time doesn’t matter; pain doesn’t matter. He can’t be there when Wilson gets up.

Besides, he wants a smoke so badly that he’d cut off his leg to get one. It’s been about ten years since he had a cigarette. That doesn’t matter, either. He pulls into the Open All Nite mini mart and asks the yahoo behind the counter for a pack of Camel straights and some matches.

The yahoo adds a bottle of water to his total. “Look like you need this, buddy,” he says. “You look like shit.”

He wants to tell the yahoo to go fuck himself, but he doesn’t care enough to do even that much. He pays, and leaves. He has to drag his right leg.

“You need some help?” the clerk calls after him.

Now he cares. “Fuck off,” he spits as he pushes the glass door open with his shoulder. His head aches. The Vicodin is at his apartment.

Outside, the sky is still dark. He leans against his car, panting with the effort he made to get there. He twists the cap off the bottle and drinks. The water feels as cold as the night air and tastes weirdly sweet in and around his mouth. He guzzles, then tosses the flimsy bottle across the parking lot before getting back in his car.

Every part of him hurts, he thinks it’s all coming from his leg until he realizes that his ass hurts, and remembers why. He’s numb, and he can’t think in clinical terms. The fact is that Wilson fucked his ass so hard that he thought he’d pass out. The fact is that he let it happen. He didn’t say no. He didn’t. That’s that.

He taps the cigarette pack against the steering wheel, pulls and tears the plastic wrapper, and finally gets to a point where he can light up.

He lets the match burn his fingers; that hurts, and he likes it. He draws smoke deep into his lungs, and that too, that hurts. He likes it. The nicotine releases a bunch of crap into bloodstream. His jaw burns, his mouth is slack. His head clouds and clears far too rapidly. He pulls over, opens the door, leans his head out; he vomits stomach acid and about half a liter of water.

Simple enough solution, he thinks, HCl plus H2O. It almost doesn’t burn. House can do the math. A little bit more water and it would have been neutral.

~~

Back home now, he takes two pills, because fuck it, he needs them.

He waits for Wilson to call, but the phone doesn’t ring. Coward. The morning sky goes from pale gray-white to fresh, pretty blue, and he’s still on the couch, wearing the same clothes. He reeks of the night before: smoke, sex, and that terrible bar.

House is not angry, which is the weirdest part. His brain seems to be stuck in overdrive as he reconsiders every decision he ever made in the space of two minutes. Maybe if I had. Maybe if I hadn’t. He warms up a cup of yesterday’s coffee; he tastes, and adds milk, which doesn’t really help. Dregs are dregs are dregs. He gives up and leaves the cup on the counter.

Thinking about last night does not occur to him until he sits down. He turns his head to look at the ceiling. He feels too tall for his chair. The muscles in his face gradually unclench, and he feels his skin sliding away. Sleep falls over him, unwanted.

Seeing the evidence on his body brings reality home to roost. Last night wasn’t a dream. The bruises are ugly and speak of the violence Wilson used to make them. If he had been able to give what Wilson took from him, House might see them differently. Right now, the dark spots shaped like Wilson’s mouth and fingers make him sick. The long pink abrasions bind him, not to the man who made them, but to the moment things went wrong.

House can’t pinpoint it, exactly.

He retches again.

He was concerned after getting a phantom call from Wilson’s mobile phone. No words, just the clamor of a bar in the background.

“What?” House said. “Wilson, what the fuck? Where are you? Hey!” The line stayed open for about a minute, and then went dead.

It could have been worse. Wilson could have accidentally called his ex wife, House thought. A quick call to a guy in the sheriff’s department he hasn’t pissed off and some crap story about needing to get hold of Wilson about a patient had the desired effect.

The phone company pinpointed the location of the repeater that made the connection. The call was placed from a not-great part of Trenton. Hell. He hoped Wilson had enough sense to stay put

Wilson was pretty easy to spot when House got there. He was sitting on the curb. Pale green light from a flashing sign and three too many drinks lent him an otherworldly look. He was dragging his outrageously expensive shoes on the street. The leather would be ruined.

“What’s a nice girl like you doing in a dump like this?” House asked. He had never seen Wilson so far gone, almost completely liquid. His gut told him to get Wilson to the nearest emergency room, but it was late, and Wilson was a healthy guy. There was no reason to think he wouldn’t just sleep this off and wake up with a headache the size of Texas and swear that he would never drink again.

In the car, Wilson leaned over clumsily and attached his mouth to House’s neck, which would be a distraction under the best circumstances. It seemed like Wilson thought of this as a kiss from the way he was moaning. In that moment, trying to drive with a drunk guy sucking and biting his neck was the worst thing House could imagine. Wilson’s shoulder bumped the steering wheel. The car swerved, and House fought to regain control.

“Settle down, honey, you need to let me drive,” House said, trying to mask his frustration.

Wilson was babbling. Death wish, maybe. That would explain a lot. House was grateful for the late hour, there was almost no traffic. Wilson’s hands were all over him, and he was not sure what he thought of that. Weird, definitely. He had never been opposed to weird before, but weird had never threatened to wrap his car around a tree, either. Gradually, Wilson shifted back into his own seat, placated with House’s right arm. Trying to concentrate on the road with Wilson nibbling at his fingers was much safer than having Wilson sitting in his lap, House rationalized.

He makes it through a shower without vomiting again. He’s glad to be clean, but the last day is catching up too fast. His boss is on vacation, and he’s supposed to be on 24-hour call tomorrow. The purpled bite mark on his jaw, the scratches on his neck make going to work impossible. What would he say, overly enthusiastic hooker? Cuddy would roll her eyes; patients would scream and faint in the lobby.

That might not be so bad, actually, but Infectious Diseases is under a lot of pressure since bioterrorism became a buzzword a couple of months ago, what with anthrax and smallpox all over the news. Laying low might be a better choice.

He dials Cuddy’s office number. She’ll be there. She’s the only person in administration who isn’t a nine-to-fiver.

“Dr. Cuddy, it’s Greg House,” he says. “I need you to get somebody to cover for me for the next couple of days.”

“That’s going to be difficult, Dr. House.” She thinks he’s playing around, which doesn’t surprise him. “Do you know how hard it is to run a hospital at this time of year?”

“Mmmmmm, no. That’s why you’re the high-priced executive and I’m the wage slave calling to beg you for time off.”

“Unless you’re contagious, you’re can suck it up, like the rest of us,” she tells him. “If nobody needs you, you’re off the hook and I might be willing to forget this conversation ever happened. Deal?”

“I can’t,” he says. He wants to make her understand without getting into specifics. “Something… happened. I need some time.” He pauses and affects a lighter tone. “Get Patel. Anybody who needs an ID consult this close to Christmas should appreciate his matinee idol hair. Do you think it’s a rug?”

“Dr. House,” Cuddy says with a sigh of defeat. “Take care of yourself.”

House takes another cigarette from the pack and lights it. Stupid. He has to make one more call before he can try to sleep. He’s going to sleep, but he has to keep it together for a few more minutes. He can do that.

The phone on the other end rings six times. House considers bailing, putting this off until tomorrow, or next month, or never, but he has to do the responsible thing this one time.

“Yeah?” Wilson answers.

“I need to know if you have any weird diseases I could have picked up after last night,” House says flatly. “I didn’t hear the telltale crinkle of a wrapper, and I don’t know where else your dick has been.”

“That’s not fair!” Wilson says.

“Let’s not get into fairness, I need to know.”

“Uh, there was no transfer of bodily fluids,” Wilson sounds sick and shameful.

“That you didn’t get off has little bearing on my health. For starters, you bit me.”

“Oh.” Wilson exhales. “You should see somebody about that.”

“Like a doctor? Forget it.”

“As far as I know, there’s nothing to worry about. What about you?”

“You know me. I’m ninety-nine and three quarters percent pure.” At least I was, House thinks. He’s not so sure any more.

There’s a tense silence. They can hear each other breathing. House smacks his lips around his cigarette as he inhales.

“Are you smoking?”

“Yeah.”

“Thought you quit.”

“So did I.”

There’s nothing else to say. House leaves Wilson to listen to the click that ends the call. He leaves his cigarette burning on a saucer, because he doesn’t have a proper ashtray.


~~

Day two breaks open, just like day one. It’s far too bright for winter, pale, but blinding. The leg isn’t so bad after a decent night’s sleep and more narcotics. He considers going to the mall to walk around, just to get some exercise, but that’s a bad idea. If the snot-nosed kids don’t get to him, the Salvation Army martyr squad will and he’ll be grumpy. Grumpier, that is.

House likes idling, but he prefers to idle while he has something that somebody else wants him to do: mission critical, job one, our highest priority. Only then is wasting time truly satisfying. Now he’s got plenty of time and he has no idea what to do with it. He remembers what life was like last year, when he couldn’t walk on his own. Life used to be so much simpler.

He fills the day with the mundane. He does laundry because it’s mindless enough that he doesn’t have to concentrate, but it requires enough presence of mind that he won’t get lost.

He makes lunch; he eats. He watches Oprah talk to Martha Stewart about holidays, which has got to be some kind of nexus of everything the American woman lives for. He drinks a lot of water. It’s not as good as the water that horrible little turd behind that counter forced on him. At that moment, the day is blown and he feels nausea rising in waves from his gut to his head. He breathes deeply until it subsides.

The irony of it all is that the one person he could talk to, the one person he trusts that completely, is Wilson. It’s absurd, black comedy.

House laughs so hard that he slips off of his chair, and then he lies on the floor until the sun goes down.

~~

He’s awake, flat on his back, in bed now. He’s fully dressed in layers of clothing. He’s can’t bear to take them off. His mind is as clear as it’s been in what seems like forever, until his body starts thinking on its own.

His skin remembers Wilson’s whole body pressing into his side, an arm carelessly moving over his torso, one hand, then the other, touching his belly; at first, the sensations hop back and forth over the line between right and wrong. Wilson makes no attempt to be gentle, but it’s not too bad. Then the hands are grabbing, pushing House over onto his stomach, slamming him against the mattress and pillows. The hands are hurting him.

His back and his lungs feel like it’s happening now, as if his central nervous system has gone back there, back in time, and there’s not a damned thing he can do about it. His legs are splayed out, both useless. Wilson has him pinned at the shoulders. House feels his arms flail. Wilson catches him, stops him.

Wilson falls forward, chest heaving against House’s back. Hot breath on his shoulder, and a wet, unsteady tongue gives way to teeth. Wilson’s whole body vibrates with his groan. House feels it pass into his own shudder. The teeth nip at his skin, then bite, then tear.

He feels Wilson’s erection drag against his thighs, hot and dry, tugging at his barely damp skin. Wilson fumbles, tightens his legs; falls again. His sternum bangs House’s spine. He jostles House’s hips, shoving something underneath him.

House feels something cold and wet drip on his back. It’s like an acid, burning through muscle and tendon. He bites the insides of his cheeks to keep from screaming.

Fingers dig into him. The sphincter resists, but not for long. He feels it stretch and rip. Intense pain follows House’s spine all the way to his neck, over his shoulders, down his arms to his hands. His fingertips throb as Wilson jams his dick in and out, in and out; in and out and in… and House is as hard as he’s ever been.

The clock on the wall says 8:15. He remembers: for an instant, he wanted to beg Wilson to kill him instead.

He turns on the TV and cranks the volume as high as it will go. Fuck the neighbors.

The clock on the wall says 11:30. He takes two more Vicodin. Fuck you, too, James Wilson, M.D.

He throws the bottle at the wall. It falls to the floor with a dull clatter.

He looks for the Yellow Pages. He turns off the TV. He thinks about all those people who died in the Twin Towers. Some of them jumped. He thinks he would have waited to burn to death. He knows whom he would have called, if he’d been up there on that day. He knows what he would have said. He holds the phone in his hand for a while. His hands start to sweat.

Shit happens, every day.

There’s a sound, and House jumps. He drops the phone. He grabs his cane. It wouldn’t be the best weapon, but it would be something. A knock. Maybe one of the neighbors called a cop. He freezes.

He walks to the door and looks. It’s not a cop. The last person he wants to see is on his doorstep, holding a small, white paper bag.

He opens the door, but does not step aside to let Wilson enter.

“I brought you an antibiotic, cephalosporin, it’s…”

“I know what cephalosporin is. Why are you really here?” House looks at Wilson’s jacket. It’s dark blue, casual, probably lined with an overpriced polymer. It’s not the one he wears to work. Wilson offers him the bag. He accepts it without acknowledgement.

Wilson looks down at his shoes and reaches into his pocket. He pulls out his keys. House thinks he’s leaving, but he doesn’t go. He fumbles with the ring for a second. He removes his gloves and House’s heart starts to pound.

Wilson slips a key off the ring and holds it out to House in his palm. “This is yours. Take it.”

House studies Wilson’s face; it’s pretty much the same as his own. Confused, sad, and stubborn.

“Keep it,” he says quietly.

“OK…” Wilson says. He steps back. “One of those pills BID for two weeks.”

“I know,” House says.

Wilson walks away. He turns back when he gets to the curb. House stands in the doorway, watching him. He pulls his gloves on and half raises his arms in a shrug.

House shakes his head, but he half smiles in return. He needs time, but he’s got time. He needs to figure this out.

Part Three

---

Notes:. I would never have written this of my own volition, but I could not resist the temptation to write House going through this hell. I researched the medical and psychological stuff, and interviewed a couple of friends who are rape survivors for some key points.

Author: ExtraBitter
Pairing: House/Wilson friendship with vaguely slashy innuendo
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Slight spoilers for 2x01, “Acceptance,” but nothing major.
Summary: House, Wilson, booze and conversation. They finish the bottle, and each other’s sentences. A little endcap for “Acceptance.”

Notes: Nothing of substance to see here, just angst-free banter. Roughly 700 words.

Wilson appeared in House’s office after the chaos subsided from Clarence’s return to prison. A bottle sat on the desk, nowhere near full, but not quite empty.

“Three sheets to the wind again?” he asked.

“Just one,” House said. “Give me time.” House drank. “Did you want something?”

“If you offered me a drink, I wouldn’t say no,” Wilson said as he went into the conference room to grab House’s red mug. “It’s a good idea, the golden rule.”

“Uh… love thy neighbor?”

“That one works, too,” Wilson said, smiling directly at his friend. “I was thinking more along the lines of ‘never drink alone.’”

“Judaism has many strange and wonderful facets,” House said slyly.

Wilson emptied the bottle into his cup and settled into House’s comfortable chair. “How come you never have any ice? Every floor of this building has an ice machine.”

“No girly drinks for me,” House said. “I drink like a man.”

“Since when is ice girly? ” Wilson asked, sniffing at the contents of his cup. "Since when do men drink paint thinner?"

“That,” House said as Wilson wrinkled his nose. “Is high-test rum, eighty-five percent ethanol, the breakfast of champions. You’re a real lightweight.” House used his good leg and his cane to wheel his chair around the desk. He stopped next to Wilson and lifted his legs onto the stool with a bit of difficulty.

“I’ll have you know that I’m a hundred eighty five pounds of solid…” Wilson wanted to drink for emphasis, but his eyes began to water, and he choked a little. “OK, I’m a really cheap date.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.” House reached over and playfully punched his friend. “Your pal Stacy played us both,” he said semi-seriously.

Wilson lifted his cup and drank again; it went down easier this time. He understood that House would explain if he wanted to. If not, they would be quiet for a while. He propped one of his legs next to House’s, and he waited.

“I assume she told you about the encounter we had in the hall yesterday morning,” House said. “That whole business about trust…”

“…In which you told her you couldn’t be trusted, which was stupid, but...”

“…I asked if I could trust her, and she bamboozled me.”

“She works for the hospital, she was doing her job.”

“Which interfered with me doing my job!” House said. “You know, that life saving thing?”

“And that’s what led to you sitting in your office, bamboozling yourself,” Wilson said.

“Very funny, but no,” House said, swallowing the rest of his rum. “She’s got you convinced that I want her back, and I don’t.”

Wilson turned to look at House, very curious.

“I treated her husband. I saved him; it’s done. I wish she’d go home, or at least stay the hell out of my way,” House said.

Wilson rolled his eyes and took another drink. “You don’t really expect me to believe that.”

“I don’t do follow up,” House said. “I wish I could change the past, I’m human…” He noticed that Wilson was still looking at him. “What?”

“Nothing, it’s just weird to hear you admit it.”

They sat quietly for a time. Wilson swallowed the rest of his drink and set his cup on the floor. The ceramic absorbed the impact of the hard floor with a dull thud.

“I don’t want her back,” House said. “I can’t trust her.”

“Trust is important,” Wilson said.

“I don’t want her back.” House glanced to the side. His companion was slouched down in the chair, head rolled over to one side, eyes closed, arms dangling. Wilson seemed very relaxed. “I can’t change the past."

House let his arm drape over the side of his chair as he, too, leaned all the way back. His knuckles bumped against Wilson’s hand.

“I believe you,” Wilson said.

“We’re all out of booze,” House said. “So I can’t offer you another drink.”

“That’s fine,” Wilson said, yawning. “That’s not why I stopped by.”

House looked at him with one eyebrow raised. “Why did you?”

“Don’t remember,” Wilson admitted.

“Cool how that worked out, huh?” House said.

Wilson simply smiled. "I'm getting you an ice bucket for your next birthday."

Title: Buttons
Pairing: House/Wilson
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Much less angst than you've come to expect from me.
Summary: Saturday morning at House's, Wilson should really be getting home.
Notes: I was just so excited about getting a sketch to a good stopping place at exactly 500 words that I couldn't not post it. This began as a sketch for a longer, lighter piece that I've been thinking about, but went someplace else entirely. Still trying to get these guys written out of my system.


“You made me sleep late, House,” Wilson said, reaching over House’s body to examine the bedside clock. The alarm button was set to off.

“I’m not the one who kept you up explaining how the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the First World War caused the modern conflict in the Middle East.” House stretched his arms out; his elbows cracked. “Oh, wait, that was me. God, I need a shower after all that talk of sand dunes.”

“Indirectly caused, and only in part,” Wilson said as House limped toward the bathroom. “I’ll make coffee, then I have to get home. She’s already going to kill me.”

House turned and grinned. “She was going to kill you last night, too,” he said. “Yet here you are.”

“Shut up. I hate you.” Wilson grumbled as he grabbed his wrinkled pants from the spot where they had landed the night before. He shook them out as best he could and pulled them over his legs.

“I hate you, too.” House’s response was muffled by a rush of running water and a half closed door.


Four weeks had passed since they went from being friends to being lovers; taking leave was still the hardest part for Wilson. House looked up from the Annals of Internal Medicine and took another sip of coffee.

Wilson liked to pretend that this was his only life. He finished washing the dishes, brought in the paper, and took House’s trash to the curb. House wasn’t buying it.

“What can I do to make you leave already?” House asked. “I can do my own damned chores.”

“We’re almost out of milk,” Wilson said. He smiled, to make light of the slip, but he knew he was too close to uncharted territory.

“Here’s a novel idea, I’ll go to the market,” House said. “Seriously, I managed not to starve to death before we started sleeping together.” He got up and walked toward the door, gesturing with his head. “Get out, OK?”

Wilson knew he was right. He’d stalled too long. He stopped long enough to kiss House lightly on the lips. “You are truly annoying.”

“Flatterer,” House said. “You’re buttoned up all wrong.”

“That’s a new one.”

“I mean it, your shirt,” House said, more gently than usual as he pointed at Wilson’s chest. “I think you’re devolving.”

Wilson looked down. The shirt’s top button was in the second hole, and he hadn’t noticed. He blushed a bit at the mistake, and at the realization that he kind of liked being so distracted that he didn’t care how he looked. He finished adjusting his buttons, tucked in his shirt and looked at House.

“Better,” House said. “Now go, before your lungs turn back into gills.”

Wilson wouldn’t leave without just one more goodbye kiss, but it was shorter than he intended, and sharper. House never took as much as Wilson offered and almost never gave as much as Wilson wanted.

But for both of them, for now, it was enough.

Title: Smoke
Author: ExtraBitter
Pairing: H/W
Summary: Wilson loses himself in House’s bed; House finds him in it. Two short bits that were cut from The Last Mile, but seemed good enough to share.

1

Eventually, he had to come home. Wilson could wait; he’d been waiting a long time.

House’s bed was wide open and soft, with more pillows than he’d noticed the few times he had seen House in it. It was as deeply, casually wrinkled as the man himself. He imagined House leaning over the bed, picking up the pillows one at a time, throwing them at the head of the bed, not caring where they landed. He saw House grasping the comforter with his left hand and pulling it up roughly over the sheets, still twisted from a restless night, and then leaving the room. House didn’t spend a lot of time in his bedroom, which was the way things were supposed to be.

Wilson recalled an article on insomnia that suggested a bedroom should be used only for sleeping, and for sex. Looking at House’s bed, he felt drowsy and content. Being here seemed like the first good choice he had made in some time.

The shoes came off first, almost before he realized he was removing them. As he started on his shirt, he saw himself in a mirror, undressing in his friend’s bedroom. A vision came over him with palpable physical sensation. He felt House’s arms circling around his waist from behind, working his buttons loose with strong, confident fingers. His zipper gave way and his clothes dropped into a pile that House kicked out of the way, not caring where they went.

Wilson pushed the covers out of the way and let himself fall backwards onto the bed. He felt it--the pulling, biting, tangling full-body crush that he craved—all in the space of a breath. It wasn’t real. There were no pills in his fantasy, no cane, no mild hematoma on his face; no regret.

It wasn’t real. It never happened, and it never would. In that moment, Wilson hated everything that had happened to House, including himself. He wrapped his arms around the pillow, the same pillow where his friend laid his head every night, and closed his eyes.

2

When House came in, staggering slightly, Wilson was mumbling. He was dreaming. Wrapped around House’s pillow, underneath House’s covers, in House’s bed, dreaming.

House was not often surprised, but Wilson’s presence here was completely unexpected. He moved toward the bed. From above, Wilson was all eyebrows, cheekbones, and full pink lips making tiny, wordless sounds. House leaned heavy on his cane. The lamplight made a shadow of him, looming over the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen.

He wanted to fall. The basic will to stand and the cane kept him upright. His fingers reached out to linger above Wilson’s cheek, over the marks they had made, almost close enough to touch.

He was here. What was he doing here?

Wilson stirred. His cheek brushed House’s hand before he could pull away. Wilson’s eyes opened and for a moment he seemed confused.

“What are you doing?” House asked, not loud enough to startle.

“Mmm… I fell asleep.” Wilson blinked several times.

“Yeah, I got that part, Goldilocks,” House said, still fighting the ache in his chest. “You fell asleep in my bed. That’s just weird.” He winced as Wilson turned his head to orient himself to the strange surroundings. The bruise was already visible. “I’ll bet that hurts.”

Wilson sat up. “No worse than...”

Neither of them said anything for a long minute, as if anything they might say would be wrong.

“So?” House said. It was as much an accusation as a question.

“I needed to talk to you,” Wilson said, as if the answer were obvious. “I knew you’d find me here.”

“I would have found you on the couch.”

“I wasn’t really thinking,” Wilson said.

“You had enough foresight to remove most, if not all, of your clothing.” House’s eyes, tired and bloodshot, still didn’t miss anything.


End Notes: You can probably understand why I cut this stuff and reworked the last section of that story. The emotional tone is completely wrong for the first two parts. The second piece of this is the first scene I wrote, and I liked the dialogue. Sometimes, you have to cut things you like. Believe it or not, these were separate scenes, interrupted by House drinking in his living room, completely unaware that he wasn’t alone in his apartment.

Title: The Last Mile (Part 3 of 3)
Author: ExtraBitter
Pairing: House/Wilson
Rating: R
Warnings: Implicit slash, a lot more angst, extended double entendre, backlighting, and a very sad metaphor.
Summary: After a very long and trying day, House and Wilson end up in the same place. Conclusion.
Disclaimers: Standard disclaimers apply
Notes: I scrapped the original part three because, although it had some bits that I loved, it didn’t suit the story. This was not easy, and it probably shows. It should have been done a week ago. I might post some of the good bits as pseudo drabble.

Read Part One
Read Part Two

“Explain the change, the difference between what you want and what you need.” R.E.M., I Believe

By the time House got to the edge of town, clouds covered the sky. The weight in his leg transferred to the rest of his body, as if his bones were made of a toxic metal that would eat away his flesh from inside, slowly, until nothing was left of him but skin and hair.

He stopped in front of his own building and cranked the parking brake into place. The grinding teeth of the gear contrasted with the soft splash of rain on the top of the car. House sat for a moment, feeling the stillness of it all.

Inside, he went straight for the bottles. Vicodin alone wouldn’t dull him enough to get him to sleep. He had to sleep. His eyes burned and his head hurt.

He collapsed onto the couch with as much force as he could muster, not much, just enough to shake himself. In five years, he had become a really good cripple. He knew exactly what his body could take, and what it couldn’t, even if nobody else did.



Wilson piloted his car toward House’s apartment, his head full of words. So many words, most of them sounded like sorry. He was sorry, but he wasn’t. Part of him knew that he couldn’t have stopped the ill winds inside him from blowing, and the other part knew that deliberately hurting a person you loved was the most grievous of sins. He did love House; there was no denying it. He didn’t know why, or even how, but he did know.

In his head, out of his mind, Wilson drove. The rain fell now, landing fat drops of water that refracted the streetlights through his windshield. It was beautiful, the light shining at the edges of each drop, rolling down, meeting each other. He absently turned.

He was going to make this right.


House sucked back the whiskey and let it scorch his throat. He let thoughts of the past push away thoughts of the present. The past was done; so was the present, but at least he knew he couldn’t change the past. He saw the Wilson who had picked up the pieces of his life after Stacy walked out and put them back together, the man who pushed him back to living. He saw Wilson standing opposite him, today, never breaking contact as he shoved the cane back in his hand.

As if House could forget the cane; as if he could forget Wilson. How much whiskey would that take?


Something appeared in the harsh light from the front of Wilson’s car. He felt his bumper scrape over it, and hit the brakes, hard. The wheel bumped against the something, and it did not resist. The thing was made of flesh. The thing had bones and muscles. He wrested himself from the dry comfort of the car, all the wood and leather money could buy, and flung himself down on the pavement to see.

A dog, some kind of shepherd, lay there, trapped underneath his car; its pale eyes fixed forward in death, just inches away. He looked at the dog with a doctor’s fascination. It wore no collar. Rigor was setting its body into a grim twist. How long had the animal laid in the street, broken and bleeding, before death came to bestow infinite mercy?

He pressed his whole hand into the dark, glossy puddle until he touched the rough pavement. The blood was neither warm nor cold; it was slightly clotted, and it clung to his hand. Wilson studied the dog’s face. Somebody must have loved him, once. Maybe even today, maybe every second of his life until a door opened, then closed, and he ran. Somebody must have loved him.

He turned his palm up and looked too long at the thick layer of blood. He felt oddly cold, for a summer night. His heart raced, and he felt light headed as he stood up. Shock, he realized. He was in shock. He began to hyperventilate.

He wiped his hand on his shirt, leaving a deep red streak across his shoulder. He brushed his hair out of his eyes. The sky fell again, and he had to get out of that place. There was only one way. He screwed his eyes tight as he started the engine and moved forward. The car made a horrifying thud as it rolled over the body and hit the road: once, again, in quick succession.

What had he done?

That sick sinking, his heart in the pit of his stomach, would it be the same if had he not known what his tires were crushing? He had no choice, and that was the saddest part of all.


Apparently the booze wasn’t working any better than the painkiller. House stood up and pointed himself toward the bedroom; he stumbled a bit. So maybe it was working. The couch would be good enough. One stiff drink and a pill wasn’t enough to knock him back for long, but the leading edge of the buzz hit him just right. That’s what he needed, the hurt. Nights like this, the feeling of a dagger going in from point to hilt, cutting with both edges, that hurt was the only thing that kept him together.

Nights like this? Who was he kidding? The only thing that compared was when Stacy left, and he had seen that coming, even wished for it at the time.

He thought back to the friend who left him today, Wilson, with eyes and lips set in cruel, parallel lines. House shut his eyes and saw the same man, Christmas last, smiling shyly as he draped his arms around House’s neck and pressed their foreheads together.

“I’d better go,” he had said, wistful and quiet. House thought about what he wanted to say, stay. Stay with me, and we’ll deal with the rest later. But he didn’t, he said nothing and watched Wilson put on his coat and pull the door behind him, so gently that it didn’t latch.

House wondered when the crash would come. The mix of chemicals that held it at bay would wear off. He wanted to cry, just one stupid tear. Wilson and all those years were worth one stupid tear, but he had nothing left. The crash was coming, and he had nothing left. He welcomed sleep’s dark call now, but in the morning, in the light when he came to….



Commotion at the door roused him, pounding, and frantic cries sounding out his name. Please, please! He knew that voice, as well as he knew his own. The door shook and shuddered, then nothing.

House stumbled toward the door, and opened. Wilson, soaked and desperate, said the word once more, and then he looked up. His face showed an elemental human need that House had seen before, but only in pictures of people he didn’t know. This was Wilson. This was different.

House warred with himself for a split second, but no longer. Something was wrong, and no matter what else had happened, history dictated that if Wilson needed anything, that thing must be done. There could be no room for pride between them. He stepped aside.

House noted the blood on Wilson’s shirt. “You hurt?” He reached out to touch the stain. He pulled back the collar and breathed a sigh of relief at his finding: smooth, unbroken skin. Clumsy, swaying without his cane, he worked at the buttons and pushed the shirt away from Wilson’s wet shoulders. It fell in a heap on the floor.

Wilson looked at his hand, at the blood, stretched his arm out to show House the red under his fingernails, caked around his cuticles, etched into the lines of his palm. What House saw was the expression in Wilson’s eyes, and he wished none of it were his fault.

“Come with me,” he said softly. He led Wilson into the bathroom, hooked the cane over the edge of the sink and turned on the tap. The harsh sound of fast, hot water filled the room. Steam clouded the mirror. Wilson just looked down.

House pumped too much soap into his left hand and reached for Wilson’s sullied right. Wilson was either unwilling or unable to help him, which did not matter to House. He slipped his other arm around and took Wilson’s hand in both of his, working the soap deliberately into a thick lather.

He slid his fingers in between, to rub away the blood from whatever Wilson had been doing. He didn’t need to know; all that mattered was the cleansing, everything else was behind them. Wilson inhaled, sharp and frightened, and leaned back into House’s chest, as if he’d come out of the fog in his head.

House wished he knew what he was supposed to say, something reassuring, probably, but he wasn’t at all sure himself, and he never seemed to manage faking it. “S’okay,” House whispered tentatively. “I’ve got you.” That had the benefit of being true.

The blood was gone now. House moved his hands to Wilson’s wrist, without really thinking. Bubbles and fingers crept half way up Wilson’s forearm as House moved his fingers gradually, up and down, up and down. The fluid motion lulled them both.

Wilson leaned his head against House’s shoulder and a sound, half sob, half moan, came from somewhere deep within him. He reached back with his free hand to touch House’s face; remembering, like a blind man.

House’s fingers retraced their path through the soap one last time and guided Wilson’s arm under the water. Three clean, pink hands, warm from the tap, came clean.

House went for a towel, but Wilson turned around. He leaned in and hid his face in the crook of House’s neck. His wet hands soaked the back of House’s t-shirt.

“I’m so sorry,” he said. He cried quietly, for the dog he left dead in the road, for House, and for himself. He cried for all those suckers he couldn’t save; he cried for the ones he could save, because they had to go on in this crazy world.

“Me too,” House said once Wilson’s tears subsided and they had a bit of space between them.

“What for?” he asked, genuinely puzzled. “You were right. I read the thing in the Times, everything you said… I don’t know what to say.”

“There’s nothing to say,” House admitted. “And I’m sorry I hit you.”

“I deserved it. I was…” Wilson searched his brain for a word to describe exactly what he’d been.

“You were like me,” House finished. They looked at each other then, with clearer focus than they had had in months. House grabbed his cane and ran a hand over Wilson’s damp hair.

House left Wilson standing in front of the sink, knowing he would take as long as he needed. Thunder answered lightning in the distance. Raindrops lingered on the windowpane. The storm was passing. House opened the window to let in the sounds and the scents the soft, steady rain that remained. He always loved the rainy summer nights that were a constant, no matter where he went.

He listened and breathed, remembering that he had something to remember, which was oddly comforting. He felt neutral, maybe even a little past neutral, it happened from time to time; most of all, he felt calm. He noticed the light from the bathroom reflected in the window as the door opened. Wilson stood there for moment, silhouetted. House’s breath stuck in his chest. Wilson’s feet were bare; that probably meant he was staying.

“Tired?” House asked him, turning around, although he could clearly see the answer.

“I’m burning my clothes in the morning,” Wilson said after a second. He never took his eyes off House.

“Not the jeans,” House insisted as he crossed back to the other side of the room. “You’re unbelievably hot in those jeans. If I were a high school girl I’d put your picture up in my locker.” House yawned a little, ruining the effect of his grin.

“You’re tired, too,” Wilson stated. He looked pointedly at the bed, then back at House.

The night would keep its own counsel.


Epilogue

At daybreak, House opened his eyes. The first thing he saw was his hand, clasped with Wilson’s, palms facing and fingers entwined, resting calmly on his pillow. The sight warmed him. He might have chided himself if he weren’t so damned happy at that point.

They would still probably have to have a conversation, but he’d deal with that. At least he’d try. House wondered what would happen when Wilson opened his eyes, but for the moment, he watched Wilson sleeping, making note of Wilson’s slightly parted lips and a dark spot on the pillowcase. Wilson drooled! House turned over this tidbit with glee as he sank back into his pillow.

When House woke a second time, Wilson had pulled their hands to his side. He paused the light kisses along House’s radial artery long enough to say good morning.

It wasn’t supposed to be this easy, House thought. “You’re here,” he said.

“I’m home.” Wilson's smile lit up his whole face, and maybe the entire state of New Jersey. House had to smile back. It was about time.

Maybe it was that easy.

Title: The Last Mile, Part 2 of 3
Author: ExtraBitter
Pairing: House/Wilson
Rating: R
Warnings: Angst, drama, tension of all kinds.
Summary: House watches the sky; Wilson watches the Weather Channel.
Disclaimer: Standard, as usual, just an exercise that exceeded its boundaries.

Read Part One


Those last, sick moments rattled around House’s gut as he settled himself into his car.

He couldn’t stop looking at his hand on the steering wheel. He really had punched Wilson: skin and fatty tissue displacing; blood vessels spilling; tendons and muscles in the neck tensing, then giving. He remembered the hardness of bone, how it felt under his fist, and the rage in his blood. It all happened in the passing of seconds. That was a good, solid blow. House wanted to feel some pride in having thrown it, or guilt at having landed it, but he felt like an idiot for hitting the one person in the world who would never hit back.

At least not with fists.

He turned the key in the ignition and revved the engine loud enough to drown out the recriminations. Miles and miles of road led him to a dark spot near the river’s edge. The water moved slowly, but it moved. Why hadn’t he just kept his mouth shut for once in his life?

“ ‘I could break you,’ “ House quoted to himself. “I don’t need your help, Doc.”

House worked himself out of the car and nudged the ground with his cane. It was solid enough. He walked the bank for a while, not tracking the time. He looked up at the sky. The place was far enough from the city that he noticed stars and the winking moon. Thick, flat clouds lurked off to the west. They were coming in, not moving out. Something about the sky, the darkness over darkness, spoke to him of heartbreak and despair. He couldn’t let himself hear that voice. Heartbreak was a needless luxury, and besides, it wasn’t his voice.

He lost himself imagining the scenery under the darkness. Trees, water, sky, soil--a jumble of greens and blues gave him cover until his mind wandered back to the ordinary, and he thought he ought to get Wilson to come out here with him some time. If they ever spoke again… The rest was too much for House to consider. He walked back to the car and sat with the door open and his legs on the ground, wishing today had gone differently. If his deepest fear proved true, if all was said and done between them, he could do nothing to repair the damage. Cracks like the ones they’d shown each other went beyond today.

House knew how very badly he treated Wilson. He didn’t give enough; he tried not to show that he cared at all, and when he could not help himself, he made a mess of the whole thing. His heart was a lousy metaphor: it just pumped blood.

His leg felt very heavy. It ached, which was good; for once he was happy to have the pain to keep him grounded. The sound House made as he locked his fingers behind his hamstring and dragged the leg inside the car masqueraded as part of the physical pain, but he recognized the howl-wail as mourning.

He felt like a liar as he pulled away from the river.

House was preoccupied as he drove, but he wasn’t so far out of it that he failed to notice the gas gauge slipping too close to empty for comfort. He stopped at a service station. The bell clanged and he waited for the attendant.

“Fill it up,” he barked at the college-aged kid who approached.

“You in some kind of a hurry, mister?”

House sighed. What was he going home to? Not much.

He reached into his pocket and took out the slip of paper Wilson had given him, seemed like a hundred years ago. He loved Wilson’s signature, the funny, back-slanted letters that formed his name crawled along the bottom line like a bleary-eyed frat boy looking for a place to sleep off a hazing incident. Seeing the DEA number printed under Wilson’s name reminded him why they fought. House wasn’t sure how to feel at this point, or what to think.

He leaned his head against the steering wheel and wondered if there might be a way to keep the scrip, as a kind of souvenir. Souvenir, from the French verb meaning “remember.” Pathetic. He had to fill it, anyway. What else could he do? The attendant was tapping on the hood to get his attention.

“Watch the paint job, idiot. This is a classic.” House stated the obvious. No, he wasn't that far gone.

“I said $27.55.”

House paid for his gas. He wanted to be angry with Wilson, anger would be a comfort, at least it would be something. Fifty miles from home, maybe sixty, what a long fucking day.



Wilson wanted to go to a bar to celebrate his victory. It seemed like the right kind of wrong thing to do, but he did not fully trust the invincibility. He didn’t know how it worked, so instead he made his way to the place he and Julie lived. He pulled into his driveway after dark.

Home possessed a vaguely alien calm for Wilson; nothing ever happened there. As soon as he walked in the front door and saw every light in the house blazing, he knew Julie was home, too. The brightness made his head hurt and blunted his lingering buzz. Perhaps he should have gone someplace else, but he was here now, and he didn’t want to deal with the repercussions of having both his wife and House angry with him for different sides of the same thing. The concept made him cranky.

He puffed up his cheeks and blew out as he climbed the stairs with heavy feet. Immature, certainly, but he didn’t care. Julie was in their bedroom. She sat cross-legged on the bed surrounded by bits of brightly colored paper and piles of photographs. He had no idea what she was working on, but he knew he wasn’t in any of those pictures.

“Are you home late or early?” she said without looking up from her pasting. Her posture said that she did not expect an answer from the man who was her husband. His suit was beginning to itch. He walked to the closet, hung up his jacket and stripped off his tie.

“There’s chicken in the icebox, if you want,” she said.

“Yeah, OK.” He would have said the same if she told him there was a dead body in the back yard.

He walked across the hall to the bathroom to clean up. Julie’s perfunctory questions followed him. “How was your day?” Wilson shut the door rather than respond.

He didn’t want to think about House, or what had happened between them, so he thought about his wife. Julie was still pretty, but the attraction between them had long since cooled. She was nice enough, and people liked her. She had her crafts, which he could see all around the house even though he never bothered to ask her what they were. She had the same friends she’d had since college, she had clubs and a schedule full of activities; Julie had built herself a life with little connection to her husband. She had all these little, stupid things.

And he? He had a tender spot on his right cheek. A bruise would rise by morning. His neck hurt. What did it matter, really? What did any of it matter? It didn’t, he told himself as he changed into comfortable clothes and walked away from his reflection.

His thumb pounded the channel button without mercy. He enjoyed the act of racing through, which helped him keep his mind blank. He cycled through the lineup twice before stopping on a program about a tornado. He laid back on the couch and set the remote on his chest as he watched buildings in a one of those flat states disintegrate in the face of violent winds.

House’s voice crept up on him, a familiar tone in a different timbre. I’m worried about you. Those were Wilson’s words, not House’s. Wilson had said them hundreds of times over the course of their friendship. He had said them so many time that he couldn’t have responded to hearing House say them any other way. The fight was inevitable as soon as House upset the balance between them.

Wilson wanted to feel something like regret, but he stopped regretting long ago. He felt cold inside, restless, guilty. He hadn’t listened to House; he hadn’t even heard him. Wilson had simply let his own fury fly, without regard for what might be in its path.

What, or whom. None of it had mattered to him. None of it got in the way of his goal. Which was what, exactly?

He was the tornado.

He lay still and closed his eyes as two meteorologists discussed a tropical system off the coast of Florida. He couldn’t resist drifting a little bit; back to the way he left House standing alone. Wilson played the whole scene in his head. It was screwed up, twisted all wrong, as if they’d been reading each other’s lines from a script.

“Is that what it’s like, to be you?” He whispered to a figment that looked exactly like House. “So focused that you’d rip me apart if I stayed one more second? Is that what it’s like?”

He wasn’t supposed to be the tornado. His throat clenched. He would do anything to fight off the tears. There might be a time to break down, but it wasn’t now.

He prowled around downstairs for a while, banging his fist against light switches as he passed from room to room. It hurt. Finally he sat in front of his computer to calm down. He saw an e-mail from Cuddy: a link from the New York Times and a curt message: read this.

Wilson froze as soon as he read the first paragraph.

The local forecast for the night called for rain.

Read Part Three

Title: The Last Mile (1/3)
Pairing: House/Wilson
Rating: Solid R; Gen at this point
Summary: An argument between House and Wilson gets out of hand.
Disclaimers: Standard disclaimers apply. House and Wilson belong to each other. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

Note: Assume this takes place in the present. The Op-Ed I mention, "Handcuffs and Stethoscopes," by John Tierney, appeared in the NYT in July. This piece is finished, for the most part. I will be posting parts two and three later this week. Title cribbed from a Smiths song, quoted below. However, do not mistake this for songfic.


"Why is the last mile the hardest mile?" -- The Smiths, Is It Really So Strange?


Friday afternoon and House was bored. Video games? Played out. Music? Too many choices. TV? Not enough choices, at least not good ones. Patient, not that interesting, and he already knew what he was going to tell Foreman to do, when Foreman showed up.

House fell back on an old stand-by: the Op-Ed pages of the New York Times, now in convenient online format. He wouldn’t have to get ink on his fingers. There was always some nutcase going on about something: the battle of the naysayers, the yes men, and Maureen Dowd. He absently wondered if the columnist might be one of Cuddy’s mysterious friends.

“‘Handcuffs and Stethoscopes’? This could be promising!” House said to his empty office as he followed a link. He was certain that doctor porn didn’t fall under All The News That’s Fit to Print by any stretch of the imagination, but he might get a nugget that he could drop into conversation, and that was a good thing.

In reality, the column turned his mind to Wilson, and not in a pleasant way. House was still thinking about Wilson when he felt a rush of air from his office door. Brooding would have to wait.

“Have Mr. Vomit cultured for Candida, get a stool sample, and stop the Levaquin. I think we’re looking at a severe fungal infection, not bacterial, or it could be fungal and a bacteria that doesn’t react to Levaquin.” He turned then and saw not the expected Foreman, but the very same Wilson he was trying not to think about. “Oh, thought you were Foreman.”

“That happens more often than you’d think,” Wilson said.

House grinned in spite of himself. Wilson wasn’t smiling back. He stuck his hand in the pocket of his lab coat and pulled out a small slip of paper. “It’s that time again.”

“You do take good care of me,” House said. His voice was plain, and almost quiet.

“I try.” Wilson made eye contact and breathed through the tension. The prescription shouldn’t have been a problem, but it was. They were friends; they had always been friends. The pills made them more than friends.

There were days when it was too much.

House looked down as he dropped the paper into his pocket. “I’m worried about you.”

Wilson looked at House with some suspicion. Either he was up to something, or. Or what? He was up to something. The pause stretched out too long as House stood up to gather his thoughts, and Wilson moved toward the door.

“Wait,” House said. He tightened his fingers around the head of his cane to bolster his will to continue with this exercise. House had no trouble fitting words into sentences, but this was different. He wasn’t used to worrying. “You… I don’t know how to say this.”

Wilson responded with a half chuckle. “That never stopped you before.”

“Will you let me finish? The DEA is starting to crack down on doctors about pain killers,” House said with less than his usual precision. He thumped his cane against the floor for emphasis.

“If you’re going to be paranoid, leave me out of it,” Wilson said, wary, condescending and more than a little tired of it all. “It’s a stretch, but try watching your own back instead of making me do it for you.”

“I’m talking about the Drug Enforcement Agency,” House said, allowing no time for Wilson to say more. His voice was angry and impatient. “The Feds. They’ve got big guns and they take themselves very seriously. This is important stuff!”

“In case you hadn’t noticed, I’m an oncologist,” Wilson shot back. “At any given time, half my patients are medicated for legitimate pain control. I know this may bruise your ego, but you’re the least of my worries.”

“In case you hadn’t noticed, I don’t have cancer,” House said, trying to keep his voice even. “You’ve been supplying an admitted drug addict with schedule three narcotics for years! Scrip happy dentists and plastic surgeons won’t keep these people busy forever.”

Wilson shut his eyes and shook his head. “You meet the criteria for chronic pain, and you’re convinced that Vicodin is the only way to treat it.” Wilson no longer tried to hide his contempt for House, his pills, and his own role in the addiction. “What’s your point?”

“One of these days, they’ll be coming for you,” House shouted. “I’m a red flag.”

“You’re in pain, Greg. You can’t function without the pills.” Wilson raised his voice. “You said so yourself.”

“You could end up in prison because of me.” House’s tone was close to pleading, but he had no idea what he was pleading for, except Wilson’s attention, which was not coming.

“I get it now. You’re worried that if I go to prison, your supply will dry up,” Wilson said. “Who’s going to write for you then? Cuddy? You don’t trust anybody else!” They circled each other like animals, with slow, watchful precision. Neither man was comfortable in his position.

“You don’t get it at all,” House stepped closer to Wilson, who stood fast.

“Then explain it to me.” Wilson’s eyes glittered with something House didn’t attempt to read.

“Not until you answer my question.” House’s voice was worn from yelling, and his heart was tired.

“Fuck, what’s the question? I didn’t hear a question.” Their toes nearly touched; their words came fast and thoughtless.

“Why do you write for me, Dr. Wilson? Why put yourself at risk?”

“I don’t see it as a risk.”

“Then you’re not seeing.” House whispered, finally noting their positions.

“Why are you doing this?” Wilson’s eyes never left House’s, but they were blind to each other now.

“Why do you write for me?” House asked again.

“Because you let me,” Wilson yelled at the top of his voice.

“Every time you take out that pad for me, you risk your reputation, you risk your medical license.” He emphasized each word to make sure Wilson heard him. “You risk going to prison. You can’t honestly think that ‘Well, your honor, I wrote all those prescriptions because he let me’ is going to hold up in Federal court.”

Wilson recoiled as he realized that none of it mattered to House.

“You want to play it that way? Fine,” Wilson said. “I’m your doctor. I’m going to continue to treat you until they find you dead in an alley.”

Doctor. The word rang in House’s ears like a gunshot. “You…” he trailed off in disbelief. “You are not my doctor.”

“That’s not what your chart says.”

“You have a chart on me?” He never considered that Wilson would keep notes on him. For the first time in a long while, House had no idea what to say.

“I’m not like you. I keep records. Every ache, every pain, every pill is documented,” Wilson said smoothly. Power rushed through his body, obscuring everything in its path. He lifted his chin slowly. Light from the window glinted in his eyes. Every bone and every muscle exalted in the glory of winning.

In that moment, House hated Wilson; hated him for winning, hated him even more for being right. A blanket of denial suffocated the last of his presence of mind. He lashed out with his free hand and pushed against Wilson’s face, digging hard, scratching for blood.

Wilson grabbed at House’s wrist and fought to twist the arm away. “Damn it, House! You’re--Ow!” He bit into the skin between House’s thumb and forefinger. House drew back, and Wilson looked at him, really seeing for the first time in minutes.

House was hell bent on revenge, his head adrift in bad waters: bitterness, anger, and the deepest kind of hurt. He released his cane and swung at Wilson with his right hand. His fist connected, crushing bone against bone. Wilson’s head lurched from the shock of the blow.

They stared at each other uneasily, and breathed as if both of them had to remember how.

“I could hurt you,” Wilson whispered, rubbing his cheek as he squared himself away, as if to confirm the impact. “I could break you.” In an instinctive motion that proved the truth of his words, Wilson picked up House’s cane from the floor and moved it under House’s hand. His knuckles pressed into the flesh of House’s palm, and House trembled.

He did not see Wilson leave the room.

Part Two