Close Call
Author: Storm
Prompt 11: Wilson has panic attacks.
Pairing: House & Wilson (friendship, slash if you squint).
Category: General (but turned out oddly birthday themed).
Rating/Warnings: PG-13.
Words: 4526.
Summary: Wilson inadvertently wins an argument.
Disclaimer: Everything belongs to Greg House. Including his creators. And theirs.
"How about donkey dick?"
Leaning against the wall as the elevator chuntered up toward their apartment, House had the audacity to sound as though it were not a ridiculous suggestion. Wilson shot him the flat look it deserved.
"Hmm, let me think about that…" he mused, with enough theatricalism to match House's own. "No. When did bestiality become a board game?"
"Not for the board game," House snorted, adopting his patented talking-to-idiots tone that he took obscene pleasure in whenever Wilson had said something incautious enough to warrant it.
The elevator interrupted before he could get launched, pinging its intention to stop at the next floor. Ignoring the roll of House's eyes at his haste, Wilson punched the button to ensure that it wouldn't. Whilst his friend's inherent misanthropy could temporarily ride shotgun to the schadenfreude thrill of tormenting an audience, his own sense of propriety could not.
"It's not pin-the-penis-on," House continued, with cheerful disregard for any such thing. "It's a Chinese delicacy. It's an honour to be served—"
Wilson canted both eyebrows in sincere disbelief and bit his cheek to hold back a grin when House caved with a huffy sigh.
"Okay, fine. It's become a standing joke to see what the tourists will eat, but it worked at the Olympics! I'll bet you fifty that everyone here is too nicety-nice to tell you where to stick—"
"Forget it." Wilson cut him off with a hasty chopping motion that jangled the keys he'd had out since he opened the door from the street. "You're not conning me into a loser's bet today—"
"Older and wiser. I thought that was a myth—"
"Shut up."
Wilson did his best to ignore the knowing expression House turned on him at that. He knew himself that he'd been quite impossibly tetchy since the first card flopped onto the doormat three days early. He was well aware too that the various bottles of medium brown Just for Men and the new range of moisturising creams accumulating at a ferocious rate around the sink were plastic milestones marking off the route to a mid-life crisis. If he came up with something worse than a two-wheeled, road-kill, Repso, then House could make snarky remarks about it.
"And," he added, in case the crucial point had got lost in their habitual bickering, "I'm not coercing my cooking class into making penis cuisine."
House had the gall to feign disappointment. "Why not? It was their idea to throw you a party."
Wilson met that with a thoroughly cynical smile. "This, I'm assuming, is your attempt to ensure that they'll never do it again?"
"Birthdays are another meaningless signifier of the subliminal sway held over us by Hallmark and Hersheys," House informed him, with a none-too discreet look in the mirror and a yank at the peak of his flat cap that pulled it down lower over his own thinning hair. Evidently still chewing over the theme of mid-life crises, he was pointedly not contemplating the moth-eaten, greying, army crop it had been butchered into by Mayfield's answer to Sweeny Todd. "A recipe and board game does not a party make. Whose idea was it that being made head chef and the banker in Monopoly constitutes a celebration?"
He had a point, although at this late stage in the argument that had been going on for two days Wilson was way past willing to concede it. He made an exasperated gesture with both hands. Encumbered as he was by keys in one and his briefcase in the other, it came across less annoyed than fit to describe a man careening off the straight and narrow onto the Lunatic Turnpike. At this precise moment it could have signified either one of them.
"You wouldn't care – except that they invited you too!"
That, of course, had been the insult to add to the injury. In House's demented worldview, birthdays, when they couldn't be ignored, were only to be celebrated with the three Bs: beer, a ballgame and bedroom antics. In no way, he'd said firmly when Wilson relayed the invitation, were those substitutable for baking, board games and boring-ass chitchat. It was only the threat of blue-balls that had got his RSVP at all. On reflection, Wilson should've realised how much he was going to pay for that.
"How about honeyed worms?" House persisted with relish, visibly revelling in every rebellion of Wilson's stomach. He cursed himself silently for being completely incapable of maintaining a poker face. "Deep friend scorpion? Cow's stomach? Turtle hot pot?"
A familiar sense of amazement welling at the breadth of House's knowledge, which he pretended to find annoying and secretly was rather impressed by, Wilson countered rashly:
"Shall we stop by 3B on the way and ask Nora if we can borrow her dog?"
"That's the spirit!"
The grin that accompanied that wouldn't've looked out of place on the devil. Wilson groaned, this time unconsciously dramatic as the swish of his arm to grind the back of his hand against his forehead made his reflection in the mirrored wall appear to be swooning. Ignoring the smirk that twitched onto House's lips, Wilson decided that if he did he'd be sure to kick all three of his friend's legs out on the way to the mat.
Shooting him a dirty look, he let his hand drop and strode out into the hallway, saying over his shoulder:
"If I hear so much as a yap when you pick up your bag tonight, you'll find yourself sleeping—on the stoop…"
He tailed off as he caught sight of a long blade of sunlight gleaming on a stretch of windowless hallway. It jutted through one of the white arched double doors to their apartment, which stood ajar. A six-inch strip of black and white diamond lobby floor tiles and a chink of recently decorated lounge were visible. The corner of pale curtains flickered into view, belling in a breeze through a raised sash-window.
House clopped up alongside him.
"Huh," he remarked, with none of the concern Wilson felt congealing heavy and cold in his belly. "Good to know the extortionate rent on this place pays the salary of a vigilant and well-trained super."
"We should—we should call him."
It came out somewhat breathless, as if he'd run up the stairs rather than ridden the elevator. Wilson jittered in place, muscles all over his body bunching and releasing with the urge to run back down them. Six flights. It would be quicker than a phone. Quicker, except…except that then he'd have to leave House. Forgetting his keys were still in his hand, he groped in his pocket for his cell. The metal shafts splayed every which way, teeth catching on the lining of his coat. He shoved at them, urgently. The silk gave way with a wet rip. He heard neither that nor the jangle as he let the keys tumble to the floor.
It was nothing, he told himself, fingers scuttling over the contents of his pocket without making sense of the collection of objects shoved in there on his way out of the hospital. The open door meant nothing at all. Nothing more than that House hadn't locked up on his way out that morning. The hours between seven and eleven a.m. had always been, in his opinion, served up by hell in a hand basket. Ever since he'd made the transition from Vicodin to ibuprofen he'd woken in paroxysms, as though his ruined thigh muscles were being viciously weaved into the wicker. It wouldn't be the first time mere details like not leaving the stove on or the bath running or the door open had got lost in his swearing struggle to the office, scarfing NSAIDs as if they were Tic Tacs.
That, of course, was exactly why it might not be nothing.
With uncharacteristic obliviousness, House started to push past him and head for the open door.
"Ring and ream later," he said carelessly. "Aprons and deep fried chicken feet now."
"No! Wait."
Wilson flung out an arm to bar his way. He hardly noticed that his briefcase struck House's cane out from under him, that he stumbled into the wall or his startled "—the hell—?" as he slapped his palm into the plaster to save himself.
"We can't go in there." Wilson jabbed at buttons on his Blackberry with fizzy, fumbling fingers. "We don't know why it's open, House. We should call someone. The super, the police—"
"For an open door?"
That light, frank tone should have tipped him off that House hadn't been oblivious at all. It didn't. Wilson nodded, his heart beginning to pound as he thought he saw a shadow flicker across that shaft of light.
"We should stay out here," he insisted tightly. "It could be a break in."
"I could've forgotten to lock up."
"So you made it easy for them." Wilson swallowed rapidly, flicking his tongue across his lips, trying to raise enough saliva to go on. "Don't make yourself a target too."
"A target for what?"
"For whoever is still in there!"
Wilson clapped a hand over his mouth, silencing himself too late. His vehement hiss had brought movement. There was a sudden thunk as something fell to the floor and the thud of a body colliding with a hard surface. He darted another glance toward the open door and was sure he saw a shadow this time: the toe of a shoe, the thin shaft of a gun.
"I told you. I told you," he whispered, over the cold rush of adrenaline and the soft, telltale squeals of leather shifting against plaster as he tried to tow House back toward the elevators. "Please, please, just say out here."
"Wilson." House's breath buffeted his chin, his voice very dry. "It's seventeen twenty. No one burgles a place just before rush hour. The car chase is lame if the get-away vehicle gets stuck in a queue with the panda in the next lane over and the robbers have to hotfoot it through gridlock."
Wilson stared at him, incredulous.
"This isn't funny!" he snapped, letting his voice come low and hard and furious. He checked and double-checked anxiously for the presence of the shadow in that sharp shaft of evening light. "There's someone in there."
"Having coffee and watching a Metz game on the plasma screen they're about to nobble?" House cocked an eyebrow, the right corner of his mouth all crumpled up and wry. "Yeah. All burglars do that. If we've been burgled, they'll've taken their loot down the fire-escape and scarpered."
Sick with fear, Wilson wanted to shake him.
"You don't know that," he growled. "They could've come for anything."
The hollow rattle of an almost empty pill bottle punctuated that. He shuddered, hearing the clatter of cold sterile instruments being laid out in the morgue. He'd found House sleeping in there yesterday, sleeping, on the hard steel gurney, his cane on one side, pills on the floor, face slack, as if he were…
Again, he jerked hard at fistfuls of leather jacket he hadn't known he was holding and faltered over House's name. But instead of a sleepy, surprised chuckle, his own voice went on, clipped and urgent.
"We're doctors!" He seized the bottle through the coat to quiet it, before thoughts became submersed in memory. "There are people – the clinic – your drug use – anyone could think – you've got prescriptions – stashes – they could – they might've come to get – trafficking – think you deal–"
He broke off, chest heaving, shaking his head. No point in going on. House had never wanted to hear it, never wanted to see. They'd come for less. They'd come because House made one crack too many. Bang. A thirty-eight in the diagnostics office. They'd come because he liked puzzles and no one else could be bothered with the hard ones. Bang. A Browning in Cuddy's office, trading hostages for MRIs. Bang. Bang. Bang.
"Wilson, Wilson."
House wrapped his hands around Wilson's wrists, forefingers sinking into the soft line of skin over his radial artery. Bangbangbangbangbangbangbang.
"Do you know how ridiculous you sound? Any fool knows doctors don't cart around pharmacies with them. If anyone wants to get a hit off me, they'd do better holding up a 7-11."
"But they won't know that." The bottle rattled again, clutched in his trembling fingers. How many times had House tipped it carelessly into his mouth, in front of patients, in the middle of the clinic, the middle of the street? "House, please. Just let me call—let me get some help."
"Yeah," House murmured softly, finally, finally, taking heed of Wilson, after all. He glanced from the open door to the elevator before catching Wilson's eye, his own a turbulent blue. "I think we're going to need it."
He loosed his hold on one wrist and dug in his other coat pocket, punching buttons. Bleep, bleep, bleep. Wilson closed his eyes as the hall began to spin, round and round, round and round, like wheels, wheels on a bus, wheels on a bypass machine. Bleep-bleep-blee—stop.
Fingers flexing fitfully in House's shirtfront, Wilson thought for a moment his own heart had gone into flatline. His ears rang and the dizziness was getting worse. His lips wouldn't work right as he struggled to focus, focus on anything except the fact that House's face was contorting into pained lines, stiffening, stilling, that grim, death-courting resignation that he'd come to dread. Bang. A knife in a wall socket. Bang. House's head hitting the floor, an empty Oxy bottle falling from his limp hand. Bang. The door to Mayfield behind him.
"Get help," Wilson repeated, through clenched teeth. "Please."
Bang. His hands on House's chest, punching his heart into rhythm over and over. Bang. Their teeth clacking together as he blew air into House's stalling lungs. Bang. The door of his own car closing in the Mayfield drive. Bang. His forehead hitting the steering wheel while his chest got too tight to breathe. Bang. The car he'd clipped on the way home, the headlights and streetlights running in streamers. Bang. The closing door to Amber's apartment, empty, again. Bang. The lid of her coffin. Bang. The judge's gavel in the divorce court. Bang. Bang. Bang.
Faintly, he could hear a voice demanding, over and over and over again:
"Get help. Get help."
Before it's too late.
"Got it, Wilson. Someone's coming."
"A doctor. Get another doctor."
He meant police. Why was he asking for a doctor? He couldn't remember, couldn't think around the din of blood surging in his ears and the blinding flashes of adrenaline. His left hand went numb and started to tingle, sharp bursts of pain shooting up to his shoulder.
"Wilson. Wilson." Now House sounded urgent? "Listen to me—"
"I can't! I can't! House! – I can't breathe. I feel—"
Wilson let go of him abruptly and clutched at his own chest; pain wrenched through it. A face like his own flashed into his memory, wide-eyed, startled, tumbling to his knees in front of birthday cake and candles. The light streaked his hair in pale blades as he fell.
"Aspirin," he gasped, as his own knees buckled. "My father—heart—forty-five—don't leave me—"
"Wilson." Hands seized his biceps, physically hoisting him back on his feet. "Listen to me. Listen."
He swayed dazedly as he was shaken, struggled to focus. If he blacked out, if he lost it now, he might never come back. It was tempting, so tempting, to close his eyes…
"You're not having a heart attack, Arthur Dent," House's voice cut through the crowding darkness, steady and relentless. It forced the hallway to fan out again from the centre of his vision, mottled flooring, wide picture windows and magnolia walls with delicate mouldings. "You're having a panic attack. It's not dangerous so quit whining like a basket of puppies. It's just scary. You've been freaking out since you got off the phone with your pals in the white top hats. Tell me why."
"I—I—it doesn't—" matter. Or make sense….
Wilson blinked at him in confusion, the airless cramping in his chest making him his head throb. He lowered it, let it thud up against House's chest, feeling himself spinning, spinning, spinning. Tyres. Wheels. Bus. Bypass. Bang. Bleep. Bleep, bang, bangbleepbleepbleep—BANG.
A skull hit the floor. Bright brown hair, grey at the temples. A tallish, stocky man in a business suit, tie loosened on the drive home. Glazed brown eyes. Lopsided lips formed silent, shapeless syllables. Wilson stared down at Wilson and shivered, ghost over grave, while a terrified twelve year old stammered into the phone, amidst the shocked stare of his older brother and his younger one's screams.
"Help," he whispered, his voice thin and unbroken. "I-I need help."
"No kidding," House muttered, his thumbs sliding up and down the inseam of Wilson's jacket arms. He cleared his throat and said louder, "Help's coming."
He nodded to something on the floor and Wilson's eyes drifted to it. A dropped cell phone came into focus. The call. He'd made the call. His father would be all right. He would be all right.
His shoulders were shaken again, lightly. It loosened a little of the tension in his chest.
"Talk to me, Wilson," House continued, still gruffly calm. "It's important. Tell me what you couldn't tell Delia Smith or Jamie Oliver or whoever it was."
Wilson swallowed, tasting metal, and stared around the deserted hallway, searching for the upset table and the shattered crockery on the terracotta carpet where his mother had dropped the dessert plates.
"I—uhm…I didn't know what to make."
He heard the echoes of her voice in his, repeating herself in the waiting room while she cradled Danny on her knee and David under her arm. Wilson – James – looked anxiously into her dark eyes from his place opposite and was baffled when they turned blue.
"For dinner?" House pressed firmly. "The cooking class?"
Wilson passed a hand over his eyes, erasing grey plastic chairs and a dough-stained orange apron. He glanced down, nodding as he focused on the peeling gold foil of the skull on House's shirt. There was a silver rose between its teeth.
"Yeah. I didn't know what to cook tonight."
"Okay. Why did that matter?"
"I—uh…I don't…" Candles. Cake. Shards of wine glasses where the tablecloth had spilled. A melee of foodstuffs, unplanned, uncertain. "My mother. She didn't know what to cook either."
"When?"
"My father's birthday."
"His forty-fifth?"
"Yeah."
"Okay," House said heavily. "It's okay."
He nodded, almost to himself, and his grave features settled into a comprehending expression, as though he were quietly having an epiphany. About…him?
Slowly, it dawned on Wilson that he had a fistful of House's shirt, scrunching the smiling death's head on it into a ghastly grimace. He'd had him pinned against the wall. He took a startled step back and his foot skated on a piece of paper. He'd dropped his briefcase and it had burst open on the floor.
"When—?"
He raised a hand without any real thought of what to do with it and froze, fixated. Blood was trickling down the back of it in a thin, dotted line. His keys had bitten him.
"What—?"
House grunted and let go of him, giving his shoulder a light shove. "I told you already, there's no hyperspace bypass coming through the apartment. You can quit panicking now. Hey, Nora."
Wilson spun around as the elevator doors sprang open behind him and their neighbour hastened out, barefoot in a white Hyatt bathrobe with her blonde hair hanging in wet twists down her back.
"Hey," she said, gaze flitting swift and appraising between them. "Are you two okay? You rang, but all I heard was shouting."
"Wilson thinks there's monsters in the apartment," House announced, with brash, exaggerated cheer. "But he's too much of a big girl's blouse to go in there. I figure you've got bigger…boobs than he has. Would you mind?"
Nora opened her mouth to object, suspicious hazel eyes piercing Wilson's. He glanced down, a rush of heat to his cheeks making him dizzy again. She ticked a look behind him, at House, and her face changed.
"Oh, you so owe me another rendition of Evita," she sighed and swept past them into the apartment.
Fear jagged through Wilson, sharp and immediate. "She—"
"She'll be fine." House took hold of his elbow and tugged firmly. "Sit down and breathe slowly."
*
They sat on the floor in the hallway. Wilson had drawn his knees up, one elbow braced on top and his forelock scrunched up in his fist. His brow was pressed against the heel of his hand and most of his face was hidden. House stretched his aching leg out and reclined his head against the wall. The friction of fabric on plaster had pulled his flat cap back so that it perched higher on his forehead than it should. His cane lay on the floor beside him. He rolled it idly back and forth, the soft crrk-crrk of wood rattling across linoleum a distraction from the padding of Nora's bare feet as she searched their apartment. Once or twice she passed by the open door, the end of her bathrobe tie swinging idly from her fingers. He kept imagining it was his testicles.
"Your father didn't die, did he?" he said, breaking the awkward, embarrassed silence.
Wilson ground his knuckles into his forehead, pushing his shoulders back to sit rigid and tense. He answered low and wary, as if he were expecting mockery.
"No. He had a heart bypass. He's fine now."
"It's not hereditary."
"No."
House nodded, although he already knew that. He'd double-checked Wilson's medical file for his family history again that morning. He wasn't the one who needed to hear it again, out loud.
"You're not going to have a heart attack, Wilson."
Given some of the things he'd sputtered in the throes of his panic, Wilson's hollow laugh wasn't wholly unexpected.
"You're going to stop giving me them?"
House fingered his pill bottle through his coat. It had been a little while since the urge had been so strong to switch it for Vicodin. A week, at least. With an effort, he forced his hand back to playing with his cane instead. He didn't meet Wilson's sidelong glance. There was not enough hope in it and, leaden in his own stomach, was far too much guilt.
"You know, therapy—" he started brightly, then exhaled, hard, looking up at the ceiling.
Wilson sighed, a repetitious cadence to his voice as if he were parroting the words of his own down-to-earth therapist ruefully. "Sort of works, some of the time?"
House bit his tongue and pulled a slight face in silent apology. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Wilson's shoulders rise and fall in another sigh. He nodded.
Nora strolled out of their apartment, her bare legs elegantly accentuated by the gleaming ribbon of sunlight. House followed the smooth lines and curves of her body up to her face, then hopped to his feet, breaking the world-weary moment with relief.
"No one there except the dancers on your Chorus Line poster," she announced, still eyeing them as though she suspected this were some kind of practical joke. There was no way she didn't believe that they were gay. And really, really, annoying. "Your front door is locked, but open. I guess it didn't catch whenever you shut it this morning."
Wilson sighed from the floor, a reverberating growl. He levered himself to his feet and glared at House, bushy brows scrunched together and his face crinkly with frustration.
"You," he jabbed an accusing forefinger for emphasis. "Forgot to lock up."
House shrugged, hands spread in indifferent responsibility. "Technically, I—"
"You're an idiot," Wilson interrupted. He scooped his papers and keys off the floor, stuffing them all under his arm. "I'm sorry, Nora. I—" He shook his head, flushing as though he were too embarrassed to explain any or even part of what had just happened. He settled for a muttered "Thank you," before hurrying past her into the apartment.
"Thanks," House echoed brusquely. He grabbed his phone and cane and plodded after Wilson, unlocking the door and tipping it closed behind them.
In the corridor, Nora threw up both hands in bewildered despair and trudged back to the elevator.
*
Wilson had beaten a hasty path through the apartment, as if he couldn't quite believe that it were truly empty. He jumped when House stepped into the doorway of his bedroom and sweat trickled in fine lines down his temples. It wasn't tact, House told himself, as he chose to ignore it; it was just that they were done talking about it, for now.
"You ready?" he said instead.
"For—for what?" Wilson blinked at him, eyes still glassy and disoriented.
It was fair enough, House supposed. Panic disorder was a bitch of a thing. Pills and prattling were a half-assed treatment at best and there was not a lot beyond them more sophisticated than a lobotomy. The kind done on the black market, with an unlicensed surgeon, in the back of a truck. Since he'd just got his license back and he wasn't minded to get blood on the Corvette's leather interior, he opted for the old fashioned way. Nolan could say what he liked about deflection; it was a valid medical technique. Puzzles instead of Vicodin. Elastic bands instead of cutting. God instead of alcohol. Calling it diversion or, House's personal favourite, distraction – as in driven to – was pure semantics. It was all a way to take a man's mind off its own self-destruct button.
Right now he needed to get Wilson out of here and his head and his battered bleeding heart. House could maul the super on the way and they'd come back to the Fort Knox Wilson paid for. That way he wouldn't find himself repacking all the boxes that they'd just finished unpacking. House was not, absolutely not, going to spend the next year shacking up in a hotel room. Even if it meant waving the white flag on what had been a thoroughly entertaining battle.
"Poached snake and poker," he conceded reluctantly. "Since you're not dead, we'll go celebrate your birthday."
"Huh? Oh. Okay, yeah." Wilson shucked off his jacket and shirt and reached for the green polo shirt he'd laid out in his usual anal-retentive fashion on the bed, along with a pair of jeans and his blue apron. He smiled suddenly, just the corners visible, before he turned and shot House a wicked look over his broad, bare shoulder. "But when we pick up the ingredients on the way, we're going vegetarian."
[End].