Gregory House considered himself an iconoclast. He'd never met an institution or tradition that he didn't want to tear down, or at least undermine. But he'd discovered to his chagrin that he'd managed to form his own set of rituals that made his life meaningful. A glass of good bourbon at the end of a long day; a paddock pass for the opening day at Belmont; poker nights and movie nights and bowling nights that he'd thought he could do without until he couldn't.
Too many of those little rituals, he'd discovered to his even greater chagrin, included James Wilson. Some of them even originated with Wilson. It was Wilson, for example, who'd found Mickey's Diner. House had been converted when he'd gone in search of an uncharacteristically absent Wilson and found him huddled in a Naugahyde booth, mourning a lost patient or the end of a relationship, or both. With Wilson, they tended to bleed together. House drowned his sorrows in Vicodin and malt beverages. Wilson took refuge in towers of French toast overflowing with syrup. After the first stolen bite, House had begun to see the appeal.
Now, whenever they both found themselves working until dawn — saving a life or waiting for one to slip away — they went wordlessly together to Mickey's Diner for buckets of hot, strong coffee and an overload of carbohydrates.
Both their patients had made it through the night, though it was only a matter of time for Wilson's. Still, they'd been giddy from lack of sleep and a temporary victory over death, and House had made Wilson laugh at even his most offensive statements about Cuddy's anatomy, so it was a good morning.
But Wilson frowned once they'd exited the diner. "Lend me five bucks," he said, shading his eyes against the unexpected glare of the morning sun.
"What do you need money for? We just ate." House was happily sated with grease, caffeine, and carbs, but he was full, not brain dead.
"I just bought you breakfast and you're balking at lending me five dollars?"
Wilson had a point, but he hadn't actually answered the question, so House felt free to ignore it. "I didn't realize you'd put conditions on your generosity. What would your rabbi say?"
"That I should atone by spending time with the needy. Lucky you." He held out his hand. "I'll pay you back tomorrow. I just don't have any cash on me right now."
"Tell me what you need it for and I'll give you the money." House reserved the right to renege, especially if Wilson's reason was boring. "It can't be for food, because we just ate. It can't be for bus fare or a taxi, because your car is just down the block. Do you need change for the condom machine? Five dollars seems a bit optimistic." He'd be willing to front the money for that, though. To the best of his knowledge — and he'd spent a lot of the hospital's money filling in the gaps of that knowledge — Wilson had been living a monastic life since Amber's death. If it went on any longer, House would have to get Wilson a birthday present from his favourite escort agency.
Wilson dropped his hand. "Never mind. I should have known better than to ask you for even a small fraction of what I've loaned you over the years." Wilson had elevated wounded self-righteousness to an art form, but fortunately House was just as accomplished at ignoring him. It was a far more useful immunity than iocaine powder.
"Generosity should be its own reward," he intoned, but Wilson's reaction wasn't the expected eye roll or scoff of disbelief. If he wasn't mistaken, Wilson almost looked guilty. He narrowed his eyes.
The request had come after they'd left the diner, so it was spontaneous. If Wilson really needed cash, he would have insisted House pay his share of the meal. He looked around, searching for the trigger for this sudden covetousness. His gaze fell on a man standing outside the market across the street. He was poorly dressed and unshaven and held a faded baseball cap in his hands. There was a dog at his feet, curled up on a blanket.
Bingo. Wilson might not be boring, but he was predictable. "You want me to give you five dollars so that you can give it to some panhandler?"
"Well, we could cut out the middle man, but I didn't think you'd volunteer your own money."
He was right about that. "If you want to cut out the middle man, why don't you just buy him some crack or heroin? I bet Thirteen could find a connection for you."
"He's not a drug addict," Wilson replied. "His daughter was killed by a drunk driver two years ago. His wife committed suicide that Christmas. He hasn't been able to work since."
It was bad enough when Wilson handed out spare change to every beggar or busker he passed. Now he was stopping to get their life history. "And you believe that story? Cameron wouldn't believe that story." Three years under him, and a year in the ER, had worn away her naïveté. It was too bad. He'd enjoyed shattering her illusions. "He's playing you. They all have a story worked out." It was a good thing Wilson had House around to protect him from the grifters and leeches who could smell a mark a mile away.
Wilson didn't look grateful, however. "Does it make you happy to go through life thinking the worst about people?" he demanded. "Sometimes stories are true. There was a woman in my support group whose three-year-old son drowned in a neighbour's pool. She has trouble just getting out of bed every day. One of the men lost his job because he had to take time off to look after his daughter when his wife died. But you must know that. Or did you only tell your pet PI to do a background check on the grieving widows?"
The problem with knowing Wilson too well was that Wilson also knew him too well. "Putting you in a grief counselling group is like setting Imelda Marcos loose in a shoe store. I'm surprised you didn't come out with a shopping cart full of fiancées."
"I have them on back order," Wilson replied. "They don't actually go on sale until the mourning period is over."
House would have laughed if he'd thought Wilson was actually joking. But he suspected Wilson had an internal database of eligible women, with full contact information, sorted by dating propriety. He would have to find a way to crash the program before Wilson shed his own widow's weeds. "You should be saving your money, then, instead of giving it away to random strangers."
"Or buying meals for miserly friends?"
They were straying into dangerous territory. House opted for a pre-emptive strike. "If you want to help him, buy him some food or get him a night in a shelter, don't just hand out spare change. Better yet, why don't you take him home with you? Make him your special project. Cheaper in the long run than getting married and divorced again." He didn't give Wilson a chance to retaliate, just launched a second wave. "But that would require more than a monetary investment. It's easier just to drop a few coins in a hat and keep walking."
"Well, normally it is," Wilson said wryly, "but at this rate it's a toss-up."
House ignored him. "You need people to think you're a good guy, so you volunteer for the important committees, give to the right charities, and pretend that you're a well-adjusted, contributing member of society. You became an oncologist, because curing cancer is a noble cause, and you're a clinician, not a researcher, because you get off on patients and their families fawning all over you. But even if Dana Miller never sets foot in a lab again, she'll still have done more to cure cancer than you ever will."
"I get it," Wilson said, his face expressionless. "You really don't want to lend me five dollars." He turned around and pushed open the door to the diner.
House watched as he walked over to the counter. A waitress hurried over, pushing a stray wisp of hair behind her ear and smoothing down her uniform top. She smiled and nodded as Wilson spoke to her, and House made a note to avoid her section the next time they were in. He considered walking away and leaving Wilson to whatever folly he had planned, but he never passed up the opportunity to watch a Wilson folly.
A few minutes later, Wilson came out with a take-out bag and a cup of coffee. He ignored House and walked across the street, stopping next to the panhandler. House didn't have to be within earshot to imagine the hesitant offer of coffee and food, accompanied by a bashful, boyish smile that would have fooled anyone who didn't know Wilson was a sanctimonious hypocrite. When Wilson reached into the bag and offered a sausage patty to the dog, House thought he would lose his breakfast. He hoped Wilson would lose a finger, but the dog sniffed and licked his hand like all the other dumb animals Wilson had hoodwinked.
He watched Wilson speak with the man for a couple of minutes, and saw him point across the street and mime leaning heavily on a cane. When the panhandler smiled and waved in his direction, House knew that Wilson was playing dirty pool. He scowled as Wilson crossed back over to where he stood waiting.
"Not taking credit doesn't invalidate what I said," House said. "You know it was you, and I know it was you, and those two opinions mean more to you than some guy standing on a corner."
Wilson shrugged. "When did it become a crime to want to feel good about myself? I'm not trying to offend your sensibilities by pretending to be altruistic. And I know giving the guy a meal is like putting a Band-aid on a severed artery, but it's food he didn't have before. My motives don't invalidate the fact that at least he won't be hungry for a few hours."
"What do you want, a round of applause? The key to the city?"
"I always wanted to win the Roberto Clemente Award," Wilson mused.
"Pussy," House said. He started to walk away. "A real man aspires to hold the NHL record for penalty minutes."
"Tiger Williams, career," Wilson replied promptly. "Dave 'The Hammer' Schultz for a single season. One of the Broad Street Bullies. Dad took us to the game against the Red Army in '76, when the Russians walked off the ice in the first period. Michael didn't stop talking about it for weeks. He liked to pretend that I was Valeri Kharlamov and he was Ed Van Impe."
House remembered then that Wilson had his own rituals — nights spent wandering the streets looking for the lost, or waiting at a dark street corner for someone who never came. That was one tradition House had no intention of adopting, but it wasn't one he could bring himself to subvert.
"Those that can, do," he said. "Those that can't, memorize box scores and record books. Or play golf." It was easier to mock Wilson than to admit that five dollars wasn't all that excessive an offering, even for someone else's faith. He cracked a wide yawn. "I'm going home. Are you going back to the mausoleum for your dead girlfriend?"
Wilson grimaced and tried to smother a sympathetic yawn. "Can't. I've got a meeting in an hour with a researcher from Penn. I'm not going to cure cancer, but maybe she will."
House looked away. "I'll see you later, then." He'd take a short nap and a long shower before heading back to the hospital to make sure his fellows hadn't killed their patient in his absence. And if he happened to buy a double espresso for a tired oncologist on the way in, he'd still be $2.65 up. It wasn't as if he planned on making it a ritual, or even a habit. Some things didn't need to be repeated to have meaning.