Warning: Crazy POV and tenses to follow.

You Don't Say

If you asked him at any given moment during the day, he could give you twenty different answers, not a one sensical, as to why he deleted those messages. Of course by the time he'd finished weaving his web of verbal frip-frappery and topped it off by hitting you over the head with a comment so misogynist and/or racist and/or homophobic and/or all of the above, you'd forget what it was you wanted to know in the first place.

Oh, right. Why he wanted Wilson to stay.

There was the little matter of the food. You heard them arguing over "clearly labeled lunches" and House making an offhand comment about "sandwich custody battles." It sounded weirdly appropriate.

And after the three stooges had left the shiny room they liked to call an office, he'd stopped tearing into the pancakes (macadamias, who knew?) and savored them like fine filet mignon. Had anyone been watching (like you, perhaps), they'd have been overwhelmed by the sense that something orgasmic had been laced into those mere confections of wheat and nuts, a conclusion utterly inescapable because the expression on House's face—nay, not just his face, his whole body for that matter—was one of pure ecstasy.

You might wonder if it really had anything to do with the pancakes. (Which were delicious, mind you. But was that really the point?)

Then there was the somewhat larger matter of the cleanliness. House was by no means a boor when it came to keeping up appearances, but the fact of the matter was, he rarely exerted effort if a) there was nothing in it for him or b) he could get someone else to exert that effort and get the same result. And getting Wilson to clean up his messes satisfied both criteria because, believe it or not, House enjoys giggling. Watching Wilson fluster and bluster and try so, so very hard to be fair when it was obvious they weren't playing by the same rules gave him many a good chuckle in the shower (wait, in the shower?) and when he was on his way to work. That didn't stop House from absolutely blaming Wilson for the bugs he got in his teeth for his effusive amusement on the freeway—he'd even been kind enough to let him participate in the wonderful process of extracting invertebrate skeleton from his teeth. What were friends for, after all?

If you tried to pin him down about why he was laughing about Wilson in the shower, he'd give you a baffled "are you some kind of new brand of moron?" look and pop a vicodin into his mouth so he'd have a few extra seconds to come up with an appropriately scathing and distracting response. But by now one would hope that you'd caught on to his tactics (though oddly enough it seems that few in his life do—could it be that underneath that verbally and facial-hair prickly exterior lay a charming son of a bitch?) and that you'd calmly block the exits and ask the question again until he answered.

Because, see, there was that other teensy-weensy little matter. Sort of like friendship, but not quite. That's the tricky part, because he really can't give you an answer for that one—half the time he doesn't even want to admit it's there. The way he can feel his eyes crinkle at the corners when he walks in the door and sees Wilson on the couch, but he won't let it move down to his mouth because that would be giving too much away. The smiles he shows Wilson are the safe ones—the ones that are smug, superior, the ones that say "ah, look merry gentlemen how I have bested ye yet again at the game of tomfoolery, would you care for another round?"

But he's catching himself. When he's standing out front of his door and he can smell something—damned if he knows what, he's no fucking Martha Stewart, though he's starting to suspect that Wilson has signed his soul over to her—something delicious and mouth-watering wafting out from under i his /i door, the apartment that has always smelled like wood polish and peanut butter and expensive cologne, well, he can't help himself. The smile grows unbidden, organically, like the food Wilson likes to pick up Tuesdays at the Farmer's Market and then artistically tear up into concoctions that he claims are salads but really look like modern art to House, and ugly modern art—oh, wait, getting redundant there.

What you would see if you watched him in these moments would be akin to watching a neglected plant start to get care. Of course this particular stubborn plant likes to hold onto its brambles and brown edges and even its incredibly cramped root system which would thrive if you could re-pot it into something bigger. This plant likes being cramped, it likes knowing all the edges of it territory and it even likes being ugly and unappealing. That way no one will expect it to turn out something pretty like a green leaf or a flower or some bullshit like that.

Unfortunately for House, Wilson doesn't care about what a tangled mess of vines with a penchant for ODing on MiracleGro wants. He's a doctor to his core and he brings the light and water and sun with him wherever he goes, because he is a lifegiver in the most basic sense of the word. He can't help it, just like House can't help the fact that he enjoys the feeling of Wilson's fingers digging into his soil and gently, delicately re-arranging things. Those fingers are deft and know just all the places where the old growth needs to be cleared and where it's still serving as a scab.

But saying that House can't deny it is technically incorrect. Because even if you asked him point blank, he wouldn't understand what you were saying. He doesn't have that kind of vocabulary and isn't about to take the time to learn it. You might as well be having the "is Chase some sort of British spy, and if so, should we alert the Queen? argument with him. You'll get about the same response.

So when Wilson cornered him in the kitchen, caught between a sink full of dirty dishes and a stove top full of various boiling and bubbling things, he had no answer. He couldn't really explain why he wanted Wilson to stay or why he couldn't get enough of eating his food or why he squirmed in bed when he listened to him in the shower and had images of how lathery the soap must be. House didn't know when he'd become jealous of his own fucking bar of soap or how Wilson had diffused into his space in a matter of minutes. He.did.not.know.

Walk away from it. Smile and nod. Duck!—yeah, the cane was getting a little close there—and pretend you didn't notice anything. Nothing to notice. You know where to draw the line between boss and employee (unlike him ), and if some of that good fortune of whatever's going on at that apartment of his transfers over to the workplace, all the better.

Just smile and nod and be glad that you got the witness the world's (or, maybe just this hospital's) rarest phenomenon: House being okay with not knowing… and even liking it a little bit.