To go where all the strange ones go
And just like that, Wilson decided to move out.
House found him one morning reading through the classifieds, drinking coffee and circling an ad here and there with a blue pen. "What did you in?" House asked.
"You didn't replace the toilet paper," he said smoothly, automatically, without even looking up from the paper.
"Huh." How disappointing. After all that trouble yesterday to fill Wilson's briefcase with extra-large tangerine-flavored condoms, it was something this banal that defeated him. "How camelish of you, to collapse under the weight of straws."
"Remember, we camels spit," Wilson warned.
By the end of the day Wilson had squared away a new apartment. When House heard of its location, he tried to remind him that the bogeyman and his nefarious friends hung out there. Wilson waved off his concerns, saying that he'd been there before ("buying drugs?") and that it wasn't anywhere near as bad as people made it out to be. As long he was careful, he'd be fine. He seemed quite determined to move out, and House wasn't one to insist on defending his friend's best interests. If he wanted to live in a crack-whore den, so be it. Maybe while he was there he could pick up some new hooker contacts for House.
With the apartment empty of both foreign persons and objects, House was exuberant. Wilson's presence didn't demand I too /I much propriety and social niceties, but he still required some nonetheless. And, finally, a full night's worth of sleep!
All in all, he was feeling something nearing jovial the next day. He almost caught himself nodding at Cameron's good-morning smile, and stopped himself just in time. He scowled instead—wouldn't want to give her the wrong idea—but she kept right on, lips still all bent upward. Maybe she could smell the cheerfulness on him. This was bad. He didn't want to let his slaves get happy; it led to bad work ethics. The way his department worked, someone would probably die if anyone got too self-satisfied.
He swung by Wilson's balcony door, just to see how the old doctor was getting along, but his door was locked. It turned out that he hadn't even come in that morning, with the flimsy excuse of setting up his new apartment. House snorted when he heard the news. He could just see Wilson carefully planning, as if it mattered, where to put up each painting— but Wilson didn't have any paintings to hang at the moment. What little he did have wouldn't take that long to arrange. Perhaps he was buying a whole new apartment's worth of furniture and goods, to help wash away the taste of the memories from his old place and ex-marriage.
House didn't take Wilson's absence to heart on the first day, nor on the third, and didn't wonder at the lack of phone calls updating him on the latest prices on bookshelves and tables. In fact, he was so overdosed on Wilson from the past few weeks of living together that the lack of contact came as a relief, like going for a cruise on the Caribbean.
By the fifth day of work House was tired of his metaphorical vacation and wanted to go back home. It had been over a week since he'd last seen or heard from Wilson, and while he tried to fill the gap by annoying his interns instead, it wasn't the same; they didn't annoy him back. Not intentionally, anyway. Cuddy wasn't a good substitute either: instead of annoying House back, she tended to rip him new holes where he least needed them.
He asked Wilson's new aide (or personal assistant or whatever politically correct term was currently in fashion) if she knew when her boss was coming back in. She blinked her beautiful clear blue eyes at him—the reason why Wilson never criticized House for hiring Cameron was because he too preferred to work with pretty women—and supplied, "He's been back for two days."
"Just testing to see if you're on toes. Stay there, little ballerina," he said, to cover the fact that he hadn't known, and she rolled her eyes, thinking it was another one of his unfathomable pranks.
Wilson had vanished while in plain sight. This was curious and, therefore, fascinating.