Title: The Life of Brian
Author: hwshipper
Disclaimer: Brian is the creation of hickman1937. Characters from House MD belong to Heel and Toe Films, Shore Z Productions and Bad Hat Harry Productions in association with Universal Media Studios.
Beta: invaluable help from srsly_yes
A/N: In my fic 'verse, this follows Enough of the Déjà vu.
Summary: House has a clinic patient who interests him.
The Life of Brian
"Hi honey I'm home," Wilson's voice called, and House twitched his nostrils and opened his eyes to see Wilson coming in the door, arms splendidly occupied with take-out bags.
House eased off his headphones and reached for his cane. "And that smells like--?"
"Nepalese." Wilson walked through to the kitchen and put the bags down on the counter.
"They have a cuisine?" House followed Wilson in, sniffing appreciatively.
"Enough of one to open a restaurant downtown." Wilson turned his head, and kissed House on the mouth. "So how was your afternoon? Kill anyone in the clinic?"
House sat down on a chair and propped his cane up between his knees. "I got hit on by a patient."
"In the clinic?" Wilson looked up from removing foil containers from the bags, and raised a bushy eyebrow. "Nice breasts?"
House looked at Wilson through glinting blue eyes. "Can't say he had, no."
Wilson looked reassuringly surprised, then grinned. "Nice ass, then?"
House grinned back, reading the unspoken words perfectly: thanks for telling me. "If he hadn't been seriously underweight, yeah, he might. Anyway, I thought you might agree this is a good reason for me to stop doing clinic duty. We can go tell Cuddy together--"
"That's gonna happen. So who's this patient?" Wilson popped open a foil lid. The pleasant, mild curry smell increased tenfold and filled the kitchen. "Tell me more."
House leaned forward and dipped a finger in the curry sauce. "His name's Brian."
House walked into Exam Room One with a scowl, Nurse Brenda having handed him a file just as he had been about to sneak off ten minutes early.
He didn't open the file. The problem was obvious, the man sitting waiting on the table was too thin. Skinny as a rake, with bony hands. His face was gaunt and pale behind clunky thick Buddy Holly spectacles, and a dark brown beard which didn't look like it had been trimmed any time recently.
"How tall are you?" House asked, without preamble, taking a seat. He couldn't tell with the patient sitting down.
The guy looked surprised but answered readily enough. "Um, about six one."
"Then you're about twenty pounds underweight. You're trying to hide it by wearing three sweaters at once, and probably by hiding behind that beard." House continued his scrutiny. "And it's happened recently and fast. Unless you buy all your clothes two sizes too big."
"Actually I do, 'cause I'm secretly a sulky teen who thinks jeans don't fit unless they're showing off my ass crack," the man said, with a twinkle in his eye.
House suppressed a grin at that. He noticed that the patient had light green eyes behind those godawful glasses. "It's been a while since you were a teen. Mid-thirties?"
"Good guess. I'm thirty-five."
"And you've been vomiting away all that weight? Diarrhea?" House glanced down at the file cover to find out the patient's name. Nurse Brenda's scrawl in the first square said Brian. Or possibly Brain, but Brian seemed more likely.
"Both. For weeks. Not hungry, can't keep anything down anyway. Got gas, been tired all the time too." Brian hesitated and went on. "First I thought it was just something I ate, then I figured it was a bug which would pass... but it's getting worse."
It sounded depressingly like a history might be required. House sighed. "Any lifestyle changes when it happened? Stop eating red meat? Start eating red meat? Move recently, change job? And if you switched from one tedious office job to another tedious office job, I don't want to know."
Brian hesitated, and a faint flush appeared in his pale cheeks, visible through the beard. "Well actually, I had a big change of lifestyle at the start of this year."
Something embarrassing. Sex or drugs? House wondered, and mentally bet on sex.
"I quit my job and got dumped by my boyfriend on the same day," Brian began.
House was vaguely amused. What a great fucking day that must have been. Had one led to the other, and if so which? Left the job because of the boyfriend, or got dumped because of losing the job? The latter seemed a bit more likely, although the boyfriend must have been an asshole.
Anyway, interesting as it was to speculate, neither event would obviously lead to extreme weight loss. "And this damaged your health because?--"
Brian's face was very red now, and House guessed they were approaching the sex part. His guess was confirmed as Brian continued, "Well, after that I spent the next six months trying to drink New York City dry, and having sex with pretty much anyone who asked."
"Long slow suicide by sluttishness? Fan-fucking-tastic." House rolled his eyes, and awarded himself five dollars. He would claim off Wilson later. "I'm guessing it wasn't safe sex."
"Not always. But I had an STD screening, it was all clear," Brian hastened to add. "It'll be in your file. I moved to New Jersey last month, came to this hospital for that then. I haven't, um, had sex with anyone since."
"You're still a grade A idiot, just a lucky one," House said brutally, but his mind was already moving on to the implications of moving. "Then the symptoms appeared when you moved to New Jersey?"
"No. Whatever it is, I got it in New York. I was just starting to get sick when I moved--I remember throwing up the day before I left. I thought getting away from the big city would do me good. But it didn't." The flush had started to fade away from Brian's cheeks, House guessed because he had gotten past confessing the sex stuff. "I'm house-sitting for my sister, she's away in Europe for the fall."
"Raiding her liquor cabinet? Still drinking yourself into a stupor?"
"Not since the move." Then, unexpectedly, "I've been learning to bake. My sister has a big stand mixer on her kitchen counter, and I have the Food Channel on twenty-four hours. Haven't got much of an appetite, but it's fun to watch."
"Of all the new hobbies for a guy who can't keep anything down." House rolled his eyes.
"Yeah, it really takes the cake," Brian deadpanned.
House couldn't suppress a grin that time. He opened the file and glanced down through the patient notes to hide it. Apart from the STD screening there was a sad lack of any other recent medical check-ups. House would have liked to come up with some obscure illness connected to baking, but if he'd gotten ill before the move then that couldn't be the problem...
"It's very soothing," Brian added. "Baking, I mean. All the measuring, timing, trial and error...."
"It's probably saving you a fortune in therapy. You need a full physical, including a stool sample. And we'll re-do some of those STD tests." House scribbled a new note in the file. "Come back tomorrow, before you actually fade away."
"Will you do it?"
House glanced up, surprised. "The physical? No, some other sucker on clinic duty will do it."
"I want you to do it." Brian locked wide, imploring eyes onto House, and there was a tiny bat of eyelashes.
House snorted. "You do realize that a physical doesn't actually mean I'll have sex with you."
Brian blushed a little, and laughed. "No, but I was kinda thinking perhaps we could do dinner sometime."
House gazed at his clinic patient with surprise. He couldn't work this guy out. Getting hit on in the clinic was something of an occupational hazard for doctors (and especially so for Wilson, apparently) so he supposed it wasn't too surprising that someone who'd been sleeping his way around New York for six months would try his luck... but that behavior had stopped, apparently. Or had it?
"Can't do dinner," House said eventually. "But tell you what. You're into baking. Bake me a cake--a big chocolate one, with frosting and lots of sprinkles--and I'll do your damn physical."
"You're on," said Brian.
"So you agreed? You're doing this guy's physical, even though you don't have to?" Wilson was incredulous.
"Didn't you hear me? He's baking me a cake!" House scraped a fork around Wilson's plate, making sure to get the last drops of Nepalese curry sauce. "I thought it could be your birthday cake."
"Flattered as I am that you want to give me a cake baked by some guy with an undiagnosed wasting disease, and possibly riddled with STDs, my birthday is, what..." Wilson counted on his fingers. "Five months away!"
"I told him to make damn sure he washed his hands before he started baking," House said with the air of one trying to be helpful.
"You're curious about him. You want to know why he quit his job and got dumped by his boyfriend on the same day," Wilson deduced. "You could have just asked him."
"Much more fun to probe during a prostate exam," House said.
Brian went to a grocery store especially to buy chocolate sprinkles on the way home. He consulted recipes and spent some time that evening baking the perfect chocolate cake.
He knew he might be wasting his time; he judged the odds to be fifty-fifty whether House would be there tomorrow or not. But he hoped so. Brian had liked House from the minute he'd walked in; the stubble, the strong, sinewy arms, the sharp blue eyes, the swift penetrating questions. Okay, House was clearly a jerk, but a jerk who knew what he was doing. And anyway, Brian was comfortable with jerks. He'd spent his professional life dealing with them, as a litigator in his big city law firm. At least, he had until he'd quit his job...
Brian was pleased to find House was indeed there at the hospital the next day, and presented him with a large aluminum bake pan. House inspected the cake critically through the clear plastic lid, and pronounced there were just enough sprinkles on it for the physical to go ahead.
"Okay, take off all those sweaters. Let's see what damage those six months of whoring did."
Brian removed his sweaters (only two today), unbuttoned his shirt, and House took his blood pressure and then listened to his heart through a stethoscope.
"Heart is fine," House said presently.
And there I thought Ethan broke it, Brian thought, letting out a small involuntary sigh, and House looked up sharply as the stethoscope shifted under his hand.
"Nothing," Brian said hastily.
"Spare me the bleeding heart story, please," House said, moving on to Brian's lungs, and Brian admired House's perception.
A minute later House contradicted himself, betraying obvious curiosity. "He dumped you, right? The ex-boyfriend? Same time as you quit your job?"
Brian didn't particularly want to talk about this, but he did want to prolong this encounter with House. "Yeah. We'd been together for five years. He said that I'd gotten boring, and was now both unemployed and boring."
"Charming. And I'm sure Mr. Dumper was the most fascinating person in the world?--"
"He's a chef. He'd also met someone else, some flashy investment banker who's going to set him up in his own restaurant."
"So you decided you'd prove to him that you weren't boring after all." House unhooked the stethoscope from his ears. "By going into meltdown and playing Russian Roulette with your sexual health."
"Pretty much," Brian admitted, feeling his face going red again. He seemed to be blushing a lot around House. Fucking annoying. Brian had always been shy, painfully so as a kid when he'd hated how much he blushed. He could deal with the shyness these days, but he was getting too easily embarrassed around House.
"Not boring, just idiotic," House commented, and Brian nodded meekly. House continued to explore, both with fingers and with questions. "And you quit your job the same day you got dumped. Why did you quit--or were you fired?"
"I quit." Brian figured he might as well try and explain. "I walked into a coffee shop on my way to work one morning, and watched the barista pouring my latte, and I'd have done anything to be him and not me. Anything to be making coffees and toasting paninis, rather than face the brief I knew was waiting on my desk."
"You're a lawyer?" House asked.
"I was. I quit that same morning." Brian looked House dead in the eye. "Too many cases of ripping apart witnesses and shredding the D.A.'s cases, and getting the client off because they brought money and publicity to the firm, not because they were innocent."
"Lawyer with a heart of gold," House was sardonic. "And this was more than six months ago. Not run out of money yet?"
"Not yet," The trust fund had survived surprisingly well over the last year, Brian reflected, but this brought him no pleasure. Some relief, perhaps, that he didn't have to go back to the Firm unless he wanted to.... but no joy.
They'd nearly finished the physical when another doctor came into the room. This one had brown hair and brown eyes, and unlike House, was wearing a white coat.
"This is the reason I can't do dinner," House said to Brian, who cottoned on immediately: boyfriend alert. House glared at the newcomer with a mixture of exasperation and affection, and went on, "Did I ask for a consult, Wilson? I think not."
"Cuddy was so alarmed to see you in the clinic when you weren't scheduled, she asked me to check up on you," the new doctor said cheerfully. "Hello, Brian. I'm Dr. Wilson, don't mind me."
"Hey," Brian said, a little uncertainly.
Wilson peered inside the bake pan. "Wow. Your favorite, House, good of you to pick it out for me."
"It's his birthday cake," House explained to Brian.
"Happy birthday," Brian said dutifully to Wilson.
"Thanks. It's not for another five months." Wilson glanced at Brian with an interested brown eye.
Brian regarded him back with just as much interest. "Well, it'll freeze. Keep an eye on it, though, or you might find Dr. House ate it in the meantime."
"He is in the habit of stealing my food," Wilson said gravely.
"Some kind of booby-trap might be in order, then," Brian said with an air of ingenuity. "A fake cake--where the chocolate frosting is actually--"
"I am right here, you know," House cut in. "Wilson, don't you have a practice to run, or something?"
Wilson smiled and excused himself gracefully, and left the room. House turned back to Brian.
"Prostate exam time," House said. "And I hope you're not expecting this to be sexually exciting, 'cause I can guarantee it won't be."
Brian dropped his pants rather sheepishly and bent over the table, watching as House snapped on latex gloves. He mused on the appearance of Dr. Wilson. Brian hadn't thought about what kind of boyfriend House would have but...this seemed right. It looked like Wilson knew just how to handle House's grouchiness, and they were obviously comfortable together. Brian wondered how long they had been together. He made a mental bet: more than ten years.
"Cute, isn't he?" House said, and it took Brian a few seconds to realize House was talking about Wilson.
"Uh, yeah." Was that the right answer? Could there be a right answer to a question like that? He saw House's eyes gleam a predatory blue, and decided it was the wrong answer. Unfortunate timing as House was just reaching for his ass, in those gloves.
"Lots of people think he's cute," House said conversationally, digging inside, and Brian let out a small yelp of pain. "Three ex-wives for a start, plus far too many girlfriends and a few boyfriends to boot. He used to be like you, in your let's-fuck-everyone-in-New-York phase... After twenty years, I finally decided I'd had enough of this crap. Told him if he didn't stop fucking around, he could get the hell out of my bed and not come back."
Whoa, some story. And--twenty years? Wow. Even with three wives and other significant others along the way, that was impressive.
"And he promised he would. That was three months ago. So far it looks like maybe he can do it after all. And that's why I couldn't do dinner.--Your prostate's fine." House stepped backwards, and added in a bright tone, "Right, we've got blood, urine, stool samples....Come back next week for the test results, okay?"
House arrived back in his office to find Wilson behind his desk, leaning back, hands folded, eyes half-closed. House plumped himself down opposite.
"You like this guy," Wilson observed, peering out from beneath dark lashes.
"That is an outrageous slander," House said indignantly. "Brian is... interesting."
"Same thing, for you," Wilson pointed out. "Since when do you remember clinic patients--or any patients--by name?"
"All right, you got me." House held up his hands. "I've fallen in love with him and we're going to elope just as soon as I've figured out what's wrong with him and fixed it. I'm thinking parasite, by the way. Just need to find out which one."
"He's a funny-looking guy," Wilson said, with an unusual lack of diplomacy. "Those glasses, that beard? It makes him look very... brooding, and serious. But he's not, is he?"
"Nope," House diagnosed readily. "He's hiding behind the glasses and the beard, 'cause he's shy and he's clearly got self-esteem problems right now. Isn't it interesting that after all the crap about you stopping fucking other people, you're the one now worrying about me?"
"Who said I was worried?" Wilson answered readily. He picked up the over-sized tennis ball from the desk, and threw it nimbly to House.
Six months of whoring.
House's words returned to Brian over and over that week waiting for the test results, as he watched the Food Channel and experimented with cheesecake.
Just when he'd finally gotten up the courage to quit his job, at a time when he'd really needed some support and encouragement, Ethan had left him. The traitorous fucker. Brian had had no idea how empty his apartment was until he suddenly found it was just him there. He'd spent a week at home by himself, alone, numb, cold, in shock.
Then he'd spoken to his sister on the phone, telling her he'd left his job and lost his boyfriend, "but I'm fine. Really. I'm going to take a bit of time out, have some fun."
That evening he got drunk at home to give himself some nerve, then went out to a bar on his own for the first time in years. It was less than half an hour before a guy bought him a drink, and a mere fifteen minutes after that before the guy muttered, "Wanna fuck?" in his ear.
"Yeah," he muttered back. Brian had gotten home twenty-four hours later, exhausted, exhilarated, with only a patchy recollection of events and rather worried to find himself bleeding a little rectally. He holed up recovering for a couple of days before he dared venture out again.
Over the next six months, he'd gone out almost every night and consumed more alcohol than in the previous thirty-four years of his life put together. He didn't usually go out with the intention of getting laid, but if it happened, it happened. He almost never said no. He became expert at reading the signals; body language across a crowded bar, raised eyebrows in nightclub bathrooms before slipping into a stall, a muttered come-on cruising in a street.
He tried to make himself uglier. He stopped shaving. He switched his wire-rimmed spectacles for chunky dark frames which more fit his adopted loser persona.
He still got laid. Somehow he didn't get beaten up or killed either.
There were some encounters where he knew he was being just simply fucking insane. Like the time he ended up at some random apartment after a party, half-asleep and naked under a blanket on a couch. Some guy came and joined him, crawling on top of him with an already greased hard-on. Brian sleepily arched his back and angled his hips, and the guy levered up inside him. One swift hard fuck later, the guy came right inside Brian's guts, then pulled out and fell asleep still on top of him. Brian drifted off again himself, uneasily aware that he had no idea who the hell this guy was.
Another time he found himself crashed in a spare room of a shared house inhabited by three stoner guys. Brian had the strong impression that he could have just stayed there forever and nobody would have minded--so long as he was willing to be ass-fucked by whichever of the guys felt horny at any particular moment. As it was, Brian stayed a week, high pretty much just on breathing the air in there, before deciding he'd better go home.
The day before he'd been due to leave New York to go house-sit for his sister, he'd woken up in a strange bed, no idea where he was. He was aware only that he needed to vomit, and fast. He managed to find the bathroom before throwing up. As he'd sat with his head resting against avocado porcelain, breathing hard and wondering if there was anything else to come up, he'd felt a hand on his shoulder and then an unfamiliar voice from above: "Hey. I've called a cab, you need to get dressed now and out before my boyfriend gets home."
It was a turning point. Once out of the city, ensconced in his sister's large suburban home on the outskirts of Princeton, he took stock, and realized how stupid he'd been.
And not just for the obvious health reasons. It had been dumb because it had made him even more unhappy than he was before. The highs had been short and sharp and fun for a while; but the lows were serious and increasingly prolonged.
The following week at Princeton Plainsboro, Brian arrived to find House already there in Exam Room One, waiting with test results. Brian wasn't surprised to find Wilson there too, perched on a table in the corner of the room.
"You have a parasite," House announced. "Giardia lamblia. You need to take medication, eat, rest, and stop rimming strangers."
Brian blinked and felt himself blush at the last few words. "Is that how--?!"
"It's commonly transmitted by water. People pick it up who are dumb enough to drink from lakes on camping trips, that kind of thing. But it's also caused by direct fecal-oral contamination," House spoke with altogether too much relish.
Brian knew his face was bright red now, and was glad to know his beard would be concealing the worst of it.
"The meds can have some gross side effects," House said with an air of helpfulness, handing over a prescription.
"I need to move in three weeks, will I be better by then?" Brian eyed the slip of paper nervously.
House shrugged. "Should be, though some people never actually recover fully. And it'll take a while to put that weight back on. What, is Sis back from Europe? Are you moving back to bright lights, big city?"
"My sister is coming home, but no, I'm not going back to New York, I want to stay in New Jersey." Brian had a very nice apartment in New York, but the thought of going back to it on his own made his stomach churn. He looked from House to Wilson. "Know anywhere I could rent an apartment around here?"
"He could sleep on our couch," House exclaimed to Wilson, his voice full of fake childish hope. "Mommy please, can we keep him? I'm sure he wouldn't be much trouble--"
"You want a realtor, I could get in touch with Bonnie," Wilson said, his tone innocent.
Brian had no idea who Bonnie was, but this was apparently some kind of threat. House was looking at Wilson through snake eyes. House then turned to Brian and said brightly, "Have you considered the Jersey coast? It's the off-season now, there may be rentals available."
This time it was Wilson who pulled a face; surprise, this time. There were definitely undertones to this conversation that Brian wasn't picking up.
"Beaches, ocean breezes, sea air," House continued. "Spent a few days out there myself not long ago. Very refreshing."
"Sounds good." Brian was cautious. It did sound good. It sounded perfect, actually.
"Wilson's got a friend who lives out there," House said, keeping his eyes on Wilson now. "You could give him a call, Wilson, ask around?"
"Yes," Wilson said slowly. "Brian, could you excuse us for a second?"
Alone, Wilson regarded House with a fond exasperation. He knew House wasn't interested-interested in Brian, but he was interested, and that meant Wilson wanted to know more. House simply did not go around helpfully finding places to live for his average patient. Or any patient. Or indeed anyone, ever.
"You want me to call Chris," Wilson said, trying to see where this was going, thinking aloud. "You're... encouraging me to call Chris." Very odd; House was not in the habit of encouraging Wilson to call his ex. "To offload your interesting clinic patient onto him?"
"No," House said, in a much-maligned tone. "To ask if he knows of any rentals in his area. You were listening, right?"
"I'm not sure Chris is going to appreciate you foisting a socially-awkward parasite-ridden guy with a swanky New York apartment but no visible means of support onto him."
"I'm guessing he earned himself a fat wad of cash before he quit being a scum-sucking lawyer. Hold on." House rolled his eyes. "You checked him out?"
"I asked a few questions." Wilson spread his hands out. "You'd have done no less. He hit on you."
House grinned, acknowledging the truth of this, but didn't let up in his tone. "Yeah, and I didn't take him up on it. And I've sent him off to the coast."
Wilson stared. "House, you're not telling me--you're deliberately--House, you're not... matchmaking, are you?"
"I have no idea what you're fucking talking about," House said with acerbity.
"Of course not," Wilson said solemnly. He reached out and flicked the side of House's head affectionately, then took out his cell.
END
A/N: Brian's tale morphs into the story of my recurring OMC Chris from this point on. House and Wilson fade out, so future parts aren't posted here: you can find them on my LiveJournal (link in my profile).