Topsy Turvy.
Author: Storm.
Pairing: House & Wilson (pre-slash).
Rating: PG-13.
Disclaimer: Everything belongs to Greg House. Including his creators. And theirs.
Summary: "I'm not pitiful – I'm in pain! I'd like to see you handle it." What passes for fluff in Storm's world.
"That was incredible."
Stretching languorously on the tousled red sheets, the young nurse – Bette? Becky? Belinda? – tugged a damp black corkscrew curl out of her mouth and smiled. Teeth gritted, her head of department clenched his right hand around the gnarled knot of scar tissue distorting the muscles of his thigh and snorted confidently.
"Well, what else did you expect?"
Beth chuckled, a deep, seductive contralto that tugged at his libido. His eyes strayed over her dusky skin and hourglass curves, momentarily contemplating another round. The dull, grinding ache in his leg took the edge off it, though, and he rolled over onto his side to snag his pill bottle from the cabinet. Little white oblongs clattered against the amber plastic. He dry-swallowed two and scowled at the bitter taste. The heat still percolating in his loins was nothing but a tease. Vicodin was worse than scotch for taking the spirit out of the flesh. That was it for the day. Christ, as if getting old wasn't enough.
Bonnie's hand coasted over the thickened line of his hip, dipping down toward—He sat up, dislodging it, and hoisted his legs over the edge of the mattress.
"You're on shift in twenty minutes, aren't you?"
He didn't wait for her to answer; he'd timed it perfectly. No pawing afterward, no time for a shower and no chance she'd try to take over his kitchen in that godforsaken mother hen way of all women since the infarction. Brooke sighed lazily and the soft rustle of cloth came from behind him as she reached over the bedside for her emerald shirt.
"Are you coming back in?"
"It's one-forty in the afternoon, Bronwyn; the day doesn't end at lunch hour."
"That's when it starts, right?" She laughed again, rich and playful. So. She'd been watching for him to come in had she? One damn lunch date and she was keeping tabs on his calendar. "I guess you'll stay late. Maybe get off the same time I do…?"
"What time is that?" he asked, throwing a long, smoky look over his shoulder for good measure.
"Ten."
Right. He'd be gone long before that then.
"We could meet up." Legs curled beneath her, she traced a manicured forefinger around the edge of the wetness coagulating on the sheet. "Tomorrow's the weekend. No need for an early start."
Set a moving date yet? When are we getting engaged? He knew better than to say such things out loud. Women could hear a hard tone in the most innocuous statements, but pitch them one and it sailed right past unnoticed. All the same, a weekend of it... She was young, energetic, kept her damn fussy fingers off his leg and could suck a ping-pong ball through a juice straw.
"This is my number." She reached for a pen and – oh, who did she think she was, a groupie? – scribbled the digits on his new pillowcase. "Call me."
He shimmied into his jeans and scoffed, chilly and derisive. "If I needed to call for sex, I'd be paying for it." He threw her Prada heels across from his side of the bed to hers. "Get out."
"There's a boycott on the fourth floor."
Head nurse Brenda stood in front of the expensive antique desk in the Dean of Medicine's office, her arms crossed and her freckled face set into the stubborn lines that declared, for once, she was on her staff's side.
Lisa Cuddy looked up from the card that had arrived with the desk, bottom lip still pinched girlishly between her teeth. Lisa. Sorry it didn't work out - again. Stacy says to call her for coffee. You can go back to being annivorcery buddies, compare notes on how good I am in bed. Love G.
She came back to the prosaic with a frown.
"Another strike? I thought the Unions were satisfied with the results last week – it's the first decent pay rise that's been conceded in ten years."
It had decimated her budgeting and embroiled her in another heated round of Telephone with various donors and insurers, but she was wholeheartedly behind it. Upcoming job cuts aside.
"Not formally, no. It's confined to one wing. They're all refusing to work for You Know Who."
"Oh gawd." Cuddy resisted the urge to rub her forehead as the first throb of a headache with a name and social security number bloomed between her temples. "What's he done this time?"
"Eighty percent of the nursing staff." Brenda paused for a heartbeat and continued, lip curled. "Female and male."
"So much for that politically incorrect strategy."
Why she hadn't seen that one coming, Cuddy couldn't now imagine. It was not that she objected to hiring male nurses in military quantities. It was more the mounds of resignation letters she'd be swimming in if there wasn't a reasonable way out of the logjam.
"Wait a minute. Are you telling me the nurses are all refusing to work with him because he's slept with them?"
"Because he's slept with all of them, yes." Brenda's expressive features creased with disdain. It could have been directed at either the nurses or the curmudgeonly Cassanova for whom they all kept dropping their pants. "They're refusing to work with him until he – and I'm quoting – 'stops behaving like a high school jock.'"
"Oh yeah." Cuddy sighed and set the card on the desk, where the parodic Sad Families montage could brighten what was shaping up to be a thoroughly trying day. "That's going to happen anytime now."
"Oh, and there are sixteen complaints from clinic patients this week," Brenda added over her shoulder. Message delivered, she was headed for the door. "All his."
"Sixteen? In four hours?" Cuddy wasn't getting a headache. She had one.
"I think he was aiming to beat a personal record."
"Chase. Kid's got Atypical Progeria Syndrome. It's incurable. Talk management strategies with the mom, do up a laundry list of painkillers, and get the kid to come up with a list of 'gotta do in this lifetime' activities. He's, what, six? At best he's got twenty years. Tell him to get high and get busy. Go.
"Peevy – if you came here for my expert advice, stop damn questioning it. Run another ANA. It's not Lupus until that one time the exception proves the rule. Get out of my doorway.
"Cameron! Get me the status on Joanne Henderson and when Foreman gets out of surgery on George Summers, search her house.
"Hadley, cover my clinic duty – I'm six hours behind on the email consults and I will get this damn paper in before the five o clock deadline or I won't be signing off on yours."
An exhausted Hadley and Cameron exchanged glances in the doorway to the adjoining glass rooms.
"I will if I can go home tonight without getting called back in over the weekend," Hadley bartered.
"Diddums." The sarcasm in their boss's voice carried even over his visible astonishment that sleep might seriously constitute one of the necessities for human survival. "Did you sign up to sit around and play crossword puzzles? If none of the patients crash, you might get lucky. Go.
"Taub – Erin Lukas? If you don't get me the test results for our only interesting case, I'll tell your wife about Lizzie in Accounting. Then you can tell her how well withholding works. Wait. Hold that thought."
He picked up the phone.
"House, it's me." Cuddy's frazzled tones crackled down the line. House shunted the sprawling papers of his latest research piece off the speakers and her exasperation came through loud and clear. "Can you please help me convince You Know Who's nurses that there is a good reason to continue working? Apparently bald, puking, terrified patients aren't incentive enough."
House cast a rueful look at his incomplete article. Seven in ten months. Damnit, he would not be beaten at the last deadline.
"Puking and terrified describe most of the next-door nursing staff," he shot back. He closed the lid of the laptop, unable to resist the blatant appeal to his sense of humour and added affectionately: "Go."
"Erin Lukas—" Taub began as House dropped the phone into its cradle.
"Did I say go to you?" House sprang to his feet, his new sneakers squeaking as he jogged across the carpet. "You, stay. I've got to go and play Lone Wrangler."
He snatched the results out of Taub's hand on the way past.
The nurses stood in a hostile half-circle behind their station desk, most with their arms crossed over their Calamine pink scrub fronts: a mutinous army of Ken and Barbie dolls. Remarkably none of the emergency show-tunes were caterwauling out of the multi-parameter monitors keeping tabs on the shiny-pated proto-cadavars paying reluctant rent on the oncology ward. It was a testament to the loopholes built in by the insurance companies and to the ludicrous commitment people had to the thinnest string of a lifeline that so many refused to settle for the second or even third best cancer department on the East Coast.
"Dr. House!" A red-haired assistant appeared at his elbow the second he pushed open the doors from the Diagnostics wing and hurried through, nodding briefly to the handful of familiar faces amongst the ever-rotating staff lists on the oncology ward. "I don't suppose you need—"
House barely glanced at her.
"Survive six months here and send me your CV," he said shortly. Passing the nurse's station he paused momentarily. "Tina, you tough little hellcat, you I would steal in a heartbeat. Is he in?"
The stoic silver-haired assistant to the oncology head flashed him a grin that was halfway toward the teeth-bared smirk of a lioness: fierce and fearless.
"Prescription Passion is on. It's a rerun and he missed it yesterday when a patient coded. You might want to wait fifteen minutes."
House shook his head. "I don't have fifteen minutes."
She grimaced. "Then I can offer you a chair and a bullwhip."
"You keep them; you'll need them when I'm through."
Folding the notes into his pocket for what was going to be a very intriguing medical later, House flung open the door to the oncology head's office. Reflected in the vertical glass windows either side of the door, the seething standoff of nurses shrank back.
"Not now!"
Back to the door, Wilson clamped a heat pack to his thigh and chewed his tongue to keep himself from cursing out loud. The jagged spikes of breakthrough pain were receding, leaving behind a sensation that his remaining leg muscles were being dragged over the serrated teeth of a dozen knives. His glazed eyes were fixated on the threadbare tracks in the blue broadloom, paced in when the pain got too bad to sit through. His battered wooden cane lay where he'd dropped it when he stumbled from the TV to the chair. The worst kind of medical drama flickered on the screen, but he was too far gone to take in even the most contrived of plotlines.
"Shout louder," a dry voice suggested. "You'll scare the nurses out of my department too. Half of yours are still hiding there anyway and I'm tired of tripping over them."
The prickling tension at being caught, vulnerable, subsided. He snorted softly and straightened out of his agonised huddle over his leg to lean back in the wheeled desk chair, spinning around to face the desk again.
"Come for a critique of your article this time? Last one sucked, by the way."
"Did it?" House strolled casually over and perched on the desk, picking up a lighter and clicking it up and down a staircase made of his fingers. "That's not what the reviews are saying. There're at least two-dozen researchers getting invested in that CIPA project I suggested. Growing pain-free nerves and implanted them in place of damaged ones." His voice was softly amused. "Got to throw them an idea sometimes."
That turned Wilson's head around for him, curiosity almost enough to distract from the din in his thigh.
"You wanted people to poke holes in it," he realised. "You weren't handing them a completed theory. You want to know if it can be done."
House snorted, as if that were too obvious for words. "Ketamine coma didn't work," he countered, equally needlessly. "Can't keep prescribing Vicodin for you forever. I'm getting hit up in the corridors as the hospital kingpin."
"Won't need to. My liver will give out sooner or later." He rubbed his thigh and, to prove a point, popped his tenth pill of the day.
"Good thing I've got a donor lined up."
House held out the lighter absently as Wilson picked up the half-smoked joint resting in the ashtray on the desk edge. He relit it and took another hit gratefully.
"You hiring staff based on blood type now?"
"Aren't you hiring based on clean STD panels?"
Ah, now, that wasn't fair. He made no secret of his alternative pain management strategies; his sugar coating was no thicker than the one the pharmaceutical companies used. He'd slept with no one who hadn't been keen to jump into bed with him; they had no right to be jumping down his throat now. He said as much through a cloud of smoke.
"I didn't promise them anything. I've nothing to promise. I'm…" He broke off, raking a tired hand through his greying hair.
"Maudlin," House cut in. He leaned over and stole the joint, taking a long, lazy toke. "Stop angling for a pity fuck."
Wilson cranked his head around, hurt and incredulous. "Don't fucking pity me then!"
"Quit being so pitiful." House blew a smoke ring and huffed a smaller one through it.
"I'm not pitiful – I'm in pain!" Wilson rubbed savagely his ruined leg, and stared ruefully through the tall glass windows at his collapsing practice. More tired than angry, he muttered: "I'd like to see you handle it."
House's face crinkled into faint, thoughtful lines. He shrugged in under a minute.
"I'd handle it fine," he announced, with breezy conviction. "I'd get a peg leg, an eye patch and a parrot." He wrinkled his nose at Wilson's ugly cane. "Three cornered hats are way cooler than that thing."
Wilson tried to glare and found himself fighting a smile instead.
"Why not replace your hand with a hook and keep a crocodile while you're at it?" he muttered, grudging amusement colouring his voice and earning him an entirely too smug smirk from House.
Outside, the decisive click of red Dorothy heels heralded the arrival of Cuddy. Wilson felt hollow all of a sudden, as if the draught from the open window was blowing right through him. He was sure he was about to get fired; tenure only went so far, after all.
To his surprise, Cuddy stalked around in front of the sulking crowd of nurses and put her hands on the hips of her power suit. Her voice came clearly through the door, crisp and uncompromising.
"Okay. This has gone on long quite enough. You were hired to do a job here, not to stage a sit down protest like high schoolers over a cancelled prom. There is one thing and one thing only that you need to know about Dr. Wilson. He is the best oncologist on the East Coast. So. Unless you're planning on moving to another state get back to work."
"But Dr. Cuddy—"
"Cuddy, please—"
House rolled his eyes as petulant voices rose around Cuddy like kids clamouring for sweets. He tossed the joint back into the ashtray and jumped off the desk.
"Hold that thought," he said, striding over to the door.
He flung it open and stood in the frame, his reappearance alone enough to silence the protesting nurses. House studied them critically, eyes seeking out each one individually. Immediately feet began to shuffle and iron-cast scowls melted into involuntary attentiveness.
"You're wrong, Lisa," he announced brusquely, spinning her around to raise shapely brows at him in a pointedly silent demand for alliance. "There're two things you need to know about Wilson." He nodded reassuringly to her and turned firmly back to the nurses. "One is what she said. Two is that he's a whore. You talk; you know that; you don't get to pull the 'woe is me, he didn't call routine' afterwards. Hold a Wilson's Anonymous group in the morgue, get a pin with I fucked the chief oncologist and I didn't even get a lousy STD, and get over it. Do it fast or I'll have him fire you all faster. There's plenty more graduates from the school of Useless Nursing around, so you'd better prove you aren't one of them. Go."
With a cocky smile for his former wife, he flipped the door closed again and grinned at Wilson. Wilson stared back at him, empty and exhausted.
"That's it? The internationally renowned Gregory House, my only damn friend, and that's the best you have to say about me?"
House pulled a face, unsympathetic. "You're hiding in your office from a string of jilted lovers. You're not exactly earning the big compliments here, buddy."
Nettled, Wilson grabbed the joint out of the ashtray and sucked on it provocatively. "Because hiding in the closet is so much more manly."
House laughed, sharp and sudden. He strode over to the desk, braced both hands on the edge of it and leaned right down into Wilson's face. His bright blue eyes were clear through the veil of smoke.
"Who's hiding?" he demanded softly, breath stirring warm and promissory against Wilson's lips. "Three divorces in ten years, two to the same woman. I gave up my job over that stunt you pulled with Vogler. I got thrown in jail because you played hide-and-seek with that cop and the thermometer. What more do you need – skywriting?"
He plucked the joint from Wilson's startled fingers and swirled it in the air between them. Three symbols, a cyberspace shorthand for words Wilson had never thought would be addressed to the bitter, disfigured cripple he'd become. He stared at House, speechless.
"Get it together," House said, soft and serious. "I'll medicate you for the pain; but I'm done medicating you for being a moron." He went over to the TV and jerked the cable out. "Turn your computer on. I've got an article I need you to look over when it's done."
Swinging on his heel, he headed for the door again. Wilson found his tongue just in time.
"House – what time do you finish?"
House glanced over his shoulder, frustration replaced by a flicker of surprise. "I'll be done by eight."
Wilson hesitated for a minute, afraid to lose the last thing he had going for him. Some stupidly courageous part of him cleared his throat and said gruffly: "Want to spend the weekend?"
House snorted, unimpressed. "You'd better be offering more than that."
Wilson chewed his cheek, unsurprised. With House it was always all or nothing. Out of sight, he traced his fingers over the handle of his second desk drawer, visualising the leaflets for several renowned pain management and rehab facilities. He took a deep breath and nodded.
"How about a lifetime?"
House didn't smile, but he rarely did when he wasn't staging his own stand-up routines. He gave a single nod, the dauntless gleam of intrigue lighting up his eyes. He spun away from the door and in three long steps had reached Wilson's side of the desk. Wilson kicked off his with his good leg and swung the chair around to face him. House seized his hand, pulled him upright and into him: a heady collision course, reckless and long overdue. Their lips met, all tongue and teeth and mutual triumph.
"One condition," House asserted, breaking the kiss only long enough to flash a wicked, apparently irresistible grin. "If we screw this up, it's my turn to sue someone for alimony!"