As he stood in his office, surveying what had once been a neat and perfectly organized desk, James Wilson reflected that it was often inconvenient having a genius for a best friend.
It wasn't a question of feeling inferior -- he had grown up in the shadow of brilliant men and women, and it was a lot easier to follow House's medical leaps of logic than to understand quantum mechanics, though the potential for violent disagreements was about equal. As a child, he had been kept awake at night not by his parents arguing, but by debates over string theory that lasted until dawn.
And while he would never claim to be House's intellectual equal, keeping a genius with the attention span of a two-year-old interested for the better part of fifteen years was no small achievement. Certainly years of association had honed his innate talent for deception, and the elaborate ruses required to fool House even temporarily kept his wits sharp. His plans didn't always work out the way he'd intended, but when they did, they were infinitely more satisfying then the bush-league schemes that had been his training ground in university.
Nor was it a question of patience. House drove everyone around him crazy. That was a given, like the backlog of Monday morning messages after a relaxing weekend, or fresh snow melting into grey slush. Wilson generally wanted to strangle House at least once a day, but that was more than offset by the number of times House made him laugh each day. And if he were being honest with himself, it was probably less frequently than House wanted to strangle him.
Wilson could live with the superior attitude and the erratic behaviour. He'd grown accustomed to the complete -- and deliberate -- lack of social skills. Smoothing ruffled feathers and soothing hurt feelings had become second nature to him. What he couldn't always handle was House's pathological need to imprint himself on every aspect of Wilson's life. And because House was a genius, the imprinting took form in ways Wilson could never entirely anticipate. Background checks on his girlfriends were standard, stalking and ambushing an everyday occurrence. He could deal with that. But his patients -- if not his patience -- were off-limits.
The door opened behind him and he recognized the pattern and pace of Cuddy's footsteps.
"Oh my," she said, and he sighed at the laughter in her voice. "What happened here?"
"What do you think happened?" he snapped. "House happened." It would be funny, he supposed, if it were someone else's desk. But having the contents of his filing cabinet emptied and rearranged in three piles on his desk, helpfully labelled Dead, Dying,and Reprieved, was less than amusing to him. He had to admit, though, that the height of the third stack was at least somewhat encouraging. He was less encouraged by the Build-A-Bear dressed in widow's weeds that was perched on top of the Dead pile. "Can't you find a case for him?" he whined. "He doesn't mess with my patient files unless he's completely bored and has run out of ways to make my personal life a nightmare."
"Unfortunately the Princeton area is experiencing a mysterious illness deficit. The only people dying, it appears, are cancer patients." But even the middle files were fewer than usual. Cuddy patted him on the shoulder. "I'll call around and see if I can drum something up. I was going to ask if you had time to look through some residency applications with me, but I can see you have your own paperwork to deal with."
"Ha, ha," Wilson said flatly, but relaxed enough to manage a small smile. "I need to get this cleaned up before my next appointment, but I could drop by your office after rounds. Maybe there's a particularly keen and cheery applicant who's interested in a diagnostics rotation."
Cuddy shook her head with mock disapproval. "That's just cruel," she said. "Sacrificing a baby doctor like that. I'll pull some possible files."
He had half an hour before his next patient would arrive, but of course House had stacked them in an order that only made sense to him, so it took forever to realphabetize them. He was just putting away the Reprieved pile, when he saw a name that was out of place. He opened the file and found an article, obviously ripped from one of the international medical journals House subscribed to, attached to the latest test results. House's familiar handwriting translated the key information from the original German. He glanced out the window, across the balcony, to see if House was in his office.
Not unexpectedly, he was leaning back in his chair, feet up on his desk, bobbing his head to whatever tune was playing on his iPod. Wilson hopped across the low wall and slid open House's door. He waited almost patiently until the song ended and House deigned to lower his feet back on the ground and look at him.
"That's a little optimistic, don't you think?" he asked, handing the file to House. The patient had esophageal cancer. The original tumour had been surgically removed, but a secondary tumour had appeared that wasn't operable. He'd been responding well to the latest round of chemo, but Wilson privately gave him no more than twelve months. The results of the study weren't promising much more than twice that.
"Everything's relative," House replied. "We're all only ever temporarily reprieved. Besides, they've been having good success with tumours in that location. You're the one that gets excited over an extra year."
A year to a nine-year-old was different in relative terms than a year to a fifty-five-year-old, but the principle was the same, Wilson supposed. Still, he didn't allow himself to be optimistic. "There aren't any clinical trial partners in the United States yet," he pointed out.
"He has a passport and a bank account that's way healthier than he is," House retorted, and Wilson really didn't want to know how he knew that. "You sweet-talk a few colleagues, I'll make some threatening phone calls, and he'll be an anonymous file in no time."
The patient's daughter had been married in September, Wilson remembered. Another year might give him enough time to meet a grandchild. "Hold off on the threatening calls for now. I know someone in Stuttgart who owes me a favour." He glanced at his watch. His patient -- who had been safely in the Reprieved pile for nearly a year -- was due to arrive any minute. "You do know it wasn't necessary to rearrange my filing cabinet just to bring that study to my attention," he said.
"If it had been necessary," House replied, "I wouldn't have done it." He put his earbuds back in and leaned back in his chair.
Wilson knew when he was dismissed, so he returned to his office and filed the rest of his success stories away. It occurred to him, however, as he looked at his once again neat and perfectly organized desk, that it was in fact very convenient having a genius for a best friend.