Author's Note: This has been on my hard drive for so long I don't know what to think about it anymore. Not a plea for reviews, just a general warning.
-
He wants to be in bed, head on the pillow, before this begins.
The idea of bed is so wholly focused in his mind that he stands in the bathroom for a moment, staring at the reflection of the desperate man in the mirror because he's forgotten what he meant to do.
He can only barely manage to drag his bum leg over the lip of the tub and actually curls one hand around the bar he had, grudgingly and after many scary half falls, installed in his shower. As he rubs the bar of soap down to his hand, he realizes he is maneuvering it in and around his fingers, as though he were going into surgery. He chuckles slightly at this, then washes his hair.
As the fog dissipates he lumbers into his bedroom and falls onto his side of the king sized bed. He doesn't even bother to put on pajamas, which is unusual and will probably draw Wilson's attention in the morning.
Then, not now.
Now, he pulls the blankets up to his chin and goes to sleep.
--
In the early morning pre-dawn grey he half awakens, long enough to realize someone is running a hand down his stomach and onto his hip.
"Hey." Wilson nuzzles into his ear. House flinches from the contact and shrugs him off.
"G'way," he mumbles.
Wilson pulls back slightly, hurt.
"You okay?"
"M'tired."
Wilson rolls away and there is the rearranging of blankets on his side of the bed. House breathes deep and drops back into sleep.
--
He awakens at noon, irrationally angry at whoever is watching television in the living room. He rubs his eyes with the palms of his hands and rolls over onto his back. He is sweating again and his head is throbbing delicately, as though his skull is being held together with Elmer's glue.
He is going to kill that fucking kid if the television doesn't turn off soon.
He attempts to focus on his breathing, hoping this will lull him back to sleep. In and out, chest going up and down. Breathing makes the pain change, not better or worse, just different, like notes on a scale.
He throws back the blankets and grabs his cane, one hand going to bed side table before he remembers.
This almost makes him laugh.
He heaves himself up and lurches down the hall and into the living room. The television is blaring, though no one is on the couch. He shut its off.
There is a note on the kitchen table saying Wilson has taken Joseph to the mall to buy shoes. House crumbles the paper and tosses it towards the trashcan. He misses by a few feet.
It is probably a good thing they are gone as House can feel the next phase pressing in on him and it's going to be fairly disgusting.
--
He lays on the floor of the bathroom, a place he is certain to grow intimate with over the next few days. He groans, pulls himself up over the toilet and vomits. This has been happening with just enough deviation from any sort of pattern that for the last hour and a half he has been unable to get off the bathroom floor.
About twenty minutes ago he heard Wilson's car pull into the driveway and the front door open and slam. He is still getting used to paying attention to noise; the quiet personal cues of living with other people. In apartments one ignored the other occupant's noises and a consistently flushing toilet was a minor annoyance, not a sign something was wrong.
This is why he is confused when Wilson puts the boy to bed a bit early and knocks, every so quietly, on the bathroom door.
"House? You okay?"
"Yeah…" He coughs as he says this and his voice comes out rough. "Stomach flu. I'll be fine."
The door is just barely open and House pushes it shut with the tip of his cane.
"House?"
"I'll be fine. Go away."
"Can I get you something?"
House doesn't answer because he is vomiting again.
--
He awakens some time later on the bathroom floor. Someone is wiping a cool cloth on his forehead. It feels nice. He knows it is Wilson, not because of the voice, but because of the way the hands feel on his skin.
"What did you take?"
"Nothing," House mumbles, much preferring the cool cloth to questions.
The voice in infinitely patient. "House, what did you take?"
"Nothing."
He feels much better now. Not, of course, well enough to stand, but good enough to be laying back in his bed. He glances at Wilson who is still trying to process what is going on. House would really like to be in bed when he does. He adopts a slither halfway between playing horsie and army crawl. It gets him the few feet from master bathroom to bed and then it's just a quick scramble onto the mattress and his head hits pillow. He smiles.
"You stupid…" Wilson begins, trailing off. "You know, you don't have to do everything all by yourself!"
House opens his mouth to laugh but no sound comes out.
After a moment of tense breathing, Wilson sits on the bed. He doesn't say anything, just leans his back against the headboard and pulls House's head into his lap. His hands pet House's limp and thinning hair.
House closes his eyes and for a moment, just barely, it's like everything is almost alright.
"Why didn't you tell anyone?"
House knew this question was coming. "It isn't anyone's business." This is a bullshit answer, one he doesn't really believe but is suitably misanthropic that someone might buy it if they didn't know him very well.
Wilson knows him very well.
"Why didn't you tell anyone?"
House considers telling Wilson about how long this has been in planning. How many days he woke up telling himself it would that day. How many times he gave up at ten, eleven, noon. He considers telling Wilson about the other time he flushed his pills down the john and how he, well, he didn't run to the pharmacy but…
"It isn't anyone's business," House says.
"It's mine."
"No, it's not."
Wilson is still stroking his head. He doesn't stop but his movements are slower now.
"Yes, it is. What if Joseph had seen you like that?"
House hisses in irritation so loudly that Wilson removes his hands from House's head altogether.
"Why do you think I'm doing this?"
--
Wilson does that thing he does.
Calls are made and House's wellbeing is discussed calmly and rationally into the mouth pieces of telephones.
House is given several days off, Wilson rearranges some appointments.
House tries to sleep.
--
A doorbell rings and in the moment before wakefulness, House is back in his apartment.
It isn't his ground floor at 221 or even the one before that, where the landlord hated him. Was it Birch and 12th? The one where he lived on the top floor and dropped things into peoples' laundry when they hung it out to dry. Condoms mostly, free ones from work.
He hears the doorbell and thinks he is back on Birch and 12th and he's pissed that he has to wake up on his day off to buzz somebody in, probably that sullen moody girl on the fifth floor who always loses her key.
So, when it all comes rushing back like it does he's extra pissed off and extra miserable and of course the first voice he hears is Cuddy.
Cuddy is the one thing in his life he can consistently be upset about. Cuddy is always doing something upsetting.
He considers getting out of bed to inform Cuddy of her permanent position in his life, then throw her out of his apartment. Wait, no, his house. Ha ha, House's house and hasn't that joke been just fucking hilarious since he was five years old.
He considers if maybe he's being a little irrational.
Fuck no, he decides as he hears Cuddy's tone again from the front hallway. He wants her out of his house right this minute. Fuck her and fuck her fucking lost key.
That doesn't sit quite right in his head. He tries to decipher why he's mad at Cuddy but his head hurts and his stomach hurts and he finally just rolls toward the wall and jams a pillow over his exposed ear.
He hears a little mouse noise from maybe three feet away.
House peers out from underneath his pillow at the kid, Joseph.
The kid still looks at him like he's not sure if House is really real.
"I'm going on a trip," the kid informs House. "To stay with Lisa." The kid's lisp is prominent and when this is all over House is going to talk to Wilson about it.
House nods.
"Because you're sick," the kid elaborates solemnly.
House nods.
"Are you going to die?"
"Not today," House says, his voice rough and gravelly. "Not because of this."
"Good."
The door opens and Wilson appears, striding across the room and talking quickly. "Joseph, I told you to pack some toys."
"I did."
Wilson hustles Joseph out of the room and shuts the door behind him.
House sleeps.
--
House awakens to pain.
The pain is a sound ringing all around him.
Wilson pulls him gently into a sitting position. He puts something in House's mouth.
"No drugs," House says, as though just the feel of a pill on his tongue isn't helping. There are two things in House's over focused mind. The pain and no drugs.
Wilson pushes a glass of water towards him.
"Good drugs. Not Vicodin. Take it."
House knows he should think about this. But it's Wilson.
He swallows the pill with the glass of water.
Wilson lays him back down into his pain and he's so pathetic he can't even pull himself into a fetal position. House lays on the bed, shaking in his pain until Wilson's medicine pulls him down, sharply, into sleep.
--
When he wakes again the pain is not so bad and he has thanked God before he remembers he doesn't believe in Him.
He grabs his cane and gets out of bed, the ground rushing up to meet his feet, leaving him woozy and shaken.
He shakes his head to clear it and stalks out of the room.
Wilson is sitting on the living room couch, some paperwork spread before him on the coffee table. His head is in his hands and he's rubbing his eyes with his fingertips.
House feels a momentary jolt of guilt that he struggles to set aside.
"Hey," he says softly.
Wilson jumps.
"Hey," House repeats.
Wilson leaps up from the couch and throws his arms around House's shoulders.
House stiffens and tries to withdraw, but Wilson will have none of it. He tightens his arms and pulls House close, choking back a noise in his throat.
"I'm confused," House says.
"I'm not."
--
Wilson has been kind enough to buy him cigarettes, but not kind enough to allow him to light them in the house.
He is sitting on the back patio, in a lawn chair, lighting Marlboroughs off each other and watching the smoke drift off into the sky.
Wilson is sitting in the chair across from him, a blanket wrapped around his shoulders, nodding off.
"It's a nice place," House says finally.
"Hmm?"
"This place. It's nice."
"I know," Wilson says sleepily. "It's ours."
House smiles and puffs some more on his cigarette. "Go to bed," he directs after a moment.
"I'll be okay."
"So will I. Go get some sleep."
Wilson opens his eyes to look at House directly. House jerks his head towards the kitchen door.
Wilson stands, pulls the blanket from around himself and, before House has time to complain, tucks it around House's lanky body, taking advantage of House's brief incapacitation to kiss him on the forehead before tromping inside.
House settles down in the chair for another smoke.
--
House awakens to pain. A whole fucking orchestra of pain.
He jolts up from the chair and stumbles away, falling to his knees and vomiting copiously onto the lawn.
He rolls now, laying on his back on the wet grass.
The stars are spinning and it's making him nauseous.
Stop the world, House thinks, I want to get off.
--
The phone rings and Wilson has to roll off the couch to answer it.
It's a very nice neighbor woman informing him that there's somebody asleep in his backyard and would he like her to call the police?
"No," Wilson says. "It's my boyfriend. I think he's sleepwalking again."
She clucks gently, but the code of the suburbs is "Mind Your Own Business" and too much social programming wins out in the end.
He fills a saucepan with water and carries it into the backyard, where he finds House's sprawled form.
"House?"
"Hmm."
"House, wake up, please."
"Hmm!"
Wilson dumps the pan over his head.
House sits up in shock. Water drips off his nose.
"What the hell?"
"Come in the house, the neighbors are watching."
--
House is back in front of the toilet.
He's puking and puking and puking and it's never been this bad before, never been this crazy, this intense.
Wilson is sitting next to him, still wearing his clothes from yesterday, matted now and wrinkled, rubbing his back with one hand, like he's a little kid.
He's sweaty and overheated and if he could stand up he'd take a shower but he can't and he doesn't want to lay in the tub and let the water beat down on him and he doesn't know if he could get in and out of the tub anyway.
So he's sweaty and over heated. He smells bad and he's in pain.
This is his life now, he realizes. He braces one arm over the toilet seat and leans his head there.
"Let that little fucker say I'm not his father now," House mumbles.
"House…" Wilson scolds.
And that little chide is entirely too much.
"What?!" House yells. "What more could you possibly want from me?"
The comforting hand on his back vanishes. He doesn't care.
Wilson slowly withdraws from the bathroom and he's all alone with his vomit and his sweat and his pain. House puts his head down on the cool tile and shuts his eyes.
--
Eventually, he does get better.
It's hard to imagine, but eventually he does.
Eventually, he's able to sit up and watch a movie with Wilson. Eventually he's able to take a shower and put on clean clothes and concentrate on things outside himself. Eventually he's able to eat and to walk and to stay awake for more then four hours at a time.
Eventually, Joseph comes home.
It helps that they get him on a new pain management schedule. It helps a lot really. And sure, he's clever enough to know he could get around Wilson's rules and regulation, but mostly he plans a lot and never goes through with it.
His new habit, when he's lost in thought, is to rub his arm, bringing the trans-dermal narcotics patch that much closer to his bloodstream.
It mostly doesn't work.
There's pain. There is a lot of pain. There is pain and depression and irritation and boredom and he'd not quite what he used to be. But he's House and Wilson is Wilson and Joseph, of course, is Joseph and this place, this house, House's house, is his home.