House Call

Part Two

"The mystery of existence is the connection between our faults and our misfortunes." --Madame de Stael

Six-thirty that evening found House in the clinic. Not in an Exam Room, where one might happen upon a doctor normally, but camped out in the patient waiting area. He was sitting in a chair with a rather large group of ailing, bleeding, sniffling and itchy people surrounding him.

"What's going on?" Wilson asked, approaching Cuddy, who was watching the scene from a safe distance away.

"He's telling them a story." She said with a mocking, exasperated tone that couldn't quite hide her amusement.

The Oncologist tuned in to what his friend was saying.

"...So there we were, right in the thick of the woods. Our broken paddles and my cane were the only things we had to protect ourselves, it was getting dark and we were hungry-"

"What about the wolf you shot?" A gangly looking teenager interrupted then, acting as though House's story was some cool new wave of interactive television. "From earlier that afternoon?"

"It was long gone by then," House answered smoothly, sounding only slightly irate.

"Yeah," A woman maybe a little younger than Cameron piped up. "The bear got it, right?" She fluttered long, attractive lashes.

House smiled back, looking uncharacteristically bashful - that was until Wilson caught sight of the manipulative gleam in his eye. "That's right," he agreed, looking at her fondly. "The bear got it. And Jack's hand. He was on the verge of collapsing from blood-loss when we finally stumbled upon this deserted looking cabin smack dap in the middle of these woods."

"Tell me you didn't go in." A wary voice wafted up from the crowd and House just shook his head once quickly.

"Of course we went in." He snapped, sounding insulted. "We were wet, shivering, the sun was about to go down-"

"Haven't you ever watched a horror movie?" It was a female voice that jumped out from the masses this time, sounding a little all knowing.

"Yeah," another one spoke up. "Don't you know never to go in the abandoned building?"

"Yeah, well," House grumbled. "Trust me, when your two options are dying from hypothermia and facing some imaginary ghosts, it'll pretty much be a no-brainer."

"So what happened next?" The impatient demand elicited silence from the rest of the crowd and Wilson was awed at yet again being witness to his friend's amazing ability capture and keep such a wide variety of attentions.

"Well-" And House may well have launched into his tall-tale yet again, had it not been for Nurse Cadre coming down the hall, frowning only slightly at the herd of patients crowded together and looking so intent in her waiting room.

That frown smoothed into a look of understanding when she caught sight of House, the center of attention that he was. Nurse Cadre was a strict-looking old lady only a few months away from retirement. She'd been at Princeton-Plainsboro longer than Wilson, Cuddy or House, and accepted the crippled man for who he was only because of the one common dominator they shared; constant boredom.

Wilson would swear sometimes, if he didn't know any better, that Nurse Cadre and House were related. She was one of the only people in the hospital - other than the ones in his immediate circle of interlocking relationships - that could put up with or stand up to Greg House.

"Hate to ruin the fun," she rasped, placing her hands on her hips sternly. "But the clinic's closed for the day."

There was an eruption of immediate protests from the group, and whether they were upset that they hadn't gotten time in with a doctor, or because they wouldn't be able to hear the rest of Greg's story, was truly a toss-up.

"You heard the lady," House declared when everyone looked back up at him, to see if he would actually comply with the order. "Go home. Eat some chicken noodle soup."

He stood up, cringing in a way that had become par for the course since this morning, and used his cane to point to a middle-aged man near the back of the crowd. "'Cept you."

Turning to Cuddy as if he wasn't all surprised she'd witnessed his entire spectacle. "He needs blood work and treatment for a Grade A bacterial infection." Turning back to the group again, he waved his cane in a semi-circle. "It's been a pleasure."

He was out of the lobby before any more protests could sound.

"House," Wilson animated to Cuddy after his limping friend was gone, "Has left the building."

"I don't know whether to be worried about him or mad at him." Her confusion was genuine. And shared.

"At least he seems to be enjoying himself." The well-loved Oncologist shrugged to hide his own worry, watching as patients slowly trickled out the hospital doors. "I don't think he's ever stayed at work this long. Other than when he's got a case."

"Did you find out what happened to him?" She inquired seriously. "What really happened?"

James just fixed her with an obvious stare. "Right." She sighed, crossing her arms and looking tired. "It's House."

---------------

James Wilson was a skirt-chaser by nature, and always had been. He blamed his brother, actually, because he'd found that when he sat down and thought about it - really thought about it - he could trace the early days of his Playboy persona to bets and challenges put forth by the elder of the two.

He was the middle child, yet he'd lost his virginity first, started dating first, and was the one most often in trouble with his parents for braking curfew and doing other, various scandalous things that tended to fog up car windows and make bedsprings creak obnoxiously.

His parents were good people, and had taught, amongst other valuable life lessons, to never get committed to any person or thing unless he had a true devotion for it. James, as far as romantic relationships went, had had a true devotion for all his wives, and all his girlfriends.

It was just hard to convince them of that when all he ever seemed to do was cheat on them.

So, when his latest girlfriend had kicked him out of her apartment, he hadn't exactly been surprised, or even especially sorry. He knew this relationship was doomed to fail; they all seemed doomed to fail.

In fact - although he tried not to think about it too often - the only constants in his life were his job and the appropriately dubbed 'Stupid, screwed up friendship' he shared with Greg House.

So, two nights later, when he was knocking on his best friend's door at two-thirty seven in the morning, lugging behind him his battered and abused suitcase, he wasn't shocked that his life had once again brought him back to this doorstep.

"Again?" House greeted him when he opened the door.

James nodded silently and was rather pleased when the older man paused for only a few seconds before opening the door wide enough to allow him to step through the threshold.

House, for his part, didn't look much better than he had the day before. The bruises were still deep shades of browns and army-drab greens and the cut had scabbed over in an ugly, thick manner, but his eye had finally un-swollen and opened fully, now simply bruised around the edges.

"Beer in the fridge?' He tried, when Greg wouldn't stop looking at him with those impossibly expressive blue eyes.

"Of course." He mumbled, still studying him. "So what'd you do? Cheat on the nurse with a nurse?"

"House-"

"Or was it an intern?" He interrupted casually. "I don't remember. Her name was Sally, wasn't it?"

"Sara." James corrected, his bag off to the side of the door and shrugging off his jacket. He hadn't told House about his most recent girlfriend, but wasn't surprised at all that the older man had somehow come across the information.

"Sara." House repeated. "That's cute."

"So was she." James said wistfully.

"But someone else was cuter, right?" Greg was incredibly blunt, James was used to that, and it didn't faze him; it was actually rather comforting.

"So," he evaded, "Beer?" Making his way to the kitchen, he pulled open the fridge and grabbed a glass bottle. Standing there with the door open, he pulled off the top and took a long swig. Greg's cane thumped rhythmically against the floor until he was next to him.

James handed him one without looking away from the refrigerator. "God, have you been shopping at all since the last time I've been here?"

"So, what was it this time, Jimmy?" He ignored the younger man's bewildered expression. "Hot blonde at a bar? Nurse?"

"There's nothing in here except left over Pizza and an Orange." He balked, wondering why the hell his friend had an Orange.

"So if Sara was an intern and Jenny was a nurse and what's her face was an actual patient, that means next up is someone not directly linked to your job." House actually had his dating patterns down to a mathematical form.

Somehow, that wasn't shocking.

James shut the fridge and looked at Greg, who was clad in sweats, a t-shirt and seemed to be sagging slightly against his cane. "Were you asleep?"

"It's two-thirty in the morning." Came the answer that could mean anything to the man with the chronic insomnia.

They moved their conversation smoothly into the living room, where James flopped down on the couch and Greg sat slowly at the Piano bench, plucking a note randomly.

"Her name was Barb." James divulged. "I met her at a club Sara dragged me to last week."

"Damn women," his friend cursed them sarcastically. "When will they learn that they can't take you anywhere?"

"I was happy with Sara." James felt the need to tell him, although he wasn't sure why, he knew exactly what response it would get.

"You're happy with all of them." Greg told him easily. "You don't know how to be happy, so you sabotage it when you happen to stumble across it."

"I think you're projecting." James pointed out lightly.

"Says the man with three ex-wives and the most depressing job known to man." Greg bit back lightly, playing out a little tune as he did so.

"What happened to your face?" He abruptly changed the topic, wondering if it would do any good.

"I already told you," House was one person you could almost never catch off guard.

"No, you already lied to me." James amended. "What happened to 'you don't lie'?"

"Everybody lies."

"Yeah, I set myself up for that one." He took another swig of his beer, having almost forgotten that he had it.

"It was a patient." He said suddenly, and when James turned around to look at him, Greg kept his own eyes steadily fixed on the keys of the piano. "I paid a bunch of clinic patients to leave the other day, so I wouldn't have to treat them. One came back and paid his regards."

"Are you lying?" James asked slowly. The words were spoken slower, more deliberately than the other times in the last thirty-six hours when he'd 'confessed' the reasons behind his injuries.

But still, House was an intertwining mess of contradictions and anomalies. As were most people, admittedly, but he was a kick-ass lair to boot.

"I guess it was his wife that I sent away." He said in way of an answer. "She got sick and he blamed me."

"Was she... I mean, is she okay?" House was also a great conductor for guilt. In fact, James had never met someone so willing to blame himself when things went wrong, and he knew losing a patient to a simple mistake like that would bring him down quite a few notches.

"She's fine." House dismissed, switching tunes and playing something classical sounding that was only vaguely familiar to James. "I was actually pretty impressed that he had the initiative to track me down."

"So he just came over and beat you up?" James couldn't help but laugh. "God, that's a little... High School reminisce."

"No, actually he came over, beat me up, then held a knife to my throat until I went to their house and figured out what was wrong with her." He said it so casually, without so much as a hitch in his voice, that the younger man actually had to blink a few times and shake his head sharply to make sure he hadn't daydreamed or hallucinated the response.

"...what?" He finally managed.

"Well, it wasn't so much at my throat while he was driving," as if explaining away the logistics made it all better. "Just kinda pointed in my general direction. But you get the drift."

"He held you hostage at knife point?" James gaped, still turned on the couch and staring at his friend.

"It was overkill, really," House shrugged, still playing that piano. "I probably would have helped them without the added incentive. But hey, I guess he had no way of knowing that."

"House..." James took a deep breath, then another. "Greg..."

"Oh, don't do that." His friend sighed before he could work out exactly what it was he was going to say.

"Don't do what?" He was beginning, ever so slowly, to regain feeling in the majority of his body parts. "Don't be concerned that some psychopath with a knife almost killed you?"

The music stopped abruptly, Greg's hands slapped down onto the keys, making an ugly, distorted sound. "First off, he was never going to kill me. He wanted my help and he knew how to get it. Second, I was actually more worried about him killing me when he was beating the crap out of me, having the knife and wielding all the power seemed to keep in control."

The fact that Greg was concerned about being killed at all was really all James took away from that oddly detached and slightly contradicting statement.

"And lastly, I cured his wife, got them medicine for free, and I'm sure she's gonna be fine. And I changed the locks. Just in case." Greg's eyes met his at last. "So stop worrying."

"I...I... I can't believe you've been treating this whole thing like a...a joke for the last three days." He finally exclaimed. "You could have been seriously hurt!"

"Yeah," Greg acknowledged easily, "but I wasn't."

"He... He could have done anything to you." James went on, not sure what he was trying to gain by pointing all this out.

"Probably." Greg admitted easily, again.

"What if you hadn't cured his wife?" His anger had been growing steadily, although he wasn't sure exactly who it was directed at.

Greg rolled his eyes. "She had Esophagitis caused by an infection. Comes equipped with some nasty symptoms, but very treatable."

"How'd you get them medicine for free?" He circled back on one of his previous statements, still not sure why it mattered. He felt scattered and a little out of touch with reality.

"I paid for it." He said. "I also recommended them a nice doctor at Princeton General."

"Are you going to file a police report?" He demanded, latching onto that, already wanting to see this man behind bars.

"After the whole Tritter thing, I'm never going near a police station voluntarily, ever again." And that's when James Wilson - sweet, kind Oncologist, loved and respected by all - experienced for the first time the physical longing of wanting to beat someone to death with a tire iron - or a similarly deadly blunt object.

He knew Greg's recent run-in with the police had been scarring. Hell, he'd experienced much of the drama first hand; been the one to find Greg passed out from a drug overdose on this very floor, made the deal, risked their stupid screwed up friendship. But for it to have had such a lasting affect that the older man wouldn't even consider going to the police now, when such an obvious crime had been perpetrated against him, well, that was more than a little frightening.

"Stop worrying." Greg said casually, seemingly reading his thoughts. "It's all over and done with."

"You're underplaying this." James practically snarled at him. "You were scared and traumatized and you're trying to make that go away by turning it into a joke."

Greg nodded, looking at him thoughtfully, his eyes dancing with intense and interwoven knowledge. "Or," he said casually. "You're upset that I didn't come running straight to you after the fact. You feel left out because you didn't get to play hero and you're trying to upset me now so you can."

James balked. The notion that he would want his best friend to become upset and act traumatized for the sake of his own neediness was completely...

Well, damn it.

"Why didn't you come to me?" His tone was softer, more subdued. Realization finally hitting hard.

"It was no big deal." Greg shrugged.

"No, of course not." James laughed a hollow laugh that carried the polar opposite of humor with it. "Crazed patient with a knife. No biggie."

"He wasn't crazed and he wasn't my patient." House repeated. "Can we stop talking about it now?"

"You're the one who brought it up." James bit back.

"No," House rolled his eyes, tone obvious and plain. "You did."

"You told me the truth." He noted. Which, with Greg, was a fair point to make.

"Would you have let it go if I hadn't?" He retaliated, and James had to concede a little.

Silence stretched between them for a while. Greg shifted his cane from hand to hand, spinning it in the air occasionally; James sipped his almost empty beer and caressed the smooth leather on the back of the couch.

"Are you going to tell Cuddy?" He finally inquired, still not ready to do as his friend asked and let it go. He still felt a little hurt that the Diagnostician hadn't come to him when he could have helped, and more than a little guilty, as well. That he hadn't been paying more attention, that he hadn't pushed it farther when he so obviously could have.

He'd fallen into one of House's traps, for the first time in a long time. He'd let his best friend divert attention away from himself, let him joke up so many walls of defenses that he couldn't see what was really going on within them. He'd been so caught up in his own life, his own circle of meaningless romantic drama, that he'd failed to notice.

He wondered absently, if Sara hadn't kicked him out tonight, if he ever would have found out about Greg's near-death experience.

"No." The older man answered his previous question. "She wouldn't believe me-"

"Yes she would." James snapped at once, almost eagerly, hoping to convince him to take some sort of action. "You're an ass, House, but she knows you wouldn't lie about this."

"-and even if she did believe me," he went on with what he'd been saying before, not paying any mind to his best friend's helpful words of optimism. "All she'd do is insist on filing a police report. And since I have no evidence-"

"You went to their house, right?" James was encouraged when he nodded. "You know where they live, you got them prescription-"

"I'm not telling Cuddy and I'm not filing a police report." The older man snapped, suddenly angrier than he had been all evening. "And if you try to do either, I'll claim I was lying."

Slowly, the Oncologist shook his head back and forth. "God, House," he said wearily. "You sound like a battered housewife."

"Just drop it, Jimmy." Greg's tone was borderline pleading, still tinged with anger, and there was really nothing more James could do for his friend except agree and let the subject go.

--------------

The next day at work, Wilson wouldn't let his mind wander. He was tired, emotionally drained from the previous night's conversation, physically exhausted from staying up so late and sleeping what few hours he had on the lumpy cushions of Greg's sofa. He found that he could only keep his focus on one thing at a time. So, all morning and most of the afternoon, he made sure that one thing was work.

In fact, he had comfortably blocked out the existence of anything else, until four-oh-four rolled around. When one of his nurses knocked on his door and said in an undisguised exasperated voice when she entered his office, "Dr. House was looking for you."

He found House after a while of searching. When he wasn't in his own office, on their adjoining balconies, the cafeteria, an Exam Room or any of the other places he normally frequented, James was about to go up to the roof, knowing his friend tended to hide up there when he needed to escape something that was bothering him.

Only, on his way through a hallway to get to the staircase, he found his friend. He'd been subconsciously glancing in every room he passed on his way to the roof, just in case, and he'd seen the back of Greg's head, and the telltale form of his cane setting on a bed next to a patient that James knew was one of his own.

Sliding the door open gently, he caught the dying end of the young boy's giggles, before pulling the glass wall closed behind him and standing there firmly, hands on his hips, torn between disbelief and amusement.

"Dr. Wilson!" The seven-year-old greeted him enthusiastically as the older doctor slowly turned so he too could face the Oncologist. "Dr. House was telling me about the fight he got into with a Gorilla at the zoo."

"Was he now?" Wilson didn't want to say anything discouraging in front of his patient, but sent his friend a look with a mixture of emotions clearly displayed.

"No," Greg rolled his eyes, disregarding his glare entirely. "I was looking for you. Kevin here, just wouldn't stop bothering me about it."

To James, the statement seemed very cold and almost mean, but the young boy giggled sweetly, in a way his doctor hadn't heard in a long while, and not for the first time, he wondered what secret language Greg had with children that he just couldn't grasp. It was especially odd, given how much he claimed - and even acted like - he hated them.

"Well I'm here now." He pointed out, "What do you want?" And if it came out a little harsher than normal, Greg didn't seem to notice, or he ignored it.

"I was hoping for a consult." He made no effort to move from where he was seated on the side of Kevin's bed. "How does a forty-five year old male, crippled, get home when he was driven to work by his overly protective and guilt-ridden best friend, who went to monumental lengths to make sure that said cripple wouldn't be able to ride his bike to work?"

Kevin giggled again and Wilson sighed. "I didn't go to monumental lengths." He argued somewhat weakly.

"You hid my keys." He pointed out.

"It was raining." Was all he could come up with to defend himself.

"It was drizzling." House amended, and turned back around to Kevin before Wilson had a chance to respond. "Such a worrywart." He jerked a thumb in his direction. "He wouldn't even jump in and fight the Kola Bear."

TBC...

I was thinking about just leaving it at that, but it feels like there needs to be some more resolution. I'm going to try to add one last part that may or may not turn into slash. In the mean time, your comments are much appreciated.