Part Three:
It was nearing six a.m. when House snuck out of bed, leaving a shallow, empty depression cooling in the pre-dawn blue dark. Scooping his cane from the floor, where he'd left it so that it wouldn't clack against the headboard it was normally hooked over, he tiptoed lurchingly around to the other side of the room to pre-empt the penultimate summons of the alarm clock. The soft click of the button as he shut it off made him grimace, sounding as loud to him as the ear-splitting shrieks it forestalled. But there was no movement from the heap of Wilson-shaped pieces buried conclusively under the covers.
Eyes straining and the back of the clock tilted towards the vaguest hints of orange where the streetlights patched the curtains, he reset the alarm for nine a.m. Wilson had woken readily enough over the course of the night and he'd thrown up again only when he'd been too sleepy to recall that water needed to be swallowed, not inhaled. It would do no harm now if he were out for two or three hours rather than one. House put the clock back on the nightstand beside the half-finished mug of chocolate and Cut-Throat Bitch's picture, which by some unfortunate miracle hadn't broken when Wilson pitched everything across the room. He considered laying her flat on her smugly smiling face but, dead or alive, she held some thrall over Wilson, and Sinatra had a point: sometimes a man had to have whatever it took to get him through, be it tranquilisers, Jack Daniels or a dead chick's mugshot on the nightstand.
Pausing only long enough to further muffle the rubber tip of his cane with one sock and secure it in place with the other, House crept over to the door. He left it slightly ajar and set off down the hall, sacrificing dignity for the sake of stealth by using the wall as well as his cane to brace himself. The effort quieted his usual clomp-step to a desynchronised tapping. Picking his way through the smoky shadows gathered in the corridor and lounge, he collected, from where he'd casually discarded them last night, his black and red leather bike jacket and battered backpack.
He carried them over to the coffee table and perched on the couch. Inside the rectangle of sallow light coming in through the window from the street, he opened up the bag. The thing was jammed full to bursting, thanks to that Be Prepared Boy Scout Wilson. The idiot had skipped half his lunch break yesterday, and a great opportunity to gossip about the new tranny anaesthesiologist, to run an errand to the hospital shop. He'd cornered House in the elevators on the way back up to their adjoining offices and presented him with three new pairs of socks, a pack of boxers and one of those fussy little travel kits containing a toothbrush and paste, comb, flannel and a bottle of shampoo-cum-shower gel.
House dug that out first and eyed it with much the same distaste as he had the first time. Whichever Taub-sized moron had invented them ought to be shot. He'd tried to tell Wilson that he wasn't vacationing with the seven dwarves, that the New York trip was only three days for fuck's sake, and that despite it being the cleaning lady's week off, he hadn't entirely run out of washed underwear: Wilson had two whole drawers full that he could purloin. But all that had got him was a dimple-flashing grin, the inevitable quip about Caustic being second cousin to Grumpy and the hi-ho, hi-ho theme song floating off-key over Wilson's shoulder as they parted ways outside the glass doors of the DDX room.
The travel pack impacted with the coffee table with more force than he'd intended, as it occurred to him that had been the last time he'd seen Wilson until Chase had paged him with the 911. He was binning the stupid kit the first chance he got; there was a mawkishness about having it now that it had become associated with the early symptoms of nostalgia. He scowled at ferociously at the unused – unusable – Tinkertoy items in their translucent box. He didn't see why Wilson should care if House's regular toothbrush emerged from the bottom of his bag covered in accumulated fuzz and dirt. It wasn't like he had to use it and the exchange of germ-infested fluids that went on during kissing didn't magnify exponentially based on whether or not a toothbrush lived in a plastic case.
Not, he realised, with a sickening lurch of his gut, that it mattered any more. Wilson would probably kick him out in the morning. House having desperately scattered as many of his guitars, clothes, sneakers, books and general junk all over the apartment in an attempt to claim as much of a foothold in Wilson's life as Wilson had in his didn't do a damn thing to prevent him pulling up the welcome mat. Wilson kept stacks of moving boxes flat-packed in the second bedroom, as though he'd decided that, with three divorces behind him and a dead girlfriend, any future relationship he had was doomed to end in disaster. He was probably right.
Whatever hearts and Hershies crap Wilson had deluded himself into thinking he had with CB, it was a lot closer to happy than he could possibly get with House. Their relationship was a cut-and-shut: two half-wrecked, run-hard, old bangers soldered together because they were past fixing up separately. They weren't meant to be or any other Hollywood bullshit. They didn't belong together. But, with the worst bits sawn off and a lot of willpower, somehow, they'd become roadworthy. Most of the time they cruised along okay, with a few blowouts, the odd breakdown, and a stall or two thrown in so they never got too comfortable with going absolutely nowhere. They weren't built for this, though. House had no idea if tonight's fiasco meant that they'd just wrecked completely or if they were going to be able to rattle on somehow with a huge spanner jammed in the works. Even if Wilson didn't remember what he'd said in the parking lot – or if he was going to forget about it for as long as he needed the ride to and from New York – he wasn't going to be in the mood for any of kind of backseat sexcapades for some time.
Which brought House back to the task in hand. Dumping all of Wilson's dubious gifts onto the floor, along with the screwed up tangle of a suit jacket he'd been dragging to and from the office because he was too lazy to unpack it, he turned his attention to the items already piled up on the coffee table. A thoroughly suspicious Chase had been solicited into bringing them over earlier in the evening. It hadn't been the medications House had requested that had perplexed his former fellow. It had been the laptop and the miscellaneous patient files. Files, moreover, that he was legitimately entitled to have, rather than the ones Chase had no doubt expected: Wilson's personal file or his recent cases, filched from the Oncology wing. House made a mental note to call Chase, Foreman and Cameron in on a weekend or two soon to run differentials on a few of the unsolved cases that he spent his time off tinkering with. By Monday, they'd be obliged to come if they wanted their paycheques.
The patient files were, admittedly, a ruse. He'd wanted his laptop so that he could hack the hospital's mainframe for the existing records on Wilson's last cases and especially the two jerks who had attacked him in the showers. However, since House didn't want Chase to guess and alert Cuddy, he'd asked for a few of the old files out of his bottom drawer too. He'd claimed that waking someone every hour was boring enough to put anyone to sleep and he'd rather work than watch TV. Less chance of getting distracted for long enough for Wilson to slip into a coma.
To give him credit, Chase hadn't bought a word of it. If he'd figured out what House was really up to, though, he hadn't said or done anything to make Cuddy change the mainframe password. It wasn't entirely surprising. Of his three former fellows, the Aussie was the one most like him, a motivation he hadn't admitted even to Wilson that had lay behind his summary firing of the man eighteen months ago. No one deserved to end up like him. He was two parts stunned and four parts disappointed that, after working for him for nearly four years – and leaving voluntarily – Foreman and Cameron were still gullible enough to believe that he really spent every Saturday and Sunday drunk or high or both, watching television until he ran out of soaps and downloading porn to watch after. Clearly they hadn't learned as much as he'd expected. Sure, they'd picked up enough medicine to make them marginally less moronic than most of the other doctors in the hospital, but they'd missed out on at least five valuable House lessons.
Number one was that the television networks didn't have enough good shows to entertain the brain dead, let alone someone like him for forty-eight hours solid, even with TiVo, six zillion channels and the adult Pay-Per-View. Numéro deux was that with no annoying patients or a rabid administrator with battering rams strapped inside her bra to contend with, there was a very simple equation: less pain equals less pills.
Nummer drei was that paying for sex and company was great for the shock value if it was all that could be had. But free, willing and not unwelcome company had turned out – mostly – to contribute to the above equation too. Actually, his fellows had probably figured that one out before he did. Número quarto was that smokin' hot sex literally beat porn hands down. He'd utterly renounce wide-screen and surround-sound for the live version any day. Pái míng dì wǔ – the most crucial lesson of all – was that everybody lies. Especially sneaky drug-addicted diagnosticians.
Whilst he was thinking, House emptied the irrelevant case files out onto the coffee table and booted up his laptop. He checked that his top-of-the-range web cam was set up to take snapshots, switched the sound over to mute, closed the machine into standby and tucked it into the emptied bag. He transferred a series of unused plastic bags, slides and vials from the SOEC kit he'd run part of at the hospital from his jacket pocket into the outer pocket of the backpack. He dug his glasses out of the tangle of stuff he'd discarded onto the floor and put them on his head. Lastly, he got out a small bottle of injectable lorazepam and drew up a one mg dose into the syringe that had been secured to the side of the glass with an elastic band.
Discarding his cane, he shouldered the bag and picked up the syringe with his left hand. Using the wall to balance himself, he limped back to the bedroom. He shut the door as quietly as possible, lips twisted into a grimace in case the change in the light levels made Wilson stir. It didn't. House lurked by the door for a few moments, waiting for the natural hush to settle: the annoyingly irregular drip of the sink faucet in the en-suite, the occasional patter of cat feet along the window ledge and the intermittent swoosh of cars passing on the road. When he could hear nothing but that, the tuneless humming of a drunk wandering down the sidewalk, his own stifled breaths and the slightly too rapid huff of air in and out of Wilson's lungs, he stole back to the bed and climbed onto it.
He settled himself with his good leg bent beneath him and the other stretched out. His body was alongside Wilson's hip and his toes touched the dented pillows where he'd been lying, wide-awake, since nine-eighteen that evening. He put the syringe between his teeth. One by one, he unpacked the things he'd brought in from the lounge and spread them over what was left of the crinkled cover that Wilson was hogging. He opened the laptop. It reanimated with a burst of light and he stifled it hastily under a pillow. Wilson took a deeper breath and grunted in pain, but he didn't wake. Dimming the screen, House woke up the photography programme and checked the cord on the web cam was long enough to manoeuvre. He made absolutely certain that it was sending only to his hard drive and not to any part of the world-wide-web, then set it down with the warm edge of the casing touching his outstretched calf. It left the screen visible to him but, tucked safely behind his bad leg, it was out of range if Wilson rolled over and made him yelp. Finally, he took the syringe out of his mouth.
For a moment he did nothing. He simply stared down at the only real friend he'd ever had. Isolation and insomnia had been his only constant companions for decades. Shuttling to and from military bases throughout his childhood and adolescence, rarely spending more than a year in the same time zone, sometimes as little as a few weeks or months, had wreaked havoc with any sense he might have had of stability or sanctuary. Constantly acclimatising to new people and places, routines and customs, had stressed him into a near-permanent state of acute alertness, his brain hurtling in overdrive as he battled to process, to adjust, to familiarise himself and find his feet amidst the deluge of sights and sounds and smells. There'd been no expectation of finding a home – yeah, like that wasn't a twist of nomenclature irony – and he'd never been the kind of man who found it easy to fit in or make friends.
Wilson, though… Okay, so now House had a post and an apartment that suited him he'd pig-rooted, seeing no need to ricochet around like that ever again. These days, he was pretty easy to stay in touch with, geographically speaking. But he was accustomed to the loneliness he'd grown up in; he neither hated nor cared for it; it simply was. He knew how to work within it, how to do what he was best at, without having to question who he was or have his feelings and behaviour warped by unnecessary transitions. Loneliness was homeostasis. He'd fought to keep it, whatever the cost.
Wilson hadn't given a damn about that. No matter how many times House slammed the door in his face or refused to pick up the phone, he'd kept calling and he kept coming over. And he rarely returned the same favour when House's own piqued curiosity got the better of him. That curiosity had become fascination, become obsession. It had become friendship. Become more. Become whatever the hell came after stalking had been left a few stops back along the line. Wilson headed up the very short list of people House gave a damn about. He was king of the hill, the big cheese, the grand poohbah, House's one and only go-to-guy. If the psycho-bitch universe meant to call in the debt he owed Wilson for giving a toss about him, she could damn well bring it on.
Scarcely aware of what he was doing, House reached out and brushed a fluffy cowlick of bright brown hair off Wilson's forehead, the better to take in the expressions playing unconsciously across his features. It had become habit to watch Wilson sleep, when his leg wasn't too bad but his capricious brain was keeping him up. He was held rapt by his friend's constant animation, even in sleep. He'd watch while bushy brows twitched or his nose wrinkled or he half-smiled whenever House reached out and touched him, somehow safe in the darkness from reproof and mocking commentary – even his own.
Tonight, though, Wilson's forehead was tight and wrinkled, a sweaty sheen of discomfort gleaming on his skin. His lips moved, throat clicking as he muttered, incoherent and disquieted. His respiration and heart rate were elevated: seventeen breaths per minute up from fourteen, and seventy-two up from sixty-three. Normally he would be sprawled on his front, one arm cocked over his head and under the pillow, his face smooshed into the cotton, snoring as he dragged in breaths of recycled air trapped in the cocoon of bedding. Instead, his body was bent around the pain inside it, curled up like a question mark. His eyes beneath their closed lids were only now settling into the rapid movement of real sleep that the alarm had necessarily interrupted every hour before. What House was about to do would compromise that, but it couldn't be helped. He wasted another few moments, wishing that it could.
Whatever Wilson figured was the way forward tomorrow morning, House was keeping a weather eye on the big picture. For once, it hadn't been either one of them who'd stomped on the gas or the brake or taken his hands off the wheel of their relationship. Someone else had ploughed right into them and sent them into an almighty tailspin, running right over House's heart as they flipped and crashed and fetched up somewhere off the edge of the map to the sound of things breaking and groaning, suspended in shock. Thumbing at a pain crinkle between Wilson's eyebrows, trying to make it stay flattened out, House swallowed the flat, copper taste of fear and grimaced as pain torqued up his leg, sending the muscles into spasm. He rode it out, teeth clenched, then shifted up onto his knees. He dug in the pocket of his jeans for his Vicodin and dry-swallowed two. Whether or not he and Wilson could crawl out of this wreck and put their battered car back on the road, he wasn't about to let his best friend go up in flames for the sake of a label stuck on the back windscreen. Both the discomfort and his queasy sense of compunction were getting in the way of what he needed to do.
Shoving his pill bottle into his hip pocket, House made a last attempt to stroke away the crease between Wilson's eyes.
"Don't wake up, Jim," he whispered, his voice barely audible below the hissing passage of a truck on the street outside.
In the fleeting glare its headlights raked through the gap in the curtains, he switched on the bedside lamp. Then he drew back the covers and unbuttoned the overcoat to get at the waistband of the borrowed scrubs.
Wilson stirred, his good hand releasing its grip on the edge of the pillow to smack vaguely at the cool air skimming his skin. Keeping the syringe out of his reach, House caught his hot, damp fingers and briefly squeezed them, before laying them back beside the pillow. Wilson muttered something, settled and slept on. Praying to the makers of Ambien that he'd given him enough that this wouldn't rouse him, House slowly coaxed the waistband of the scrubs down to bare Wilson's hip and part of his gluteus maximus. He fished a small packet out of the knapsack, bit it open and wrapped his forefinger in the antiseptic wipe it contained. Lightly, he traced it over Wilson's skin. The wet pressure made him flinch, sharply enough that House was sure his eyes were going to open. But the soporific was doing its job. Wilson stayed out, for now.
Knowing that the Ambien alone wouldn't be enough to keep him that way – or induce amnesia if he accidentally did wake – House tugged the cap off the syringe and pocketed it. His fingers shook and, for an instant, he wanted to hurl the thing across the room. The armed fury that he'd barely managed to keep in check since Chase had paged to the locker room came upon him from behind. It broke across him suddenly with the sharp, infuriating crack of a soldier's night stick, meting out instant reparation for some unseen, but foreseeable, error: fix this, fix this. He clenched his fingers on the plastic cylinder and held on. He was. This was the only way. Or the only way he had come up with in the nine hours he'd been staring at CB's damn ugly ceiling light.
The analytic side of his brain was at war with itself, though, because he knew there was another way. He wrestled with the urge to shake Wilson awake instead, shove amphetamines down his throat until he was conscious enough to listen, and rail at him about this whole sickening mess and possible remedies until he came to some kind of Wilson-inspired epiphany. The man had a knack for knowing things and remembering things and seeing things a different way to everyone else. He stayed calm when everyone else was hot headed and he was usually ten times better at the emotional stuff than House was. One thing in favour of his personas was that there was always one to fit the moment.
But Wilson could get himself lost in those too. And he made crappy decisions when anyone close to him was at stake. House didn't figure he'd be any better with his own life on the line. Besides, between the pills and the concussion, he'd hardly been able to think coherently. Which left House right back where he started, with his one lousy option and the no-gos of waiting to see what happened next and discovering he should've done what he was planning in the first place or waking Wilson. He swayed slightly at the sudden sense that the soft grey coverlet had been pulled out from under him. He always went to Wilson when things descended into the suckiest gutters of Suck Alley in Suckville. Where the hell was he supposed to go when what was wrong was wrong with Wilson?
Get control of yourself, Greg. His father's voice struck like a box on the ear. House shook his head, resenting the very idea that he could have anything to say, but some part of his brain disagreed with the rest of it and the echo went on. Trusting himself, rather than his old man, he waited, syringe poised, for the memory to play itself out. You're too sensitive, John House went on in his brusque, carrying voice that always held the hard edge of a yell. Caring doesn't save a damn soul. It's all about actions and you're always on your own. Good times, bad times, hard times, you're always on your own. You think this is tough, son? Teeth chattering at the remembered retribution for weakness, House forced himself to listen to what had subliminally passed through the sobbing apologies of his early boyhood and gritty silences of later on. It'll get harder. Get over it. Get on with it. Get through it. You. Will. Get. Control.
Cruel to be kind, huh, dad? Setting his teeth, House dragged his courage out of that chilly place where the copper tub in the snow-covered yard was freezemarked into his memory and used it to quench the firestorm of rage. It had been a while since he'd had to step himself through the process again. Eighteen years under his father's hardship-makes-the-man regime had made it both a hated and respected second-nature. This, though, this thing that had happened to Wilson – his damn Wilson – had come close to shaking him apart from the core. He supposed it was what all that so-called training had been for: not the battlefield of the day-to-day, but these surprise attacks.
Damn you for being right about me, you son of a bitch, he silently cursed his father's ghost. Where did he get off stalking around on the lunatic fringes of House's conscious, like a bad Old Hamlet impersonator? Well, you're not right about everything. Yours wasn't the only way to make a boy into a man. Proof of that was snoozing in front of him. Wilson had had a scrapbook childhood, complete with family fun days out and a pet pooch to play with, not rattling around on military bases figuring out that it was okay to play with fire if you could suck up the burns and the smack upside the head for it afterwards. Wilson had made it through this process once without some dead drill sergeant standing over his shoulder telling him to take it like a man. He had his own brand of courage. He didn't have to verify to House that the once hadn't been a fluke.
"Damn you," he whispered, no longer sure if he was talking to his father or to Wilson, or which one had done a better job at screwing with his head. "Damn you."
He jabbed the needle into Wilson's hip and slowly shot the plunger home. Wilson shuddered, sinking deeper into sleep, and House ran his hand over the abused skin in silent apology.
"Sleep," he said, hearing the grim, tired edge in his own voice. "You don't need to be awake for this."
Fishing the cap out of his pocket, he put it back on the needle and tucked the syringe safely away in his bag. He put on his glasses and drew the pieces of the SOEC kit closer. Turning back to his now fully unconscious partner, it was with a cold, cultivated detachment that House carefully stripped him out of his clothes.