House had received surprise after surprise in the past fortnight, beginning with his friends and colleagues at Princeton, Doctor Wilson, his best friend, and Doctor Cameron, his former departmental subordinate, deciding to get married after her divorce from another one of former his subordinates, Doctor Chase, had come through long after Wilson's third divorce.
That had knocked him for six – he'd always thought that Wilson had shown more interest in House's boss, Doctor Cuddy, than he had ever had in Cameron, but they had proved him wrong… and he was rarely proved wrong. He'd won a lot of money from Wilson and another colleague, Foreman, when he'd surmised that Chase and Cameron's marriage had been on the rocks though.
Another surprise was that a military base in Colorado Springs, catering in 'Deep Space Radar Telemetry', which he had already guessed to be a cover for its real operations, had poached him.
He liked Princeton Plainsboro. He knew that he was a pain-in-the-rear but he also knew that he was lucky to have friends who cared about him and resisted, in the long term, his tendencies to push them away, and though he never said it aloud, he appreciated it.
In Colorado he felt overwhelmingly vulnerable and alone, away from his friends and the people he had worked for years to antagonise and rile up. The idea that he would have to break new people in galled him to a certain extent. He had started to become comfortable in New Jersey.
The surprise that he had initially felt capped all of his surprises off was when he discovered what really went on at Cheyenne Mountain under the guise of Deep Space Radar Telemetry. He would never have seen it coming in his wildest dreams.
Aliens… alien technology… a myriad of diseases and pathogens that he would have to study. The Stargate. A very nice Colonel who reminded him a lot of Cameron had given him a brief rundown of sixteen years of operations at Stargate Command after pressuring him into signing a non-disclosure agreement.
Great. He couldn't tell his friends what he was doing without getting shot or being killed in mysterious circumstances.
Why had he agreed to go to Colorado in the first place?
Well… to be honest with himself, he missed working with his friends, most of whom he had managed to drive away with his usual callous-on-the-outside demeanour, and by taking them for granted. In his formative years, he had never stayed in one place for any significant length of time due to his father being a Marine, his job taking the family all over the world.
While, as a result, he had an impressive grasp of many languages, cultures and subjects, he had never settled long enough anywhere to learn how to make friends or to know what it felt like to be accepted.
This new calling had come at the right time for him. He knew that his record, despite impressive, was scary in parts to people who didn't understand and that it would affect his options with regard to further employment. So, it was a big surprise when a new job came to him rather than the other way round, and what a job…
The surprise that did cap all those other surprises off, was the fact that his new boss' husband, Doctor Daniel Jackson, the brainbox that had unlocked the Stargate and was bewilderingly lucky in love, had been pregnant once before… and wanted to be pregnant again.
Was he mad?
What did he think women were for?
He listened to Jackson's pathetic reasons for having another child, mainly having given his wife four other children – she must have been lying about her age; there was no way that she was forty-eight – and wanting to add to their menagerie.
He sighed and remarked as Doctor and General Jackson sat across his desk from him as he wondered whether guilt was curable, "You want another child because you feel insanely guilty about hurting the good General in the past and you think that by having this baby, it's going to bring you closer together. It won't. Babies don't work that way."
Jackson and Jackson gawped at each other, obviously in awe of his prowess, and female Jackson said, "With all respect…" oh, it was bad when military figures said that… because what they were about to say was rarely respectful, "… Doctor, we understand the risks and everything and we're going to share." Ok, that wasn't too bad… surprisingly. Wait, share?
"Share? You're going to share childbirth? That's the craziest thing I've heard since my idiot of a best friend decided to marry someone with an insanely rigid moral compass and so much compassion that she's in more pain than the patient she's performing a lumbar puncture on."
And it was then that he received another surprise, a surprise that capped off the surprise that he had initially thought had capped off all the rest. He really had to check the label on his Vicodin… and give male Jackson a lot of credit for his new boss not being anywhere near as grumpy as Cuddy.