Part B:

A loud knock woke House in the guest room of apartment 8A. His first deep breath tore out of him in a harsh gasp. He groaned, scrambling to get out of the recovery position. Despite the sour gritty residue of vomit and charcoal that hit the back of his throat as he wheezed, lips sealed white to check a groan, he groped urgently across the crumpled red coverlet for his Vicodin.

His hand encountered several unfamiliar bottles. There was slightly cloudy sports drink in a dubious shade of lime; a handwritten sticky label was affixed to the side indicating that it contained a 70 mg/kg oral dose of N-acetylcysteine to counter liver damage. Beside it were the glass vials of Kenalog and lidocaine he'd been prescribed last night and, rattling around in solitary amber plastic confinement, a single Vicoprofen. There was also a tab of aspirin. Ignoring the second intrusive knock, House dosed himself in swearing, grudging relief. Thank you, Wilson, for collecting fucked-up friends. There were certain advantages of crashing with a medic who was also a fellow addict.

Pages peeled off his face and fluttered down onto the bedding as he sat up, rubbing instinctively at the spastic objections of his right thigh. The safely stowed remains of a home blood draw kit had been left amidst the paper piles that had precipitated its necessity: a stark reminder that he would be no good to Wilson if he continued sucking back his pills in conscious disregard for their high acetaminophen content. He shoved aside the paraphernalia and rescanned the printouts of Walker and Granville's medical files.

The black type, slightly smudged where it had adhered to his cheek, confirmed once again two full and recent sets of STD panels. The results were a little over a week old. They'd been taken when Walker donated sperm to assist his sister-in-law's latest attempt to conceive. Let's hear it for keeping it in the family. Venting a hard breath, House let the pages fall as a third sharp rap heralded the peremptory opening of the door.

The click-shuffle of crutches inched over the threshold and a man limped in, his right knee encased in a hinged orthapaedic brace. Anterior cruciate rupture, post very recent surgery; the diagnosis was automatic. House scrubbed a hand over his face, belatedly processing the hard muscular lines of a vigorous athlete, the scruffy pale fuzz along a square jaw-line and sleep-ruffled ash-blonde hair outgrowing a crew cut. A pair of grey sweat pants, the right leg rucked up high over the brace, were slung low on narrow hips. The intruder moved his right crutch awkwardly, hampered by the white cordless phone in his hand.

"Greg House?"

The unapologetic wake-up identified a fellow military brat. Grey-blue eyes swept briefly from House's face, over the drugs, to the puke bucket by the side of the bed and back again, with neither surprise nor judgement.

"Ben Chamberlain. We met last night. It's zero seven hundred hours and I've got a Dr. Lisa Cuddy on the phone for you. She said she doesn't care if you're in a coma and, or, a ditch: put your cell back on and wake up."

Ben shifted the both crutches into his left hand and slung the phone from the doorway. It landed on the bed beside House's knee. Cuddy was squawking on the other end before the door had closed again.

House didn't bother to pick up. He hit the end call button, snapped the back off and removed the batteries. He dropped the phone on the floor and went back to staring at the results of Wilson's assailants' STD panels.

A soft humming roused Wilson. For the second time, he awoke with the disorientated expectation of having nodded off at his patient's bedside in Princeton Plainsboro. But the effects of the sedative were fading and, before he'd even opened his eyes, he'd processed that the wordless melody was neither tuneless nor the same four bars repeated ad infinitum in the riveted tone-deaf manner of Lew the Janitor. He lifted heavy lids and sought Hananda, napping on the Ottoman.

He jolted awake upon discovering Cooper. She lay in the spot her brother had occupied, upside down; her head rested on the seat, her legs stretched up the back. She stopped humming as Wilson stirred and glanced toward him under the sheaf of progress notes she was holding in the air above her nose.

"Evening."

"Uh…" Adjusting the lie of his scratchy blankets in a reflexive - pathetic, paranoid – need to cover himself up, Wilson masked his fussing with a glance at his watch. But beneath its fresh cobweb of cracks its analogue dial uselessly showed half past nine. "Is it?"

Beyond her, the intermittent passing of nurses in calamine scrubs and the chiaroscuro illumination of the corridor offered no indication of whether it was night or morning; he didn't spend enough time at NYMH to tell the hours from its routines.

"Nah." Cooper lowered the notes and swung her feet down from where they'd been hooked over the headrest so that she could sit up. "You've only been asleep a couple more hours."

"Oh-kay."

Wilson's breath snagged in his throat as she moved, before logic overcame his irrational anxiety. It had been a long time since he'd had genuine cause to be ill at ease around her; he didn't much care to revisit it.

He sucked in a steadying hit of oxygen through his cannula and added: "Good."

Cooper nodded and, following the aimless downward drift of his eyes, automatically began to reorder her rumpled clothes. A pair of black jeans that had been ruched up around her knees settled into crisp, flared lines over low-heeled, tasselled, suede loafers and she resettled the front of her violet angora cowl-neck tunic, tidying away an errant bra strap. She'd obviously been home, though she seemed to have done no more than change and splash water on her face. The remnants of yesterday's eyeliner were smeared in dull crescents beneath her eyes.

Wilson rubbed his good hand over his own in involuntary empathy with her visible fatigue.

"Have you been here long?"

"A while." She stifled a yawn, then gestured imprecisely toward the door with his progress notes. "Came in to give Kit a break a few hours ago. I didn't sleep."

Smothering an inevitable yawn of his own – an effort that made his bruised jaw ache – Wilson nodded, unsurprised. Tattling lines clustered around Cooper's mouth and brow, etching qualms and questions across her features. He'd seen that look on her often enough at med school. He and Hananda had slumped together on countless bunks in innumerable on-call rooms, on the verge of passing out over their textbooks, while she sat bolt upright, stalking radical and complex theories.

"Apparently I was the only one." Another loose wave of his notes gestured to an elsewhere that encompassed a several block radius. "Kit's in the on-call room catching zees and El Champino's passed out in the guest bedroom at the flat. I'm sure they'll both join us soon enough."

She sounded mildly put out, though Wilson couldn't guess why.

"Mmhm. There's this new-fangled concept people are trying," he mumbled. "'S called sleep."

As if on cue, his eyelids slipped to half-mast. It took most of his strength to heave them up again. Sedative or no sedative, he felt as weak and dozy as neonate.

"I've heard of it," Cooper replied dryly. "Requires skulling two soporifics and a bottle of scotch and it helps not to have anywhere to be the next morning."

It was testament to their friendship that she hadn't knocked herself out and left her brother to handle the early shift, though it wasn't what had been arranged last night. Wilson wrinkled his nose, which itched where the cannula chafed his philtrum, and peered at her. Yesterday, she'd been taken unawares by his injuries and, antagonised by House at every turn, become ansty and quick to act. It was her way, to fix first and explain later; but, with his ability to trust so recently shattered it was sharp enough to shred his rationality, Wilson had ricocheted away from her. This morning, she seemed reticent and introspective. In spite of the litany of aches making their plangent presence known, he was curious and a little concerned.

"Are you okay?"

"That depends." She turned her sagacious scrutiny on him. "How're you?"

Without thinking, Wilson glanced at the monitors, making Cooper snicker under her breath. He summoned a weary, sheepish smile at his own lingering stupefaction and shrugged one-sidedly.

"I'm okay."

Cooper propped her chin on her fist, puck-like, and eyeballed him.

"If I lean over and poke you, am I going to hear you squeak?"

If she so much as moved, she was going to find him clinging to the ceiling. Wilson quickly lifted his left hand in an apotropaic gesture.

"You know, one day I'm going to find myself some nicer friends," he said, affecting a put upon expression that softened her inquisitorial stare into mere inquiry. "Meg, I hurt and I'm exhausted. Apart from that, I'm—"

He started to consider it and swiftly stopped. Beneath the sedative's lethargic legacy his nerves threatened to noose themselves into twitching knots. He shoved the sensation down with a whole host of emotions that he didn't want to think about and flexed his mangled masculinity instead:

"I'm not as think as you concussed I am."

It wasn't conscious, let alone deliberate but, as Cooper arched an incredulous eyebrow, he realised how flirtatious he'd sounded.

"Why, Jimmy!" Somewhere between impressed and amused at his attempt to assume normality, she shot him a coquettish glance from under her curly lashes. "You do make the drip look undeniably sexy, but if you really want to start rocking the on-call room again, you've got to be offering me at least a surgery."

A faint warmth tugged at his chest as Wilson felt the beginnings of a real smile stir. He gathered up the edge of his blanket in the stiff fingers of his right hand, as if to flick his covers back, though he couldn't quite bring himself to do it.

"Well. What're we waiting for? Let's go!"

Their eyes caught, gleaming, remembering their med school days, swapping sex for study opportunities in playful trade-offs. Cooper laughed first, clear and easy. Wilson grinned with her, then grimaced as his jaw and side registered throbbing protests.

"Hoh! Ouch. Don't make me laugh!"

Inside, the warmth in his chest rolled southwards undaunted. His skin tingled as it recalled: the feel of delicate turquoise satin and black lace, ochre skin and corkscrew curls; the gentle crash into pillows that smelled of starch and Lysol; and, that one fateful night, the sudden disorientating head-rush as brutal arms wrenched him away—

Wilson went cold, his grin freezing in a frigid parody of his former mirth. Cooper missed it, covering her eyes with her hand as colour leapt in bright splashes to her cheeks. She shook her head, still smiling.

"You started it, Chachi."

Her mirth too faded abruptly and she reached down beside the Ottoman to pick up a decorative cream metallic can that looked as though it should have held soda. Bubbles tinkled lightly against the aluminium as she took a long pull from it and stared at him, growing sober herself. Metaphorically.

"You scared me."

"I'm sorry—" Wilson started, not certain whether he was apologising for yesterday's fright or the one from years before.

Cooper cut him off with a shake of her head, swift enough that he wondered if she were remembering that one too.

"Don't apologise. You always apologise." She drummed her fingers testily on the can and he caught a glimpse of the intricate branding through her fingers. Sparkling Chardonnay. It didn't explain the next sentence. "Talk to me: rabid cheerleaders?"

He blinked and half-glanced at his IV, wondering if he was on something he didn't know about. It took a minute for comprehension to dawn.

"House." A rumble of annoyance percolated in Wilson's throat. "Is that what he told you?"

Cooper shrugged an acknowledgement.

"It was one of a number of tall tales. There was also some Lord of the Flies riff about your cancer kiddies." She chewed her lip and corrected herself. "Actually, he said patients."

Wilson dodged her questioning look. Experience had taught him that, sooner or later, House would figure out what had happened. He would poke and pry and theorise, hack computer systems, search homes, and ram-raid Wilson's psyche until he found out what had been done to him, what he'd done and what he hadn't done. What Wilson would do then, he couldn't imagine, couldn't bear to consider how House might respond. It was all he could cope with at present to know that House would know. But Cooper…it was appalling how tempted he was to confide in her.

She'd been there, after all, intimately tangled in the bad judgements, intoxication, and stuttered statements the last time he'd got some all too personal attention from the cops and an EMT crew. It had not been quite like this, not really at all, when it came down to the raw details. There wasn't any heart-stopping sense of déjà vu. But there could be. Soon, if he gave Tania's family any reason to make good on their threat. And there was so much more that could be damaged than a few bones, his body and his pride.

Resolutely, he shouldered his predicament and kept it to himself.

"Speaking of issues with patients," Cooper ventured, giving up on his prolonged silence. "I owe you an apology."

"Ohh…kay."

Puzzled, Wilson shifted against the pillows and raised himself awkwardly on his left elbow. Cooper, in turn, retreated behind a lowered brow and her gaze skulked downward to settle on the can in her lap.

"I was an ass last night," she told him, her thumb fretting over the ring pull with a tinny sequence of unsettled clicks. "I should've let Kit take point sooner. It…I'm not… I can't treat people I'm close to. Not after what happened to my brother and I. I always think I can – that I should be able – but I'm not good at it, not good for the patient. I never explain. I just do, like I used to before I knew what I was doing, just following my foster father's directions, fixing Kit up after one of Jed's damned experiments."

She sighed, fitting her thumbnail into the ring pull's groove.

"I did the same to you and I upset you—"

Wilson winced as his dramatic reaction outside the CT lab came back to him. He'd sworn at her, struck out with his good arm in such a vehement appel that she'd had to grab him to avoid being hit. He'd clammed up at once, apologising and reproaching her through shallow pants. Damnit, Meg, damnit. What are you doing? What do you want from me? In his defensive distress, it hadn't mattered that he'd given his consent for the tests. It had only mattered that, even if he insisted, he didn't believe she would allow him to be discharged unmolested.

"I'm sorry," Cooper finished.

"It's okay." Wilson murmured automatically, willing his pulse to settle down again as the monitor peeped troublesomely beside him. "You were doing your job. I should've trusted you. I'm so—"

"Stop." Cooper warded off his own apology. "We've been here before, falling over each other with sorrys and should'ves." She cast her drink a nasty look and put it on the floor again. "Let's forget it and move on."

Wilson's stomach plummeted, as if he were falling, back twenty years in time to the morning after that awful night.

He was escorted through trampled balloons and ripped down banners. His shredded shirt billowed in the draft of his limping movement and the cold air coagulated the sticky mess all over his unzipped trousers. His vision was in fragments. There were guns and badges everywhere. By the door, paramedics hovered. In the kitchen, his fiancée, Sam, was in floods of confused tears. Voices came at him from all sides, asking questions he could barely hear over the pounding in his ears, demanding answers. And Cooper, her hair plastered to cheeks whiter than Chase's had been, stared blankly at him as she tried to piece together a statement beside the police van—

The memory disintegrated as her long dark curls shrank into their current tousled crop and her glazed eyes became hooded, sheltered under her furrowed brow, as if she too had flashed back upon the incident. For a moment, Wilson thought she would bring it up; but her mind had gone elsewhere and she sighed peevishly.

"After thirty odd years, you'd think I'd've got over the lab in the basement and the weekly hands-on how-to demonstrations in doctoring that I got instead of piano lessons or pony rides." She faffed with a tassel on her battered loafers. "Turns out, I'm still not much of a doctor when someone I care about is on the table, hurting." She flicked the tassel ruefully. "And conscious."

Wilson hadn't been the only one who'd calmed down after the dose of lorazepam.

Somewhat relieved, he said reassuringly, "You don't stop being a good doctor, Meg – or," before she could object, "a good friend. How is your foster father, by the way?"

She shot him a knowing look, but let him shift the subject away from himself.

"Still alive. He's—" She paused as her pager buzzed twice in quick succession. She pulled it off her waist belt and glanced through the messages, before replacing it, unconcerned. "Flying into LA next month to introduce us as speakers at the annual Clinical Congress of Surgeons. His motor neurone disease has reached the stage where he might as well Fed X us a voice recording rather than haul his chair and computer in from UPenn to show us off. But I probably shouldn't've told him that. Frankenstein's coming just to spite me now." She fixed Wilson with a stare incisive enough to conduct a hands-free autopsy. "I guess you do always hurt the ones you love."

Belatedly he understood why he'd woken to find her there. It knocked the breath out of him in an astonished incoherent exclamation of denial.

"Hoh!" He struggled to hoist himself upright against the pillows. "You think House did this to me?"

Her face twisted with reluctance.

"I—" She hesitated, then took a swig from her can and shrugged decisively. "Look, Jim, you turn up here, like this, without any explanation, have a panic-attack in our lobby and end up hitting your head so hard you have to be admitted. House goes bugfuck whenever you're out of his sight and then spends last night talking rings around me. The only thing that's obvious is that you're both hiding something huge. Frankly, I don't know what to think."

No wonder she'd been guarding his bedside.

"It's not—" Gnawing his lip in a futile attempt to gate out the discomfort, Wilson heaved himself higher on the pillows and strived to look less downtrodden and dejected than he felt. "This isn't—"

He couldn't quite prevent himself from wavering over the words.

"It's not—it isn't House's fault. He wasn't…responsible for any of this." He wiggled his head stubbornly and tried again. "And he wasn't making up stories."

"About the cheerleaders?"

"About the patients."

Cooper scrutinised him sceptically. "Is that so? Or, now that you've had time to think it over, that's the most plausible excuse?"

Wilson sighed, lightly pinching the bridge of his tender nose. He reminded himself that it had taken her years to believe that Kit's partner, Ben, had no ulterior motives. Neither of the twins was exactly credulous. Jed's, ultimately successful, quest to become one of the foremost medical researchers had done a hell of a number on both of them.

"House hasn't been trying to conduct revivification studies on me," Wilson reproached, half in jest and, this time, all in seriousness.

Cooper tossed her head, as if she didn't believe him. Standing so quickly that Wilson's heart hit the back of his throat she tromped across the room to sling her empty can into the trash under the sink.

"You can joke about it all you like," she said, swinging around on her heel to pin him to his pillow with a penetrating stare. "But in case you haven't noticed a pattern over the last ten years, you've come running to us every time something bad goes down in Princeton. It's not that I mind, but I have noticed: House is always at the centre of it. Twelve months ago: the bus crash, where your girlfriend – Amber – died. Two years ago: that narcotics bust, when you called me from the middle of nowhere one Christmas Eve, because he'd done something stupid in his apartment. Two years before that you called to say you'd been forced to resign your post at Princeton, because of some stand off between House and that overweight, overbearing suit who was playing Chairman of the Board. You two keep breaking up and getting back together and it's more and more fraught every time."

Her face contorted grimly as she churned on, dredging up more of the past, as if Wilson hadn't been there the first time around.

"Until House turned up, I could count on the fingers of one hand the number of times you got that frazzled about anything." Before he could protest, she listed them with unerring accuracy. "Sam Carr. Your brother Danny. And that damned party."

The night loomed between them again, all shattered glass, spilt booze, and unforgettable misjudgements. Wilson shivered in a febrile flood of shame.

"Graduation day." A white static filled his head and he found himself saying numbly: "So you do remember—"

"Remember what?" Cooper curtailed him, jaw jutting, eyes darkening, all denial there was anything to remember.

She had so many unpleasant experiences in her past to drown every day and doubly so whenever she utilised one of the new procedures or experimental treatments that had put the twins on the map as neurosurgeons. By one-sided accord, they'd never spoken of the one they shared. Wilson subsided into his lonely silence and shuffled his head back and forth.

"Nothing."

Cooper let out a pent-up breath that sank heavily through the stifled quiet.

"Remember what?" she retracted, so softly it could be passed off as another sigh.

Wilson pondered her sidelong. Standing between two stripes of light falling in from the corridor, her face was flanked by shadows and he doubted the validity of her offer. The tip of his tongue unconsciously fretted with a stinging split where his lower lip had been driven into his teeth by a punch, while he searched for some thing, some reason, that would be good enough to pursue the subject. But what he wanted from her abstruse, even to himself. Absolution? Castigation? Some indication that he was caught up in a warped karmic game of Consequences?

Cooper didn't wait for him to decide.

"Do I remember what?" she repeated, direct now, her tone dust-dry and determinedly devoid of emotion. "The catalogue of mistakes that were made that night? The part where you cheated on your crippled fiancée? The part where a good friend set you up? Where the 911 services crashed the party? How what they found nearly ended up in court? Or the part where, to keep that from happening, we lied to police?"

The static in Wilson's brain grew louder, threatened to tunnel his vision into confined spaces and menacing faces. With an effort, he wrested his attention to his own ghostly reflection, trapped in the glass doors between the bars of the blinds. Cooper's image was superimposed over the corridor there too. He searched her translucent visage again for blame or accusation. But it was set in the implacable lines she wore whenever anyone questioned why she had never reported Jed for his kids are for experiments, not just for fostering approach to parenthood; it was pure faire et se taire mentality and utterly impenetrable.

"So you do remember," he murmured at last, half surprised when the words did not form soundless clouds in the air before him. "You—you always said you were too drunk…"

Cooper harrumphed candidly. "There're a lot of things in my past that I'd like to have been too drunk to remember."

She weaved away from the door and circled the foot of his bed, returning to the Ottoman. Stooping briefly, she picked up her ever-present bottle of water and snapped open the sports cap to suckle on the dispenser, contrarily impelled to dilute the levels of alcohol in her bloodstream. Her pupils had grown huge as she returned to the darkest patches of the room; the shadows stole the age lines from her face, falsified a youth she'd never really had.

"Jim, c'mon," she muttered between slurps, her voice taut and vaguely chastening. "Memories are anchored in the—"

She stopped. Her nostrils flared as if she'd caught a scent; continued slowly at first, then harder, quicker:

"Memories are anchored in their internal contexts. Meaning that if you get someone drunk they usually remember what happened on previous occasions that they were drunk…"

She tailed off, the ellipses burgeoning with realisations. The silence was sudden, somehow breathless.

Wilson's heart skipped two beats, one for himself, one for her. Each caught on first to their own conundrum, then the other's. Then that the other had done the same. His heart resumed a thumping percussion.

A slight shudder passed through Cooper's frame. She shed her history like a skin and drew the water bottle away from her mouth. The soft click as she capped it punctured the pause.

"Why did you bring this up, Jim? How did you get hurt? What did you do?"

The dull-edged dagger of regret twisted its way into Wilson's gut. He contemplated the bulk of his cast, which mounded the covers he'd settled over his abdomen.

"Does it matter? Beyond the fact that it was my own fault?"

Cooper shifted in his periphery, her stance half-challenge, half-guarded, a wary confrontation.

"Was it?"

He couldn't allow himself to think otherwise. It had been his choices, ultimately, that had landed him, blanket-wrapped, amidst a baying circle of cops and paramedics. He raised his chin and said firmly:

"As much as graduation day was. Even you blame me for that." He couldn't meet her eyes; he didn't realise that she would not meet his. He finished quietly, staring at the scuffed toes of her loafers: "You have every right to."

Cooper's feet ticked, as if she would approach him; but she pirouetted away with an unfinished gesticulation that became a loose grasp on the jamb of the bathroom door. When he chanced a look toward her, for affirmation, she was staring at the dully gleaming line of the threshold divide. The pale glow from within etched out her profile, left the nearest side of her face unreadably dark.

"You're breaking the doctors' code," she said flatly, paraphrasing an old adage as if he – or they – were interns once more. "Anyone involved in a situation has a measure of responsibility – and we don't share our feelings afterwards."

He should've known better than to resurrect the subject. He'd got no more out of her than he had the first time he'd tried to find some sort of resolution to the fuck of a mess he'd got her caught up in. But, unlike House, Cooper was of a mind that there were some puzzles it was better to bury than to solve. Wilson sighed tiredly, wondering if that might not be the answer to the question he'd been trying to ask her all along.

"Forget it, then," he waved his hand in an attempt to clear the tension from the air. "What's done is done. I'm just thinking out loud."

Cooper blew air through her teeth and, forgoing the Ottoman, subsided easily onto the edge of his bed.

"Less of that," she advised gently, gesturing to the saggy shapes of the emptying boluses strung on a steel stand to his left, glowing in translucent traffic-light colours where the phosphorescence from the LCD screen caught them. "You have a concussion, Jim. You're not going to be thinking straight."

Half-heartedly, Wilson deflected still further from their former topic: "Now that House is responsible for."

Cooper crooked the requisite smile. But her gaze panned over the half-open window blinds, drawn to a loitering shape in the corridor.

"Promise me," she said abruptly, as if she suspected that they were about to be interrupted. "Promise me that it wasn't House who tried to grind your bones into bread."

Ignoring the quick, sick, speeding of his pulse as he did so, Wilson reached out and pried her fingers away from the bottle label she was scoring lines into with her nails. The fierce, familiar interlock of their fingers steadied him, smoothed out her bunching eyebrows.

He snorted, unable to help himself, and chided: "I'm a battered spouse – seriously?"

She dug her nails into the back of his hand and scowled. "Quit dodging the subject and tell me if I've seen the other guy!"

Wilson's half-smile faded. "No. You've never even met the other…person. People."

Her grip tightened in shock. She opened her mouth, then, tenaciously, pressed her lips together into a hard, thin line. Now that she was sure that there was no immediate risk to him, she would not ask anything he wouldn't volunteer. Neither of the twins cared to get caught up in crossfire.

Trusting that she was curious, but that she'd let the matter go if he were to speak of it, Wilson bit his tongue and wondered what he could safely allow himself to remember.

"Look," he said hesitantly, thumbing the fine skin over the backs of her strong, slender, surgeon's fingers and giving her hand a gentle shake to get her attention. "You're right about this being my first stop whenever I need to get the hell out of Dodge. So I owe you an explanation. Is Kit awake yet? I don't—I don't want to go through this twice."

Cooper studied him steadily, assessing his certainty. At length, she nodded and tapped the tip of her bottle against her pager.

"Yeah. He's in the cafeteria with Ben. House should be—"

"Here."

The blinds chattered and House laboured in from the corridor where he'd been eavesdropping. He paused as his eyes adjusted to the dim light and his brain to the handclasp between his partner and his newfound enemy. Wilson readied himself for another outbreak of war, but, as Cooper squeezed his hand and let go while House merely nodded to her, the pissing contest seemed to have reached an armistice. House spoke directly to Cooper, but his serious stare was all for Wilson.

"Now you've figured out I'm not the Big Unfriendly Giant, go set up your breakfast club or whatever," he dismissed her. "I need a word with Jack here about his magic beans."

TBC…