A/N: Yep, there really is such a thing as a rat-ball. It's actually pretty cool. It's a fair-sized plastic—well, ball—with a little door that has a snap and you unsnap the door and put a rat or hamster or small animal inside, and then you just snap the door shut and put down the ball and the rat can go rolling itself all round the house. It's a bad idea if you are on the second floor though.
There is one more chapter after this. I hope everyone has enjoyed the—brief—ride.
Thank you very, very, very much for the reviews.
XI.
Steve walks warily down the street
The brim pulled way down low
Ain't no sound but the sound of his feet
Machine guns ready to go
Are you ready?
Hey, are you ready for this?
Are you hanging on the edge of your seat?
Out of the doorway the bullets rip
To the sound of the beat, yeah
Another one bites the dust
Another one bites the dust
And another one gone, and another one gone
Another one bites the dust
Hey, we're gonna get you too
Another one bites the dust
-Queen
Wilson woke up the next morning with a rat on his face.
He would not have found this quite so unusual had he been in House's apartment, but as things happened he was attempting to sleep on the too-small, too-hard couch in his office with no blanket, no pillow, and no breakfast, and he definitely hadn't expected to have a rat on his face at—he checked his watch—seven-thirty in the morning. Last time he'd checked, there were no rats in the oncology department.
Wilson reached up with one hand, dislodged the furry culprit's claws from his nose, and acknowledged that it was Steve. That was good. He didn't particularly want a rabies shot. It was much nicer to have a friendly rat on your face.
Steve.
House.
He let his head hit the arm of the couch again—bump bump stabilize—closed his eyes.
He'd been living with House for about three weeks when he'd had his first nightmare. It had been so real; it was like going back in time and reliving, over and over, the memories which he'd worked so hard to bury. But then he was woken by the sounds of a television he recognized—General Hospital—and when he'd fought his way back to reality, he'd seen House sitting there watching the show. It made him feel surprisingly safe. There really was something to the idea of carrying a big stick.
He'd never mentioned anything he dreamed of to House. Though he was able to tell the man a lot of things he hadn't thought he'd be able to tell anybody, some things would remain his secret forever.
To Wilson's credit, he'd never imagined House might go behind his back.
House and Julie had not been friends when he was married and didn't become friends afterward—House had attended two dinner parties, caused both to end catastrophically, and, in fact, was banned from the property. As a result of that they'd barely spoken; Wilson knew perfectly well House hated her guts. And after the phone call from the lawyers, Wilson found himself torn. Part of him still loved Julie and wanted to see her again, to find out how she was doing, and the rest of him wanted to slit the first part's throat and was terrified of ever so much as walking within five miles of Julie. He knew she didn't want to talk to him, and there he was torn as well—he couldn't decide whether she didn't want to talk to him because he didn't deserve her attention or because she'd just given up on him. There was also the possibility that she did, in fact, want to talk to him but was waiting for him to make the first move.
Wilson was afraid of seeing Julie again, wanted to see her again; was relieved she wasn't contacting him, was ashamed he'd been such a rotten husband that she didn't want to contact him; knew he didn't deserve her behavior, had a niggling feeling that wasn't quite true and maybe he did anyway. And through all his confusion one question had resounded in the depths of his mind—why?
He was not certain really of anything else, had no clue of her motives, was even growing less certain of how he felt about himself, but he knew one thing—he wanted, wanted to hear from her lips the reason why she hated him.
Wilson had been distracted and he forgot to be suspicious. He forgot what a bastard House could really be when he sat down and gave it the good college try, and he forgot that House saw a Rubik's Cube where everyone else saw a man. Again, his common sense told him House would not betray him, had a greater sense of honor, was a better friend than that, but his emotions didn't believe it. And when House came home, told him so bluntly—as if it were an everyday thing—that he'd seen Julie at the grocery (House never went to the grocery—how did he wind up there?), told him in so many words that Charlie was dead, something had come over him. He'd lost control; he'd exploded. Grabbed his stuff, stormed out, got drunk in a terrible bar, and wound up on the couch in his office at three in the morning, dead to the world.
He'd had a nightmare by himself, the first in two weeks, and no one was there with soaps and silent brandy when he woke cold, sweating, afraid.
And there he was, drained, slightly hung over, and with a rat on his face.
Wilson cradled Steve in his left hand and got to his feet. The blood rushed to his head as he stood, but he ignored it. Steve squeaked. Wilson lifted Steve to his shoulder and moved slowly, gingerly across the room. There was a cage by the door. Wilson bent down and picked it up. It was Steve's. A small piece of paper had been pinned to the bars; he undid the safety pin and examined the slip. The note was written in House's handwriting. It was unsigned.
"You're a dog person, but Steve seems to like you. I'm sure you'll survive."
A few lines had been skipped, and then—
"He hates walnuts. After dinner he gets a small—small—piece of Swiss. And Wilson, if you give him alcohol I swear I will hunt you down and kill you."
One more line—
"Take care of McQueen. He's good company and a real ladies' rat."
"My God," said Wilson reverently (if House had been there he would have said "You finally got it right"), once things had properly sunk in. He shrugged on his lab coat, dashed a comb through his hair, and made for the elevator as fast as he could considering that he had a cast on his ankle and a sleeping rat on his neck.
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House was twirling his cane. Every now and then he opened one eye and glanced up at it, spinning through the air, a blur of smooth silver against the sterilized ceiling of his office. If he squinted he could not make out the cane itself at all any more, only an oval that somehow mysteriously glowed. He thought he would make a nice kitchen fan and laughed mirthlessly to himself. The hallways and the Diagnostic rooms were silent. The white-board was blank; his markers were—thanks to Cameron—color-coded; his team wouldn't be in for fifteen minutes. It was too early to be anywhere and he was at work. At least he had his iPod, and said machine was currently blasting Queen.
House concentrated on separating the sound of each individual instrument from the beat created by the collective.
Then his own private version of meditation was utterly ruined, because the song finished and changed to a terrible ballad by Mariah Carey.
Wilson had been tampering with his playlists again.
House scrolled to the next song. This was one Wilson actually recommended. He kept scrolling. There was a knock on the door—sounded more frenzied than usual. He pretended not to hear. The knocking kept up. He'd closed the blinds and locked all the doors to his office.
Five minutes later the knocking stopped. House heard limping footsteps retreat down the hallway outside. He scrolled until he found a song by The Who, closed his eyes, and lost himself.
House sat with the Coma Guy at lunch, using the man's left hand to hold his bag of Doritos, his chin for his Reuben, his belly as a perfect soda can holder. He watched General Hospital sprawled in a guest chair with his feet propped on the edge of the bed and nobody found him. Cuddy forced him to do a few clinic hours in between consults and his patient's MRI; he told a fat nun she was pregnant, a man with kidney stones that he had prostrate cancer, and was well on his way to telling a worried young mother with a colicky baby that her son had smallpox when Cuddy caught on and forced him to stop doing clinic hours instead. He left at four-thirty, didn't get home until five. His apartment was too empty without Steve or Wilson; he ordered Chinese and cracked open his fortune cookie by himself.
THINGS ARE LOOKING UP.
4533436357456434265474356
He threw the paper into the fireplace. There was no fire but he thought there might be one eventually.
He lay on the couch, researched his case for a few hours. When he had an idea, he poured some scotch and punched buttons until he found a show on television to watch. He quit playing the piano at midnight. Then he popped two Vicodin, went to bed, and stared sleeplessly at the ceiling.
After a month and a half, he no longer liked the sensation of making music for himself.
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House got to work the next morning at nine-fifteen. His team was already by the white-board; Foreman—Foreman—was touching his markers. He didn't realize Wilson was leaning against the wall in the corner until he was halfway through railing on the black boy for being where he didn't belong—they didn't call it a white-board for nothing—and noticed that Cameron was grinning more than usual.
When he looked at Wilson, Wilson merely stared at him.
House hid his surprise by sending Cameron to take patient history, Foreman to run an MRI, and Chase to—well, as he put it, to wherever blond-haired British boys liked to go at nine-thirty in the morning. Then he went into his office, locked the door, and found his iPod. Ten minutes later, Wilson left. He still hadn't said a word.
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That evening Wilson was sitting on the couch eating chow mein clumsily with chopsticks when House got home.
Steve was in his cage on the coffee table.
