29.

"Hey." Wilson joined House as he crossed the foyer, trying not to seem as if he'd been lying in wait. Even though that's exactly what he had been doing. House barely grunted an acknowledgement, letting Wilson push the call button for the elevator. "So," he prompted, "How'd it go?"

House smiled to himself at that, letting the question hang in the air, unanswered, until the doors opened and they had both stepped through. "She's testing my resolve," he said finally.

"And how's it holding up?" Wilson had to ask.

"We're going shopping for nursery fittings this weekend," came the incongruous reply.

"So..." He moved to the back of the car to make room for more passengers on the second floor. "I assume you're strapping on a parachute, about to make the jump to freedom?"

House just looked at him.

Wilson shrugged. "I know. Divorced three times. It's a shocker. But shopping. Don't try to tell me you're looking forward to it."

House shrugged back. "She wants me to be 'involved'. She wants my input on things. So I'm giving it to her."

"Oh boy."

"Wasn't that your thing - be a man, give her what she wants? Soon she'll be Cuddy-putty in my hands?"

It was his turn to give House the 'are you kidding me' look. "You're driving her crazy, basically."

"Giving it my best shot." The doors opened again on the fourth floor and as he followed him down the corridor, House was digging for his cell phone in his pocket. "Hold on," he said over his shoulder, coming to a halt, "I just had a thought."

Wilson waited for whatever one-sided conversation he was about to be presented with and tried not to cringe. It would only egg House on.

Not that he needed any encouragement, Wilson reflected, as House let loose a stream of words, cell phone at his ear.

"I've been giving some thought to the 'wood vs. wicker' debate. I know you're leaning towards wood, which I can only think must be some kind of Freudian thing, but you know, shabby-chic is just so in at the moment I think we'd be cheating ourselves if we didn't give the matter serious - hm?" He stopped talking to listen for a moment before scoffing, "A meeting! How important is some meeting compared to the -" This time he took the phone away from his ear and looked at it in mock consternation. "She hung up on me. What's that about?"

House closed the phone. He dropped it back in his pocket with a smile. "Relationships are so much fun," he said.

Wilson didn't quite know what he'd been expecting - possibly that House would continue to sabotage himself to such an extent that he never managed to get anywhere with Cuddy. Now that he apparently had, Wilson felt the need to speak to the woman in question as soon as humanly possible.

And, after what he had just seen of House's end of the deal, possibly administer a mental capacity exam.

Unfortunately he had more than one patient a week to treat, unlike some people, which meant he didn't have time to track Cuddy down till late morning. She was in her office, seated in the armchair just inside the door when Marla waved him through with a muttered, "Good luck."

It didn't bode well, and he hovered in the doorway, wishing suddenly he'd thought up a legitimate excuse to be here. "Hey."

She had her toes hooked on the edge of the coffee table, her laptop set up nearby, and she glanced up at him distractedly, asking, "Do my ankles look swollen to you?"

He couldn't imagine a possible world where he would answer 'yes' to that question. "Uh, no, not at all."

"They feel swollen." She rubbed the bridges of her feet. He found himself looking down at her high-heels, kicked off under table. "Don't," she said, apparently sensing his thoughts.

He didn't. Thinking quickly, he said, "You know the elevators are down out there?"

"Twenty minutes," she replied. "That's the latest estimate. Meanwhile, House is up on the fourth floor throwing SOS messages from his balcony in protest."

He couldn't help a small show of amusement. Which she did not share.

"Go ahead and laugh, you didn't have to deal with the guy who almost got brained by a stapler with a note wrapped around it saying 'help, I'm a prisoner of the establishment'."

It was still funny, near-fatal accident and all, but all he said was, "He knows there's elevators down the other end of the floor, right?" Cuddy looked at him. "Of course he does," he amended quickly and contritely. "He's just being... him."

"Shouldn't have to walk that far, apparently. Did you need something?" she said suddenly, looking up at him as if his presence had only just now registered.

"No, just... wondering how things are," he said, aiming for casual.

"You mean besides the elevators, wanting to strangle certain members of the maintenance team, my feet killing me, and House trampling on my last nerve?"

"Right. Stupid question." He moved around and settled onto the sofa. "So, you and House..." It was not, he realised, the most subtle segue he'd ever made.

"Me and House? What about us?" She frowned. "What has he told you?"

He shrugged. "Hardly anything, but from what I see it's not exactly roses and candlelit dinners."

For some reason, inexplicably, she smiled at that. "Well, it's House. It's about what you'd expect."

"I know it's none of my business -"

"Do you?"

With her eyebrows raised at him pointedly, he conceded with a nod. "All right, so I do consider it my business, and you're both just going to have to put up with my obsessive need to monitor the situation as it unfolds."

She looked amused. "Especially if we crash and burn, because House will want to take you down with him?"

"A fairly dour prediction - I thought you were supposed to be an optimist."

"I said 'if'."

"You're not convinced," he said with a sinking feeling, and she sobered at the pronouncement.

"He's House," she said finally, helplessly, and when her phone rang a few seconds later, she seemed relieved. Until she got up and moved over to the desk to answer it. "No... No. I don't know, because anatomical cross-sections stencilled on the walls doesn't say 'happy baby', it says 'Ted Bundy lives here'?"

She glanced up at Wilson, giving him a pointed look that said see what I mean?

And it wasn't as if he didn't see, but it was times like this he was reminded that he and Cuddy saw different sides of House. More often than not, she got the jackass, the employee who lived to make her life difficult. Up till now, she had always been House's boss before she was anything else.

He didn't think they trusted each other, not under these circumstances. The phone calls were a key indicator. If Cuddy, as House had said, had him on probation, he was just as clearly testing the boundaries with her.

"House?" Cuddy was saying at that moment. "One more call like this and I'll come up there, take your phone and put it somewhere you'll need a very long scope to retrieve." Her boundaries had been pushed far enough for one day, apparently. Following another brief pause, she rolled her eyes. "I'll take the stairs." And a moment later, "Yes, that is nice for me. They'll be up and running again any time now. Where do you need to go so badly, anyway? ...Right, that'll happen. Goodbye House."

She hung up with a sigh and looked over at him. He spread his hands. "At least he's trying."

She snorted. "He's trying to drive me crazy," she said, confirming his earlier suspicions. She had seated herself behind her desk as she talked to House and now started shuffling files and papers distractedly.

He got up from the sofa. "Is that in a good way," he ventured as he moved to sit opposite her, "Or..."

"It's about fifty-fifty." It came out wryly, but she was smiling again.

"I think that might be a record. He is trying, you know. In his own way. I think he's actually... very happy about this. If you can believe it."

He had said it casually enough, he thought, but she was staring at him as a growing realisation took over her features. "You think I'm going to crush his heart into a million tiny pieces," she accused.

He winced. "It's... been known to happen."

"I suppose I should be flattered you think I have that much influence here."

"You don't know - you didn't see him with Stacy -"

"I saw him," she muttered.

"He wanted her to leave Mark." He didn't know how much she knew of the details surrounding Stacy's departure, couldn't remember what she'd been told and what she must have simply deduced. Her expression didn't give anything away. "And I think she would have, but then House... did his best to push her away, like he does, and of course when it worked and she left... You know he doesn't do this sort of thing lightly - when he's in, he's in. It's... why he doesn't do this, ever."

"You can't compare me to Stacy," she said. "This is hardly the same situation."

"Because you're not married?"

"No, because my history with House - there isn't the same amount of baggage between us. Not the bad kind, anyway. When Stacy came back it was so easy for them to hurt each other all over again. They practically got off on it. I've thought about this and I'm not..." She frowned, searching for the right words. "No matter what happens, we'll both still be here, he'll still be working for me. I'll still have a hospital to run and I'll still want him here - need him here - doing his job. He could never hurt me enough to make me forget that. I know what's important here."

He realised he had failed to take into account the extent to which she would always put the hospital first. But he heard what she was saying, too, reaffirming that responsibility they both felt; the strange burden that was having House in their lives.

What he suspected she wasn't saying was that when it came down to it, she wasn't so invested she couldn't pull out relatively intact if she had to.

"There's that optimism, again," he quipped, wondering if that was, in fact, all it was. Maybe she was fooling herself, and if this thing didn't work it would screw her up as much as he thought it would House.

More importantly, he wondered how much House knew, or suspected. It was possible he was completely in the dark on this - House had an emotional blind spot a mile wide. It might be one of the few things House would never see coming.

It was early evening and he was thinking about heading home for the day but decided to check in with House first, see if he was still around and if he needed some company. He stopped on approach to House's office, however. Cuddy had beaten him to it.

He stood down the hall and observed them together for a moment, having to fight the urge to join them. They were fine; they didn't need a chaperone.

For all that Cuddy was obviously on a tear about something, making emphatic statements and talking with her hands, and House, his very stance mocking, was giving back as good as he got - they were also, it seemed to Wilson's experienced gaze, very clearly enjoying themselves.

Thinking about the tenuous state of the budding relationship between them he didn't want to intrude, even if all they were doing at this moment was bickering. He didn't think his presence would be unwelcome - House would try to get him on side, Cuddy would roll her eyes at them both - but it was unnecessary.

They're fine, he told himself, and turned around.

Heading back to his office he could hear a vaguely House-like voice in his head suggesting that he was the one with the problem. Which wasn't out of the realm of possibility considering he had House on the brain. But there was also the fact that he had been fretting over a relationship all day that wasn't even his.

That was probably not healthy.

Maybe he was the one who needed to consider therapy instead of always bringing it up as an option for House.

Or maybe he just really needed to get a life, he mused as he collected his things and headed home alone.