Ack! I still can't figure out my pairing for House, and I had an entire week in Palm Springs to think it over. Spoilers for Bones have been occupying me, I guess. When I first entered the House fandom, I was crazy about House/Cuddy, but the magic has been lost this season, I think. And I loved House/Stacy, but that's been over for a long time. I also love, love, love House/Wilson. So, House/Cuddy/Wilson or OC, I'm thinking. But no House/Cameron! No! Though Cameron is a good character. I think she'll be coming back in my fic, because as annoying as she is, I miss her hyper-morality. I hope they aren't going to channel her role into Thirteen, because I don't like Thirteen and I don't like her character. Bleh. And I realized that I made a really silly mistake back in chapter 1. House and Wyatt were friends back in '74, not '64. Stupid confuddled brain. Anyway, on with the chapter!
Chapter 5: Middle-Age and Malfunction
"So, you're Gordon Wyatt?" Wilson asked, sitting down with House beside Gordon Wyatt's bed. His and House's morning had been relatively uneventful, but the oncologist had been up to his ears in paperwork, and had just barely made it to the noon lunch that House had set up. To be honest, he had absolutely no idea what House's old friend would be like, as 'really British' wasn't exactly much to go on. And for some reason, the fact that he was a psychiatrist for the FBI unnerved him, although he had never been uncomfortable with shrinks before. But the smile that was on the face of the man in the bed didn't help him feel any better. It was sort of smile Wilson gave to patients when they didn't quite understand what they were doing with their treatment. And somehow lunch didn't seem to go well with any sort of treatment.
"I believe so, yes." the older man answered, directing his smile more towards Wilson. His accent was certainly very English. It reminded Wilson of the trip he had taken with his family just before he graduated med school, and the old man with the greasy white beard in the pub asking him what a schoolboy was doing with a bottle of beer. It warmed him up in a way he couldn't explain. "I don't think I'm old enough to have taken leave of my senses, although I do tend to deal with people who have. I'm fairly certain that my doubtless myriad of problems hasn't muddled my sense of identity."
He could see why House liked him, at least. Though the man seemed rather more cheerful than anyone he tended to hang around, the way he spoke told Wilson that he was a witty, intelligent person, exactly the type that House respected and enjoyed. "You must be James Wilson. I'm afraid Greg has been reluctant to say much about you. Actually, he's been reluctant to say much about anything. That has always been in his nature, I suppose. Though he may have mentioned in passing that you fancied yourself quite the amateur psychologist." Wilson blushed, scowling at his best friend briefly, before setting his eyes back on Wyatt. Trust House to give him a bad reputation before they even got introduced.
"Nothing wrong with that, no, though the problems begin when self-righteousness enters into the equation." the psychiatrist continued, a wiseman's twinkle in his eye. "Then, you see, the message is lost in the other person's indigence. A lesson I learned the hard way, I'm afraid. I hear you're an oncologist, too. Hard job, especially for someone who wants to fix every person they encounter. I'm sure you do the best you can, as do the rest of us. But enough about you, let's hear about Greg! How has the poor chap been? I haven't seen him in thirty-five years, so I daresay he's changed."
"House has been… House-like." Wilson said slowly, still trying to process what Wyatt had been saying. He was pretty sure the man hadn't been trying to insult him, but the ease at which he had dissected his inner personality frightened him slightly. And that had just been casual conversation. He certainly didn't want Gordon Wyatt as his shrink.
"Ah, of course! House-like! How deliciously specific, Dr. Wilson! Well, I can definitely say during the short time I knew him he was quite Greg-like. I'm starting this off serious, by the way. Doubtless Greg has some diabolical plan to stick to small talk, waiting for an excuse to end our impromptu heart-to-heart before it gets anywhere. But I think that perhaps some real discussion would be of use, before I slip into an inexplicable coma, diverting all of your attentions to my acute ailment."
Wilson sat there, gaping at the nonchalance with which the psychiatrist had single-handedly dismissed all of the yet-to-be-spoken formalities and bypassed the small-talk stage. He thought that he was skilled with manipulation and conversation, but apparently the real masters were the shrinks. His respect for the man grew, as his sense of foreboding became more prominent. Despite what he liked people to think, he rarely discussed his inner feelings and emotions, and the prospect of having a deep discussion about himself with House terrified him.
"Uh, okay." the oncologist said, avoiding House's eye. He had yet to speak, and Wilson didn't really feel like looking at his best friend and seeing the discomfort that was doubtless on the diagnostician's face. If he hated talking about his true feelings, then House, champion of evasions and deflections, must loath it a thousand times more.
"So, you two, where did you meet?" Wyatt asked cheerfully, choosing to ignore the awkwardness that had settled in the room.
House spoke for the first time. "A medical conference, after Wilson's first wife. I bailed him out of jail, and the rest is long, messy, dysfunctional history." He didn't explain further, choosing to stay silent, and Wilson found he didn't have anything else to add to his answer. Wyatt didn't leave the room silent for long, though.
"Greg must have found you quite interesting, to bail you out of jail, then. He doesn't make friends with many people. We met purely by chance, actually. I was buying music at the record store, and I accidentally bumped into him while rounding the corner. It turned out that I had grabbed the last copy of the record that he wanted, so I suggested he come back to my house to listen to it. It was phenomenal how much we had in common, actually. Even at fifteen, he had incredible ambition to enter the medical field, and I was also entertaining the notion of medical school, though I was geared more towards the mysteries of the mind, whereas his interest rested in obscure diseases and syndromes." Wilson nodded; that sounded like House, alright. He must have met Wyatt not long after his experience in Japan with the 'janitor'. "We both shared a heavy interest in music, too. We started a band, though it only ever had members other than us for a few weeks at the most, and we never came up with a name, but jamming with Greg got me very interested in the musical field. When he left, I had just graduated from high school, and he had just barely gotten enough credit for all of his schooling in various countries to pass the tenth grade. Academic studies caught my attention for a while, but the siren call of music drew me away from university and I found myself portraying the glam rock alter-ego, Noddy Comet, for three splendid years."
"I listened to you." House said, with what seemed to be a pretty damn genuine grin on his face. Few things Wilson knew were able to make House as happy as he seemed now, and he was pretty damn glad one of them had come back into his life. If there was one thing House needed, it was happiness with no strings attached. "Bedded a beautiful woman to one of your songs, too. It was playing on radio, God knows why. I didn't think anyone still listened to your music in the eighties." Judging by the contented yet melancholy look on House's face, Wilson guessed the woman to be one Lisa Cuddy, Dean of Medicine. He voiced his thought aloud.
"All I say is 'beautiful woman' and you jump straight to Cuddy?" House replied, giving him a look.
"Well, was it?" he pressed, seeing Wyatt's amused look out of the corner of his eye.
"Yes." he admitted reluctantly. "But you make it seem like Cuddy's the most attractive woman I've ever slept with."
"She probably is." Wilson retorted.
"I'll have to think about that one." House mused, looking out of the window absentmindedly. "So, after your whirlwind success as the bisexual spaceman from the planet Dewd, how'd you get back into school? I didn't think that the universities would be so open to letting the evil influences of rock'n'roll into their prize institutions." he asked Wyatt, not wanting to ruminate on his boss any longer. Before he knew it, Wilson would be telling Gord about their history and how he had failed miserably with her so many times. The last thing he needed was another pompous pep-talk from a man who seemed to be equally unlucky in the love department. At least he didn't sleep with all of the women he met or marry the ones that caught his fancy.
"Quite an accident, really. I ran into one of my old professors at one of my gigs, and he suggested that I go to medical school. I had only done a year of undergrad studies, but I had excelled at his biology class, and apparently he had heard that I showed real promise in psychology too. I rethought my life a little, and much to the displeasure of my fans, I went back to school. The field of psychiatry grabbed me, and before I knew it, I was diagnosing crazies with some of the best minds in the field. My success caught the eye of the FBI, and so started a long career helping track down serial killers."
"Your academic history sounds almost as convoluted as mine." House commented, taking a bite of Wilson's sandwich while the other man wasn't looking. The younger man scowled at his friend, snatching back the sub before House could put another monster dent in his sub.
"I got you your Reuben, why do you want my sandwich?" Wilson asked, putting his tray on a side table, far away from roving House hands.
"Stolen food tastes better." the diagnostician replied, reluctantly taking a bite of his own sandwich.
"He must really like you, Dr. Wilson. He only steals the food of people he doesn't think are complete morons, and as I'm sure you know, morons make up 99.99999% of the world."
"Yeah, make it into something nice, Gord. As I remember, you didn't like my food-filching tendencies much, either."
"Yes, but you never thought I was a moron. That was good enough for me." Many a time House had coerced him into buying the fish and chips, and he never failed to steal half of his chips. Of course, he had acted angry on the outside, but Greg's friendship had been more valuable to him than the couple of pounds he spent on lunch.
"A complete moron. I don't think there's anyone in the world without some sort of moronic tendencies. You did some pretty stupid stuff back in the teenage years, if I remember correctly."
"Judging by the amount of booze, LSD, 'shrooms and marijuana we ingested back then, I'm not sure if you can remember correctly." He gave a good chuckle at that, remembering the wild partying and experimenting they had done back in the day. The Gordon Wyatt back then was quite different from the one in the hospital bed now, that was for sure.
"Yeah, but all of that kinda falls under the 'stupid' category."
"Quite true, quite true. Besides, I think we're a bit tamer now, yes?" House looked up to the ceiling. Yeah, he hadn't done any drugs.
"Yeah, House has been real tame." Wilson said, giving his friend a look. "He just got off of his narcotics addiction, he's dropped acid several times over the past few years, and his psychiatrist said he was an alcoholic."
"Trust me, Wilson, that's tame. And all of that was for medical reasons, except for the booze. Besides, I'm clean now, isn't the present supposed to be the only thing that matters?" He gave Wilson a big sappy frown, but the oncologist just rolled his eyes.
"Sure, House. I'll just ignore all of the crap you've put me through over the years and start anew."
"Oh, God, Wilson, we are NOT going to get into the blame game. I'm sure that'll be enough to drive Gord's blood pressure sky high." Nearly every time they started talking about House's various addictions, Wilson ended up chastising him for being such a burden and a bad influence, as if the oncologist wasn't screwed-up at all. House usually just let it all slide past him, but occasionally his best friend would say something outrageous and they would get into an argument, which never actually got them anywhere.
"Please, do play the blame game. I haven't been clued in to everything Greg has done over the years, so perhaps we should start from the beginning." House frowned at the way Wyatt had turned practically gleeful at the prospect of exposing the story of the years since they had last seen each other, his grin as wide as the Cheshire Cat's. Then again, he was a psychiatrist. Dr. Nolan had wanted to know everything about him, and while not everything had come out, most of his life had ended up spurting involuntarily out of his mouth during their sessions. Gord already knew about his childhood stuff, so it was only natural for him to be curious about what came after. And this was starting to sound like Wyatt wanted to engage them in some sort of impromptu therapy. Well, he wasn't going to have any of it. His mind began whirled as possibilities for playing hooky from their lunch began to appear.
"Well, let me see." Wilson started, putting his hands on his hips in that annoyingly endearing Wilson way, getting his rant voice warmed up. "First, he roped me into his twisted ways with that strange overture at the medical conference, a move that I should have seen as the beginning of a drawn-out and torturous disaster, then he proceeded to alienate all of my wives, gradually driving them away from me, he dragged me into the whole mess with him and Stacy and the infarction, then he slowly got me to support his drug habit, he practically screwed my marriage with Julie, he's made me do countless illegal things, not to mention the Tritter debacle, which nearly landed us both in jail with charges of drug trafficking, then there was the whole mess with his diagnostics team, and then there was Amber…" he trailed off after mentioning his late girlfriend, and refused to meet anyone's eye.
"I killed his girlfriend." House said, and Wilson was surprised to hear that he didn't say it with any sarcasm or melodrama. It seemed to be with actual regret that House looked back on the bus crash.
"Surely you didn't really…" Wyatt admonished, looking his old friend in the eye. He could see pain there, guilt, regret, remorse, all of those things, but nothing of what became of men who murdered.
"Well, it was my fault that she was on the bus, because I was getting drunk, being so ridiculously dependent on Wilson's friendship that I had managed to work myself up into such a torment of self-pity that I needed to get smashed at random bars every night." He looked quickly at Wilson, his face as guilty as the oncologist had ever seen it. He was disappointed to find that he was surprised to see such a look of shame and remorse on his friend's face. With a pang, he realized that this was one of the reasons House had gone downhill. Guilt washed over him too, a fact that didn't escape Wyatt's notice. He could tell from the energy in the air that some taboo topic had just been breached, perhaps something that had escaped real discussion for a long time. "And it was my fault that I called her, because I really did know that you had been on call that night, and I… I don't know… but before I knew it, I woke up in a strip club with half a skull and no recollection of the hours before." House looked up at Wyatt, his eyes glassier than before, though the older man didn't feel any need to mention it. He looked at Wilson, letting the sadness wash off of his face, to be replaced with something angrier. "Let's really face this, Wilson; as I'm sure you've been thinking ever since we figured out that it was Amber that I needed to save, it's all my fault that the one good thing that's happened for you since like, ever, got taken away from you. No more denials, no more shifts in blame, it was all my fault." The oncologist looked completely taken aback. He had certainly not expected their lunch to turn into a full-blown confession from House, even though he had felt the atmosphere shifting.
"Did they teach you nothing in therapy?" he asked, incredulous. "There were a hundred thousand factors leading up to her death, House, and you getting drunk was just one of them. She chose to get on that bus with you; she chose to care enough about you to return your cane!"
"No, I can't be vain enough to take credit for everything, but if it wasn't for me, neither us would have been on that bus. Hell, maybe if we hadn't taken those extra seconds to get on that bus, maybe the whole damn crash would have been avoided. Maybe-"
"Greg." Wyatt said darkly, cutting him off. "Wilson's right; there are always an infinite amount of factors in every event. If the people who got on at the stops after you hadn't been there, if a car in front of you hadn't been parking, if the road had been paved smoother, if the timer on the red light was just a few seconds shorter or longer, maybe this crash could have been avoided. Each person who contributed to the event feels some amount of guilt over what happened, but you cannot live your life dwelling on the small part you play in the misfortunes of the universe. What we can do is try to make good choices, and do all that is in our power to prevent misfortune from happening. This doesn't mean that we need to suppress our natures, for that too, leads to tragedy. We only need to do the best we can, and the rest is left up to chance and circumstance." While Wyatt didn't know the exact details of the accident, he could see the weight of guilt sitting heavily on House's shoulders, and he was loath to see his old friend in pain.
"She was still on that bus because of me." House muttered, looking down at his feet. He hadn't wanted anything about their dysfunctional relationship to be brought back into the light, least of all Amber's death. Even though he had learned to let go of much of the guilt during his stay in Mayfield, the pain was still there, and he felt a sudden urge to convey to Wilson how much he felt responsible for the incident. Maybe that would make the younger man believe in his remorse, because Wilson didn't seem to be able to trust him about anything.
"She was on that bus because of me, too, House. You don't think I feel guilty? I dragged her into our crazy friendship; it was my fault that she managed to care enough about us to go pick you up in the middle of the night! I have to live with that guilt, too, House! But your friend is right; all we can do is live as the people that we are and hope for the best."
"What about the blame game? What about all of the crap that I've put you through?"
"Might I suggest that Wilson is beginning to rethink his opinions of you and your place in his life?" Wyatt said, pleased with what had been discussed. He spotted the unresolved issues between the pair from a mile off, and while only the surface had been scratched, he always enjoyed helping people get the peace they disturbed. He certainly wanted to talk with the psychiatrist House had or was seeing. Then again, he had more important things to deal with than the battered emotions of his adolescent friend, like the case. And then there was the annoying fact that was sick with something. "Perhaps, as is often the case, the blame game is played to try and push all of our faults onto another person, alleviating ourselves of guilt, when we ourselves are the ones we hate the most. I'm sure you're no stranger to this, Greg."
"He shifts from blame to sympathy too easily." House muttered. "One minute, he's pinning all of his life problems on Greg House; the next, his messiah complex is driving him to comfort me."
"And perhaps now you're the one criticizing to draw attention away from yourself."
"Well, I'm supposed to have already been fixed, so I don't see what the point is in-"
"Might I suggest something for the two of you?" Wyatt cut in. "I know a bright young psychologist who would delight in engaging you in couple's therapy. He's already been working with Agent Booth and Dr. Brennan." That would solve the problem of his already busy schedule, and he was sure Sweets would delight in such a dysfunctional relationship to study. Though of course, his main focus remained the FBI agent and his forensic anthropologist partner. He wasn't surprised in the least, unfortunately, that Booth hadn't managed to 'grow a set'.
"And I can see how well that's been going; they obviously have NO issues. If he can't get them to sleep together, I don't know how much good he can do with me and Wilson."
"Wait, you want to sleep with me?" That was totally messed up. As far as Wilson knew, House was attracted to one sex, and one sex only, and that sex's genitalia did not dangle.
"No, that's not what I'm saying at all!" Trust Wilson to take everything in the completely wrong way. "If he can't get them to admit their feelings for each other, I don't see why he's such an ingénue." House had met his fair share of young super geniuses, and he had yet to be impressed by any of them. "Wilson's pretty stubborn when it comes to talking about his issues."
"Me? You used to hide behind a brick wall of Vicodin and sarcasm!"
"Yeah, well who's the one who successfully made it through the looney bin? I think we all know who the one with the real problems is, Mr. Not-So-Well-Adjusted. I think you're the one who should have been carted off to Mayfield!"
"Yeah, because I couldn't sleep for days after my employee did himself in and started hallucinating my best friend's dead girlfriend! You're right, I should have gone and you should have stayed here, because you're the stable one!"
"Oi!" Wyatt shouted, interrupting their increasingly heated argument. "You're both screwed-up, ass-backwards, convoluted, labyrinthine, full of bollocks, malfunctioning middle-aged men who can't talk about their emotions to each other in fear of shifting the delicate balanced that their twisted relationship functions on and-" His words were cut off by a gasp that came from his own mouth. Both House and Wilson shut up at this new development. Wilson's usual caring face made an appearance on his face, but if he had taken the time to look at his best friend, he would have seen a similar expression.
"My, my hands!" Wyatt exclaimed, holding them out in front of him like they no longer belonged on his body.
"What's wrong with them?" House asked, going into doctor mode, quickly forgetting the argument of a few moments earlier.
"At first they were numb, but it feels like the very fires of Hell have been set on them." he answered, in a remarkably calm voice. "Now, if my medical training hasn't abandoned me in my years of catching criminals, I believe we have a new symptom to add to the board."
House nodded. "Pain and paresthesia in the hands. Wilson, get the fantastic four out of the cafeteria and into the office. It's time for a differential diagnosis."
The oncologist nodded grimly. He got up, disposed of his lunch, and nearly knocked into a tall boy. On second glance, he turned out not to be a boy but a young man with a face more boyish than his own.
"Dr. Lance Sweets." the man said, offering his hand. Wilson shook it, still a little confused from the almost-crash. Sweets directed his attention to Wyatt. "I heard about you being in the hospital from Dr. Brennan, and I thought I'd stop by, Dr,- I mean Chef, or is it Doctor again now… never mind. It's good to see you again."
"Ah, Dr. Sweets." House got a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach. No way this Boy Scout was- "Gentlemen, meet your new therapist." Dr. Lance Sweets looked at Wyatt, confused, but the older man only gave him a cryptic wink in answer. This was going to be a lot of fun.
"I'll get the nurse in here for your hands." House grumbled, limping out of the room. Fan-freaking-tastic.