Fic: Lessons we haven't learnt yet (House, House/Wilson, R)
Guys, I have been doing nothing for the past three weeks except having feelings about House. And House and Wilson and how they are more in love with each other than any two other men who have ever been on television. So I wrote some chat fic for Lucy between last week's episode and now, and I'm posting it because the series is ending in an hour, and if I don't do it now, I won't post it ever. I'm not telling you it's any good, but I had a lot of feelings.
Title: Lessons we haven't learnt yet
Fandom: House
Pairing: House/Wilson
Rating: R for sex and drug use
Summary: House and Wilson get stoned and then get married. (Shut up, I know.)
Warning: SPOILERS THROUGH 8.21.
Notes: Unbetaed. Fix-it fic. ~2600 words.
He doesn't know where House got the pot. He asked, but House just shrugged and said if he was going to jail on Monday anyway, what difference would a little possession make? Wilson conceded the point.
The living room floor is cool under his back, smoke wreathing upwards from his open mouth, and he watches it rise in fascination. He hasn't been high in a long time.
"Medical marijuana laws make a lot of sense," Wilson says astutely. From the corner of his eye, he can see House looking at him, but he doesn't turn his head.
He waits a beat, then adds, "Dying men deserve their fun too," just to watch House flinch, the subtle drawing in of his expression. It's cruel, but everything about this is cruel. He passes the joint back, House's fingers brushing his as he takes it.
House takes a deep hit off the joint, and Wilson watches the paper kindle, the way House's lips purse to take in the smoke.
"Shotgun," he suggests, because if he was going to say, "kiss me," he would have done it twenty years ago.
House's clear-eyed stare says he knows the ploy for what it is.
But he leans in anyway, one elbow on the floor, his hand still holding the joint resting precariously on Wilson's chest. He breathes a stream of smoke into Wilson's open mouth, and their lips don't even graze, but it's still almost more than Wilson can stand.
He tilts his chin up, seeking more contact. But House has already pulled away. "Next time just ask for what you want."
Wilson coughs a little and licks his dry lips. He didn't know it would matter so much.
He thinks about six months of chemo without House, two weeks on, two weeks off, a see-saw between active misery and the more insidious, creeping kind. He thinks of dying while House is serving out his sentence, never seeing him again except during visiting hours. There are no good options, not even any mediocre options. "Don't go," he says. It's all he wants.
House kisses him.
Wilson loses himself in it, the feel of House's lips parting on his, the scrape of stubble, the taste of smoke. House is whispering something against his mouth, between kisses, folded into them, and Wilson feels the shape of the words before he recognizes them.
"Don't die," House is saying over and over again, not even breath behind it.
Wilson cups a hand around the back of House's neck and kisses him harder. The floor seems less miraculously comfortable as he shifts against it, looking for a better angle, better access to House’s mouth.
House must have snuffed out the joint somewhere because when he grips both hands in Wilson's hair, nothing catches fire. But the floor is still hard and cold under his back, too much of House's weight pressing down on his chest as House kisses him fiercely. "Bed or couch," Wilson pants out, turning his face to the side so House's lips catch his jaw instead. "Pick one."
"Bed," says House, and he yanks Wilson up by his shirt collar.
House limps, cane-less, to the bedroom, fingers brushing the wall to keep himself upright. Wilson follows him.
They aren’t touching, and now that they've stopped, it's harder to start again. There's more thought involved, instead of blunt, stoned instinct. Wilson puts a hand on House's chest, stroking the warm cotton of his t-shirt, not sure how to begin again. His thoughts are running stickily, too much in his head, and House is standing so still, just watching him.
It's a game of chicken all over again, waiting to see who moves first. Wilson nearly laughs; they are impossibly bad at this. He moves his hand to the back of House's neck, brings their foreheads together. "I want you," he says quietly, and waits for a punchline.
But House doesn't say anything at all. He kisses the corner of Wilson's mouth, improbably tender. And the only thing scarier than House laughing at his desire is House taking it seriously.
So they don't negotiate in words. Apparently House feels no need to be sharply witty when he's using his teeth on the lobe of Wilson's ear. He's shaking as House undresses him, for too many reasons, his heart beating strongly under the hand House lays on his chest, holding him to the bed.
They make out like teenagers, and it would be funny if Wilson didn't need him so much, if he couldn't still feel House whispering, "Don't die," against his skin.
By the time both of them are naked -- no need for coyness, though Wilson flinches from the feverish memory of his days on House's couch -- Wilson is as desperate as he's ever been in bed, and as directionless. He can keep his hands moving, keep putting his mouth on every part of House's body he can reach, but deciding what follows is more daunting.
House drags himself down the bed and Wilson knows what’s coming before House’s lips close around the flushed head of his cock. He throws an arm across his eyes. He can’t watch this. He can’t look at House’s head in his lap, House hollowing his cheeks to create better suction, House swallowing fluidly around him like he’s done this before. Has he done this before? Wilson is his best friend. Wilson should know these things, but he doesn’t.
House nudges him onto his side and curls around him from behind, one hand going straight back to Wilson's cock. He whispers a question he must already know the answer to, and Wilson nods, their cheeks brushing, stubbled on clean-shaven. House has condoms and a bottle of lube in the nightstand, and Wilson parts his legs willingly, although this is all unfamiliar territory.
He moves on two of House's fingers, shifting into the slick pressure of them, allowing it and opening to it and then finally wanting it. House looks at him with an expression that would seem impassive if he didn't know better, if he hadn't had to read every stormy crease of House's brow over the years.
Wilson reaches a hand up to him, touching his cheek, and House presses a kiss to the center of his palm, bending his fingers in and up, spreading them a little.
He's buzzed enough that it hurts less than he expects when House presses into him, but it's still new, surprising. House kisses his mouth, tenderly, and Wilson's hands move to his hips, holding him in deep.
It's not perfunctory like the threesome, not an experiment; it's slow and actually kind of devastating, finally having House in him. The pleasure of it creeps up his spine, settles low in his belly, makes him grip at House with his knees. It is completely unfair. He's dying, his body betraying him day by day, and he never knew before now how badly he needed this.
House makes him come first, moving steadily inside him and stroking him with a slick hand, kissing every desperate noise Wilson makes straight out of his mouth. Wilson watches him through slitted eyes, sees the way his face goes slack in orgasm for the first time.
They lie close afterwards, shoulders touching, hands overlapping. The quiet is easy for a while.
Then House says, "Do you want to get married?"
“I’ve been married,” Wilson replies evenly, not opening his eyes.
“Not to me.”
The silence is not easy this time. “What are you doing, House?” It’s terrible in the way that any hope is terrible right now, and he can’t just treat it as a joke, although a month ago it would have been.
“I’m asking you a question.”
Wilson opens his eyes, can’t stand to see House so earnest - nearly entreating - and closes them again. “You’re asking a dying man to marry you. You mocked Cameron for five years for doing the exact same thing.”
“Cameron was a romantic idiot. I know what I’m getting into, and I know my own motives.”
“Which are?”
“I need you.”
Wilson doesn’t know what to say to that. He can’t contest it, but the ache he feels in his chest when House says the words is almost unbearable. He knows that House needs him, has allowed it to go unsaid for decades because that was just how it worked, just the nature of their friendship. And now all those things they’ve never said are spilling out of them all over the place. Wilson wants to say yes, but he holds back, hesitates. If either of them were really sane, this would be a terrible idea, a further complication in an already difficult situation.
House puts a hand on his face, and Wilson looks at him, so close that he can’t help it. “Answer the question,” he says against Wilson’s lips. “Not, ‘should we get married?’ Not ‘is it responsible to get married?’ Do you want to?”
“Yes,” Wilson tells him reluctantly.
“Good,” House says. Then he rolls back to the other side of bed, onto his side so Wilson finds himself looking at the back of House’s neck.
“House.”
“Sleeping,” replies House.
“You can’t ask a question like that and then roll over and go to sleep.”
“Do you want to cuddle instead? I’m used to that costing extra.” It’s like House is back to his old self, and it shouldn’t be devastating, but it is. Wilson feels so raw, so taken apart, and House is making jokes about hookers like it’s any other night.
“I need you too,” he says. “I need you to not run away, not now. I know how much that’s asking. But if you need me to be here with you, for however long I can, I need you to not act like an ass.”
House rolls over onto his back again. “I’ll set the alarm for seven. It can’t be that hard to find a justice of the peace in New York if you start early enough.”
They take the train into the city, awash in the early morning commuter crowd. Wilson wonders what his rumpled suit is telling the other passengers, but House reads the Times in his jeans and t-shirt like nothing unusual is happening. There's a mark just above his collarbone from Wilson's teeth. Every once in a while, House catches his eye, and Wilson wants to laugh because there is nothing that is not ridiculous about this situation. It is crazier than anything Kyle could have done.
He doesn't even think about the fact that what they're doing is illegal until they're already over state lines and it's too late. House doesn't touch him, doesn't look at him, just says, "I won't get caught," and Wilson wonders how he knows. Everything else has gone so badly wrong, but it's hard to think about that in light of House's reckless hope.
They take a cab to city hall, weak and crippled as they are, hardly a romantic sight. As they pass through security, Wilson waits for someone to catch on, for someone to realize that they shouldn't be there, but a bored security guard nods them through the metal detector. House's cane gets barely a second look.
Wilson remembers getting married as a complex and arcane process, a pile of paper and a long list of phone calls to make, but now he realizes that that most of that was the wedding, the insurance, the joint accounts and financial shuffling, all these things that don't matter now. House probably wouldn't even want to be beneficiary on his life insurance.
The marriage license is one piece of paper, and the process of getting it takes half an hour, less time than he's ever spent at the DMV in Princeton. "It will become valid in 24 hours," the clerk says.
"Don't worry," says House, when Wilson asks what his plan is now. "I know a guy. Do you have enough money for a hotel?"
They both know the reason Wilson splurges on a plush room at [some really nice hotel, idk], but neither of them say it. House spends the day watching a Dance Moms marathon in the king-size bed, and Wilson feigns disinterest. Neither of them answer their phones, although Wilson surreptitiously emailed his patients on the train and skimmed their deeply sympathetic responses, feeling vaguely guilty. He's not sick, he's playing hooky.
House touches him carelessly, a hand in his hair, tucked into his waistband, slowly folding into his own. Wilson looks at the license on the room's imposingly modern desk and feels so giddy he's almost sick with it. He tries not to think beyond the morning, every time he's ever said, "Take it day by day," to a patient coming back to haunt him.
It turns out that the guy House knows is a city clerk named Marvin Feinstein who lives in Queens and doesn't have anything better to do with his Saturday morning. "His brother-in-law needed a heart transplant a few years ago. I pulled some strings. He thinks he owes me."
"And to think I questioned your ethics," Wilson replies dryly.
They stop for breakfast at a diner, and House disappears halfway through. He says he’s going to the bathroom, but after ten minutes, Wilson starts to wonder if he’s been ditched, if House is both crueler and more cowardly than Wilson ever thought. It would be the worst joke in the series that starts with, “Did you hear the one about the oncologist who got cancer?”
He sits paralyzed, on the verge of hysterical laughter, both hands cupped over his mouth as if that will hold it in. He’s lightheaded by the time House slips back in, as though he hasn’t taken a real breath in half an hour. “Where the hell did you go?” Wilson asks sharply.
House’s eyebrows go up. “I had to get something,” he says. “Have you paid? Marv’s expecting us.”
Feinstein's wife is their witness, and it's obvious both that she's done this many times before and that she enjoys it, cueing up a recording of "Here Comes the Bride" on the living room stereo. “Do you have rings?” she asks. Wilson stutters in embarrassment.
“Yup,” says House, pulling a small velvet box out of his coat pocket. Inside are two scuffed wedding bands, probably gold-plate, and Wilson remembers the pawn shop they passed down the block from the diner. House’s smile is almost an apology.
It must be obvious that they've rushed this, and House's bleak downward glance on "until death do you part" must tell them why, but Feinstein and his wife don't ask questions. Wilson is grateful. He wiggles a slightly over-large ring onto House's finger and kisses him clumsily on the mouth, a surreal yet binding exchange.
"Mazel tov," Mrs. Feinstein says, kissing them both on the cheek, eyes soft with the memory of other weddings. House winks at him.
Wilson lies in House’s bed that night, twirling his ring. The sensation isn’t new, except in all the ways it is. “If this is the honeymoon, I expected more sex and less brooding,” House says, stopping his hand.
“I’m still dying.”
“Not on our honeymoon.” He leans in close, close enough that Wilson could kiss him if he wanted to. “Tonight we are both going to live forever.”
Wilson laughs against his mouth. “This is your soft heart. The one I told every woman you ever dated she would break.”
House squeezes Wilson’s hand. “Now it’s your turn.”
-end-
Title: Lessons we haven't learnt yet
Fandom: House
Pairing: House/Wilson
Rating: R for sex and drug use
Summary: House and Wilson get stoned and then get married. (Shut up, I know.)
Warning: SPOILERS THROUGH 8.21.
Notes: Unbetaed. Fix-it fic. ~2600 words.
He doesn't know where House got the pot. He asked, but House just shrugged and said if he was going to jail on Monday anyway, what difference would a little possession make? Wilson conceded the point.
The living room floor is cool under his back, smoke wreathing upwards from his open mouth, and he watches it rise in fascination. He hasn't been high in a long time.
"Medical marijuana laws make a lot of sense," Wilson says astutely. From the corner of his eye, he can see House looking at him, but he doesn't turn his head.
He waits a beat, then adds, "Dying men deserve their fun too," just to watch House flinch, the subtle drawing in of his expression. It's cruel, but everything about this is cruel. He passes the joint back, House's fingers brushing his as he takes it.
House takes a deep hit off the joint, and Wilson watches the paper kindle, the way House's lips purse to take in the smoke.
"Shotgun," he suggests, because if he was going to say, "kiss me," he would have done it twenty years ago.
House's clear-eyed stare says he knows the ploy for what it is.
But he leans in anyway, one elbow on the floor, his hand still holding the joint resting precariously on Wilson's chest. He breathes a stream of smoke into Wilson's open mouth, and their lips don't even graze, but it's still almost more than Wilson can stand.
He tilts his chin up, seeking more contact. But House has already pulled away. "Next time just ask for what you want."
Wilson coughs a little and licks his dry lips. He didn't know it would matter so much.
He thinks about six months of chemo without House, two weeks on, two weeks off, a see-saw between active misery and the more insidious, creeping kind. He thinks of dying while House is serving out his sentence, never seeing him again except during visiting hours. There are no good options, not even any mediocre options. "Don't go," he says. It's all he wants.
House kisses him.
Wilson loses himself in it, the feel of House's lips parting on his, the scrape of stubble, the taste of smoke. House is whispering something against his mouth, between kisses, folded into them, and Wilson feels the shape of the words before he recognizes them.
"Don't die," House is saying over and over again, not even breath behind it.
Wilson cups a hand around the back of House's neck and kisses him harder. The floor seems less miraculously comfortable as he shifts against it, looking for a better angle, better access to House’s mouth.
House must have snuffed out the joint somewhere because when he grips both hands in Wilson's hair, nothing catches fire. But the floor is still hard and cold under his back, too much of House's weight pressing down on his chest as House kisses him fiercely. "Bed or couch," Wilson pants out, turning his face to the side so House's lips catch his jaw instead. "Pick one."
"Bed," says House, and he yanks Wilson up by his shirt collar.
House limps, cane-less, to the bedroom, fingers brushing the wall to keep himself upright. Wilson follows him.
They aren’t touching, and now that they've stopped, it's harder to start again. There's more thought involved, instead of blunt, stoned instinct. Wilson puts a hand on House's chest, stroking the warm cotton of his t-shirt, not sure how to begin again. His thoughts are running stickily, too much in his head, and House is standing so still, just watching him.
It's a game of chicken all over again, waiting to see who moves first. Wilson nearly laughs; they are impossibly bad at this. He moves his hand to the back of House's neck, brings their foreheads together. "I want you," he says quietly, and waits for a punchline.
But House doesn't say anything at all. He kisses the corner of Wilson's mouth, improbably tender. And the only thing scarier than House laughing at his desire is House taking it seriously.
So they don't negotiate in words. Apparently House feels no need to be sharply witty when he's using his teeth on the lobe of Wilson's ear. He's shaking as House undresses him, for too many reasons, his heart beating strongly under the hand House lays on his chest, holding him to the bed.
They make out like teenagers, and it would be funny if Wilson didn't need him so much, if he couldn't still feel House whispering, "Don't die," against his skin.
By the time both of them are naked -- no need for coyness, though Wilson flinches from the feverish memory of his days on House's couch -- Wilson is as desperate as he's ever been in bed, and as directionless. He can keep his hands moving, keep putting his mouth on every part of House's body he can reach, but deciding what follows is more daunting.
House drags himself down the bed and Wilson knows what’s coming before House’s lips close around the flushed head of his cock. He throws an arm across his eyes. He can’t watch this. He can’t look at House’s head in his lap, House hollowing his cheeks to create better suction, House swallowing fluidly around him like he’s done this before. Has he done this before? Wilson is his best friend. Wilson should know these things, but he doesn’t.
House nudges him onto his side and curls around him from behind, one hand going straight back to Wilson's cock. He whispers a question he must already know the answer to, and Wilson nods, their cheeks brushing, stubbled on clean-shaven. House has condoms and a bottle of lube in the nightstand, and Wilson parts his legs willingly, although this is all unfamiliar territory.
He moves on two of House's fingers, shifting into the slick pressure of them, allowing it and opening to it and then finally wanting it. House looks at him with an expression that would seem impassive if he didn't know better, if he hadn't had to read every stormy crease of House's brow over the years.
Wilson reaches a hand up to him, touching his cheek, and House presses a kiss to the center of his palm, bending his fingers in and up, spreading them a little.
He's buzzed enough that it hurts less than he expects when House presses into him, but it's still new, surprising. House kisses his mouth, tenderly, and Wilson's hands move to his hips, holding him in deep.
It's not perfunctory like the threesome, not an experiment; it's slow and actually kind of devastating, finally having House in him. The pleasure of it creeps up his spine, settles low in his belly, makes him grip at House with his knees. It is completely unfair. He's dying, his body betraying him day by day, and he never knew before now how badly he needed this.
House makes him come first, moving steadily inside him and stroking him with a slick hand, kissing every desperate noise Wilson makes straight out of his mouth. Wilson watches him through slitted eyes, sees the way his face goes slack in orgasm for the first time.
They lie close afterwards, shoulders touching, hands overlapping. The quiet is easy for a while.
Then House says, "Do you want to get married?"
“I’ve been married,” Wilson replies evenly, not opening his eyes.
“Not to me.”
The silence is not easy this time. “What are you doing, House?” It’s terrible in the way that any hope is terrible right now, and he can’t just treat it as a joke, although a month ago it would have been.
“I’m asking you a question.”
Wilson opens his eyes, can’t stand to see House so earnest - nearly entreating - and closes them again. “You’re asking a dying man to marry you. You mocked Cameron for five years for doing the exact same thing.”
“Cameron was a romantic idiot. I know what I’m getting into, and I know my own motives.”
“Which are?”
“I need you.”
Wilson doesn’t know what to say to that. He can’t contest it, but the ache he feels in his chest when House says the words is almost unbearable. He knows that House needs him, has allowed it to go unsaid for decades because that was just how it worked, just the nature of their friendship. And now all those things they’ve never said are spilling out of them all over the place. Wilson wants to say yes, but he holds back, hesitates. If either of them were really sane, this would be a terrible idea, a further complication in an already difficult situation.
House puts a hand on his face, and Wilson looks at him, so close that he can’t help it. “Answer the question,” he says against Wilson’s lips. “Not, ‘should we get married?’ Not ‘is it responsible to get married?’ Do you want to?”
“Yes,” Wilson tells him reluctantly.
“Good,” House says. Then he rolls back to the other side of bed, onto his side so Wilson finds himself looking at the back of House’s neck.
“House.”
“Sleeping,” replies House.
“You can’t ask a question like that and then roll over and go to sleep.”
“Do you want to cuddle instead? I’m used to that costing extra.” It’s like House is back to his old self, and it shouldn’t be devastating, but it is. Wilson feels so raw, so taken apart, and House is making jokes about hookers like it’s any other night.
“I need you too,” he says. “I need you to not run away, not now. I know how much that’s asking. But if you need me to be here with you, for however long I can, I need you to not act like an ass.”
House rolls over onto his back again. “I’ll set the alarm for seven. It can’t be that hard to find a justice of the peace in New York if you start early enough.”
They take the train into the city, awash in the early morning commuter crowd. Wilson wonders what his rumpled suit is telling the other passengers, but House reads the Times in his jeans and t-shirt like nothing unusual is happening. There's a mark just above his collarbone from Wilson's teeth. Every once in a while, House catches his eye, and Wilson wants to laugh because there is nothing that is not ridiculous about this situation. It is crazier than anything Kyle could have done.
He doesn't even think about the fact that what they're doing is illegal until they're already over state lines and it's too late. House doesn't touch him, doesn't look at him, just says, "I won't get caught," and Wilson wonders how he knows. Everything else has gone so badly wrong, but it's hard to think about that in light of House's reckless hope.
They take a cab to city hall, weak and crippled as they are, hardly a romantic sight. As they pass through security, Wilson waits for someone to catch on, for someone to realize that they shouldn't be there, but a bored security guard nods them through the metal detector. House's cane gets barely a second look.
Wilson remembers getting married as a complex and arcane process, a pile of paper and a long list of phone calls to make, but now he realizes that that most of that was the wedding, the insurance, the joint accounts and financial shuffling, all these things that don't matter now. House probably wouldn't even want to be beneficiary on his life insurance.
The marriage license is one piece of paper, and the process of getting it takes half an hour, less time than he's ever spent at the DMV in Princeton. "It will become valid in 24 hours," the clerk says.
"Don't worry," says House, when Wilson asks what his plan is now. "I know a guy. Do you have enough money for a hotel?"
They both know the reason Wilson splurges on a plush room at [some really nice hotel, idk], but neither of them say it. House spends the day watching a Dance Moms marathon in the king-size bed, and Wilson feigns disinterest. Neither of them answer their phones, although Wilson surreptitiously emailed his patients on the train and skimmed their deeply sympathetic responses, feeling vaguely guilty. He's not sick, he's playing hooky.
House touches him carelessly, a hand in his hair, tucked into his waistband, slowly folding into his own. Wilson looks at the license on the room's imposingly modern desk and feels so giddy he's almost sick with it. He tries not to think beyond the morning, every time he's ever said, "Take it day by day," to a patient coming back to haunt him.
It turns out that the guy House knows is a city clerk named Marvin Feinstein who lives in Queens and doesn't have anything better to do with his Saturday morning. "His brother-in-law needed a heart transplant a few years ago. I pulled some strings. He thinks he owes me."
"And to think I questioned your ethics," Wilson replies dryly.
They stop for breakfast at a diner, and House disappears halfway through. He says he’s going to the bathroom, but after ten minutes, Wilson starts to wonder if he’s been ditched, if House is both crueler and more cowardly than Wilson ever thought. It would be the worst joke in the series that starts with, “Did you hear the one about the oncologist who got cancer?”
He sits paralyzed, on the verge of hysterical laughter, both hands cupped over his mouth as if that will hold it in. He’s lightheaded by the time House slips back in, as though he hasn’t taken a real breath in half an hour. “Where the hell did you go?” Wilson asks sharply.
House’s eyebrows go up. “I had to get something,” he says. “Have you paid? Marv’s expecting us.”
Feinstein's wife is their witness, and it's obvious both that she's done this many times before and that she enjoys it, cueing up a recording of "Here Comes the Bride" on the living room stereo. “Do you have rings?” she asks. Wilson stutters in embarrassment.
“Yup,” says House, pulling a small velvet box out of his coat pocket. Inside are two scuffed wedding bands, probably gold-plate, and Wilson remembers the pawn shop they passed down the block from the diner. House’s smile is almost an apology.
It must be obvious that they've rushed this, and House's bleak downward glance on "until death do you part" must tell them why, but Feinstein and his wife don't ask questions. Wilson is grateful. He wiggles a slightly over-large ring onto House's finger and kisses him clumsily on the mouth, a surreal yet binding exchange.
"Mazel tov," Mrs. Feinstein says, kissing them both on the cheek, eyes soft with the memory of other weddings. House winks at him.
Wilson lies in House’s bed that night, twirling his ring. The sensation isn’t new, except in all the ways it is. “If this is the honeymoon, I expected more sex and less brooding,” House says, stopping his hand.
“I’m still dying.”
“Not on our honeymoon.” He leans in close, close enough that Wilson could kiss him if he wanted to. “Tonight we are both going to live forever.”
Wilson laughs against his mouth. “This is your soft heart. The one I told every woman you ever dated she would break.”
House squeezes Wilson’s hand. “Now it’s your turn.”
-end-