Knots: Ghosts (5/12)
Pairing: House/Wilson
Rating: Mature Audiences, not suitable for children
Warnings: This series deals with sexual abuse and recovering it. And there’s het smut in this chapter.
Summary: Wilson has a terrible Christmas eve and a number of unfortunate encounters with women.
Part One (By Pitza)
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four
Wilson is in the car on the way to work when his phone rings. “Hi Mom, I’m driving.” Conversations with his mother do not require that much attention. He would have pulled over for any other call.
“Hello Jimmy, this is your mother.” Hearing her voice makes him happy. She’s talking about family and neighbors. Her thoughts rarely connect.
“We had a nice card from Ellen. Did you know she’s gone back to her maiden name? She signed it ‘Ellen Metzger.’”
As far as he knows, the only time Ellen was ever referred to as Mrs. James Wilson was at their wedding reception, and she wasn’t happy about it then. Mom threw a minor fit after Ellen complained to his father, who made the introduction. Mom must have forgotten about that. She has a unique ability to forget things that do not please her.
“Ellen and I are divorced, Mom. She can call herself Elizabeth Taylor if that’s what makes her happy.”
Mom laughs and keeps talking. Wilson focuses on the road through three or four lights.
“How’s Greg? Is he walking any better, the poor thing…” Her voice trails off, and Wilson can hear the pity dripping from her words. Such a young man, cut down in the prime of his life. As if House is dead and buried.
He doesn’t feel like listening any more, so he lies about the traffic and hangs up. He stops for coffee, because he’s got time. He’s thinking about his second wedding, and how House spent most of the reception flirting with his mother and her sister, and how charming they thought he was. Women are crazy. House isn’t charming, but there’s always been something about him. Wilson can’t deny that.
“Hey, are you open tomorrow?” he asks the girl at the counter as he pays for his morning boost.
“Uh, tomorrow is Christmas,” she says. She’s looking at him as if he’s from another planet.
“Some of us have to work.”
The girl rolls her eyes, as if she can’t imagine such a thing. “Sucks to be you.”
Maybe she’s right. She’s young, and in her world, Christmas is a day off. Wilson thinks about being 23 years old, going through his first divorce. That was ten years ago. He hasn’t spoken to his first wife since about a month after they signed the papers. She knocked on the door late one night and handed him a set of keys for the apartment, said she had forgotten about them.
She looked good. He asked if she wanted a drink. A thought crossed his mind that he might be able to get her to go to bed with him, for old times’ sake, but she told him that her new boyfriend was in the car, waiting for her.
And that was it.
Wilson has no clue what happened to her. He feels like he ought to know, they were married after all, but he isn’t going to make any effort to find out.
The soles of his shoes scrape against the damp pavement as he opens his car. Will House be another one of those people who move out of his life? They all seem to go with such ease, leaving nothing where a lover, or a friend, once belonged.
He’s filled up with ghosts today. ‘Tis the season, he supposes.
He spots Cuddy on the way in.
“I’ve got an inpatient who needs a lung biopsy to rule out CMV pneumonia as the cause of a persistent fever,” he says. “Any chance we could get that done, uh, yesterday?”
“Perhaps if you’d asked me yesterday,” she says. She doesn’t sound happy. It’s the season for that, too. “Stop by my office after rounds and I’ll see what I can do.”
“Thank you for coming in, Dr. Wilson,” she says. “Have a seat.”
Her manner is stiff, almost formal, which is odd. He’s the one who asked for a favor.
“I have to sit down to talk about Mr. Simons biopsy?” he says.
She puts her desk between them. She’s the boss, yes she is. She’s looking at a chair. “Have a seat, Dr. Wilson,” she repeats.
God, it’s quiet in here.
Wilson chews the inside of his lower lip; he’s pretty sure Cuddy notices.
“About the prescriptions you wrote on Sunday, the ones for Dr. House,” she says. “He’s taking the antibiotic, but he denied any knowledge of the Xanax, and his tox screen was negative for benzodiazepine.”
“So?” Wilson asks. He’s curious, and trying not to sound defensive, but he knows he’s failing, miserably, as a matter of fact.
“So I want to know what happened to the drugs after you filled the prescription." She pauses. "I know you filled it, I pulled the pharmacy records."
Oh. That. There’s no good way to respond to that, nothing that won’t make him look like a liar and a cheat, both of which he is, technically. “Are you accusing me of something?” Wilson says.
“We’re talking about a controlled substance,” she says. “If I ordered a drug test on you, right now, what are the chances that your results would be positive for benzodiazepine?”
He’s busted. “Somewhere around one hundred percent,” he admits. He can’t look at her. He really doesn’t want to be having this conversation. He’s sure his face has gone red.
“What were you thinking?”
It’s the same question he’s been asking himself for days, about so many things. He has to remind himself that he’s a doctor, a licensed physician, not a kid in the principal’s office.
“Acute stress disorder,” he says. “I experienced symptoms of classic panic attack four times over a 24-hour period.”
“Any idea what might have triggered these symptoms?” Cuddy sounds skeptical, and even that’s being generous. She sounds like she knows he’s lying and she wants him to confess.
It’s getting harder not to by the second.
“I, uh, yeah, I have an idea.”
“You committed at least two kinds of fraud, Dr. Wilson,” Cuddy announces. “That’s clear grounds for me to terminate your contract, effective immediately.”
Wilson feels the blood drop out of his head. His mouth hangs open. His ears are tense. He can’t seem to stop blinking. He has to say something.
“Does your anxiety have anything to do with what happened to Dr. House last weekend?”
The fact that she knows comes as a surprise. He supposes House admitted something during the exam. He’s grateful, it’s a kind of deliverance. He feels his upper body relax for the first time in days. “Yeah. That was a huge mistake.”
Cuddy looks like she’s been gutted. She coughs without covering her mouth. “Are we talking about the same thing?”
Wilson is completely lost. “House helped me out of a jam Friday night, things got a little out of control.”
“It was you?” She seems to have a hard time grasping what he thought was a simple statement. “You… you raped House? This can’t be happening.”
Rape? Where did she get that idea?
“It wasn’t like that! He never asked me to stop.” Wilson protests. “He didn’t say no.”
“Did you give him a chance?”
Wilson has no answer for that. House got into his bed, naked. He was so warm. House felt solid, like something to hang on to. He just wanted something to hang on to, he just wanted…
“I was drunk.”
Cuddy holds up one hand. “Stop right there. It’s bad enough that I know as much as I do.”
Wilson shuts his eyes tight and blows all the air out of his lungs. This might be the worst moment of his life. “Does this mean I’m fired?”
“I’ll put you on administrative leave,” she says. She’s looking at her desk. “Do you have any critical patients?”
“A couple, yeah.” Like the one he thought he was coming in here to discuss.
“Fine,” Cuddy says. “As soon as I can get somebody in to cover oncology, you go on leave. I will not let your phenomenal screw up jeopardize patient care.”
He nods. He gets it. This consideration is more than he deserves. Cuddy is writing now. He wonders if it’s the start of a memo for his file. He rises to go. He hesitates. “Is he, is House OK?”
Cuddy looks at him, and he can tell that she’s thinking about privacy, and hospital regulations, like any stranger couldn't see House's problems from a hundred feet away. He expects her to make a perfectly legitimate excuse and tell him she’s getting a restraining order.
“He’ll be fine,” she says, like she doesn’t believe it. Maybe Cuddy doesn’t, but Wilson has to.
He takes the long way back to his office. Cuddy’s accusations bounce around his head. She jumped to the wrong conclusion. Things just got out of hand, that’s all. He’s not proud of what he did. The memory of that night haunts him when he’s not taking the pills.
The hospital is quiet, its halls hung with tinsel garlands and crowded with plastic trees. Wilson feels none of the peace of the season. He reaches the pediatrics wing. He sees the pink and brown babies through the nursery window, those tiny, curious new people; it’s no use.
He does not remember the impulse that led him from wanting to touch his friend’s skin to wanting to tear it any way he could. He wanted a word, a sound to let him know he wasn’t alone, and that’s the one thing House didn’t surrender. Even ‘no’ would have been enough, he thinks, but he’s deluding himself. House could have said no, and Wilson would have called that a victory, but he would not have stopped.
That’s rape, isn’t it? That he did not set out to commit a crime makes no difference. He… he can’t get his head around the word. He bent House to his will, his desires.
He violated a man he once described as inviolable. No one else could get close enough. He, James Wilson, by all reports a really good guy, raped his best friend.
It’s about time for another Xanax. The pills will probably cost him his job, but right now, he can’t do without them.
House stops by his office late in the afternoon. Wilson grips the arms of his chair.
“Did you talk to Cuddy?” he asks.
"She talked to me," Wilson says, then he remembers about the patient.
“Liver function is impaired. That points to CMV,” House says. “So start him on gancyclovir right now, or we could wait for a biopsy if you prefer the extra strength certainty.”
Wilson relaxes, and in that moment, he feels like the previous week has disappeared. “I’ll order the anti-viral. Even if you’re wrong, it won’t kill him.”
“But I’m not wrong,” House protests.
“I know,” Wilson says. He hesitates. “Hey, do you want to get something to eat later?”
House appears to consider it for a bit. “Don’t think so, I’ve got a lot of cases. I’ll be here pretty late.” Wilson can’t read the look House shoots him. “Maybe some other time.”
Wilson nods. He watches House walk out of his office and feels pathetic, not so much because House turned him down, but because he asked.
Everything is closed as Wilson makes his way home. People are with their families, their loved ones. He feels like the runaway kid in that phone company ad that’s supposed to make people cry; only it’s worse, because there’s nobody to call. Who could possibly understand the terrible thing he did?
He stops at a downtown hotel because he knows the bar will be open. He hasn’t had a drink since that night. Alcohol is a depressant, but a couple of drinks will convince him that he’s at ease with himself.
He nurses bourbon on the rocks for a while. His head blurs a little and he can almost hear House cursing at the microfilm reader in the medical library on the day they met, so many years ago. He doesn’t notice the woman sitting down next to him at the bar until she addresses him directly.
“Looks like you’re missing somebody.”
She’s wearing a shiny green blouse. She isn’t particularly pretty, her face is a bit too pointy, but she has a nice body and she doesn’t seem to mind showing it off. He sees a bit of black lace under her neckline. He wonders if she’s a call girl.
“Maybe I am,” he says. He’s missing a lot of people. He finishes his drink in one swallow. “Maybe you are, too. Can I buy you a drink?”
She’s not actually a call girl. She’s a sales rep for a software company whose travel arrangements were screwed up, so she’s stuck in New Jersey until tomorrow afternoon. Her name is Bonnie, or something with a B.
Two drinks later, they’re in her room. Her shoes and skirt are on the floor, and she’s writhing underneath him, gasping and giggling as he works at the buttons of her blouse. She sits up to take off her bra.
Wilson reaches out to touch her now naked breasts, bouncing and squeezing them in his hands. She rolls her head back and forth as she tells him to keep going. He knows she’s turned on because her nipples are hard before he touches them. She squeals as he pinches one between two fingers.
She leans back, moves one hand in between her legs and pushes the fabric of her panties to the side.
Wow. He watches as she circles her fingers around the wet, pink folds of skin. He listens to her panting and moaning. He feels like he ought to be doing something, but he has never seen a woman masturbate before.
He leans down and starts sucking on one of her nipples. He likes the way it feels in his mouth.
“Bite,” she cries.
He closes his teeth around her flesh. She comes almost immediately.
He looks at her for a second. He’s not sure what to do.
She pushes him down, grabs at his zipper and… nothing. He ought to be hard as a rock after watching that.
She crouches beside him. She’s rubbing her hands up and down his torso. “Maybe this will bring you to life,” she says as she moves to take him into her mouth.
Nothing. No response, not even a twitch. “What’s your problem?”
He has no clue. There's a horny woman crawling all over him and he can't get it up.
“This… this has never happened to me before,” he says. He’s utterly humiliated.
“Right,” she says. She has enough sense to go into the bathroom while he puts himself back together.
The hotel’s elevator is lined with mirrors. Wilson imagines that his people, the ones who have left him, are staring at him from behind the glass.
House is not among them.
Part Six
Rating: Mature Audiences, not suitable for children
Warnings: This series deals with sexual abuse and recovering it. And there’s het smut in this chapter.
Summary: Wilson has a terrible Christmas eve and a number of unfortunate encounters with women.
Part One (By Pitza)
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four
Wilson is in the car on the way to work when his phone rings. “Hi Mom, I’m driving.” Conversations with his mother do not require that much attention. He would have pulled over for any other call.
“Hello Jimmy, this is your mother.” Hearing her voice makes him happy. She’s talking about family and neighbors. Her thoughts rarely connect.
“We had a nice card from Ellen. Did you know she’s gone back to her maiden name? She signed it ‘Ellen Metzger.’”
As far as he knows, the only time Ellen was ever referred to as Mrs. James Wilson was at their wedding reception, and she wasn’t happy about it then. Mom threw a minor fit after Ellen complained to his father, who made the introduction. Mom must have forgotten about that. She has a unique ability to forget things that do not please her.
“Ellen and I are divorced, Mom. She can call herself Elizabeth Taylor if that’s what makes her happy.”
Mom laughs and keeps talking. Wilson focuses on the road through three or four lights.
“How’s Greg? Is he walking any better, the poor thing…” Her voice trails off, and Wilson can hear the pity dripping from her words. Such a young man, cut down in the prime of his life. As if House is dead and buried.
He doesn’t feel like listening any more, so he lies about the traffic and hangs up. He stops for coffee, because he’s got time. He’s thinking about his second wedding, and how House spent most of the reception flirting with his mother and her sister, and how charming they thought he was. Women are crazy. House isn’t charming, but there’s always been something about him. Wilson can’t deny that.
“Hey, are you open tomorrow?” he asks the girl at the counter as he pays for his morning boost.
“Uh, tomorrow is Christmas,” she says. She’s looking at him as if he’s from another planet.
“Some of us have to work.”
The girl rolls her eyes, as if she can’t imagine such a thing. “Sucks to be you.”
Maybe she’s right. She’s young, and in her world, Christmas is a day off. Wilson thinks about being 23 years old, going through his first divorce. That was ten years ago. He hasn’t spoken to his first wife since about a month after they signed the papers. She knocked on the door late one night and handed him a set of keys for the apartment, said she had forgotten about them.
She looked good. He asked if she wanted a drink. A thought crossed his mind that he might be able to get her to go to bed with him, for old times’ sake, but she told him that her new boyfriend was in the car, waiting for her.
And that was it.
Wilson has no clue what happened to her. He feels like he ought to know, they were married after all, but he isn’t going to make any effort to find out.
The soles of his shoes scrape against the damp pavement as he opens his car. Will House be another one of those people who move out of his life? They all seem to go with such ease, leaving nothing where a lover, or a friend, once belonged.
He’s filled up with ghosts today. ‘Tis the season, he supposes.
He spots Cuddy on the way in.
“I’ve got an inpatient who needs a lung biopsy to rule out CMV pneumonia as the cause of a persistent fever,” he says. “Any chance we could get that done, uh, yesterday?”
“Perhaps if you’d asked me yesterday,” she says. She doesn’t sound happy. It’s the season for that, too. “Stop by my office after rounds and I’ll see what I can do.”
“Thank you for coming in, Dr. Wilson,” she says. “Have a seat.”
Her manner is stiff, almost formal, which is odd. He’s the one who asked for a favor.
“I have to sit down to talk about Mr. Simons biopsy?” he says.
She puts her desk between them. She’s the boss, yes she is. She’s looking at a chair. “Have a seat, Dr. Wilson,” she repeats.
God, it’s quiet in here.
Wilson chews the inside of his lower lip; he’s pretty sure Cuddy notices.
“About the prescriptions you wrote on Sunday, the ones for Dr. House,” she says. “He’s taking the antibiotic, but he denied any knowledge of the Xanax, and his tox screen was negative for benzodiazepine.”
“So?” Wilson asks. He’s curious, and trying not to sound defensive, but he knows he’s failing, miserably, as a matter of fact.
“So I want to know what happened to the drugs after you filled the prescription." She pauses. "I know you filled it, I pulled the pharmacy records."
Oh. That. There’s no good way to respond to that, nothing that won’t make him look like a liar and a cheat, both of which he is, technically. “Are you accusing me of something?” Wilson says.
“We’re talking about a controlled substance,” she says. “If I ordered a drug test on you, right now, what are the chances that your results would be positive for benzodiazepine?”
He’s busted. “Somewhere around one hundred percent,” he admits. He can’t look at her. He really doesn’t want to be having this conversation. He’s sure his face has gone red.
“What were you thinking?”
It’s the same question he’s been asking himself for days, about so many things. He has to remind himself that he’s a doctor, a licensed physician, not a kid in the principal’s office.
“Acute stress disorder,” he says. “I experienced symptoms of classic panic attack four times over a 24-hour period.”
“Any idea what might have triggered these symptoms?” Cuddy sounds skeptical, and even that’s being generous. She sounds like she knows he’s lying and she wants him to confess.
It’s getting harder not to by the second.
“I, uh, yeah, I have an idea.”
“You committed at least two kinds of fraud, Dr. Wilson,” Cuddy announces. “That’s clear grounds for me to terminate your contract, effective immediately.”
Wilson feels the blood drop out of his head. His mouth hangs open. His ears are tense. He can’t seem to stop blinking. He has to say something.
“Does your anxiety have anything to do with what happened to Dr. House last weekend?”
The fact that she knows comes as a surprise. He supposes House admitted something during the exam. He’s grateful, it’s a kind of deliverance. He feels his upper body relax for the first time in days. “Yeah. That was a huge mistake.”
Cuddy looks like she’s been gutted. She coughs without covering her mouth. “Are we talking about the same thing?”
Wilson is completely lost. “House helped me out of a jam Friday night, things got a little out of control.”
“It was you?” She seems to have a hard time grasping what he thought was a simple statement. “You… you raped House? This can’t be happening.”
Rape? Where did she get that idea?
“It wasn’t like that! He never asked me to stop.” Wilson protests. “He didn’t say no.”
“Did you give him a chance?”
Wilson has no answer for that. House got into his bed, naked. He was so warm. House felt solid, like something to hang on to. He just wanted something to hang on to, he just wanted…
“I was drunk.”
Cuddy holds up one hand. “Stop right there. It’s bad enough that I know as much as I do.”
Wilson shuts his eyes tight and blows all the air out of his lungs. This might be the worst moment of his life. “Does this mean I’m fired?”
“I’ll put you on administrative leave,” she says. She’s looking at her desk. “Do you have any critical patients?”
“A couple, yeah.” Like the one he thought he was coming in here to discuss.
“Fine,” Cuddy says. “As soon as I can get somebody in to cover oncology, you go on leave. I will not let your phenomenal screw up jeopardize patient care.”
He nods. He gets it. This consideration is more than he deserves. Cuddy is writing now. He wonders if it’s the start of a memo for his file. He rises to go. He hesitates. “Is he, is House OK?”
Cuddy looks at him, and he can tell that she’s thinking about privacy, and hospital regulations, like any stranger couldn't see House's problems from a hundred feet away. He expects her to make a perfectly legitimate excuse and tell him she’s getting a restraining order.
“He’ll be fine,” she says, like she doesn’t believe it. Maybe Cuddy doesn’t, but Wilson has to.
He takes the long way back to his office. Cuddy’s accusations bounce around his head. She jumped to the wrong conclusion. Things just got out of hand, that’s all. He’s not proud of what he did. The memory of that night haunts him when he’s not taking the pills.
The hospital is quiet, its halls hung with tinsel garlands and crowded with plastic trees. Wilson feels none of the peace of the season. He reaches the pediatrics wing. He sees the pink and brown babies through the nursery window, those tiny, curious new people; it’s no use.
He does not remember the impulse that led him from wanting to touch his friend’s skin to wanting to tear it any way he could. He wanted a word, a sound to let him know he wasn’t alone, and that’s the one thing House didn’t surrender. Even ‘no’ would have been enough, he thinks, but he’s deluding himself. House could have said no, and Wilson would have called that a victory, but he would not have stopped.
That’s rape, isn’t it? That he did not set out to commit a crime makes no difference. He… he can’t get his head around the word. He bent House to his will, his desires.
He violated a man he once described as inviolable. No one else could get close enough. He, James Wilson, by all reports a really good guy, raped his best friend.
It’s about time for another Xanax. The pills will probably cost him his job, but right now, he can’t do without them.
House stops by his office late in the afternoon. Wilson grips the arms of his chair.
“Did you talk to Cuddy?” he asks.
"She talked to me," Wilson says, then he remembers about the patient.
“Liver function is impaired. That points to CMV,” House says. “So start him on gancyclovir right now, or we could wait for a biopsy if you prefer the extra strength certainty.”
Wilson relaxes, and in that moment, he feels like the previous week has disappeared. “I’ll order the anti-viral. Even if you’re wrong, it won’t kill him.”
“But I’m not wrong,” House protests.
“I know,” Wilson says. He hesitates. “Hey, do you want to get something to eat later?”
House appears to consider it for a bit. “Don’t think so, I’ve got a lot of cases. I’ll be here pretty late.” Wilson can’t read the look House shoots him. “Maybe some other time.”
Wilson nods. He watches House walk out of his office and feels pathetic, not so much because House turned him down, but because he asked.
Everything is closed as Wilson makes his way home. People are with their families, their loved ones. He feels like the runaway kid in that phone company ad that’s supposed to make people cry; only it’s worse, because there’s nobody to call. Who could possibly understand the terrible thing he did?
He stops at a downtown hotel because he knows the bar will be open. He hasn’t had a drink since that night. Alcohol is a depressant, but a couple of drinks will convince him that he’s at ease with himself.
He nurses bourbon on the rocks for a while. His head blurs a little and he can almost hear House cursing at the microfilm reader in the medical library on the day they met, so many years ago. He doesn’t notice the woman sitting down next to him at the bar until she addresses him directly.
“Looks like you’re missing somebody.”
She’s wearing a shiny green blouse. She isn’t particularly pretty, her face is a bit too pointy, but she has a nice body and she doesn’t seem to mind showing it off. He sees a bit of black lace under her neckline. He wonders if she’s a call girl.
“Maybe I am,” he says. He’s missing a lot of people. He finishes his drink in one swallow. “Maybe you are, too. Can I buy you a drink?”
She’s not actually a call girl. She’s a sales rep for a software company whose travel arrangements were screwed up, so she’s stuck in New Jersey until tomorrow afternoon. Her name is Bonnie, or something with a B.
Two drinks later, they’re in her room. Her shoes and skirt are on the floor, and she’s writhing underneath him, gasping and giggling as he works at the buttons of her blouse. She sits up to take off her bra.
Wilson reaches out to touch her now naked breasts, bouncing and squeezing them in his hands. She rolls her head back and forth as she tells him to keep going. He knows she’s turned on because her nipples are hard before he touches them. She squeals as he pinches one between two fingers.
She leans back, moves one hand in between her legs and pushes the fabric of her panties to the side.
Wow. He watches as she circles her fingers around the wet, pink folds of skin. He listens to her panting and moaning. He feels like he ought to be doing something, but he has never seen a woman masturbate before.
He leans down and starts sucking on one of her nipples. He likes the way it feels in his mouth.
“Bite,” she cries.
He closes his teeth around her flesh. She comes almost immediately.
He looks at her for a second. He’s not sure what to do.
She pushes him down, grabs at his zipper and… nothing. He ought to be hard as a rock after watching that.
She crouches beside him. She’s rubbing her hands up and down his torso. “Maybe this will bring you to life,” she says as she moves to take him into her mouth.
Nothing. No response, not even a twitch. “What’s your problem?”
He has no clue. There's a horny woman crawling all over him and he can't get it up.
“This… this has never happened to me before,” he says. He’s utterly humiliated.
“Right,” she says. She has enough sense to go into the bathroom while he puts himself back together.
The hotel’s elevator is lined with mirrors. Wilson imagines that his people, the ones who have left him, are staring at him from behind the glass.
House is not among them.
Part Six