Fic: Harmony (The Music Moving Remix) [House; Gregory House/James Wilson; PG-13]
Title: Harmony (The Music Moving Remix)
Author: queenzulu
Summary: In his head, House has already begun numbering Julie among Wilson's ex-wives.
Fandom: House
Pairing: Gregory House/James Wilson, James Wilson/Julie Wilson
Rating: PG-13
Disclaimer: David Shore, Bad Hat Harry Productions, and FOX Broadcasting. Not mine.
Original story: Dissonance, by bironic.
Notes: Thank you to my betas: thedeadparrot, daemonluna, and troutkitty, who kicked my butt and watched over me while I wrote. It's been so long, if I got you to read this through for me and forgot to mention you, please knock me upside the head and I'll acknowledge you. Um...spoilers for The Great Escape?
***
Not the stillness of the violin, while the note lasts,
Not that only, but the co-existence...
***
It's the silence that holds them together most days, more than their words.
That would shock the hell out of most people, who only see House and Wilson walking in syncopation down the hospital hallways, shoulders brushing on their near steps, House's cane swinging on the out steps, and talking, always talking. Arguing the merits of a case (or of Cuddy's breasts) with extravagant metaphors and a lot of verbal jabs back and forth, aimed for the weaknesses that don't really hurt, because they've grown calluses from the constant mockery. Trading gossip in the cafeteria, shouting inside jokes across the clinic, Wilson lecturing on happiness, House detailing General Hospital plotlines, one-upping each other during the differential (and it really is cancer, this time, so Chase spends the day ducking frisbees and paper airplanes and spitballs). They talk.
Not always, though. What no one else really understands is the language of looks they speak, glances and gestures and the new mess of sandy lines in Wilson's Zen garden that wasn't there before lunch. When Wilson doesn't wander by the conference room some mornings, House skips his clinic hours to watch monster trucks in the oncology lounge, with the volume rising to eardrum-bursting levels until he drives every doctor out onto the wards to pick up their damn slack. When House limps in late to snarl and pace and bite Cameron's head off when she offers coffee, Wilson makes eyes at the new clerk on the admit desk. He casually asks after new cases with weird symptoms, and when he finds what he's looking for he drops a word to Foreman, who thanks him and takes the file to Diagnostics to wave in House's face with plenty of stupid theories for House to shoot down.
And sometimes they simply sit, House's Hungarian dictionary and the Académiai Kiadó spread out across Coma Guy, Wilson writing awkwardly on the charts stacked in his lap. They pretend preoccupation, but when the pain digs in, Wilson looks up an instant before House gives in and reaches for his pills. He asks with his eyes if it's bad, and House grimaces and pops the top on the bottle in reply. In return, House reads Wilson's shifts and sighs until he knows how many death sentences Wilson will be delivering today, and how many reprieves, and whether he'll be making a guilty call to Julie before staying late, again.
Tonight will be one of those nights, so House goes back to Diagnostics to give Wilson time, and Wilson leaves to care for people who aren't his wife.
***
Most of the time, work is a game. Each morning House drags himself through the chore of showering, feeding himself, dressing in halfway decent clothes, and getting to the hospital. Work is word games on the whiteboard, hide and seek with patients (his hiding; Cuddy's seeking), and diseases that speak to him in cipher. House lives for symptoms that zig left and veer right, for possibilities that sharpen into probabilities. He even loves the lies, because there's always truth buried somewhere underneath. And when the patient goes home (or dies; House opens the nagging bottom drawer when the itch of the unsolved gets too strong, and mutters over treatment decisions he can't unmake), House solves the people around him. He tries to make them tick the way they would if the universe was rational. For hours at a time, he forgets that this is supposed to be his job, and not his playground. It's only as evening approaches, and he's faced with the prospect of his empty apartment, that boredom clutches at him again.
***
When Wilson comes over, he and House laugh through their takeout and sprawl on the couch in the glow of the television. House watches Wilson's face soften as he starts to breathe easy, and he waits for the moment when Wilson's tie comes off, when he unbuttons his cuffs.
After they eat and check House's TiVo and talk about nothing, House moves stiffly to the piano bench. He sets down his glass and places his fingers on the keys, but he doesn't begin to play immediately. Wilson waits as if he isn't waiting, sipping his drink and surfing to the channels House rolls his eyes at when he has the remote. House strokes the keys with his fingertips and thinks that once, the only person he played for--really played for--was Stacy. Now he has Wilson to listen, but it never ends the way it once did, with the warmth of a body standing behind him, and hands on his shoulders turning him away from the fading notes and into a kiss. Still, he can watch Wilson settle into his couch, listening, and maybe that's better than enough.
He never tells Wilson what he's playing--most often jazz, rarely classical--and he doesn't talk about names or composers or beats, but he's caught Wilson more than once with his CD collection, always careful to put them back where they belong. Wilson has an instinct for House's mercurial organization system. He ignores the alphabet and the liner notes to keep standards with standards, originals well away from riff tunes, Freeman cheek-by-jowl with Mulligan and Brubeck, the improv masters gathered along the higher shelves where they're easier to reach. House drinks and plays and thinks that if he doesn't stop, then Wilson won't fumble with his watch and his goodbyes. Lately, though, Wilson's begun spending more nights spreading blankets on House's couch.
In his head, House has already started numbering Julie among Wilson's ex-wives.
***
Wilson has always gotten along well with women. He's easy to like, House knows. Too easy, he sometimes thinks, and he wishes that Wilson would just stand up one day and say no.
Just: not to House.
House spends part of each day prowling the hospital, distraction and PT, and more often than not he'll stumble across Wilson chatting with this resident or that HR rep. Who's cornered and who's doing the cornering varies, but Wilson's the one in danger. He gets too close, too easily.
"What the hell are you doing?" Wilson asks, when House shoves his way into the space (there isn't much) between Wilson and the new ICU nurse, so that he can describe the latest shade of purple that's appeared in his patient's vomit.
"Requesting a consult," House says. "You're a bit slow on the uptake today. I guess it's hard to think if Little Jimmy's doing it for you--"
The ICU nurse smiles in a polite "I have to stand over here now," fashion and starts edging away. Wilson smiles an apology at her as she goes. "He's--" he starts, but gives up and hisses at House, "What was that for?"
"I was rescuing you from her clutches. Don't thank me." House glares a bit, to get the point across. "You were flirting."
Wilson twists his lips, half in annoyance, but House senses an equal measure of self-disgust. "I think it was called a conversation," Wilson says, "the kind a person might have with a new colleague, if that person wasn't a misanthropic hermit."
"Does getting their life stories make it easier to pounce when their marriages fall apart and their husbands take custody of the colicky baby?"
"She's not--"
"She smells like baby puke, but she's not exhausted," House says, and nudges Wilson's shoulder with his until they're heading towards the conference room together. "Someone else is getting up for those shrieky three-AM feedings. She has a hyphenated name on her badge and only introduces herself by the first half. I say six months until D-day. Think you can get in ten weepy lunches before then, or would that cramp your schedule?"
Wilson rolls his eyes. "You know, you don't have to diagnose everyone; you could try talking with them. Learn what's really going on."
"Learn what they like to lie about. That's your flaw, not mine," House says. "You care too much, and it's a problem."
"I care about you," Wilson says. "Is that a problem?"
"For you," House says, "maybe it is."
Wilson sighs, but ignores that. "I know this might sound crazy, but I actually like making friends."
"You like making people like you," House corrects him. "If you're likeable, then it's not your fault you keep getting divorced."
"It's not about that." But Wilson doesn't even try to defend himself any further, and House narrows his eyes and counts a point scored. They swing around the corner to Diagnostics, and House holds open the conference room door. Wilson just frowns at him and heads to his own office. House lets him go, and then smuggles himself back into Wilson's space, over the railing and through the balcony door that Wilson leaves unlocked. House spreads himself out on Wilson's couch, and Wilson watches him with dark eyes but doesn't say anything, just squeezes the bridge of his nose and then turns back to his work.
"At least I still like you," House tells him, "even if your wife doesn't."
***
House hates himself, but it's easier to hate Wilson when he needs a target. His goddamn sanctimony, the brochures on pain-management regimes and alternative therapies that he keeps in his office where he knows House will snoop and find them, the way he's right more often than House can let anyone else around him be.
Most of all, he hates the way Wilson believes every lie he tells himself. That a box of chocolates and a limp bouquet will soothe Julie, as if she's a teenage girl and not an intelligent woman who resents absence and half-measures. That if Wilson leaves House's place an hour earlier, or two, every couple of nights, then Julie won't think he's making excuses or sleeping his way through the hospital staff. That his marriage isn't slowly disintegrating under its own stagnant weight. That House will want to--will be able to--comfort him, when it does.
Despite what House says, he knows Wilson's not having an affair, this time. Wilson's spending all his time with House, and House wonders if it wouldn't just be easier for Julie if he dragged Wilson into bed rather than rolling his eyes at the thin sham of the blankets on his couch. Wilson's hand slides to the back of his neck when he says, "I guess I should go," and it takes all of House's cowardice not to reply, "No, you shouldn't."
Wilson isn't weak. He's just: an oncologist. He's used to hanging on until the bitter end. He uses poison and radiation to try and save the unsalvageable. Mostly, he waits. Cancer is all about slow terrible deaths, about not giving up when the going gets tough. It's that same strength that keeps him going back to Julie even though he must know it's another terminal diagnosis. It's House's weakness that prevented him from telling Wilson why he shouldn't have married her in the first place.
***
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
***
Wilson doesn't seem to know why his marriage is failing. He moves through his life doing his best, as if that will mean anything in the end. House could tell him that no matter what his mother told him, it's not the thought that counts. Actions are the only certainty, the treatment that tests the diagnosis. House isn't ready to prove his theory yet, so he watches Wilson, and he waits.
House doesn't like Julie. Doesn't dislike her, either. After the wedding, she mostly only shows up in his life on the rare occasion that they both attend some hospital function. Wilson dances attendance on her, smiling gamely, as if he's been told a joke he doesn't understand but he's trying his best to laugh along. The only problem is, the joke's on him. Julie places a hand on his forearm when he moves away, steps back and turns her head when he moves closer. When Wilson makes his excuses and ducks across the room, House meets him at the bar and offers him tidbits of overheard disasters: Jennifer's boyfriend has left her yet again (this makes three); Ann-Marie's precocious son was caught vandalising his school. Wilson grins wryly, and asks, "What else?"
"I saw Cuddy making out with some bigwig's nephew," House says. "Shouldn't you be getting back?"
Wilson gives him a half-hearted glare, one that asks did you have to bring that up?
House looks away, surveying the room. Cuddy dragged him here with a mixture of threats and the promise of low-cut evening wear. He wonders why Julie came, when it's clear she's wishing she hadn't. She hasn't shown up to any of these things in months. Guilt, he thinks, and wonders what she's atoning for. "That look either means you forgot you were married or you don't want to talk about it. I'm really hoping you don't want to talk about it."
The bartender passes over a bourbon and a white wine spritzer. Wilson stares at the drinks like he can't remember ordering them.
House pokes Wilson's polished shoe with his cane, leaving scuff marks. "Wanna cut class, Jimmy?"
Wilson picks up the drinks, and looks back across the room to where Julie's not watching them at all. "Yeah," he says. And he heads back to her side.
House has seen the end of all of Wilson's marriages, and he knows this one's no different. They start ending from the beginning.
***
House knows exactly when it started.
Seven years ago, Wilson's second marriage was crashing and burning, and House was living drained and exhausted in the whirlwind wake of Stacy's departure. Wilson dropped by nearly every day, trying to badger and coax House off the couch. PT. Food. Work. Anything.
"What the hell do you care?" House asked, more than once, and he hated himself every time he did. One of these days, surely Wilson would realize there was nothing in it for him and stop coming.
Wilson saw the worst of him, then. Dressed in unwashed pyjama pants and grimy t-shirts, unshowered and unshaven, blasted out of his mind on pills, yelling curses and insults and doing his best just to be left the bloody fuck alone. One night, Wilson came in quietly, using his key without knocking first. He didn't call out or bring food, and he didn't come into the living room, to stare at House with his hands on his hips and his mouth tight with determination not to let House cut him with words. House knew it was him--he'd heard the door, and the sigh, and the thump of Wilson's briefcase hitting the floor, and who the hell else would it be?--but then the silence gathered, and House couldn't make himself break it. He glanced over at his cane, then at the kitchen doorway. Finally, with a grimace, he reached for the cane and levered himself to his feet, hissing at the aching burst of fire in his thigh. He still limped heavily, but he could make it to the kitchen. He saw Wilson from the doorway, sitting at the table. He was still dressed in his overcoat, still neat and pressed and perfect. His face was in his hands and his back shuddered as he breathed heavy and slow. He was on the edge of crying, burnt out and broken, and House wanted to (but couldn't, of course, couldn't ever again) run away. Instead he hitched his way across the room, and gripped Wilson's shoulder tightly. They stayed like that, silent, until they were both able to pretend it hadn't happened at all.
Yeah. That was the moment House knew he was screwed. Their beginning was in that end.
***
Wilson on the phone to Julie is a Wilson praying to be rescued. House wouldn't admit it, but he hates that look on Wilson's face, the hunched guilt of his posture, the placating tone of voice he uses.
House does his best to help. He settles into the chair across from Wilson and prepares to do battle with Julie from across the room and through the phone line. She's a worthy adversary, but House has been winning their little war of attrition lately. He wonders if Julie keeps the opposite score of his own: counting Wilson's apologetic gestures as victories, his unexplained nights out as defeats. He pushes his case, prodding Wilson to get a move on, listening for the buzz of Julie's voice from the receiver. "Is that House?" he hears, and he hides a grin.
Then Wilson's looking at the phone in exasperation, with overtones of relief. "Great," he says. "She hung up on me."
And House thinks maybe Julie isn't counting coup anymore. Maybe she really doesn't care. And when Wilson seems to have forgotten the call completely by the time they've reached the hallway, House wonders if the war's already over, and if that means he's come out the victor.
House frowns that thought away and steps up his pace. "Come on," he says to Wilson, trailing behind. "Let's get moving. Those cancer scans don't run themselves."
"No," Wilson agrees. "That's what your staff are for."
House gives him a pointed glance. Wilson's department head skills run mainly to delegation, freeing him up to help House when he needs it. Wilson says he's saving his doctors from House. House lets the symptom list on his whiteboard suggest paraneoplastic syndrome often enough to make it necessary.
He forgets Julie, too; Cancer Girl's more interesting, and anyway, Wilson's marriage is beyond help. House knows enough not to try. He'd rather concentrate on saving the pieces when they fall.
***
House uses the excuse of a double bill of The Great Escape and The Magnificent Seven to invite Wilson over, as if he needs a reason. Wilson loses some of his hectic and harried look, and nods, a pen in his mouth, as he reviews a file. He takes the pen out to scrawl his name on the chart, and says, "Julie's going to some piano recital tonight. Should be fine."
House files that information away at the back of his mind. Julie's been attending a lot of concerts alone, lately, and House wonders if Wilson's even noticed.
Wilson cooks, something with rice and stir fry, and they're mostly quiet right through until Steve McQueen leaps his motorcycle over the second fence, with the Nazis after him. Maybe this is all House has won, after all, because when the credits roll (and House says nothing about Wilson's sniffs during the execution scene), Wilson stands and straightens up around the couch, and then gathers his jacket and briefcase.
House gets to his feet and stands at the window, watching Wilson head to his car, circling around to the driver's door. It's only after he starts the car and pulls away that House tells him, "You should leave your wife."
***
Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.
***
They're approaching the crisis point. House doesn't know how he knows this, after years of suppressing the casual twinge of mine that Wilson provokes, but he feels unbalanced, as if their strange flirtation has shifted into new territory. The point he turns on is the moment when Stacy says she will stay. That she loves him. That they can try again. House feels like he does when the diagnosis arrives, fully formed, in his mind; that same clarity, perfection, rightness. The answer spins out like a final chord with his foot on the sustain pedal. His mind makes connections, links symptoms and disease, test results and patient condition. He feels, even as he stands looking into Stacy's eyes, that he will kiss her again. He knows it won't be what he wants.
And so he sends Stacy away.
His leg's been more of a bitch than usual, and his shoulder's starting to join in on the complaints. Wilson wants it to be psychological; Wilson wants it to be nerve regeneration. House wants Wilson to open his damn eyes.
House is sitting in his office, watching the shadows lengthen outside his window, when Wilson passes by. He's dressed to leave, but he turns in to House's office rather than heading for the elevator. He takes a seat in House's lounge chair across the room, stretching out his legs. He's looking anywhere but at House when he says, "It shouldn't be all about sex."
"Still working on paving that road to hell?" House asks. Gonorrhea Guy is gone, and it's that dull spot between cases when it feels like nothing at all will happen ever again.
Wilson still doesn't look over. His voice is quiet in the colourless twilight that fills the room. "No good intentions," he says. "I've been thinking of cheating on her for more than a year."
House grunts and checks his mental tally of women he's seen Wilson with lately. There's always someone; nurses and orderlies and support staff. Probably the only women he stays away from are his patients. But he can't think of any who have been around for that long. Somehow they're always moving on, to different hospitals or different cities. House wonders if Wilson chooses them for that reason. Transience. Some subconscious thing, he'd call it, if he was the one who lived to psychoanalyze the crap out of things. "You're going to tell her, aren't you?"
"If she asks."
"If she cares." House twists around a bit. Wilson's watching him now. His eyes are bright in the dimness, and his face is tight, like he's suddenly furious. It's not Julie he cares about any more. House wonders what set him off.
"No, no, it's all right," Wilson says, in that same dry matter-of-fact voice that doesn't expect anything. "Please, don't ask me how I'm doing."
"You're doing crappy," House says. "I don't need to ask." He turns back to the window. Go back to your wife, he thinks. Leave me the hell alone.
"Yeah," Wilson says. "I suppose I'd better hope that roses are in season."
Julie won't be surprised by the roses. Even after all of this, though, Wilson will probably still be surprised by what she says.
***
The guilty idiot, House thinks, when Wilson only sighs and settles deeper into House's chair. It would never occur to him that the reason House doesn't want to hear it isn't just because he's a heartless bastard.
"Maybe it would be easier if I was having an affair," Wilson says. "If I was sleeping with someone else, then--"
"Then Julie would have a reason for going for your balls," House says. Interrupting, insulting. Anything to make Wilson shut up. He drops his legs down from the window ledge and spins to face Wilson fully. The office is cold and it's getting dark enough that Wilson's mostly just a blur across the room. That doesn't stop House from knowing exactly how he looks. "And you'd still be getting dragged up the aisle the morning your divorce was final."
"It would be different." Wilson says. House just stares at him, and hates that he can't wrench his eyes away. Wilson's tired. Looks like he could use some sleep in a bed that's actually his. Not a couch. Not next to Julie. Fuck.
And then: "It's you," Wilson says. In that so-careful voice. "In case you still think Debbie in Accounting should top your hit list." He smile is slight, empty. "The mob connection's got to be good for something besides a free car."
So he's said it. Said it like it was easy to say. As if intention is ever enough. House grits his teeth and looks away, down and to his right. Fuck Wilson, anyway. As if it was easy. "I can't wait until you start putting me off with bad candy," he says. "Then I can join the club. Think Julie will let me be president? After all, I've known you longest--"
"House." His name, when Wilson says it, can mean anything under the sun. This time it's longing, and tiredness, and can't you just let this--
No. He can't. House pushes himself to his feet, gets his cane under him.
"I don't," Wilson says, still in that almost-trembling voice, "I don't want to fix anything. I just want it to be different, with us."
"Do you always have to talk?" House snarls.
Wilson tips his head back to watch him pace the length of the room. "I've heard that's what friends do, occasionally."
"So it's an occasion," House says. "Does that mean we can drink to get through it?"
"House. Stop--stop using your stupid defensive mechanisms."
"That's not a defensive mechanism." House stalks towards the door.
Wilson stands up behind him. Getting angry, now. Good for him. "What would you call it?"
"I just meant," House says, "drinking isn't one. This is."
He walks out.
***
The way Wilson's marriages end is by Wilson showing up on House's doorstep with a suitcase and a pleading look. It's silence that holds them together, even more than their words, so after a moment when he considers telling Wilson to go to hell, House steps back and lets him in.
He makes sandwiches and breaks out the beer. There's a monster truck rally on TV. House lets it play out although he knows how it ends, and makes a few comments on autopilot about the crush-factor of Volvos. Wilson smiles faintly and swallows his beer.
What doesn't get said is the way they sit next to each other on the couch, their shoulders pressed tightly together. Comfortable, and warm. They don't talk about Julie, who's apparently going to stay with her mystery fuck. She's the one who ended it. House lifts his beer and toasts her silently. She's got what she wants. House sneers at himself. If this is what he wants, he's got it. Wilson's just as good at he is at letting conversations go, at pretending they can go on just as they always have.
Wilson's usual mess of blankets is waiting for him. All House has to do is go to bed and leave the living room to him, and they can forget everything they said. House thinks about unsolved cases, about treatment decisions he can't reverse. And, at last, he smiles when he bites into his sandwich.
***
Flushed and decided, he assaults at once;
Exploring hands encounter no defense.
***
With his soon-to-be-ex-wife gone, Wilson seems easier. He relaxes, lazy, in front of the TV. House hauls himself up and brings him another beer, but keeps hold of it, so that Wilson's fingers wrap around his on the chill neck of the bottle. He meets Wilson's eyes, and Wilson knows what he intends even before House kisses him. When they break apart, Wilson sets down the beer and House mutes the TV, and they start again from the beginning.
end
Author: queenzulu
Summary: In his head, House has already begun numbering Julie among Wilson's ex-wives.
Fandom: House
Pairing: Gregory House/James Wilson, James Wilson/Julie Wilson
Rating: PG-13
Disclaimer: David Shore, Bad Hat Harry Productions, and FOX Broadcasting. Not mine.
Original story: Dissonance, by bironic.
Notes: Thank you to my betas: thedeadparrot, daemonluna, and troutkitty, who kicked my butt and watched over me while I wrote. It's been so long, if I got you to read this through for me and forgot to mention you, please knock me upside the head and I'll acknowledge you. Um...spoilers for The Great Escape?
***
Not the stillness of the violin, while the note lasts,
Not that only, but the co-existence...
***
It's the silence that holds them together most days, more than their words.
That would shock the hell out of most people, who only see House and Wilson walking in syncopation down the hospital hallways, shoulders brushing on their near steps, House's cane swinging on the out steps, and talking, always talking. Arguing the merits of a case (or of Cuddy's breasts) with extravagant metaphors and a lot of verbal jabs back and forth, aimed for the weaknesses that don't really hurt, because they've grown calluses from the constant mockery. Trading gossip in the cafeteria, shouting inside jokes across the clinic, Wilson lecturing on happiness, House detailing General Hospital plotlines, one-upping each other during the differential (and it really is cancer, this time, so Chase spends the day ducking frisbees and paper airplanes and spitballs). They talk.
Not always, though. What no one else really understands is the language of looks they speak, glances and gestures and the new mess of sandy lines in Wilson's Zen garden that wasn't there before lunch. When Wilson doesn't wander by the conference room some mornings, House skips his clinic hours to watch monster trucks in the oncology lounge, with the volume rising to eardrum-bursting levels until he drives every doctor out onto the wards to pick up their damn slack. When House limps in late to snarl and pace and bite Cameron's head off when she offers coffee, Wilson makes eyes at the new clerk on the admit desk. He casually asks after new cases with weird symptoms, and when he finds what he's looking for he drops a word to Foreman, who thanks him and takes the file to Diagnostics to wave in House's face with plenty of stupid theories for House to shoot down.
And sometimes they simply sit, House's Hungarian dictionary and the Académiai Kiadó spread out across Coma Guy, Wilson writing awkwardly on the charts stacked in his lap. They pretend preoccupation, but when the pain digs in, Wilson looks up an instant before House gives in and reaches for his pills. He asks with his eyes if it's bad, and House grimaces and pops the top on the bottle in reply. In return, House reads Wilson's shifts and sighs until he knows how many death sentences Wilson will be delivering today, and how many reprieves, and whether he'll be making a guilty call to Julie before staying late, again.
Tonight will be one of those nights, so House goes back to Diagnostics to give Wilson time, and Wilson leaves to care for people who aren't his wife.
***
Most of the time, work is a game. Each morning House drags himself through the chore of showering, feeding himself, dressing in halfway decent clothes, and getting to the hospital. Work is word games on the whiteboard, hide and seek with patients (his hiding; Cuddy's seeking), and diseases that speak to him in cipher. House lives for symptoms that zig left and veer right, for possibilities that sharpen into probabilities. He even loves the lies, because there's always truth buried somewhere underneath. And when the patient goes home (or dies; House opens the nagging bottom drawer when the itch of the unsolved gets too strong, and mutters over treatment decisions he can't unmake), House solves the people around him. He tries to make them tick the way they would if the universe was rational. For hours at a time, he forgets that this is supposed to be his job, and not his playground. It's only as evening approaches, and he's faced with the prospect of his empty apartment, that boredom clutches at him again.
***
When Wilson comes over, he and House laugh through their takeout and sprawl on the couch in the glow of the television. House watches Wilson's face soften as he starts to breathe easy, and he waits for the moment when Wilson's tie comes off, when he unbuttons his cuffs.
After they eat and check House's TiVo and talk about nothing, House moves stiffly to the piano bench. He sets down his glass and places his fingers on the keys, but he doesn't begin to play immediately. Wilson waits as if he isn't waiting, sipping his drink and surfing to the channels House rolls his eyes at when he has the remote. House strokes the keys with his fingertips and thinks that once, the only person he played for--really played for--was Stacy. Now he has Wilson to listen, but it never ends the way it once did, with the warmth of a body standing behind him, and hands on his shoulders turning him away from the fading notes and into a kiss. Still, he can watch Wilson settle into his couch, listening, and maybe that's better than enough.
He never tells Wilson what he's playing--most often jazz, rarely classical--and he doesn't talk about names or composers or beats, but he's caught Wilson more than once with his CD collection, always careful to put them back where they belong. Wilson has an instinct for House's mercurial organization system. He ignores the alphabet and the liner notes to keep standards with standards, originals well away from riff tunes, Freeman cheek-by-jowl with Mulligan and Brubeck, the improv masters gathered along the higher shelves where they're easier to reach. House drinks and plays and thinks that if he doesn't stop, then Wilson won't fumble with his watch and his goodbyes. Lately, though, Wilson's begun spending more nights spreading blankets on House's couch.
In his head, House has already started numbering Julie among Wilson's ex-wives.
***
Wilson has always gotten along well with women. He's easy to like, House knows. Too easy, he sometimes thinks, and he wishes that Wilson would just stand up one day and say no.
Just: not to House.
House spends part of each day prowling the hospital, distraction and PT, and more often than not he'll stumble across Wilson chatting with this resident or that HR rep. Who's cornered and who's doing the cornering varies, but Wilson's the one in danger. He gets too close, too easily.
"What the hell are you doing?" Wilson asks, when House shoves his way into the space (there isn't much) between Wilson and the new ICU nurse, so that he can describe the latest shade of purple that's appeared in his patient's vomit.
"Requesting a consult," House says. "You're a bit slow on the uptake today. I guess it's hard to think if Little Jimmy's doing it for you--"
The ICU nurse smiles in a polite "I have to stand over here now," fashion and starts edging away. Wilson smiles an apology at her as she goes. "He's--" he starts, but gives up and hisses at House, "What was that for?"
"I was rescuing you from her clutches. Don't thank me." House glares a bit, to get the point across. "You were flirting."
Wilson twists his lips, half in annoyance, but House senses an equal measure of self-disgust. "I think it was called a conversation," Wilson says, "the kind a person might have with a new colleague, if that person wasn't a misanthropic hermit."
"Does getting their life stories make it easier to pounce when their marriages fall apart and their husbands take custody of the colicky baby?"
"She's not--"
"She smells like baby puke, but she's not exhausted," House says, and nudges Wilson's shoulder with his until they're heading towards the conference room together. "Someone else is getting up for those shrieky three-AM feedings. She has a hyphenated name on her badge and only introduces herself by the first half. I say six months until D-day. Think you can get in ten weepy lunches before then, or would that cramp your schedule?"
Wilson rolls his eyes. "You know, you don't have to diagnose everyone; you could try talking with them. Learn what's really going on."
"Learn what they like to lie about. That's your flaw, not mine," House says. "You care too much, and it's a problem."
"I care about you," Wilson says. "Is that a problem?"
"For you," House says, "maybe it is."
Wilson sighs, but ignores that. "I know this might sound crazy, but I actually like making friends."
"You like making people like you," House corrects him. "If you're likeable, then it's not your fault you keep getting divorced."
"It's not about that." But Wilson doesn't even try to defend himself any further, and House narrows his eyes and counts a point scored. They swing around the corner to Diagnostics, and House holds open the conference room door. Wilson just frowns at him and heads to his own office. House lets him go, and then smuggles himself back into Wilson's space, over the railing and through the balcony door that Wilson leaves unlocked. House spreads himself out on Wilson's couch, and Wilson watches him with dark eyes but doesn't say anything, just squeezes the bridge of his nose and then turns back to his work.
"At least I still like you," House tells him, "even if your wife doesn't."
***
House hates himself, but it's easier to hate Wilson when he needs a target. His goddamn sanctimony, the brochures on pain-management regimes and alternative therapies that he keeps in his office where he knows House will snoop and find them, the way he's right more often than House can let anyone else around him be.
Most of all, he hates the way Wilson believes every lie he tells himself. That a box of chocolates and a limp bouquet will soothe Julie, as if she's a teenage girl and not an intelligent woman who resents absence and half-measures. That if Wilson leaves House's place an hour earlier, or two, every couple of nights, then Julie won't think he's making excuses or sleeping his way through the hospital staff. That his marriage isn't slowly disintegrating under its own stagnant weight. That House will want to--will be able to--comfort him, when it does.
Despite what House says, he knows Wilson's not having an affair, this time. Wilson's spending all his time with House, and House wonders if it wouldn't just be easier for Julie if he dragged Wilson into bed rather than rolling his eyes at the thin sham of the blankets on his couch. Wilson's hand slides to the back of his neck when he says, "I guess I should go," and it takes all of House's cowardice not to reply, "No, you shouldn't."
Wilson isn't weak. He's just: an oncologist. He's used to hanging on until the bitter end. He uses poison and radiation to try and save the unsalvageable. Mostly, he waits. Cancer is all about slow terrible deaths, about not giving up when the going gets tough. It's that same strength that keeps him going back to Julie even though he must know it's another terminal diagnosis. It's House's weakness that prevented him from telling Wilson why he shouldn't have married her in the first place.
***
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
***
Wilson doesn't seem to know why his marriage is failing. He moves through his life doing his best, as if that will mean anything in the end. House could tell him that no matter what his mother told him, it's not the thought that counts. Actions are the only certainty, the treatment that tests the diagnosis. House isn't ready to prove his theory yet, so he watches Wilson, and he waits.
House doesn't like Julie. Doesn't dislike her, either. After the wedding, she mostly only shows up in his life on the rare occasion that they both attend some hospital function. Wilson dances attendance on her, smiling gamely, as if he's been told a joke he doesn't understand but he's trying his best to laugh along. The only problem is, the joke's on him. Julie places a hand on his forearm when he moves away, steps back and turns her head when he moves closer. When Wilson makes his excuses and ducks across the room, House meets him at the bar and offers him tidbits of overheard disasters: Jennifer's boyfriend has left her yet again (this makes three); Ann-Marie's precocious son was caught vandalising his school. Wilson grins wryly, and asks, "What else?"
"I saw Cuddy making out with some bigwig's nephew," House says. "Shouldn't you be getting back?"
Wilson gives him a half-hearted glare, one that asks did you have to bring that up?
House looks away, surveying the room. Cuddy dragged him here with a mixture of threats and the promise of low-cut evening wear. He wonders why Julie came, when it's clear she's wishing she hadn't. She hasn't shown up to any of these things in months. Guilt, he thinks, and wonders what she's atoning for. "That look either means you forgot you were married or you don't want to talk about it. I'm really hoping you don't want to talk about it."
The bartender passes over a bourbon and a white wine spritzer. Wilson stares at the drinks like he can't remember ordering them.
House pokes Wilson's polished shoe with his cane, leaving scuff marks. "Wanna cut class, Jimmy?"
Wilson picks up the drinks, and looks back across the room to where Julie's not watching them at all. "Yeah," he says. And he heads back to her side.
House has seen the end of all of Wilson's marriages, and he knows this one's no different. They start ending from the beginning.
***
House knows exactly when it started.
Seven years ago, Wilson's second marriage was crashing and burning, and House was living drained and exhausted in the whirlwind wake of Stacy's departure. Wilson dropped by nearly every day, trying to badger and coax House off the couch. PT. Food. Work. Anything.
"What the hell do you care?" House asked, more than once, and he hated himself every time he did. One of these days, surely Wilson would realize there was nothing in it for him and stop coming.
Wilson saw the worst of him, then. Dressed in unwashed pyjama pants and grimy t-shirts, unshowered and unshaven, blasted out of his mind on pills, yelling curses and insults and doing his best just to be left the bloody fuck alone. One night, Wilson came in quietly, using his key without knocking first. He didn't call out or bring food, and he didn't come into the living room, to stare at House with his hands on his hips and his mouth tight with determination not to let House cut him with words. House knew it was him--he'd heard the door, and the sigh, and the thump of Wilson's briefcase hitting the floor, and who the hell else would it be?--but then the silence gathered, and House couldn't make himself break it. He glanced over at his cane, then at the kitchen doorway. Finally, with a grimace, he reached for the cane and levered himself to his feet, hissing at the aching burst of fire in his thigh. He still limped heavily, but he could make it to the kitchen. He saw Wilson from the doorway, sitting at the table. He was still dressed in his overcoat, still neat and pressed and perfect. His face was in his hands and his back shuddered as he breathed heavy and slow. He was on the edge of crying, burnt out and broken, and House wanted to (but couldn't, of course, couldn't ever again) run away. Instead he hitched his way across the room, and gripped Wilson's shoulder tightly. They stayed like that, silent, until they were both able to pretend it hadn't happened at all.
Yeah. That was the moment House knew he was screwed. Their beginning was in that end.
***
Wilson on the phone to Julie is a Wilson praying to be rescued. House wouldn't admit it, but he hates that look on Wilson's face, the hunched guilt of his posture, the placating tone of voice he uses.
House does his best to help. He settles into the chair across from Wilson and prepares to do battle with Julie from across the room and through the phone line. She's a worthy adversary, but House has been winning their little war of attrition lately. He wonders if Julie keeps the opposite score of his own: counting Wilson's apologetic gestures as victories, his unexplained nights out as defeats. He pushes his case, prodding Wilson to get a move on, listening for the buzz of Julie's voice from the receiver. "Is that House?" he hears, and he hides a grin.
Then Wilson's looking at the phone in exasperation, with overtones of relief. "Great," he says. "She hung up on me."
And House thinks maybe Julie isn't counting coup anymore. Maybe she really doesn't care. And when Wilson seems to have forgotten the call completely by the time they've reached the hallway, House wonders if the war's already over, and if that means he's come out the victor.
House frowns that thought away and steps up his pace. "Come on," he says to Wilson, trailing behind. "Let's get moving. Those cancer scans don't run themselves."
"No," Wilson agrees. "That's what your staff are for."
House gives him a pointed glance. Wilson's department head skills run mainly to delegation, freeing him up to help House when he needs it. Wilson says he's saving his doctors from House. House lets the symptom list on his whiteboard suggest paraneoplastic syndrome often enough to make it necessary.
He forgets Julie, too; Cancer Girl's more interesting, and anyway, Wilson's marriage is beyond help. House knows enough not to try. He'd rather concentrate on saving the pieces when they fall.
***
House uses the excuse of a double bill of The Great Escape and The Magnificent Seven to invite Wilson over, as if he needs a reason. Wilson loses some of his hectic and harried look, and nods, a pen in his mouth, as he reviews a file. He takes the pen out to scrawl his name on the chart, and says, "Julie's going to some piano recital tonight. Should be fine."
House files that information away at the back of his mind. Julie's been attending a lot of concerts alone, lately, and House wonders if Wilson's even noticed.
Wilson cooks, something with rice and stir fry, and they're mostly quiet right through until Steve McQueen leaps his motorcycle over the second fence, with the Nazis after him. Maybe this is all House has won, after all, because when the credits roll (and House says nothing about Wilson's sniffs during the execution scene), Wilson stands and straightens up around the couch, and then gathers his jacket and briefcase.
House gets to his feet and stands at the window, watching Wilson head to his car, circling around to the driver's door. It's only after he starts the car and pulls away that House tells him, "You should leave your wife."
***
Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.
***
They're approaching the crisis point. House doesn't know how he knows this, after years of suppressing the casual twinge of mine that Wilson provokes, but he feels unbalanced, as if their strange flirtation has shifted into new territory. The point he turns on is the moment when Stacy says she will stay. That she loves him. That they can try again. House feels like he does when the diagnosis arrives, fully formed, in his mind; that same clarity, perfection, rightness. The answer spins out like a final chord with his foot on the sustain pedal. His mind makes connections, links symptoms and disease, test results and patient condition. He feels, even as he stands looking into Stacy's eyes, that he will kiss her again. He knows it won't be what he wants.
And so he sends Stacy away.
His leg's been more of a bitch than usual, and his shoulder's starting to join in on the complaints. Wilson wants it to be psychological; Wilson wants it to be nerve regeneration. House wants Wilson to open his damn eyes.
House is sitting in his office, watching the shadows lengthen outside his window, when Wilson passes by. He's dressed to leave, but he turns in to House's office rather than heading for the elevator. He takes a seat in House's lounge chair across the room, stretching out his legs. He's looking anywhere but at House when he says, "It shouldn't be all about sex."
"Still working on paving that road to hell?" House asks. Gonorrhea Guy is gone, and it's that dull spot between cases when it feels like nothing at all will happen ever again.
Wilson still doesn't look over. His voice is quiet in the colourless twilight that fills the room. "No good intentions," he says. "I've been thinking of cheating on her for more than a year."
House grunts and checks his mental tally of women he's seen Wilson with lately. There's always someone; nurses and orderlies and support staff. Probably the only women he stays away from are his patients. But he can't think of any who have been around for that long. Somehow they're always moving on, to different hospitals or different cities. House wonders if Wilson chooses them for that reason. Transience. Some subconscious thing, he'd call it, if he was the one who lived to psychoanalyze the crap out of things. "You're going to tell her, aren't you?"
"If she asks."
"If she cares." House twists around a bit. Wilson's watching him now. His eyes are bright in the dimness, and his face is tight, like he's suddenly furious. It's not Julie he cares about any more. House wonders what set him off.
"No, no, it's all right," Wilson says, in that same dry matter-of-fact voice that doesn't expect anything. "Please, don't ask me how I'm doing."
"You're doing crappy," House says. "I don't need to ask." He turns back to the window. Go back to your wife, he thinks. Leave me the hell alone.
"Yeah," Wilson says. "I suppose I'd better hope that roses are in season."
Julie won't be surprised by the roses. Even after all of this, though, Wilson will probably still be surprised by what she says.
***
The guilty idiot, House thinks, when Wilson only sighs and settles deeper into House's chair. It would never occur to him that the reason House doesn't want to hear it isn't just because he's a heartless bastard.
"Maybe it would be easier if I was having an affair," Wilson says. "If I was sleeping with someone else, then--"
"Then Julie would have a reason for going for your balls," House says. Interrupting, insulting. Anything to make Wilson shut up. He drops his legs down from the window ledge and spins to face Wilson fully. The office is cold and it's getting dark enough that Wilson's mostly just a blur across the room. That doesn't stop House from knowing exactly how he looks. "And you'd still be getting dragged up the aisle the morning your divorce was final."
"It would be different." Wilson says. House just stares at him, and hates that he can't wrench his eyes away. Wilson's tired. Looks like he could use some sleep in a bed that's actually his. Not a couch. Not next to Julie. Fuck.
And then: "It's you," Wilson says. In that so-careful voice. "In case you still think Debbie in Accounting should top your hit list." He smile is slight, empty. "The mob connection's got to be good for something besides a free car."
So he's said it. Said it like it was easy to say. As if intention is ever enough. House grits his teeth and looks away, down and to his right. Fuck Wilson, anyway. As if it was easy. "I can't wait until you start putting me off with bad candy," he says. "Then I can join the club. Think Julie will let me be president? After all, I've known you longest--"
"House." His name, when Wilson says it, can mean anything under the sun. This time it's longing, and tiredness, and can't you just let this--
No. He can't. House pushes himself to his feet, gets his cane under him.
"I don't," Wilson says, still in that almost-trembling voice, "I don't want to fix anything. I just want it to be different, with us."
"Do you always have to talk?" House snarls.
Wilson tips his head back to watch him pace the length of the room. "I've heard that's what friends do, occasionally."
"So it's an occasion," House says. "Does that mean we can drink to get through it?"
"House. Stop--stop using your stupid defensive mechanisms."
"That's not a defensive mechanism." House stalks towards the door.
Wilson stands up behind him. Getting angry, now. Good for him. "What would you call it?"
"I just meant," House says, "drinking isn't one. This is."
He walks out.
***
The way Wilson's marriages end is by Wilson showing up on House's doorstep with a suitcase and a pleading look. It's silence that holds them together, even more than their words, so after a moment when he considers telling Wilson to go to hell, House steps back and lets him in.
He makes sandwiches and breaks out the beer. There's a monster truck rally on TV. House lets it play out although he knows how it ends, and makes a few comments on autopilot about the crush-factor of Volvos. Wilson smiles faintly and swallows his beer.
What doesn't get said is the way they sit next to each other on the couch, their shoulders pressed tightly together. Comfortable, and warm. They don't talk about Julie, who's apparently going to stay with her mystery fuck. She's the one who ended it. House lifts his beer and toasts her silently. She's got what she wants. House sneers at himself. If this is what he wants, he's got it. Wilson's just as good at he is at letting conversations go, at pretending they can go on just as they always have.
Wilson's usual mess of blankets is waiting for him. All House has to do is go to bed and leave the living room to him, and they can forget everything they said. House thinks about unsolved cases, about treatment decisions he can't reverse. And, at last, he smiles when he bites into his sandwich.
***
Flushed and decided, he assaults at once;
Exploring hands encounter no defense.
***
With his soon-to-be-ex-wife gone, Wilson seems easier. He relaxes, lazy, in front of the TV. House hauls himself up and brings him another beer, but keeps hold of it, so that Wilson's fingers wrap around his on the chill neck of the bottle. He meets Wilson's eyes, and Wilson knows what he intends even before House kisses him. When they break apart, Wilson sets down the beer and House mutes the TV, and they start again from the beginning.
end