The Lamby Tapes
Author: resm
Title: The Lamby Tapes
Pairing: H/W friendship but with H/C & W/S mentioned
Disclaimer: do not own
Summary: What really happened at their coworker's wedding...
Beta: Special thanks to knitty_woman for everything!! :)
Slight spoiler I suppose for 7x8 Small Sacrifices
“Can you… please, can you take a look at him? It’s just…”
House reclined his chair back far enough to pull his feet up onto the desk, but not so far that the hind legs would give out under him. With exaggerated consideration, he cocked his head to the side before finally removing his reading glasses and narrowing his eyes at the suggestion of taking a look at the object of Sam’s concern. Quite frankly, he was still not entirely convinced that there was anything necessarily strange at play here, other than a good-intentioned marriage proposal. As admittedly crazy as that idea was, it had rational-thinking Wilson written all over it.
“I was talking to him earlier. He seemed fine.” If fine meant productively trying to move forward with his life and his relationship with Sam by seeking solace in their doomed past.
“He is not fine!” Sam snapped, then gathered herself together when she felt her nostrils flaring. “One, two…” he could hear her whispering, reverting to a numerical scale to muster an air of patience for nobody’s benefit because she wasn’t fooling him, let alone herself.
She folded her arms and pursed her lips together and House couldn’t help but mentally cast her as some kind of hell-begotten mother to them both. Then he wondered if Wilson was made to feel the same way during an argument, as though he were acting like an overgrown child. But Sam was forgetting that, unlike Wilson, House had no qualms about playing the child, especially if she feared him to be the influential older brother type to sway the younger any way he pleased. It was something he could use.
“Look,” she said more reasonably, and even he couldn’t deny her that. “I know there’s something a little… off with him. I can’t quite put my finger on it, but we have this wedding in two days and I’d rather he didn’t embarrass m-’im self.”
“A little off,” House smirked up at her. “Is that all? I’ve been saying that for years and no one’s-”
“It’s not big, but it’s there,” Sam pressed, the whine in her voice beginning to border on petulance.
“It is you.”
“Are you trying to tell me that you’re actually so selfish as to turn your back on whatever may or may not be going on with your best friend just to spite me?” she demanded, her resolve all but eroded away. “Please, House. There’s no denying that you care about him. What have you got to lose?”
“You played the friend card too early. Actually, too late,” he told her, crossing his hands behind his head and smiling to better display how unaffected he was by her sentimental pitch. A pitch he might have responded to if she hadn’t blown up at him within the same breath.
“Okay,” she acquiesced. “Put it this way: you give him a quick physical, or just talk to him. Whatever. If you don’t hear any alarm bells then you can belittle my medical opinion all you like from here on out.”
“Better,” he said agreeably. “But you’re forgetting that I already belittle your medical opinion.”
“Fine,” she conceded. “He has an imaginary friend called Lamby. How’s that for off the charts?”
~ ~ ~
While Wilson was indeed fascinated with his new Lamby, Sam wasn’t entirely accurate. House had done his own investigation some two hours after she’d sought him out in his office to dump her concerns at his feet (probably, he thought uncharitably, just to rid herself of the responsibility of keeping Boy Wonder in check herself). House was suitably comforted, however, to discover that Lamby wasn’t a complete product of Wilson’s imagination. It was a stuffed toy animal he had used to try to coerce a young patient into cooperating with her treatment plan a few days previously. A toy that Wilson seemed to consider a mere extension of his own voice and not really a new “friend” at all.
From what House could gather, Wilson was just messing about with the thing for his own amusement. Except that this wasn’t really Wilson’s sense of humour at all, so perhaps Sam was right in saying that Wilson was off. More than a little off, if this could be construed as a personality change.
Besides Lamby’s character being too out of character for Wilson, there were no outward signs to suggest that he was suffering from a concussion or otherwise. Of course, House had had to subtly play doctor from across Wilson’s desk, so there may well have been less obvious signs, that didn’t jump right out at him. He’d had to assume that Sam, in a better position to get up close and personal to their unbeknown patient, would have mapped out any bumps or bruising or head wounds already, so her ignorance, at least, was something.
But because they couldn’t fall back on a simple explanation of minor trauma, the idea of Wilson’s personality being altered by some other unknown cause was gathering more weight by the hour - or by the proposal. Hell, maybe he’d been suffering from something for years. You’d think that someone so sensible who'd struck out three times already wouldn’t put himself through the ringer again, especially with Sam of all people.
“Let’s film Lamby,” House suggested suddenly. He'd recently used a book to diagnose one recent patient and Jesus to diagnose another; perhaps a similarly unorthodox strategy might work to explain his friend’s strange behaviour.
“Hm?” Wilson asked, suppressing a yawn whilst pinching his thumb and forefinger together to rub sleep out of his eyes, or massage himself awake.
House turned in his chair, taking a moment to locate Cuddy and Sam on the dance floor with two of Wilson’s colleagues from Oncology. They were only three hours into the dreaded wedding reception with the rest of the day shaping up to stretch out before them as painstakingly boring as a routine surgery. The meal had finished: Cuddy still wasn’t talking to him; Sam had rather cruelly laughed off Wilson’s proposal (probably because she still believed he wasn’t all there); House wasn’t half as drunk as he’d expected to be by now, though he wasn’t sure if he could say the same for Wilson. And to top it all off, they were expected to put up with all of this while wearing uncomfortable clothes.
He turned back around in his chair again and looked challengingly across at Wilson, the only other person left at their table (His three fellows had excused themselves: Chase was off womanising, Foreman was trying to fit in with the wallpaper, and Taub was grappling to save his marriage). If he couldn’t right things with Cuddy, then he was committed all the more to righting things for Wilson.
“Give me your iPhone.”
Wilson reached into his pocket, then stalled. “Why would you bring a stuffed animal to a wedding?”
“Sabotage,” House replied innocently, snatching Wilson’s cell before he could change his mind. “Actually, it just happened to be in my bag and I keep all my ibuprofen in there so… come on, he’s a good party piece.”
With his suspicions suitably put to rest, Wilson didn’t need further encouragement. He drained the last of his martini as House lifted his blue backpack from under the table, unzipped it and pulled out Lamby. Wilson took the cuddly toy into his possession to kill any notion of House playing puppeteer and, during the process of mentally considering the course his monologue should take, he tossed him carelessly from hand to hand. House, meanwhile, was busy trying to master the applications on Wilson’s iPhone.
“I think we should make him more black-tie appropriate, given the occasion and all,” Wilson said jovially. He loosened his bowtie and pulled it up over his head, then hung it around Lamby’s woolly neck and fastened it securely. “Did you know that Sam said no?”
House’s thumb hovered over the record button. He could pretend all he liked that he was feeding into Wilson’s… they weren’t quite delusions, and he could pretend that he was doing it for diagnostic purposes only. But this was YouTube gold, and he had every intention of leaking Lamby's video to the internet once he figured out what was behind Wilson’s sudden change in behaviour. But even House had been through enough since Mayfield to recognize that some pranks went too far, and broadcasting Wilson’s relationship status online was way beyond the pale. So he held off on recording for the meantime.
“You have a good thing going on,” he said, hoping he was being vague enough for Wilson to misconstrue his words as being that of advice but specific enough to make absolutely clear his condemnation of a fourth wedding, or a first one once removed. “Don’t screw it up.”
“Mm.”
“He mumbled noncommittally…” House teased.
“I don’t-you don’t wanna talk about it. So let’s…” Wilson forced a hacking sort of cough, getting into character for his Lamby persona, and House dutifully started videoing. With nothing for his dominant hand to do, Wilson clasped at his right arm and adopted the voice that House could only describe as if he’d smoked sixty cigarettes a day since the age of twelve. The puppet, an extension of House’s best friend, sounded as if he was on his last legs. And who wouldn’t be if they were practically dead on their feet the whole time and, what’s more, dating the Harpy from hell?
Suddenly, and without really trying, House’s answer came to him, and Lamby wasn’t such a question mark after all.
~ ~ ~
“I respect the fact that there’s been a weather warning for tonight and you all have homes to go to, so let’s try to get through today’s agenda as quickly as possible, okay?” Cuddy greeted with a superficial smile. She tried to make eye contact with Wilson, whom the rest of the department heads considered to be her little right-hand man during their bimonthly meetings, but he was too busy fiddling with the cap of his pen to take any notice.
His slouched posture was off-putting too, but without further ado she took her own seat and rifled quickly through her notes, hoping that, in doing so, it would drill home to him that fidgeting and sitting in his chair as if he were vegetating in front of the television was not acceptable. If she were able to admonish him for not sitting up straight, she would, but, as it were, they weren’t in a classroom and she wasn’t the teacher and technically he wasn’t misbehaving. If anything, he should get points just for turning up, which was more than could be said for his best friend and her significant other.
“So,” she started, deciding not to be distracted by Wilson’s inattentiveness any longer, “I think first and foremost… Dr. Johnson, you wanted to raise the pharmacy backlog issue that we didn't have time to cover at our last meeting, right?”
“You’ve checked your mail then?” Johnson asked, if a little boldly, and taking Cuddy completely by surprise. And if she wasn’t mistaken, two of the other doctors stopped their subsequent snickering with ill-disguised coughs, and one hid behind a coffee mug.
“I got the memo you sent me this morning, stressing the backlog issue was of utmost importance,” she reminded, narrowing her eyes first at him and then, for no other reason than for her own peace of mind, she rounded on Wilson. Only this time he was staring directly at her, as if he had prepared himself to feel her eyes boring into him at any given second, looking imploringly at him and through him for clarity.
“I think-” he said meekly, cutting himself off to swallow down the lump in his throat and, hopefully, to better assert himself thereafter. “I think Dr. Johnson is referring to the memo that was sent out to us all shortly before the meeting from uh... House.”
All colour drained from Cuddy’s face at the mention of her boyfriend, especially given Johnson’s newfound courage and Wilson’s decency to be embarrassed about whatever House had emailed them all. The possibilities were infinitely endless: from doctored photos to private files she didn’t even want him seeing. A marriage licence? A birth certificate? Her high school prom picture?
Wilson received a cordial elbow to the ribs from Ford, the plump Head of Radiology sitting to the left of him, and several belly laughs from various points of the table then ensued. His thinly veiled smile was not convincing anybody, least of all Cuddy. When it dawned on her that House hadn’t used their relationship to suddenly prank her after all but had set out to humiliate his so-called best friend instead, she was certainly relieved, but she couldn’t exactly say that it sat easily with her.
“Will someone please explain?” she demanded. She hoped only to put Wilson out of his misery so that they might continue the meeting undisturbed and without mirth.
“As far as you know, you just woke up one morning with his hand down your pants, right Lamby-I mean Jimmy?” Johnson needled.
Cuddy tried to still her heaving chest at the idea of it. Some grainy photograph from however long ago showing an unconscious Wilson probably passed out from being intoxicated out of his skull, and either Greg’s own hand stuffed down his friend’s jeans or some other guy’s wandering hand. Did he stumble across the photo or go out of his way to take it? Was this a dig at Wilson’s sexuality, or was this documented evidence of something much more sinister - had he been assaulted, harassed? And whatever it represented, how the hell could House have thought it appropriate (or hilariously inappropriate) to share with all of their most senior work colleagues?
“I’m not quite the internet sensation yet. So you can all stop quoting,” Wilson said in a warning tone he usually only reserved for House.
“Oh, I wouldn’t say that,” Johnson said gleefully. “House was definitely onto something here. Four thousand-plus hits when I last checked. And people have subscribed to your channel!”
“House is an ass. Now can we please… please?” Wilson looked at Cuddy with his adorably sad brown eyes, emphasized even more so with his chin resting against his chest and his bottom lip puckered out without even realising. Beseeching her with all his charm and grace to just drop the sorry matter and get back to the boring pharmacy backlog crisis of 2010.
“The sooner we get through this… we have homes…” he sputtered, regurgitating her earlier words as best he could. But his lack of confidence somewhat belied the sentiment.
Cuddy booted up her laptop with the press of a button, no longer caring like the rest of them about the backlog, “The roads are icy, Wilson. It’s best we just reschedule the whole meeting after all.” She heard him sigh woefully and, when she glanced curiously over the top of the screen, noticed how he’d slumped so far down in his seat that he was almost at eye level with the table now, idly awaiting his fate.
Subject: FW: The Lamby Tapes [urgent]
Message: http://www.youtube.com/user/TheLambyTapes
I bring you the most gallant Dr. James Wilson, high on one too many antihistamines. PPTH’s very own ventril-oncologist! From porn star to comedian! Petition to release a nude calendar combining both talents can be signed in clinic log book. Who would miss a chance to see Wilson and the now infamous “Lamby” in matching stethoscopes and/or bow ties? What nurse wouldn’t buy it? Will raise funds for the cancer kiddies.
Yours hatefully,
House.
“Antihistamines,” Cuddy said aloud once she’d satisfied her curiosity with the short video clips that House had linked in his email.
“I was having trouble sleeping,” Wilson grumbled behind an arm because his hand was at his forehead to shade his eyes and his elbow was on the conference table. His other hand was resting on his lap out of view and still fiddling desperately with the damn pen to help distract himself. “I didn’t realise the sleeping pills had been making me-”
“Merry?” Ford butted in, and Wilson was jolted in his seat with another jab to the side. Merry. More like confused. His only relief was that House had failed to indicate that it was more likely a drug interaction with the recently amended course of antidepressants his shrink was trying him out on, rather than "one too many." But though his personal privacy was somewhat protected, his professional embarrassment was significant, for his colleagues would assume that he, as a doctor, should have known better.
“You’ve all had your fun,” Cuddy said, adopting her most professional tone, one she used when she was trying to gain leverage over House or having to steamroll ahead in administrative duties. But since House wasn’t here and she’d already suspended their meeting, both counts were redundant.
Wilson flashed her a tight, insincere smile because he knew her too well. Knew that she too couldn’t pass up the ample opportunity to relish in his torment. Knew that he'd just have to grin and bear it because if anyone else were his boss, they'd be seriously questioning his ability to carry the Oncology department after such folly. Knew he was lucky that deep, deep, deep down House had his back.
“But, you know,” she clasped her hands together above the table, looking at him expectantly, “a calendar would pull in funds for the hospital…”
END
Title: The Lamby Tapes
Pairing: H/W friendship but with H/C & W/S mentioned
Disclaimer: do not own
Summary: What really happened at their coworker's wedding...
Beta: Special thanks to knitty_woman for everything!! :)
Slight spoiler I suppose for 7x8 Small Sacrifices
“Can you… please, can you take a look at him? It’s just…”
House reclined his chair back far enough to pull his feet up onto the desk, but not so far that the hind legs would give out under him. With exaggerated consideration, he cocked his head to the side before finally removing his reading glasses and narrowing his eyes at the suggestion of taking a look at the object of Sam’s concern. Quite frankly, he was still not entirely convinced that there was anything necessarily strange at play here, other than a good-intentioned marriage proposal. As admittedly crazy as that idea was, it had rational-thinking Wilson written all over it.
“I was talking to him earlier. He seemed fine.” If fine meant productively trying to move forward with his life and his relationship with Sam by seeking solace in their doomed past.
“He is not fine!” Sam snapped, then gathered herself together when she felt her nostrils flaring. “One, two…” he could hear her whispering, reverting to a numerical scale to muster an air of patience for nobody’s benefit because she wasn’t fooling him, let alone herself.
She folded her arms and pursed her lips together and House couldn’t help but mentally cast her as some kind of hell-begotten mother to them both. Then he wondered if Wilson was made to feel the same way during an argument, as though he were acting like an overgrown child. But Sam was forgetting that, unlike Wilson, House had no qualms about playing the child, especially if she feared him to be the influential older brother type to sway the younger any way he pleased. It was something he could use.
“Look,” she said more reasonably, and even he couldn’t deny her that. “I know there’s something a little… off with him. I can’t quite put my finger on it, but we have this wedding in two days and I’d rather he didn’t embarrass m-’im self.”
“A little off,” House smirked up at her. “Is that all? I’ve been saying that for years and no one’s-”
“It’s not big, but it’s there,” Sam pressed, the whine in her voice beginning to border on petulance.
“It is you.”
“Are you trying to tell me that you’re actually so selfish as to turn your back on whatever may or may not be going on with your best friend just to spite me?” she demanded, her resolve all but eroded away. “Please, House. There’s no denying that you care about him. What have you got to lose?”
“You played the friend card too early. Actually, too late,” he told her, crossing his hands behind his head and smiling to better display how unaffected he was by her sentimental pitch. A pitch he might have responded to if she hadn’t blown up at him within the same breath.
“Okay,” she acquiesced. “Put it this way: you give him a quick physical, or just talk to him. Whatever. If you don’t hear any alarm bells then you can belittle my medical opinion all you like from here on out.”
“Better,” he said agreeably. “But you’re forgetting that I already belittle your medical opinion.”
“Fine,” she conceded. “He has an imaginary friend called Lamby. How’s that for off the charts?”
~ ~ ~
While Wilson was indeed fascinated with his new Lamby, Sam wasn’t entirely accurate. House had done his own investigation some two hours after she’d sought him out in his office to dump her concerns at his feet (probably, he thought uncharitably, just to rid herself of the responsibility of keeping Boy Wonder in check herself). House was suitably comforted, however, to discover that Lamby wasn’t a complete product of Wilson’s imagination. It was a stuffed toy animal he had used to try to coerce a young patient into cooperating with her treatment plan a few days previously. A toy that Wilson seemed to consider a mere extension of his own voice and not really a new “friend” at all.
From what House could gather, Wilson was just messing about with the thing for his own amusement. Except that this wasn’t really Wilson’s sense of humour at all, so perhaps Sam was right in saying that Wilson was off. More than a little off, if this could be construed as a personality change.
Besides Lamby’s character being too out of character for Wilson, there were no outward signs to suggest that he was suffering from a concussion or otherwise. Of course, House had had to subtly play doctor from across Wilson’s desk, so there may well have been less obvious signs, that didn’t jump right out at him. He’d had to assume that Sam, in a better position to get up close and personal to their unbeknown patient, would have mapped out any bumps or bruising or head wounds already, so her ignorance, at least, was something.
But because they couldn’t fall back on a simple explanation of minor trauma, the idea of Wilson’s personality being altered by some other unknown cause was gathering more weight by the hour - or by the proposal. Hell, maybe he’d been suffering from something for years. You’d think that someone so sensible who'd struck out three times already wouldn’t put himself through the ringer again, especially with Sam of all people.
“Let’s film Lamby,” House suggested suddenly. He'd recently used a book to diagnose one recent patient and Jesus to diagnose another; perhaps a similarly unorthodox strategy might work to explain his friend’s strange behaviour.
“Hm?” Wilson asked, suppressing a yawn whilst pinching his thumb and forefinger together to rub sleep out of his eyes, or massage himself awake.
House turned in his chair, taking a moment to locate Cuddy and Sam on the dance floor with two of Wilson’s colleagues from Oncology. They were only three hours into the dreaded wedding reception with the rest of the day shaping up to stretch out before them as painstakingly boring as a routine surgery. The meal had finished: Cuddy still wasn’t talking to him; Sam had rather cruelly laughed off Wilson’s proposal (probably because she still believed he wasn’t all there); House wasn’t half as drunk as he’d expected to be by now, though he wasn’t sure if he could say the same for Wilson. And to top it all off, they were expected to put up with all of this while wearing uncomfortable clothes.
He turned back around in his chair again and looked challengingly across at Wilson, the only other person left at their table (His three fellows had excused themselves: Chase was off womanising, Foreman was trying to fit in with the wallpaper, and Taub was grappling to save his marriage). If he couldn’t right things with Cuddy, then he was committed all the more to righting things for Wilson.
“Give me your iPhone.”
Wilson reached into his pocket, then stalled. “Why would you bring a stuffed animal to a wedding?”
“Sabotage,” House replied innocently, snatching Wilson’s cell before he could change his mind. “Actually, it just happened to be in my bag and I keep all my ibuprofen in there so… come on, he’s a good party piece.”
With his suspicions suitably put to rest, Wilson didn’t need further encouragement. He drained the last of his martini as House lifted his blue backpack from under the table, unzipped it and pulled out Lamby. Wilson took the cuddly toy into his possession to kill any notion of House playing puppeteer and, during the process of mentally considering the course his monologue should take, he tossed him carelessly from hand to hand. House, meanwhile, was busy trying to master the applications on Wilson’s iPhone.
“I think we should make him more black-tie appropriate, given the occasion and all,” Wilson said jovially. He loosened his bowtie and pulled it up over his head, then hung it around Lamby’s woolly neck and fastened it securely. “Did you know that Sam said no?”
House’s thumb hovered over the record button. He could pretend all he liked that he was feeding into Wilson’s… they weren’t quite delusions, and he could pretend that he was doing it for diagnostic purposes only. But this was YouTube gold, and he had every intention of leaking Lamby's video to the internet once he figured out what was behind Wilson’s sudden change in behaviour. But even House had been through enough since Mayfield to recognize that some pranks went too far, and broadcasting Wilson’s relationship status online was way beyond the pale. So he held off on recording for the meantime.
“You have a good thing going on,” he said, hoping he was being vague enough for Wilson to misconstrue his words as being that of advice but specific enough to make absolutely clear his condemnation of a fourth wedding, or a first one once removed. “Don’t screw it up.”
“Mm.”
“He mumbled noncommittally…” House teased.
“I don’t-you don’t wanna talk about it. So let’s…” Wilson forced a hacking sort of cough, getting into character for his Lamby persona, and House dutifully started videoing. With nothing for his dominant hand to do, Wilson clasped at his right arm and adopted the voice that House could only describe as if he’d smoked sixty cigarettes a day since the age of twelve. The puppet, an extension of House’s best friend, sounded as if he was on his last legs. And who wouldn’t be if they were practically dead on their feet the whole time and, what’s more, dating the Harpy from hell?
Suddenly, and without really trying, House’s answer came to him, and Lamby wasn’t such a question mark after all.
~ ~ ~
“I respect the fact that there’s been a weather warning for tonight and you all have homes to go to, so let’s try to get through today’s agenda as quickly as possible, okay?” Cuddy greeted with a superficial smile. She tried to make eye contact with Wilson, whom the rest of the department heads considered to be her little right-hand man during their bimonthly meetings, but he was too busy fiddling with the cap of his pen to take any notice.
His slouched posture was off-putting too, but without further ado she took her own seat and rifled quickly through her notes, hoping that, in doing so, it would drill home to him that fidgeting and sitting in his chair as if he were vegetating in front of the television was not acceptable. If she were able to admonish him for not sitting up straight, she would, but, as it were, they weren’t in a classroom and she wasn’t the teacher and technically he wasn’t misbehaving. If anything, he should get points just for turning up, which was more than could be said for his best friend and her significant other.
“So,” she started, deciding not to be distracted by Wilson’s inattentiveness any longer, “I think first and foremost… Dr. Johnson, you wanted to raise the pharmacy backlog issue that we didn't have time to cover at our last meeting, right?”
“You’ve checked your mail then?” Johnson asked, if a little boldly, and taking Cuddy completely by surprise. And if she wasn’t mistaken, two of the other doctors stopped their subsequent snickering with ill-disguised coughs, and one hid behind a coffee mug.
“I got the memo you sent me this morning, stressing the backlog issue was of utmost importance,” she reminded, narrowing her eyes first at him and then, for no other reason than for her own peace of mind, she rounded on Wilson. Only this time he was staring directly at her, as if he had prepared himself to feel her eyes boring into him at any given second, looking imploringly at him and through him for clarity.
“I think-” he said meekly, cutting himself off to swallow down the lump in his throat and, hopefully, to better assert himself thereafter. “I think Dr. Johnson is referring to the memo that was sent out to us all shortly before the meeting from uh... House.”
All colour drained from Cuddy’s face at the mention of her boyfriend, especially given Johnson’s newfound courage and Wilson’s decency to be embarrassed about whatever House had emailed them all. The possibilities were infinitely endless: from doctored photos to private files she didn’t even want him seeing. A marriage licence? A birth certificate? Her high school prom picture?
Wilson received a cordial elbow to the ribs from Ford, the plump Head of Radiology sitting to the left of him, and several belly laughs from various points of the table then ensued. His thinly veiled smile was not convincing anybody, least of all Cuddy. When it dawned on her that House hadn’t used their relationship to suddenly prank her after all but had set out to humiliate his so-called best friend instead, she was certainly relieved, but she couldn’t exactly say that it sat easily with her.
“Will someone please explain?” she demanded. She hoped only to put Wilson out of his misery so that they might continue the meeting undisturbed and without mirth.
“As far as you know, you just woke up one morning with his hand down your pants, right Lamby-I mean Jimmy?” Johnson needled.
Cuddy tried to still her heaving chest at the idea of it. Some grainy photograph from however long ago showing an unconscious Wilson probably passed out from being intoxicated out of his skull, and either Greg’s own hand stuffed down his friend’s jeans or some other guy’s wandering hand. Did he stumble across the photo or go out of his way to take it? Was this a dig at Wilson’s sexuality, or was this documented evidence of something much more sinister - had he been assaulted, harassed? And whatever it represented, how the hell could House have thought it appropriate (or hilariously inappropriate) to share with all of their most senior work colleagues?
“I’m not quite the internet sensation yet. So you can all stop quoting,” Wilson said in a warning tone he usually only reserved for House.
“Oh, I wouldn’t say that,” Johnson said gleefully. “House was definitely onto something here. Four thousand-plus hits when I last checked. And people have subscribed to your channel!”
“House is an ass. Now can we please… please?” Wilson looked at Cuddy with his adorably sad brown eyes, emphasized even more so with his chin resting against his chest and his bottom lip puckered out without even realising. Beseeching her with all his charm and grace to just drop the sorry matter and get back to the boring pharmacy backlog crisis of 2010.
“The sooner we get through this… we have homes…” he sputtered, regurgitating her earlier words as best he could. But his lack of confidence somewhat belied the sentiment.
Cuddy booted up her laptop with the press of a button, no longer caring like the rest of them about the backlog, “The roads are icy, Wilson. It’s best we just reschedule the whole meeting after all.” She heard him sigh woefully and, when she glanced curiously over the top of the screen, noticed how he’d slumped so far down in his seat that he was almost at eye level with the table now, idly awaiting his fate.
Subject: FW: The Lamby Tapes [urgent]
Message: http://www.youtube.com/user/TheLambyTapes
I bring you the most gallant Dr. James Wilson, high on one too many antihistamines. PPTH’s very own ventril-oncologist! From porn star to comedian! Petition to release a nude calendar combining both talents can be signed in clinic log book. Who would miss a chance to see Wilson and the now infamous “Lamby” in matching stethoscopes and/or bow ties? What nurse wouldn’t buy it? Will raise funds for the cancer kiddies.
Yours hatefully,
House.
“Antihistamines,” Cuddy said aloud once she’d satisfied her curiosity with the short video clips that House had linked in his email.
“I was having trouble sleeping,” Wilson grumbled behind an arm because his hand was at his forehead to shade his eyes and his elbow was on the conference table. His other hand was resting on his lap out of view and still fiddling desperately with the damn pen to help distract himself. “I didn’t realise the sleeping pills had been making me-”
“Merry?” Ford butted in, and Wilson was jolted in his seat with another jab to the side. Merry. More like confused. His only relief was that House had failed to indicate that it was more likely a drug interaction with the recently amended course of antidepressants his shrink was trying him out on, rather than "one too many." But though his personal privacy was somewhat protected, his professional embarrassment was significant, for his colleagues would assume that he, as a doctor, should have known better.
“You’ve all had your fun,” Cuddy said, adopting her most professional tone, one she used when she was trying to gain leverage over House or having to steamroll ahead in administrative duties. But since House wasn’t here and she’d already suspended their meeting, both counts were redundant.
Wilson flashed her a tight, insincere smile because he knew her too well. Knew that she too couldn’t pass up the ample opportunity to relish in his torment. Knew that he'd just have to grin and bear it because if anyone else were his boss, they'd be seriously questioning his ability to carry the Oncology department after such folly. Knew he was lucky that deep, deep, deep down House had his back.
“But, you know,” she clasped her hands together above the table, looking at him expectantly, “a calendar would pull in funds for the hospital…”
END