Fic: Time For Some Of Us

[joe_pike_junior]

Title: Time For Some Of Us
Characters: House/Wilson friendship, slash if you wear slash goggles.

Wilson's family, including his two brothers.
Mentions House/Cuddy, House/Stacy and Wilson/Cuddy.

Rating: PG.
Warnings: Character death.

Summary: House’s world had always been on a shakier axis than some, more marked by instability than almost anyone Wilson knew.
Disclaimer: Not mine, don't sue.
Notes: Wow. I never thought I'd write something like this. But now I have, and I kind of like it. Concrit and comments extremely welcome.

Without nomad1328's tireless beta-ing, this would be a whole heap of extremely angsty ands and buts.

I ran out of space, even though this is meant to be read in one "chunk". There's a link down the bottom of the page. You can also click the "next entry" doodad.



TIME FOR SOME OF US

First I was a hatchling waiting for my little bones to form, oh no
Next I was a fledgling leaping from the nest despite the fall

Oh they fall
How we fall.

Josh Pyke - Memories & Dust.

…

Aunt Iris should have been a Kindergarten teacher. She was patient, and she knew how to persevere, how to coax curiosity and empathy out of the new, fledgling brain of a child. She'd drive up to Trenton and sit at the dark wooden table with her sister -- the boys' mother -- and whenever one of them came into the kitchen she’d beckon him over for a hug and then dole out a minty-tasting hard candy from the depths of her cavernous leather handbag.

Later on, she'd sit out on the porch with Max -- the characteristically irascible middle child -- for what seemed like hours, mixing water-colours and rolling out Play-Doh and trying to talk to him over the loud vroom-ing noises he produced when he played with his precious Matchbox cars. Most of the time it was akin to banging her head against the wall, but she persevered, just like the boys' mom and dad.

There was so much love in what they all did for him, and so little given in return.

The summer when James was five stretched on and on, and Aunt Iris’ visits were sometimes the only highlight in a long, claustrophobic week. She came to take Jimmy and Quentin (the oldest at eleven, and cocky enough to make everyone know it), on an outing.

It happened every Saturday morning like clockwork. Jimmy and Quinn would be ready early, Jimmy dressed in neat shorts and a t-shirt, a little square backpack set on his shoulders, and Quinn wearing a pair of baggy shorts and a huge Nets shirt, his skinny arms poking from the too-wide sleeves, almost always a little bit sunburnt.

Max had his weekly session with the psychotherapist on this day. Just after his eighth birthday it had been decided, fast becoming a menace and a liability as he was, that he would need some 'extensive therapy to work on the problems that were causing his antisocial behaviour’. That was exactly what the school counsellor had said, and the Wilsons had clung to this solution like a kid who can't yet swim clings to a kickboard.

Hours of research at the library, discussions with other parents, and the pile of child-psychology books blooming beside the bed -- nothing had worked. When Max was only refusing to go to bed or bathe or eat, it was a laugh. When he spat on a teacher and started setting fire to mailboxes, it was serious. When he came home with a high, flighty look in his eyes and they found the stockpile of stolen magazines and chocolate bars and toy cars under his bed, when they found the craft knife he kept taped to the bed frame, it was harrowing. The sort of deep dismayed sorrow that goes straight to the bone.

Jimmy was too young to be left alone, of course, and Quinn was at an age when it was too easy to perceive being left out, and when childish responsibilities took hold (Quentin dutifully took out the garbage every Monday night, and helped James with his breakfast every morning, but nothing like that could make the cool guys from the Sixth Grade want to hang around with the kid with the bugfuck brother).

So every Saturday there were the outings with the aunt. She was older than the boys' mother, who was a younger child herself. Aunt Iris’ children had grown up and left home. Maybe for her the time she spent with her sister's three boys was like a repeat of what she'd had with her own children, and it was easier the second time around.

Jimmy was a fairly easy-going kid -- he didn't really care where they went. As long as it was away. Sometimes they went somewhere only Quinn would like, a scary, flashy action movie, perhaps. Jimmy might just curl up in his aunt's arms, comforted by her large middle-aged breasts and the wool-wash smell that lingered around her cardigans. The soft darkness of the theatre would still comfort him much later in life.

Years later, when Max disappeared, Quentin was old enough to remember and big brother enough to feel extraordinarily guilty, and at the same time powerless, the raging frustration that comes hand in hand with that. He remembered with clarity the serene, simple happiness of the times they were alone from Max, his loudness, his sullen stares. He remembered how the tension between them, between Max and everyone around him, was so brittle it could shatter like a stone under a hammer, how it splintered into their consciousness. These feelings, so old and familiar, were buried under the deep dismay the family felt when Max went away, probably for good.

When they were out on those sweaty summer days the absence of Max was sometimes distinct, but most of the time it was replaced by a sort of serenity, a chance to breathe, a comfortable isolation from outbursts and manipulation. It was the sort of feeling you could comfortably ignore in a sort of numb bliss until it went away. This was why Aunt Iris took Jimmy and Quinn to a park or to the movies, or just to McDonalds to quietly sit and eat. If they ate, she’d let Jimmy carry the tray, clapping her hand on his shoulder and whispering Good job, Jim in his ear so he puffed up with responsibility. To her he was always Jim, never James or Jimmy.

James and Quentin loved Max, loved him with the unquestioning adoration family gives to family. But -- they were brothers, they had to live with him, and cruelty breeds hatred. This uncomfortable truth was driven home to them, again and again. Ripped up school assignments. Prized toys beheaded. Quick fights in the dark corner of the backyard, fights that were never playful, but always strangely spiteful and scary, like you were fighting for more than a spot to play toy soldiers or a turn on the swing. James remembered hurrying down the hall to the kitchen once when Max pushed him over for brushing past him wrong. The carpet had burned his soft kid knees, and what burned deepest in his memory was a hot streak of hate, thinking I hate him I hate him I hate him.

Hate and love, intertwined like thorny vines that grab on and don’t let go. The whole family gave and gave and gave, and Max fucked it up and fucked it up and fucked it up. The more they struggled, the more they were entangled.

And Jimmy -- Wilson -- still loves him. He is proud of himself for this. And ashamed for his pride.

Jimmy loved the zoo. It was his favourite place to go, and if Aunt Iris or his mom mentioned it he’d be excited all week. He wanted to be a zookeeper. He loved sitting in the shade on a bench watching the lions prowl and strut while he gobbled down a hot dog, and he loved peering into the meerkat enclosure, giggling at how they looked like officious little people rushing around.

Most of all, he loved the birds -- loved spotting them perched on branches and perches, loved watching the flash of their feathers as they flew, and loved the squawking, chattering noises they made.

The exotic bird enclosure had a warm, feathery, bird crap sort of smell. There were birds and foliage, and a little sign posted on the front of each cage. James climbed up a little on the handrail so he could get a closer look at a majestic grey bird with dark eyes. It almost seemed to be looking at him, James thought. It almost seemed to be sad. He couldn’t read all of what was on the sign, (mostly just words like and, zoo, bird, and the) so he asked his aunt what it said. The parrot was from Africa. When James heard that he realised that this bird was all alone thousands and thousands of miles from home, further than anywhere he could imagine.

When he realised that he started crying. He didn’t stop when Quentin gave him a popsicle, or when his aunt took him to the bathroom and washed his face. He didn’t even stop when Quentin lightly punched him on the arm and called him a little wuss. He snivelled and grizzled almost all the way to the car, and when they got there he fell into a deep exhausted sleep.

Of course this outrage at the mistreatment of animals didn’t really last. Wilson didn’t grow up to campaign with PETA or break down zoo cages. When he was eleven he kept a mouse in a cage in his bedroom. He never refused to eat meat.

What stuck in Wilson’s memory was the look he imagined was in the bird’s eyes. Hopeless sorrow. Like the bird knew it was going to die in this zoo in New Jersey. Like the bird knew it was trapped. Even if it were set free it would die a hopeless miserable death. When he was five, Wilson had barely understood that, and still it had scared him, chilled him to the marrow.

Wilson never went back to the Zoo after he left Trenton for college. One time, when Julie and he were still engaged, he took her niece and nephew to the zoo. He guessed that, just like the formal family dinner and the informal beer out the back with her dad, the day with the kids was another way of measuring him, letting the family turn him over and over until he was pronounced suitable or unsuitable for marriage. Looking back Wilson would surmise with resignation that this wasn’t the most auspicious way to embark on married life.

The niece was the same age he had been that summer he cried about the bird. They were visiting Julie’s people in Chicago, and the Chicago Zoo was huge, well appointed, a great way to spend a day. He walked the kids through the place with Julie, and he didn’t even think of how he had cried about the bird until he smelt that same feathery smell in the enclosure. What had stayed with him wasn’t the horror of the caged animals, but rather the desperation he thought he had sensed in that bird, on a hot July day when he was five. Children can know such deep sorrow when they are scarcely old enough to explain it, and it was this that was indelible in him.

Mom and Dad took Jimmy and Quinn aside one Saturday afternoon when Jimmy was eleven and Quinn was seventeen and told them they had nothing to feel guilty about. That they had always tried and loved and that it wasn’t anything to do with them. That was when Max got put away in the Unit for the first time.

The second time it wasn’t just a slap on the wrist. He came out after two years really skinny and knowing a lot of really dirty jokes, and with the GED he got inside he could start attending community college. That was one of the best years he had, the year Jimmy was in senior year.

But what if they were at fault? Year after year they connected less, talked less, empathised less. Why not hate someone who ate the same food as you, wore the same clothes, lived in the same house, but couldn’t seem to get it together to want the same life?

Jim wanted Pre-Med, and he was willing to work to get it. Quinn was backpacking through Greece taking great photographs. Max seemed content with smothering any occasional glimpse of brilliance by smoking massive amounts of weed. By the time Wilson was in med school, they’d lost him again. Wilson got busier and busier, and all of a sudden he knew that he had nothing in common with his brother but a name and some genes. That was when Wilson lost his empathy for Max. It became something he had to dig deep for. They found him, but it seemed to Wilson like that shock broke something loose in the family. It changed something. He couldn’t love his brother.

Jim, or Jimmy, became the name he reserved for baseball cards and toy soldiers and other childish things. It was James, or Wilson. He grew. He severed more connections.

When he became a doctor, his aunt, widowed the year before, sent him a greeting card with DR JAMES WILSON on it in careful copperplate script, and he stuck it up in his locker with his food and his stethoscope and his coat, because it seemed new and special and so very new, to be a doctor.

Then, in the first six months that Max was missing, really missing, got gone fur-real, as he would have said, there were the posters Wilson stuck up in the lobby of the police station and on the grimy walls of soup kitchens: MAX D. WILSON, the shape of his face blurred and shadowed under the photocopy, but still distinct.

…

When Wilson met House he was a newly minted oncologist, happy to have landed a position at PPTH under Thompson, the ornery old head of oncology (yet he was not completely overjoyed - he’d applied for a position at New York Mercy, and had been interviewed at one of the Chicago University hospitals). House was working in Nephrology, pissing off the department head, and also regularly causing kerfuffles in Emergency, Infectious Disease and Maternity -- minor things like freaking out patients, insulting a pompous old man who just happened to be a major benefactor, that sort of thing.

Maybe if Wilson had thought about it, some of this temerity would have reminded him of his other brother. But at that time it seemed like Max was just another one of the things he’d left behind in his old life. He hadn’t spoken of Max with Quentin, with his parents, with anyone, for at least three years. The last time he’d thought of him was the short period of unrest while he entered his third year of fellowship. Those doubts were easy enough to push to the back of his mind.

Wilson knew of House because, as always, his reputation had preceded him. Wilson had heard plenty of coffee-room grumbling sessions. First it was just isolated occurrences, someone stirring sugar or rooting around in the fridge and saying something like So, you won't believe what House has done now. Then he realised that the gossip had a pattern, and that some of the things this House had (supposedly) done reached the level of mythology things get to when they're amplified by constant chatter and repetition. Wilson estimated that 40% of the gossip in the hospital was about House.

A person called House, who he thought might be a doctor, who he'd never met, or even seen. The guy was apparently very smart, and apparently a total asshole. That was all Wilson knew. Being new at the hospital, hearing about House was like hearing about the bogeyman.

Wilson actually met House, set eyes on the Gregory House, when he knocked him over in the parking lot.

Wilson never knew whether it was because he was the most junior doctor in the department or because he was a pushover, but he was always doing stuff like carrying and fetching -- files and boxes and lunches. Thompson had dismissively left the keys to his Porsche in Wilson's pigeon-hole with a note: File boxes on the back seat to the conference room, please.

Wilson was carrying the largest of the boxes around the corner of the building closest to the entrance when his pager went off. The old bastard had neglected to tell Wilson that the boxes were chock-full with paper and God-knows what else, and therefore too heavy to carry all at once. It was a Wednesday, late afternoon, and Wilson was annoyed and flustered.

Thompson had paged him to the lab, probably to look at test results. Wilson had been looking at test results for the past two, maybe three weeks. Looking and looking and looking, and occasionally he'd take a break to go grab his boss a coffee or do some photocopying or write a memo. Thompson didn't need a secretary or an assistant. He used his subordinates for that.

Because he was in a hurry, he didn't see House until it was too late. He was just a regular guy, standing slightly stooped at the edge of the curb, right in front of the bay where people could be dropped off and get picked up. He was brushing himself off.

Wilson turned away from his pager, cranky, just in time to see all that, but too late to avoid the inevitable. The box hit House on the chest and fell to the sidewalk with a thick thump, papers sliding off the top. House's ankles caught on the edge of the footpath, and he fell straight backwards with a dismayed yelp. Wilson stumbled, but kept his feet. The anger dribbled out of him like how milk will spill out of a dropped bottle, ebbing away in a huge burst.

“Watch where you’re going!! Je-sus!”

Wilson watched the guy brush himself off with a look of pure annoyance on his face. His shirt was untucked and his jeans had a hole in the knee. When he glanced up at Wilson, something else passed across his face, like he was trying not to smile or laugh. Wilson realised that his burning face was contorted into a look of pure horror, and the guy thought it was funny.

House returned to brushing himself off and inspecting the palms of his hands, and the look of gruff anger returned to his face. He looked so angry Wilson was just a little bit afraid. A more detached part of him also noticed that the guy had really long hands. There was a student with hands like that who had interned at Wilson’s hospital. He was a surgical intern, and he was always practising one-handed sutures or working out with a stress ball. One of those disposable paper cups was sitting beside House’s feet, the plastic top torn away in ragged pieces at the edge.

The man pointedly didn’t bother to help Wilson pick up the contents of his box. He straightened up, and Wilson started to stammer an apology. “I’m - uh, sorry!”

When Wilson spoke, House looked at him, his face flat and long and dismissive. He was kind of tall. “Forget it. Just look out next time… moron.”

Wilson blushed, then rushed out something else before the guy had time to walk out of earshot. He was already two or three steps away, his shoulders high and tight, his coffee cup forgotten at the curb. “C’mon, let me, uh, get you a beer or something.”

Wilson was on the rebound from a divorce, he remembered later. The first one was the hardest. Hardly any friends, mostly acquaintances, and no one at all that he could hang out and drink beer with. He must have been desperate to ask the guy he knocked down in the car park to be his friend, just like in grade school.

The man wrinkled his brow for a second and made a sort of dismissive chuckle. Then he pursed his lips like he’d thought better of that. Wilson could see the deliberation passing across his face. He took a pen and a scrap of paper out of his pocket and scribbled down a pager number. When Wilson saw it, he realised that the guy actually worked at the hospital. Yeah... maybe he'd seen him around. Never treating any patients, though.

“I’ve got this patient on dialysis, and if I don’t get up there to make an hourly check in the next ten minutes, three strikes and I’m out. My boss will put me through the mincer, and trust me, I do not want to have to deal with all that bitching. So here’s the deal. In half an hour you’ll emergency page me with that number, I’ll run away, and we’ll go and drink beer. Deal?"

Okay, Wilson thought. The guy's a doctor. He didn't know what of think of that.

It was one of those days you get at the beginning of winter when the cold is barely noticeable, when you can ignore the weather and enjoy the occasional burst of sunshine, knowing that soon the streets will be choked with snow and freezing rain. Wilson stood there gathering his papers, watching House’s retreating back, and then he turned his mind toward the work he had to do in the office and thought it’s getting cold.

The dramatic emergency page idea, of course, was absolutely insane. Wilson didn’t want to get in trouble. So he waited a full hour to page the guy, until there was only an hour to go in the work day anyway. Somehow, he knew that the guy would say, perhaps had already thought, that Wilson was Mr. Sensible, Mr. Middle-of-the-road. But Wilson was a lot more attached to his job than this guy seemed to be.

Wilson had finished with all his patients, and he had charting time. The prefix of the guy’s pager number told him, via the directory, that he either worked in Nephrology or Urology. Dialysis told him Nephro, so he looked through that department’s section until the last four numbers matched up. Wow. G. House. He’d knocked down Gregory House. That was House. Wilson, against his better judgement, felt a little awed.

He met House at the bar some of the doctors at the hospital and a lot of EMTs went to, a small place a brisk walk from the back door. He was sitting in a booth near the back reading the paper, boatlike feet clad in a pair of slant-heeled shoes and resting against the seat cushion on the other side of the booth.

He made a drinking gesture with his hand, and Wilson bought the first round. House didn't look surprised that Wilson was so late, raising his eyebrows as if to say surprise, surprise. Wilson blushed slightly. He moved his feet to the side so Wilson could sit down, but didn't put them on the floor.

“So… will I call you Gregory?”

Wilson smugly thought to himself: ha, I got one on this guy.

House didn't seem surprised that Wilson knew who he was, like he knew he had a reputation and either liked it or had learned to live with it.

“Ha. You can call me House. As for you…”

House twisted his face into what seemed to be some sort of representation of pondering.

“Let’s see, Dr. James Wilson, oncologist. Your ex-wife calls you Jimmy, Thompson calls you the new guy (give him a year, he’ll probably learn your name)-"

House then rattled off Wilson’s pager number, the telephone extension he shared with the other juniors in the department, his employee number, and, disturbingly, his car’s licence plate. Then he got Wilson to buy another couple of beers. He told Wilson to get something better than 'that Bud swill'. They were doctors, for God’s sake.

All Wilson saw at first was that House, the mostly cheerful asshole. Wilson didn’t doubt that if they had met under different circumstances - an intellectual embarrassment, an exposure of incompetency - he wouldn’t have wanted to know him at all. In the first year that he knew House there were certainly times when he wanted to tell House to take a long walk off a short pier.

As soon as word got out that Wilson had bought House lunch in the cafeteria, the nurses in the department looked at him as if he was radioactive. Doctors would shake their heads and say stuff like How the hell do you hang around with that jerk? House yelled out Hey, Wilson, d'you think Dr. Ellroy's got a thing for me? at an unbelievably loud level across the lobby, and Wilson wasn't able to do anything but cringe and slink away, trying not to let on that he thought it was just a little funny.

Sometimes House wasn’t fun to be around at all. He wasn't the sort of guy to let a little thing like a budding friendship get in the way of what he thought was right, either. The One True Way, Wilson called it. The harsh, blunt truth, and everything else got thrown to the wayside. If you wanted life-affirming trite aphorisms, you read a Hallmark card. If you wanted to know that your tie was ugly, and obviously reflected several cardinal truths about yourself, including the fact that you were sore about being bad in bed, you talked to House.

At first, Wilson would, with a certain amount of perverse relish, say things about how emotionally retarded and screwed up House was, especially to him, especially when he came to Wilson to complain about the office politics that irked him so much.

Wilson married Bonnie. House was best man, partially by default, and partially because Wilson's mom had taken a shine to him when Wilson invited him home for Thanksgiving (this was almost a year after they met. House had said he didn’t have anywhere to go, adding except my parents’, and Wilson had seen a weird sort of desperation that had prompted him to make a last-minute invitation and recognise that House was grateful for a good meal, free of whatever obligation travelling to his parents' placed on him). Wilson’s mom had liked him, despite… everything. So House wore Wilson’s dad’s best man cufflinks, the same ones his best man had worn, and Wilson had worn a neat tuxedo that was more expensive than he could afford. The wedding was great, it really was. In eighteen months Wilson was living in a bachelor’s apartment paying two lots of alimony. House stuck around. He realised then that he couldn’t kid himself that he was friends with House because he could teach House anything. The friendship worked because they were alike.

Wilson killed relationships. House could count the amount of meaningful emotional connections he’d had in his life on one hand and have fingers left over. The only difference was that House didn't pretend, or even try, to be normal. It took guts -- or some bizarre sort of perversity -- to pretend that you weren't totally and irrevocably fucked up, even if you didn't have any urge to fit in and play everybody else's game.

After he realised this Wilson started to wonder exactly how incidental the friendships House made were. There was an obvious reason why House had few friends -- he didn't like people and made no secret of the fact. Wilson made too many friends, and he slept with too many of them, and too many of them were people he had no business sleeping with, and even though he started every relationship thinking he could fix a little piece of them and a little piece of him, it always ended in hurt.

When they met, House was teetering on the edge of losing his job. The department head in Nephrology had already tried to fire him once, but it had been vetoed by higher-ups. He’d been on two suspensions. House’s work politics left something to be desired, but he had already published ground-breaking research within his specialty. The Dean, (a Doctor Martin, who obviously tried to get people to call him the Dean, and who House obviously called Dean Martin), felt that a little bit of annoyance with the people he worked with was worth the cachet that House brought to the hospital.

Around the time Wilson came to the hospital -- he had heard someone mention it in the cafeteria, and hadn’t believed it -- House had snuck a dog into the MRI machine. Something about testing a contrast material delivery that was too dangerous for humans. Long story short, House was a brilliant doctor, but not a vet, and despite the fact that he actually injected this dog with epi (they had taken an inventory of the supply drawer and noticed a missing syringe) in the room, the dog died. Oops. House had tried to sneak it out without alerting suspicion, and was caught arranging the dog in the backyard of a large shared house that accommodated med students, as if to suggest a natural death.

Apparently he’d overheard some student talking about his dog. It was one of those white yapping dogs that little old ladies seem to favour. Security tapes showed him sneaking through the entrance with the dead animal stuffed into his coat like a bad Santa costume. The student missed the dog, the MRI techs were scandalised, the department head was livid.

Wilson questioned House about this episode as soon as he learned that it was true. He slyly asked:
"If you were prepared to inject the dog with adrenaline, what other lengths were you prepared to go to, to prevent this tragic canine death?"

House leaned against his desk and said, "Well, I have a little rule that I like to follow in life, and that is to never give mouth to mouth to a dog. The little mongrel was never meant to die, dammit!"

Wilson smiled and raised his eyebrows, and finally House sighed and admitted that he had tried thumping the little guy's chest to get his heart going again. Wilson, as terrible as that was, found himself laughing. The image of House's face falling from triumph to dismay, doing CPR on a dog in a frenzy... it was too much. House had scowled and snapped at him, and Wilson had made dog jokes as much as he dared for months.

House got put on some sort of probation, which he found demeaning and tedious. He complained about it to Wilson every chance he got. Lots of scut work, long hours, and he was always being lent out to other departments to help with mass vaccinations or blood donation drives. In other words, he was in hell. The emergency page idea House had had when they first met was born out of frustration with this probation program. Wilson guessed that all two weeks of the probation had done were given House hundreds of new ways to avoid work.

The early winter when Wilson had knocked House over in the carpark matured into deep cold, and one afternoon House was sitting in Wilson’s office bitching and scooting his chair out of the view of the window every time someone from his department passed by. There was some sort of meeting he was intentionally forgetting about. His latest annoying thinking habit was desk soccer paired with an imitation of those South American commentators: Around-the-pencil-tin-and-against-the-screen---gooooooalllll! He'd been doing that on and off, just enough to make Wilson squirm, as he mocked Wilson's specialty and explained all the useless things he'd done in the last three days in excruciating detail.

As the bitching spiel came to an end, Wilson said, “Well, maybe you should have thought about that before you went and did the Doctor Doolittle thing! Then I'd be able to do my job without your commentary."

Wilson wasn’t like House. He couldn’t work and play at the same time and be sure he wasn’t going to kill someone with a stupid mistake. House was a lot less cautious back then.

House had spun around in his chair, his head towards the ceiling.
“I was bored.”

He was bored. He’d risked his job because he was bored. Wilson could only shake his head. Another couple of months with House, and this sort of behaviour wouldn’t seem too weird.

House flicked the paper ball so it scooted across Wilson's page, a referral request, then he reached across to get it, his arm obscuring the page. Bored.

Maybe two months after Wilson met House, they were sitting up on the roof. It was eight-thirty at night. Wilson had nothing to go home to, really. He wasn’t in a relationship. That long cold winter was finally starting to turn. Wilson thought that in a week or two they’d start to have snowmelt, and the pavement and streets would be covered with the usual Jersey grey sludge.

He was filling in the papers to get a clinical trial started at the hospital. He had been doing that, and now he was sitting on the roof sipping coffee and talking with House. He thought about the forms, sitting down there on his desk, having to get the papers passed through the department head, all the other doctors in the department. He felt like a signature whore, and it made him tired. So he came up to the roof, maybe because of the air, maybe because House was up here. They could shoot the breeze, maybe gossip a little.

House was on call. His pager worked on the roof, but he didn’t need to talk to anyone if he didn’t want to. Wilson was staring at the brown surface of his coffee, idly wondering what it would be like if he drank it with milk, and House was reading a Mad Magazine.

House stood up from where he’d been sitting against the bricks, the magazine propped against his knees, and rolled it up. Wilson saw that he’d not yet looked at the fold-in. Saving that for later, apparently. Wilson hadn’t looked at a Mad Magazine since he was ten. House looked out across Princeton and said, “You know, I think I might finish up my Infectious Diseases qualification.”

Wilson looked up from the coffee cup, startled.

“You… have two specialties?”

“Yep. This one’s from Michigan, all of it. All I need to do are the clinical hours and the exam.”

House skated over the fact, like he had on previous occasions, that he had been expelled from Johns Hopkins before he interned.

House said all this like you might say something like all I need to do is walk down to the corner store and grab a gallon of milk. Wilson didn’t need to ask why House hadn’t done all that before. It was boring. Now Nephrology was getting boring. House needed variety. Wilson knew he was interested in diagnostics, and that it had been his primary interest since at least sub-specialty training. Wilson wondered what his mind might do were he not so occupied by the puzzles he could unravel at work.

It was another three, maybe four weeks until Wilson learnt the answer to that question. He had known House for three months when his probation program was brought to a sudden halt by another disciplinary action. House had been working two days a week in the short-handed Infectious Diseases department on flexi-time. House got to work on his second speciality, the ever-complaining head of Nephrology got a break, and the Dean hoped he might publish in infectious diseases, even though he must know predicting House’s whims was like predicting the weather. Everyone was happy. Even House was happy, which was kind of odd. House could be temporarily sort of content, but rarely happy.

Winter had finally rolled around to spring, and as always Wilson felt his spirits lift with the new season. He started thinking about taking a day off and making up a long weekend, maybe driving down to see his folks, or up to New York to see Quentin and visit old med school friends working in the city.

House treated a teenage girl with syphilis. He noticed the dad had a fever, extrapolated from there, and extracted an angry confession. There was an exchange of words, which, as House said, ‘turned into a slight blow-up’. He said this to Wilson as he soaked his knuckles in a basin of icy water in the tiny Infectious Diseases breakroom, looking like some sort of demented concert pianist.

The father was a large man, around House’s height but thirty pounds heavier. House had broken his nose with the first shot. The second one chipped one of the guy's teeth as they knocked together, and jolted him back against the wall. He had eight stitches put into the back of his head. Wilson learned two things: House tolerated neither abuse nor abusers, and he couldn’t, or wouldn’t, stay still for long.

That one went past the department head and straight to the Dean of Medicine. He worked fast. When House and two department heads disappeared into Dean Martin’s office the bruise was still puffing up on his cheek.
House held one of those disposable ice packs to his face, and he threw it in the trash just outside the office door, squared his shoulders slightly, and went in. His shirt had come apart slightly at the seam where one arm joined onto the body. This had happened when the father grabbed the front of it.

Wilson, loitering near the clinic reception desk where he was afforded the occasional furtive glance into the inner office, saw a lot of raised voices and a lot of pacing. House’s excuse (he hit me first) didn’t hold much water, just as he must have known it wouldn’t. House had emerged from the office forty-five minutes later looking (temporarily) chastised.

He walked to his office, typed, printed out and signed a letter of resignation, packed his desk into two boxes, dumped them beside Wilson's desk, and left with his head held high. It was a forced resignation. If, instead of a hospital, House had worked at a corporation or a public service job, he probably would have been escorted by security.

He couldn’t carry the boxes home because he came into work on his motorcycle, an ugly crotchrocket with tape all over the seat cushion. He’d had it for five years, and was at the time the only form of transportation he owned. He asked Wilson if was okay if he could drop them off on the way home sometime. Wilson said that was fine. House nodded, wrote his address on a scrap of envelope, then left, just like that.

The guy he hit didn’t press any charges. He got arrested. It seemed that someone had taken time during the middle of all the fuss to call Social Services. Wilson wondered about that. House didn’t do that sort of thing. That the people he worked with still respected him enough to do things like that said a lot for his actions. Wilson wondered about the father’s mysterious reticence after being assaulted by a hospital employee, too. He wondered about a lot of things.

Wilson had never seen House’s place before. He didn’t know what to expect - a small bedsit with concrete walls, an apartment on top of a bar perhaps, a small house with an overgrown garden and an old woman neighbour ceaselessly sweeping the path and nodding to everyone. Maybe the BatCave. It did occur to him that to invite Wilson over to his place of residence, under whatever pretext, was a huge step for House, the most antisocial person Wilson had ever known to have friends.

Wilson figured it might be a good idea to give House some space for a couple of days. He put the boxes into the back of his late-model Volvo anyway. Six golf balls rolled out across the parking lot, and he chased after them, stuffing them all into the overflowing box they’d fallen out of. House had a boxy Gameboy and an assortment of game cartridges on top of that box -- not surprising, Wilson had seen that before. He also had at least twenty CDs, a Walkman and tapes, and a lot of other junk, some of it interesting, some of it not. Wilson saw on the top of the other box (larger, mostly containing files and books) that he had stolen some stationery -- a huge bag of rubber bands, pens, that sort of thing. Tucked underneath that stuff, as if he had grabbed it all at once, was a huge bunch of Band-aids, some other first-aid stuff. Free samples of Claritin.

And a reusable elastic tourniquet.

Wilson rifled through the other box, the one with the golf balls and the Gameboy and other fun stuff. He took out the CDs and the compact CD player to get better access and stacked them next to the box. Near the bottom, next to a harmonica and a few of those little pots that you use to hold stuff on your desk, was an Altoids tin.

There was a small plastic bag, the kind that hold the spare buttons when you buy a good shirt. It had maybe fifteen tablets in it that he knew straight away were Dexedrine. They were vaguely triangular, scored on one side, with some numbers (SKF E19) on the other.

Wilson didn’t move for maybe ten seconds. Then he realised that his heart was pounding in his chest. He hunched over the boot of his car and lifted up the little paper wrapper that comes folded over the mints, before tipping the contents into one hand and turning them over with his nervous fingers.

There were a couple that could only be MS (the flat, grey 100mg ones) and a hexagonal tablet he recognised as Inderal, a beta-blocker. The majority of the pills were uppers, though. Small, nasty-looking white ones that he thought were 10mg Benzedrine tablets, and Efed II, which was an ephedrine preparation they gave to asthmatics in the ER.

Amphetamines. On top of all the other stuff, like an afterthought, was an unopened packet of No-Doz. Speed. House kept a stash of speed in his desk drawer next to the rubber balls and the electronic games.

Wilson couldn’t kid himself that there couldn’t be a doctor who was into the hard stuff. He’d been offered cocaine at more than one late-night study session, and he’d heard all the stories, like every med student did, about the doctor who got caught dipping into his own supply or dealing on the side. But when it came to drugs, Wilson was the proverbial innocent abroad. He’d never done anything, not even when a good many of his med student friends were taking beta-blockers to cut down on exam nerves. He’d smoked weed once, and hadn’t been able to see what the fuss was about. It had made him feel stupid and kind of sick, and that was all. He'd heard of a couple of chemo patients who smoked to cut down on nausea, but he'd never actually treated someone who did.

Wilson didn’t know what to think about the Altoids tin. He emptied the pills back into the tin, closed it up, and quickly buried it at the bottom of the box again. He didn’t glance at House’s stuff again, and closed the trunk of his car hard.

He gave House three days to himself, to lick his wounds. Midday on the fourth day it was shaping up to be one of those bright clear days you get at the beginning of spring, and Wilson still didn't know what to think. He knew what his dad would say. Parents always told their children to stay away from drugs, and the people who take them. Drug addicts ended up putting all of their money into their arms and sitting all day arguing in front of a flickering old television. Drug addicts rubbed vacantly at their red eyes and dozed in alleyways.

But this was real life, and House was a doctor, for God's sake, and no matter how he turned it around Wilson still didn't know what to think. It was Saturday, and Wilson had it off. He picked up a six-pack of good beer and carried House’s boxes, one by one, over to the entrance to his apartment. He checked the address twice, disarmed. It was a nice place, unassuming, elegant, comfortable. Nothing at all like what he'd expected.

The outdoor corridor smelled like floor polish and old buildings. A faint cooking smell drifted down the stairs. Wilson wondered if the people who lived here knew House, and if they did, if they wondered about the odd hours, or if he ever played music late at night so they could hear it, if he ever nodded at them as he left in the morning.

Wilson thought about money, as well. This place wasn’t in an expensive neighbourhood, but nor was it cheap. Wilson guessed that, even if it was expensive, House put a high value on his privacy and his surroundings. He didn’t spend a lot of money on a lot of stuff, but he did gamble and he usually bought expensive booze and music. He was still paying off his school loans. Wilson wasn’t. His mom and dad had set up an account at the birth of each of their sons. Like most of the kids from middle-class families like his, Wilson had been able to pay off pre-med with the money from this account. Where some of his friends who weren’t either rich or on scholarship programs had had to put the huge expense of med school on a loan, Wilson had been able to pay off some of it outright. That was because his parents had split Max’s college account between James and Quentin.

House, Wilson would later learn, had wobbled his way through college on a pasted-together collection of scholarships, loans, and grants, with the occasional meagre contribution from his parents when his head started to slip below water (or when he spent his pay-cheque on beer). His dad was only a marine, but by the time their only child was in school he was making a captain’s wage. Wilson guessed that, while his family wasn’t exactly well-off, not helping House through college wasn’t a monetary issue. Wilson could sense some resentment there, simmering beneath the surface.

When he knocked on the door House was playing music, but it was muffled, like he had it turned down low. Wilson couldn’t tell what it was, just a few soft bass notes. House didn’t come to the door. Wilson shifted from foot to foot, rightly assumed House wasn’t somewhere else because he was playing music, and knocked again. There was a dull thumping noise, a clink like something being dumped in a sink, and the door opened. House’s eyes were bloodshot and he hadn’t shaved. He was barefoot, wearing an old t-shirt that looked comfortable, and pair of flannelette pyjama pants. He didn’t say anything, just held open the door.
“Wow, you really pulled out all the stops for my visit, I see.”

Wilson hadn’t called ahead to tell House that he was coming, but now he thought that maybe he should have.

House grunted and shifted one of the boxes just inside the door. Wilson could smell books, and over that, beer. He followed suit with the other box, sliding it with his foot. House went over to what looked like the living room and lay down on the plain floorboards. He put his head against the bare floor with the crook of his elbow over his eyes. There was a short glass with some wilting ice cubes in it, and two empty beer bottles. He was lying on the floor listening to the stereo.

There was an upright Yamaha piano with a polished black top. It wasn’t dusty. Books were piled on top of it. Piles of books seemed to the overriding motif of House’s decorating scheme, really. The place wasn’t filthy, but it was messy. Interesting stuff lying around. Books open at the spine, an open packet of muesli bars, lacrosse stick lying with a ball in the net against the back of the couch. There was a guitar on the couch. The overall impression was dark and very male, like House hardly ever had anyone around. Wilson wondered if House cleaned the place himself, or if he had someone in to do it.
“Are you going to go?”

House’s voice was rough and flat. The rough sounded like smoking, and the flat sounded like something else. Something odd. Wilson read House fine, though -- the sneaking suspicion that he wanted Wilson gone was about as subtle as a sledgehammer.
“I take it you’ve been drowning your sorrows for the past three days?”

House lifted himself up onto his elbows.
“Well, I don’t really remember much of last night. But I came home with an empty wallet, so it was either a lot of booze or…”

He crinkled up his face. Wilson sighed.
“House, I’m not going to go away just because you made a hooker joke.”

Wilson moved into the kitchen. There were four bottles of beer in the fridge, a jar of olives, and a bottle of milk with two inches in the bottom. Nothing else.
“Well, I’m not going to be much company.”

The volume of the music increased infinitesimally. Wilson pretended he hadn't heard that, and just in case House was looking, he made a big deal out of scrutinising the kitchen.

Wilson looked in the freezer. A bag of frozen peas so worn it could only be used as an icepack. You got to thirty-four and you ran a lot, sometimes you got aches and pains. There were also some of those popsicles that come in a little plastic tube, so old they were covered in frost. And two of those nuke-em then puke-em meals. The freshest thing in there was the tray of ice cubes.

The song changed. It was something with a lot of guitar and heavy drumming that Wilson didn’t recognise. He looked in the sink. One bowl, one glass, three coffee mugs. One of the mugs was a drug rep mug. There was watery milk in the bowl. He opened one of the cupboards over the sink and found an unopened packet of cornflakes, a packet of Froot Loops, and a jar of peanut butter. House had been eating cereal and peanut butter. A gourmet, he was not. Bummer, because it was a nice kitchen. Roomy, okay oven, good stove, window onto the street. Toucan Sam looked like a crazy bastard.

Wilson closed the cupboards, not feeling at all intrusive. It came naturally, this instinct to snoop, and whether he labelled it as curiosity or concern, most of all it was the same thing in him that made him glance furtively at gossip magazines while he waited at the supermarket checkout. Right now it allowed him to slightly delay the conversation he knew he had to have. Wilson wasn’t very good at delaying conversations.

It was getting hot. He shrugged off his jacket. All this bullshit suddenly made him very tired. Nice hot day like this one was turning out to be, he could be out driving, soaking up the sun. He sighed and grabbed a bottle opener off the bench (it was a stainless steel one stamped with the USMC logo. Months later House told him it was what his father gave him for his eighteenth birthday, before he went to college), and opened one of the beers he bought. He put the others in the fridge. Nothing worse than warm beer.

Then he walked over to the living room, toeing a discarded pair of runners out of the way from habit, and sat on the couch. It was leather, and actually quite comfortable, not too hard so you spent the whole time trying to find a position that didn’t make your ass go numb after ten minutes, not too soft so you had to fight your way out of it.

He took another hit of the beer and just sat there. House’s breathing became deeper and more regular there on the floor, like he might just be on the edge of dozing. The arm he had over his eyes was relaxed, the hand hanging limp by the side of his face. Ignoring Wilson in the hope that he might go away. Wilson sat there for five minutes, ten maybe, until House’s other hand crept out and raised the volume on the stereo again.

“So, explain this to me so I can try to work it out. You break hospital rules in the most ridiculous fashion. You push and you push and you push at your boss until he breaks and tries to fire you. He can’t because the Dean likes having you around, God knows why. So you’re skating on the thinnest of thin ice already, so much in fact that your boss is so glad you’re working in another department part-time that he starts looking to fill your position and boot you out. And then you go and assault some guy… And the best excuse you can come up with for why you punched the father of a patient is that you were defending yourself because ‘he started it’. Right. And in the middle of all this you were, hmm, let’s see: Insulting superiors, trying to set a personal record for pissing people off, being one of the only doctors in the hospital to consistently avoid clinic duty, and - stockpiling controlled substances in your desk drawer.”

He raised his voice slightly, and he knew House wouldn't be able to concentrate on the music.

House’s eyes snapped open at the last part. With the dark and the redness, they looked lighter than usual. He stared at Wilson, and for the first time Wilson saw something in his gaze that made him very, very uncomfortable. House was hurt. Wilson had his hands out, counting points on his fingers, but when he saw that look on House’s face, he clenched them lightly and put them in his lap.

“Wh-” House raised himself onto his elbows.

“I found them in your stuff, House. What, you just take a little toot every now and then? Something to bring you up, you like the adrenaline? I bet they work great when you’re bored.”

“Shut up. You had no right to-”

House made an exasperated noise, got up from the floor and pressed a button on the remote control. It turned off with an electronic click, and for a second Wilson had that familiar feeling that the sudden silence was a physical presence, pressing against his ears. But he didn’t stop.

“What, is that it? You wanted to be fired? No, wait, I know: You wanted to self-destruct! Nothing better than a heart attack at thirty-eight!”

Wilson couldn’t believe he was friends with a doctor who did drugs. Here was James Wilson, lived in an apartment with furniture from Ikea, he couldn’t hold onto a woman for more than a month, but nurses were crying on his shoulder at every turn. He had an impeccable record when it came to everything but wives, and c’mon, who gets married in college, anyway?

But there he was, talking to House about the speed and everything else besides, and the weird thing was that he cared. He really cared and he didn’t know why. House, saving the life of a patient because he remembered the most incredibly arcane detail, then going back to his office and getting high. Or maybe he got high when he wasn’t high on answers. House going back home and nursing a glass of bourbon. When that wasn’t enough.

House told him to save the psychobabble crap for someone who believed it.

It was the first time, and it wouldn’t be the last. What happened next was so clear-cut and predictable by the third or fourth time that you could write it up in a textbook. House-wrangling: Mind-maze analysis of the tortured genius.

Wilson pushed just a little bit further. Then House exploded.

“Well, what do you want me to say, Wilson? I hate myself? I hate you? I hate the whole world? Spare me. Think what you want. And when you’re done thinking that, you can leave.” The anger burned off him in waves. Sick, frustrated anger.

He went down a hall, past a door Wilson assumed went to the bathroom, and slammed another door. Bedroom. Wilson stood there in silence. He left the half-finished beer on the bench, made sure the milk was in the fridge, and left, closing the door lightly behind him.

If he was able to somehow analyse this situation he would see how passive he was -- always identifying problems but never fixing them. Later, when he married Bonnie, he’d act as a sort of inert support: always there to hear about her problems, always cooking comfort food and telling her just what she needed, a weekend away, a day off when she could just take it easy, whatever. It was like he could never get beyond the position of a slightly involved onlooker, telling Max what a moron he was being then retreating back into his bedroom, locking the door against his anger, and delving into his biology homework.

He’d even chosen oncology as his specialty, a field where he could prescribe medications and chemotherapies and preventative surgeries, but for every one who went back to their life there were five who, by the time they got to him, were already lost to smoking or bad food or anything - it didn’t matter. For these, he was just postponing the inevitable, the inevitable death brought so much sooner than they’d ever expected.

It was so easy to bring up the drugs with House, so easy to argue. But he never even thought of taking them away, flushing them down the sink or just stuffing them in his coat pocket and throwing them in a trashcan. He hadn’t even known House for a year, and all that would come later.

Wilson didn’t need to be prescient, or be there, to know what House looked like. He thought of Max sitting on the edge of his bunk, his shoulders high with the anger that came from nowhere, the anger that no one could fix. That was all so long ago. Except instead of Max it was House, and instead of the anger there was the deep, lonely, hopeless sorrow. House’s eyes were like the bird at the zoo.

This was the other side of House, the one Wilson hadn’t seen before. There was the loud, rude, braying House, and then there was something else, like the flipside to a coin. Like the dark underside to an iceberg. House was very skilled at hiding his inner self. When it did show you only saw what an immensely complicated man he was. It was cliché, but House was one of the most complicated people Wilson knew. When he first met House, maybe because he saw him when he was vulnerable, maybe not, he had sensed the other side like early astronomers tried to see the dark side of the moon.

Of course Wilson had seen House sulking and quiet, but that was just the tip of what lurked under the surface. There was something in House that could be deeply, intractably unhappy, a dark House that reeked of failure and uselessness. Wilson knew House was an only child. He knew House had few friends. He knew House hadn’t had a girlfriend for almost a year. He knew House would do whatever it took to do whatever he thought was right, even getting fired from his job or doing whatever it was completely and utterly alone. Sometimes, being House was a lonely, lonely place.

House stayed in his funk for another three days. Then he called Wilson and left a message on his machine while he was out. They met in the park and went for a run, and Wilson guessed that was the closest thing to an apology he was going to get. House was clear-eyed, just as limber as he’d ever been. They had played casual games of horse basketball, that sort of thing, in the ambulance bay, but it was the first time Wilson had really worked out with House.

After about half a mile House increased his kick until they were maybe doing six-minute mile pace, then looked to see if Wilson was still running, like it was a test. He slowed back down and grinned, and they kept jogging. House had the natural bouncing stride of someone over six foot tall, and the lean well-shaped leg muscles of a runner. On one knee he had one of those pink patches of scabby skin that get left behind after you get gravel rash.

He bought them both pizza, and in House’s clumsy catalogue of gestures, that meant a lot.

Of course, House got his job back. He cheered up and wised up. He played a helluva lot of golf, figuring stuff out, hanging around, and eventually he convinced Dean Martin to meet up with him. He ran into him one day on the eighth hole. Wilson didn’t know what he said to make the guy fold, but the hospital agreed to let House stand before a peer board of review. Wilson lent him a tie to wear, and he never got it back.

House went back to work, after agreeing to some pretty serious guidelines -- working in the clinic, regular hours, some sort of anger-management course -- and settled back to the way things were before. His golf swing was a little bit better. He was fitter than Wilson. He published again. He finished his infectious diseases hours and passed the exam. He got bigger in diagnostics, being asked to consult on weird cases, even in other hospitals. He went to some conferences -- the ones with good bar service.

He went in front of the Board in New York and obtained his diagnostics certification. He got arrested for breaking and entering into what he thought was a patient’s home. The patient lived on eleven-oh-one Market, and as House was rushing out of the hospital, someone (one of the other doctors, a young guy in Neurology who was assisting, the patient having originally been admitted into that department) yelled the address. House heard one-eleven, so he broke into the home of a plumbing contractor who came home and almost broke House’s head with a pipe, just like in Clue.

House talked his way out of being assaulted, convinced the guy he was a doctor, and got arrested without being bludgeoned. When Wilson came to bail him out he was raging and pacing in the lockup, convinced that a mile down the road there was a deadly neuro-toxic mould in the house waiting to be discovered while he rotted in jail.

The plumber came around and didn’t press charges (he thought it was kind of exciting that a doctor might break into someone’s home to look for killer mould), so House got off with a weekend in detention (the cops weren’t so lenient, unsurprisingly) and a criminal record, which made renewing his credentials a bitch. If he wanted to get a licence somewhere he was unknown, he might have trouble. House was glad to get off so easy.

He published. The Dean was satisfied.

One day in summer House wheedled at Wilson all day to come out and see a band with him. C’mon, he said, these guys are great. It was a Friday, and Wilson was kind of tired, and so he thought what the hell, I’ll have a bit of fun. House, as was his wont, was tipsy after three beers and drunk after four. He was a serious lightweight, perhaps what Max would have called a one-pot-screamer. Then House bought Wilson a bourbon, and then another, and Wilson thought what the hell, I’ll have a bit of fun. So then they were both drunk, and the band was great, even though Wilson didn’t remember much of it. House staggered along the street to the next bar leaning against the wall because he could barely stand up, and Wilson, also drunk, but considerably more together in the motor skills department, thought this is fun. House bounced off the wall so his shoulder bumped Wilson's. The night passed in a blur, then House sat with two girls he’d met in a corner booth, and they all talked, and then House said something to Wilson about getting up on the table and House did it and so did Wilson, and then they got kicked out of the bar, waving merrily to the girls, and the next thing Wilson knew he was waking up on the concrete floor of what could only be the Princeton drunk tank.

House was snoring on the bunk, and two groaning frat boys were as far away from the two of them as they could get. All that registered, and then Wilson smelled the vomit, and then he moved, and then a huge spike of pain reverberated through his head, and he groaned. House stirred and woke up, his eyes narrowed to the narrowest of slits.

“Wow. You know, I didn’t know you had it in you.” His voice was raspy.

“What, you expected to get thrown into jail? You do that after all your nights out?” Wilson’s head pounded dully along with his heartbeat. Even his voice hurt. House must be in hell.

“No, but that thing with the hooker… that took guts.”

Wilson’s eyes widened, and he thought Oh, no, damn you, House, and then House grinned a little and said “Haha. Gotcha.”

A bored-looking uniformed officer came to let them all out. House walked like an old man for the first few steps, like his joints were bothering him. They walked back to Wilson’s car in the dawn, and the whole time Wilson worried that it had been stolen or vandalised. House told him it was the third time he’d woken up in a place like that. He was an old hand, practically.

Wilson’s car turned out to be fine. House rummaged through the glove-box for aspirin and couldn’t find any, and decided they needed to go drive-through somewhere for a huge greasy breakfast and a coffee, and the nearest corner store for aspirin. They were driving along Elm when House grunted and said, “Stop the car.”

Wilson brought the car to the side of the road in just enough time for House to open the door, lean out and throw up last night’s efforts. Wilson looked to the side to give him some privacy, and he realised this is what it was like to be friends with House: sitting embarrassed in your car on Saturday morning while he vomited, soccer moms on the way to soccer looking you up and down, and you’d just spent the night in the drunk tank.

House survived the reign of Dean Martin. He retired, and House found a greeting card with a picture of the real Dean Martin and stuck it in his inbox. Lisa Cuddy came along. They were old university friends, from Michigan. She knew House, and she knew how to handle him. Wilson was never certain for sure, but he thought they might have slept together, just maybe. It wasn’t hard to notice that in three months they were fighting like an old married couple. He never knew the truth, and there were certain things that House kept secret.

He survived another board restructure after that, and then Stacy came along. After that, his leg came along, and his world fell apart. House’s world had always been on a shakier axis than some, more marked by instability than almost anyone Wilson knew. That impact had permanently shaken it off course.

Wilson nagged and nagged House to go to the paintball tournament. C’mon, he had said, doctors are one short. The doctors lost. House met Stacy. He bugged Wilson for the next three days - how old is she?, where did she go to school?, what music does she like?, things like that, and eventually Wilson said “Look, House, call her and ask yourself.”

One night in a bar, and boom, Stacy was moving in. Wilson couldn’t believe it, and by the nervous look he had as he broke the news, House couldn’t either. Wilson took it upon himself to prepare Stacy. They were friends, after all, and he wouldn’t let her into a relationship with House flying blind. He told her about the arrest and the guy House had decked, and a few other things. By the way they both fought after a month, he thought it would be over in two.

A/N: For the next part, click the link.
Five years...