Gradual Addition
Title: Gradual Addition
Author: phinnia
Rating: R-ish
Disclaimer: Not mine, sadly.
Author's Note: Written for deelaundry, because she sponsored me for Hugo House's Write-O-Rama fundraiser and asked for a House/Wilson/whoever polyamory fic. I hope this works! Thanks a bunch, hon. :-) Featuring House, Wilson, Cuddy, Cuddy's mother, Sweeney Todd, Scrabble, idiots with power tools, Sting and two guys with a plan. Slight spoilers for season 4.
"You know what I miss?"
It sounded random, but if you knew House you would not only know that nothing was random, but that this was the type of calculated randomness that meant he'd put a lot of thought into something. Wilson decided to play along; it wasn't as though he really had a choice, after all. "What do you miss?"
"Breasts."
"I'll make an appointment with Kaufman in Plastics in the morning."
"No, no, no. Kaufman's an idiot. At least let Taub handle it."
"Didn't you call him an idiot just yesterday?"
"Yes, but he's my hand-picked idiot." House replied with something like affection. "As intriguing as it sounds, I wasn't quite thinking you."
"You'd get breasts for me? How sweet."
"You know who has great breasts?"
"You want a list by cup size, overall hotness, what? You want it in chart format or an Excel spreadsheet?"
"Eh, the O.C.'s on in two hours, don't really have time for fancy formatting. I was specifically thinking Cuddy."
"A fine example, definitely. Thinking of asking her for tips?"
"For what?"
"Shopping. You know, for the breasts you're getting me."
It turned into the pillow fight he knew it would, but Wilson was pretty sure he'd gotten the hint House had dropped.
"What's this? Doesn't sound like your usual."
"The album? Synchronicity. The Police. The song? Tea in the Sahara."
"This doesn't sound punk. Weren't they punk?"
"They sold out before they got this far. Sting turned into a freak treehugger pinko environmentalist instead of being an angry ex-English teacher."
"... Tea in the Sahara? That's her last wish? That's kind of lame."
"Good thing you don't run the 'Make-A-Wish' foundation, Jimmy. It's about sex."
"Tea is about sex? Oh, right. Everything's about sex, according to you."
"No, seriously, the song's about a threesome. Don't you get it? My sisters and I have one wish before we die, blah blah blah you have the means in your possession? No one's last wish is for tea, how lame is that? You just can't say 'My sister and I want to fuck your brains out' on the BBC. Or, well, you couldn't then. The instrumentation on this album is great but early Police is more authentic punk - though Walking on the Moon does have a killer bass line. Anarchy beats out tea any day of the week."
"Anarchy. So basically fuck the state instead of each other?"
"Instead of or and, Jimmy, they were into threesomes, I told you. Or capitalism, and how it fucks us over. Threesomes, foursomes, whatever."
"Huh. Yeah. I guess everything really is about sex."
"Told you."
Wilson is used to this kind of Housian logic, where everything that's nothing means something eventually, so two weeks after the conversation about breasts he takes the initiative and invites Cuddy over for drinks after work. He catches a flash of an approving smile on House's face - the kind of blink-and-you'll-miss-it sort of thing, like most of his smiles outside the plastic-covered hothouse of their apartment - and knows he's made the right move, connected the right two wires within the ticking box he's been handed.
Cuddy, of course, is blissfully oblivious this first time - something which surprises her later on, because after all, it's House and that's enough reason to be suspicious if there ever was. But he's mellower these days - not that she'd say anything, because that's tempting fate a little too much - besides, he wears it well; she's seen hints of something that might be called bliss under the shell that she long ago figured out was mostly for show, a relaxed set to those strong shoulders, and she has to admit she's a little jealous. And Wilson is obviously benefiting from this as much as House is: the furrows of tense irritation across his forehead are almost a distant memory now.
They're happy together.
Her mind unhelpfully provides a soundtrack by the Turtles: she scowls at it, deletes another less-than-promising email from jDate and decides that an evening with her two most troublesome department heads has got to be better than eating Lean Cuisines at the empty breakfast bar again and staring at a pile of dirty, lonely forks tangled in the sink in the morning.
And it turns out fine. Better than fine, even though she drinks too fast, because watching House squirm and mumble as she reminisces about long-gone Michigan days is a laugh and she knows from the sparkle of Wilson's eyes that he's taking all of this in and tagging it for his own blackmail and shameless manipulation purposes. Plus James makes a damn good lasagna and she hasn't heard Greg honestly play piano in years. She stays far too late - late enough that they (well, Wilson - any more would be expecting near-miracles) insist on making up the sofa for her, and she surprises herself by accepting.
And when she wakes up early hearing their muffled groans and the squeaking of bedsprings, she pretends that the left brain doesn't know what the right hand is doing and that the fingers slipping between her thighs are a figment of her imagination, or the natural progression of hormones, or plain vanilla loneliness. And all of those are perfectly reasonable, of course.
But she accepts the next invitation (made over breakfast, by House, and he wasn't kidding about those pancakes, either) without a second thought.
"I've got tickets to this play."
"I hate plays. You know that. Take Cuddy."
"You'll like this one."
"Doubt it."
"It's about a guy who was sent to Australia - he's an ex-con - he was sent there by a corrupt judge who wanted to fuck his wife." Wilson starts talking faster, knowing by the slant of Greg's eyebrows that the clock was ticking and he had a limited amount of time to make his case. "And he comes back and he goes batshit crazy and starts killing people and he hooks up with this woman who owns a pie shop -"
"You're totally failing to convince me. Take Cuddy, damnit."
"- And he starts making people into pies." Takes advantage of Greg's momentary startled expression to gasp breath and continue on. "Besides, I got three tickets and I figured, you know, maybe we could both take her, maybe get dinner someplace nice? I'm paying."
Pause. "Was there any doubt?"
"Well, no."
"He makes them into pies?"
"Hell yes."
"This is an actual play? This isn't going to turn out to be some pansy-ass bullshit about feelings?"
"Murder, mayhem, pastry, song and dance."
"This is a musical?"
"Well, yeah, but the 1812 Overture has cannons and Stravinsky's Rite of Spring made people think he was a lunatic."
Another pause. "You realize this is a date."
"Well, didn't you say you missed breasts? I thought this was what you wanted?" He holds his breath, bites the inside of his cheek; has he gone too far? Shit.
"Well, yeah." House shrugs, and Wilson starts breathing again. "But she's no idiot. She'll figure it out. That's all."
In actual fact it takes her to halfway through the first act to figure it out.
She figures, at first, that it's just her and Wilson, more of the same two friends going out as before: but House is in the car and so she adjusts the number to three friends going out, and that's fine. But dinner is a little nicer than she'd expected, and House is wearing a tie (okay, a tie with pirate skulls on it, but a tie): Wilson pulls out her chair and House says nothing, just grins appreciatively at her low-cut top. They laugh together. House eats dessert off Wilson's fork. They finish the bottle of wine.
And she realizes, when House starts stroking her thigh at almost the same second that Wilson laces his fingers through hers, that this is a date, that the two of them are taking her on a date.
Wilson buys her chocolates the next day.
The day after, House sends one of his minions with coffee and her favorite bagels.
The day after that she deletes her profile on jDate.
"You're glowing."
"I am not glowing."
"A mother can tell! A mother can always tell when her babies are happy."
"Mom." She's forty-two but she might as well be seventeen for all that things have changed between them. "Yes, I'm happy. I have a wonderful job, which I enjoy very much - "
"And you're glowing. You're seeing someone. Is he Jewish? Please, tell me he's Jewish."
"Mother. I am not seeing any one." Person. she adds silently, crossing the fingers of one hand against the untruth. With the other hand, she traces a circle around that Friday's date in her planner. Dinner with the boys, 6:30. Because that is how she thinks of them - the boys, they've become one entity in her mind, the better aspects of each other balancing out the negatives.
Sometimes, when the right stars are falling, she changes it to my boys.
Friday they play Scrabble and watch New Yankee Workshop over dinner.
"He should really be using a bandsaw with that." she mutters, half distracted by an attempt to balance homemade pot pie and a rack full of wooden vowels.
House nearly spills his letters into the gravy. "What?"
"Nothing."
"No, what?"
"Just the idiot on the screen - he'd be better off using a bandsaw." She looks up to see something that looks like respect in his eyes. "What?"
"You actually know something about tools? Other than not to hold the pointy end?"
"Well, some - my father was a carpenter."
He grins, crookedly, and steals a piece of her chicken. "Hey Wilson!"
"What?" He's in the kitchen, and pokes his head out the doorway: he's got flour smudges all over his McGill sweatshirt and a vaguely harried expression on his face.
"Cuddy knows more about tools than you do."
"Good, maybe she can watch that idiot Norm Abram with you instead of me." He rolls his eyes and goes back to whatever he was doing.
She steals the chicken back, and he winks at her and slaps more tiles on the board.
They kiss her that night, between movies. Wilson's a sweet kisser, but meddling: his hands creep under her t-shirt even as his tongue knocks gently before it enters. He tastes like apples from the crumble he'd made for dessert. House tastes like coffee and his lips are sticky with vanilla ice cream; his long fingers trail through her hair, tumbling it down over her shoulders before they move on to the nape of her neck with his strange grace.
That night, the blanket stays in the closet; she falls asleep in a tangle of sticky limbs and afterglow.
Time management has never been House's forte - when he's in the thick of a case he's lucky if he knows what day it is, never mind details like appointments and whose date night it is tonight. But Wilson likes things compartmentalized, neat and orderly, so everything's in a big calendar on the wall plotted out with half a dozen different coloured pens.
On Thursdays he and Lisa watch Norm Abram and make out on the sofa, praying for power tool mishaps while Wilson learns the finer points of making flowers with royal icing.
On Tuesdays they go out to whatever's showing at the art gallery and bring him home cheesecake and descriptions of naked statues.
Wednesdays he and Wilson watch dumb monster movies and she works late.
And the weekends are usually left blank, or scribbled on with a riot of colour.
Somehow, it all works.
Author: phinnia
Rating: R-ish
Disclaimer: Not mine, sadly.
Author's Note: Written for deelaundry, because she sponsored me for Hugo House's Write-O-Rama fundraiser and asked for a House/Wilson/whoever polyamory fic. I hope this works! Thanks a bunch, hon. :-) Featuring House, Wilson, Cuddy, Cuddy's mother, Sweeney Todd, Scrabble, idiots with power tools, Sting and two guys with a plan. Slight spoilers for season 4.
"You know what I miss?"
It sounded random, but if you knew House you would not only know that nothing was random, but that this was the type of calculated randomness that meant he'd put a lot of thought into something. Wilson decided to play along; it wasn't as though he really had a choice, after all. "What do you miss?"
"Breasts."
"I'll make an appointment with Kaufman in Plastics in the morning."
"No, no, no. Kaufman's an idiot. At least let Taub handle it."
"Didn't you call him an idiot just yesterday?"
"Yes, but he's my hand-picked idiot." House replied with something like affection. "As intriguing as it sounds, I wasn't quite thinking you."
"You'd get breasts for me? How sweet."
"You know who has great breasts?"
"You want a list by cup size, overall hotness, what? You want it in chart format or an Excel spreadsheet?"
"Eh, the O.C.'s on in two hours, don't really have time for fancy formatting. I was specifically thinking Cuddy."
"A fine example, definitely. Thinking of asking her for tips?"
"For what?"
"Shopping. You know, for the breasts you're getting me."
It turned into the pillow fight he knew it would, but Wilson was pretty sure he'd gotten the hint House had dropped.
"What's this? Doesn't sound like your usual."
"The album? Synchronicity. The Police. The song? Tea in the Sahara."
"This doesn't sound punk. Weren't they punk?"
"They sold out before they got this far. Sting turned into a freak treehugger pinko environmentalist instead of being an angry ex-English teacher."
"... Tea in the Sahara? That's her last wish? That's kind of lame."
"Good thing you don't run the 'Make-A-Wish' foundation, Jimmy. It's about sex."
"Tea is about sex? Oh, right. Everything's about sex, according to you."
"No, seriously, the song's about a threesome. Don't you get it? My sisters and I have one wish before we die, blah blah blah you have the means in your possession? No one's last wish is for tea, how lame is that? You just can't say 'My sister and I want to fuck your brains out' on the BBC. Or, well, you couldn't then. The instrumentation on this album is great but early Police is more authentic punk - though Walking on the Moon does have a killer bass line. Anarchy beats out tea any day of the week."
"Anarchy. So basically fuck the state instead of each other?"
"Instead of or and, Jimmy, they were into threesomes, I told you. Or capitalism, and how it fucks us over. Threesomes, foursomes, whatever."
"Huh. Yeah. I guess everything really is about sex."
"Told you."
Wilson is used to this kind of Housian logic, where everything that's nothing means something eventually, so two weeks after the conversation about breasts he takes the initiative and invites Cuddy over for drinks after work. He catches a flash of an approving smile on House's face - the kind of blink-and-you'll-miss-it sort of thing, like most of his smiles outside the plastic-covered hothouse of their apartment - and knows he's made the right move, connected the right two wires within the ticking box he's been handed.
Cuddy, of course, is blissfully oblivious this first time - something which surprises her later on, because after all, it's House and that's enough reason to be suspicious if there ever was. But he's mellower these days - not that she'd say anything, because that's tempting fate a little too much - besides, he wears it well; she's seen hints of something that might be called bliss under the shell that she long ago figured out was mostly for show, a relaxed set to those strong shoulders, and she has to admit she's a little jealous. And Wilson is obviously benefiting from this as much as House is: the furrows of tense irritation across his forehead are almost a distant memory now.
They're happy together.
Her mind unhelpfully provides a soundtrack by the Turtles: she scowls at it, deletes another less-than-promising email from jDate and decides that an evening with her two most troublesome department heads has got to be better than eating Lean Cuisines at the empty breakfast bar again and staring at a pile of dirty, lonely forks tangled in the sink in the morning.
And it turns out fine. Better than fine, even though she drinks too fast, because watching House squirm and mumble as she reminisces about long-gone Michigan days is a laugh and she knows from the sparkle of Wilson's eyes that he's taking all of this in and tagging it for his own blackmail and shameless manipulation purposes. Plus James makes a damn good lasagna and she hasn't heard Greg honestly play piano in years. She stays far too late - late enough that they (well, Wilson - any more would be expecting near-miracles) insist on making up the sofa for her, and she surprises herself by accepting.
And when she wakes up early hearing their muffled groans and the squeaking of bedsprings, she pretends that the left brain doesn't know what the right hand is doing and that the fingers slipping between her thighs are a figment of her imagination, or the natural progression of hormones, or plain vanilla loneliness. And all of those are perfectly reasonable, of course.
But she accepts the next invitation (made over breakfast, by House, and he wasn't kidding about those pancakes, either) without a second thought.
"I've got tickets to this play."
"I hate plays. You know that. Take Cuddy."
"You'll like this one."
"Doubt it."
"It's about a guy who was sent to Australia - he's an ex-con - he was sent there by a corrupt judge who wanted to fuck his wife." Wilson starts talking faster, knowing by the slant of Greg's eyebrows that the clock was ticking and he had a limited amount of time to make his case. "And he comes back and he goes batshit crazy and starts killing people and he hooks up with this woman who owns a pie shop -"
"You're totally failing to convince me. Take Cuddy, damnit."
"- And he starts making people into pies." Takes advantage of Greg's momentary startled expression to gasp breath and continue on. "Besides, I got three tickets and I figured, you know, maybe we could both take her, maybe get dinner someplace nice? I'm paying."
Pause. "Was there any doubt?"
"Well, no."
"He makes them into pies?"
"Hell yes."
"This is an actual play? This isn't going to turn out to be some pansy-ass bullshit about feelings?"
"Murder, mayhem, pastry, song and dance."
"This is a musical?"
"Well, yeah, but the 1812 Overture has cannons and Stravinsky's Rite of Spring made people think he was a lunatic."
Another pause. "You realize this is a date."
"Well, didn't you say you missed breasts? I thought this was what you wanted?" He holds his breath, bites the inside of his cheek; has he gone too far? Shit.
"Well, yeah." House shrugs, and Wilson starts breathing again. "But she's no idiot. She'll figure it out. That's all."
In actual fact it takes her to halfway through the first act to figure it out.
She figures, at first, that it's just her and Wilson, more of the same two friends going out as before: but House is in the car and so she adjusts the number to three friends going out, and that's fine. But dinner is a little nicer than she'd expected, and House is wearing a tie (okay, a tie with pirate skulls on it, but a tie): Wilson pulls out her chair and House says nothing, just grins appreciatively at her low-cut top. They laugh together. House eats dessert off Wilson's fork. They finish the bottle of wine.
And she realizes, when House starts stroking her thigh at almost the same second that Wilson laces his fingers through hers, that this is a date, that the two of them are taking her on a date.
Wilson buys her chocolates the next day.
The day after, House sends one of his minions with coffee and her favorite bagels.
The day after that she deletes her profile on jDate.
"You're glowing."
"I am not glowing."
"A mother can tell! A mother can always tell when her babies are happy."
"Mom." She's forty-two but she might as well be seventeen for all that things have changed between them. "Yes, I'm happy. I have a wonderful job, which I enjoy very much - "
"And you're glowing. You're seeing someone. Is he Jewish? Please, tell me he's Jewish."
"Mother. I am not seeing any one." Person. she adds silently, crossing the fingers of one hand against the untruth. With the other hand, she traces a circle around that Friday's date in her planner. Dinner with the boys, 6:30. Because that is how she thinks of them - the boys, they've become one entity in her mind, the better aspects of each other balancing out the negatives.
Sometimes, when the right stars are falling, she changes it to my boys.
Friday they play Scrabble and watch New Yankee Workshop over dinner.
"He should really be using a bandsaw with that." she mutters, half distracted by an attempt to balance homemade pot pie and a rack full of wooden vowels.
House nearly spills his letters into the gravy. "What?"
"Nothing."
"No, what?"
"Just the idiot on the screen - he'd be better off using a bandsaw." She looks up to see something that looks like respect in his eyes. "What?"
"You actually know something about tools? Other than not to hold the pointy end?"
"Well, some - my father was a carpenter."
He grins, crookedly, and steals a piece of her chicken. "Hey Wilson!"
"What?" He's in the kitchen, and pokes his head out the doorway: he's got flour smudges all over his McGill sweatshirt and a vaguely harried expression on his face.
"Cuddy knows more about tools than you do."
"Good, maybe she can watch that idiot Norm Abram with you instead of me." He rolls his eyes and goes back to whatever he was doing.
She steals the chicken back, and he winks at her and slaps more tiles on the board.
They kiss her that night, between movies. Wilson's a sweet kisser, but meddling: his hands creep under her t-shirt even as his tongue knocks gently before it enters. He tastes like apples from the crumble he'd made for dessert. House tastes like coffee and his lips are sticky with vanilla ice cream; his long fingers trail through her hair, tumbling it down over her shoulders before they move on to the nape of her neck with his strange grace.
That night, the blanket stays in the closet; she falls asleep in a tangle of sticky limbs and afterglow.
Time management has never been House's forte - when he's in the thick of a case he's lucky if he knows what day it is, never mind details like appointments and whose date night it is tonight. But Wilson likes things compartmentalized, neat and orderly, so everything's in a big calendar on the wall plotted out with half a dozen different coloured pens.
On Thursdays he and Lisa watch Norm Abram and make out on the sofa, praying for power tool mishaps while Wilson learns the finer points of making flowers with royal icing.
On Tuesdays they go out to whatever's showing at the art gallery and bring him home cheesecake and descriptions of naked statues.
Wednesdays he and Wilson watch dumb monster movies and she works late.
And the weekends are usually left blank, or scribbled on with a riot of colour.
Somehow, it all works.