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No Argument
by selfishlywarm
nought. (when the wind starts to shift)
There is someone in Wilson's bed, and it is not his wife (unless she has finally done what she's been threatening for so long, and had some drastic surgery), and that is uncomfortable. Not in the I am a cheating bastard - you will find various implements with which to flog me to your left, divorce papers to your right, and a complimentary dish of candies in the shape of my squashed reproductive organs in front of you fireworks display that usually signifies the end of his marriages, but because the someone is heavier than his wife, and this is making the mattress dip to an irretrievably low level. He wants to scream, "Don't you know what this is doing to my bedsprings? They don't deserve this sort of abuse! Is this a personal thing? Were your parents flattened by an out-of-control metal coil?", or maybe just, "Who are you?".
He is ignoring the someone and not looking at him directly. In which respect, the someone is very like the Sun, but (hopefully) smaller and (hopefully) less bright and (very hopefully) less inclined to turn him into a nice pile of ash when it gets a spare moment. The corners of his eyes tell him that the someone is blonde and young, and may or may not be a man, and that the ceiling is darker than he remembers (total solar eclipse) and that he should maybe stop thinking in extended metaphors if he wants to be able to make friends at the next oncology dinner. The stars are just an anchor, or an illusion, or a dead illusion, and we were born from them and so are we just the same? Oh, by the way, hi, I'm James Wilson, I spend an inordinate amount of time with bald people.
What would House do?, he thinks, and realises that,
a) commit a felony, or
b) commit a felony, or
c) commit a felony naked,
aren't the best options when you have no way of knowing whether the person lying next to you has immediate access to a camera and the tendency to laugh when you find out that something is smaller than you originally assumed the something to be.
He will have to do it the James Wilson way (which, his mind - who is sounding increasingly more like Gregory House with each passing second - reminds him, is generally equivalent to the worst possible way in any given situation, on a scale of one to oh-dear-lord).
Hi, he says, except that he forgets to open his mouth. Mprgmph, he says.
"Frngh," agrees whoever-it-is companionably, and swats away the air, whose oxygen content appears to have been entirely replaced with voluminous amounts of ethanol. It's like inhaling beer. He can probably learn to live with this, but walking in a straight line and trying to persuade his brain cells to stay in his brain might prove difficult.
This is the level of conversation that Wilson is comfortable with. Verbs are such a hindrance, he thinks, and he blames television, teaching children that it's okay to speak in full sentences. The only thing that full sentences have ever done for him is to force him to spend vast amounts of money (about the cost of a reasonably small country - America, perhaps) on wedding suits & wedding dresses and divorce suits & divorce dresses.
The dresses, apart from a few notable exceptions, not being for himself.
He wishes his parents bought him one of those pop-up books when he was more impressionable - "Just Say No, Kids! You Don't Have To Propose To Everyone You Sleep With! A Respectable Percentage Will Suffice!", but now it is too late, he's too hard for anyone to make an imprint on, and he keeps waking up worrying what the neighbours will say if he spends another month not getting married.
This will either be a suit or a dress occasion or it won't. He never seems to know which until it's too late.
-
nought point five. (we clutch and grasp)
When he first started marrying Julie, which was a long process and which involved many toasters and gravy-boats, so many that he was thinking of gluing them all together into the shape of a big mess of toasters and gravy-boats all glued together and then presenting them to Julie entitled "Our Marriage: a symbolic piece of Art", she said to him: "What's it like, James, being married?".
(He had been forced to tell her about how she was Wife The Third, and how, well, yes, Henry VIII was probably his role model, except that, one, he didn't prefer his wives minus important parts, like their heads. And, two (more importantly) he didn't resemble an overweight piece of furniture with a silly hat. If he hadn't told her, she would have looked him up on the Internet, found the James Wilson Survivors support club, and invited Chaos to come and ensue in his general direction)
"It's... ah... it's different. You learn things."
"Oh?"
"Mm."
"Ah."
(Somewhere inside his head, Gregory House says, "And, Mr Wilson, at what point did you become aware that she's secretly given you a syllablectomy? And who's to say she'll stop here? She's already shown an inclination towards the severing of tiny, helpless things! What on Earth will happen when she finds your testicles?".
Wilson steals Mental-House's cane and puts roller skates on his feet, and he skids off into the distance, shouting medical abuse and slightly less medical abuse.
James Wilson is getting decidedly odder by the day)
"What things?"
"You get pretty good at ducking."
"Ducking?"
"Yeah. When people throw things at you."
"Why?"
"Well, otherwise, they hit you."
-
one. (a lifetime melts away)
After some careful consideration, the sun rises halfway through the morning sky, deliberates for a moment, and then gets distracted by a cloud and disappears.
Wilson is sitting in the kitchen - arms, legs, everything - and watching the world through his newspaper (it's a wonderful party trick, the ability to see through opaque surfaces). He has already tried to escape today, to flee from this whatever-it-is, this anti-occasion. He got halfway through the door, halfway through blinking at the running shoes he leaves in the entryway in case there's some sort of emergency that requires him to look like someone who might sometimes take part in movement-related activities. Like, for example, if the world gets invaded by a hostile dictator (he has noticed a distinct gap in the ranks of friendly dictators) who is sponsored by Nike. Halfway through sprinting out into the recycled air and pretending it was a sunset.
He stood there, blinking and ridiculous, and thinking that, Christ, Greg could manage a better getaway with this and he's got a limp - and then he realised that this was actually his house. When someone is whispering ominously about the potential pit-falls of delving into the property market, they never, ever mention the devastating fact: after inadvisable coital gymnastics with a complete stranger, you will not be able to slink out of the building unseen. You will not even be able to do it conspicuously, throwing confetti and waving a banner reading wham bam thank you ma'am.
You will be stuck with the complete stranger. You will have to feed him and entertain him and make sure he doesn't get into any trouble and, the way it looks now, with him complimenting Wilson on the design of his kitchen (he's not sure why: he made the mistake of picking out the paint samples without checking with Julie first, and the whole room is pink and green - it's like eating inside a watermelon with matching cupboards), he will probably end up paying him to leave, too.
Shit, it's like having a child.
No. It's worse than that. It's like having a House.
So far, they've discussed skirting-boards and the execution of Charles I, and a rather enlightening debate over lampshades has just drawn to an end. Wilson can't help but notice, though, they haven't actually exchanged names yet, and he's not really sure how that works. How can you extend the invitation to end up in this situation without having some idea of what the other person is called? Did he say, "Hey! Hey, you! Over there, by the statue of Johnny Depp naked - no, not you, you're eighty-five - you, the blonde one! What do you say to a road test of my bed?".
It seems worryingly plausible, but he's determined that he shouldn't be, which leaves only two logical conclusions.
Firstly: They have already introduced themselves, hours and hours of sense eclipsing sense ago, and Wilson has forgotten it. There is a large problem with this (there is always a large problem with the truth) - what if he had introduced himself in the normal way, saying, "Hi, my name's James, I drift from one unfulfilling relationship to another. I can marry a complete stranger just by walking past them - I have to avoid large crowds for fear of being arrested for bigamy!"? And what if the guy had replied, "Hey. I'm part of a cult. We ritually eat anyone who forgets our name. I'm (and then his name)."?
Secondly: There is someone sitting alone in their room with a little stuffed Wilson doll right now, and they are pissing on it.
-
At the moment, the cannibal-in-training is rifling through his cupboards. Either because she has surveillance cameras installed in there or because she has some sort of sophisticated Womanly Tin Configuration sense that James has no comprehension of, being neither sophisticated nor womanly, Julie will know that her cans have been moved the second she walks in through the door. The entire adultery situation will pale in comparison to the brutal manhandling of her baked beans. He isn't entirely sure whether this is a blessing or not.
"Pop Tarts! Excellent!"
And that's all wrong anyway, and someone must be playing the How Many Times Can We Make Him Think Of House Before Jimmy's Head Explodes? game, because House loves Pop Tarts too. Of course, he's never actually admitted this (because declarations of love would prove that he wasn't actually created in a dark basement by a monster who neglected to include any kind of aortic valves, and this revelation would destroy House's reputation forever), but he has written several dramatic monologues announcing his desire to take their (presumably quite sticky) hand in marriage, and Wilson assumes that composing such things and then performing them wearing tights requires a certain level of affection.
What Wilson needs in his life right now is someone who is completely neutral about Pop Tarts. Somewhere out there, the Switzerland of sugary snacks is waiting for him.
-
The sunlight catches and sticks onto the cutlery scattered around the room, like it's scared to bounce back into oblivion without someone knowing that it's been there. It must be tedious, he supposes: when you actually are light, then travelling at the speed of light is just travelling. The knives and forks are burning bright, and it's a shame that he's a psychopath or a serial-killer or just someone who really likes knives, because the effect is really lost on him.
"So," he says, because when you're sympathising with sunlight and philosophising over knives instead of talking to the half-naked person in front of you, that's generally a hint about your conversational skills, "what do you do, again?"
"Let me show you!" he replies, and rummages in the pockets of his pants.
"You're... not part of the pornography industry, are you?"
"No, you're safe." He produces a business card, grinning. "Anyway, my rates aren't too steep."
Wilson is hardly comforted.
The card tells him that he is talking to a Robert Chase, and that Robert Chase is a -- "Uh, you're an octor?"
"I... was in a moving vehicle when I wrote that. I'm a doctor. With a 'd'. At --"
"Princeton-Plainsboro." (Shit-shit-shit-shit).
"Yeah. Well, I haven't actually started there yet - my first day's next week."
"Princeton-Plainsboro." (Shit-shit-shit-shit-shit-fuck).
"You know it?"
"Vaguely. I... actually, I work there. Head of Oncology."
"Really? Great! It'd be good to have a friend there. From what I've seen, my new boss is a homicidal maniac."
Oh, fuck.
James knows exactly how this has happened. It's the Chaos Theory, goddamn Chaos Theory. A butterfly on the other side of the world is flapping its miniscule wings at the moment, and the tiny flutters of destruction are about to knock him flat on his face.
He's going to cull every butterfly in the world when he gets a chance. Maybe some moths, too. Just to be safe.
"Yeah. We've... we've met."
-
two. (debate what's truly permanent)
House had met all of the Wilson Wives at one point or another. The first two reached a Zen-like state of almost-tolerance eventually, after months of meditation and prayer, of drinking organic concoctions seemingly formed entirely of sticks and humming a lot, and of playing 101 Fun Ways To Kill Gregory House in their heads for extended periods of time. They looked on it as a sort of, well, if he's determined to have a pet, then he can, as long as we aren't the ones cleaning up his messes and disposing of all the dead animals said pet presents us with (although, sometimes, they did wish that they were metaphorical dead animals).
Julie, third time not-exactly-lucky, hadn't adapted quite so well.
They had been sitting, eating dinner in front of the TV, knees almost-almost-touching. Every month, their legs seemed to want to be further and further away from each other's, like they were two magnet poles repelling each other. Jesus, by Christmas, she would walk into the room and the force would hurl him right out of the window. It would hardly be an ideal situation - for a start, it would cost them a fortune in glass. What they needed, what they needed was to be a large electromagnet instead. Wilson wondered whether Julie would mind him pumping 230 volts through her every time the marriage felt a bit flat -- and, if she didn't, was "Bitch wouldn't let me connect her to the mains!" a valid ground for divorce?
"Why don't you," she asked, "ask your little friend - what'shisname - over one night?"
"Little? Julie, all my friends are pretty large." He considered. "Which is actually a blow to my masculinity."
"You know! That one you spend all the time with! Something beginning with A, Alan? Adam? Agamemnon?"
"Greg?"
"Yeah, that's right. You've never really told me about him."
"There never really seemed like a... good time. You were never drunk enough."
"Invite him."
And he agreed, because he was still hoping that she might say yes to either the electricity thing or the happy holy matrimony thing. He suspected that the two were perhaps mutually exclusive.
-
House had taken slightly more persuasion. Wilson had tried every convincing line he could think of ("Alcohol will be present! You can ignore Julie and tell it how much you hate me instead!", "Julie's sister has a baby! We'll invite it, and you can poke it and depress the hell out of it!", "I might even let you touch the TV remote! You've never been allowed to do that before!"), and he was just about to even give up on waiting for House to launch himself into a compromising position while he waited in the wings with a video camera, when, one morning, House sacrificed himself.
"We'll do it tonight," he said, with a leer, and James weighed up in his head the possibility of House propositioning him against the possibility of House willingly meeting his wife, and discovered, worryingly, that: 1) the latter was far less likely, and 2) the former was far less terrifying.
"Okay. Good."
"I'll probably wear that hat I have - the one with the purple feather. And my gold pimp cane. Just so you know."
"I'll appreciate that."
-
He arrived an endless amount of time late, presented Wilson with an empty bottle that might have once contained something ("Sorry, got thirsty, it's the thought that counts"), invested a great amount of effort into studiously ignoring Julie (who, for her part, invested a great amount of effort into being studiously ignored) and deposited himself on the couch partly next to Wilson and partly on Wilson. And James wondered, was this art, watching the incline of House's body, or was this a man with unreasonably heavy legs making craters in his thighs?
There was a fine line, definitely.
-
"Guess what!" Julie poked her head through the door, ignoring James' thighs (a worrying amount of women seemed to take this to an art form). "We have potatoes!"
"Do you really," House pushed his foot into Wilson's leg and Wilson tried not to wince, lest House pulled out the Only Cripples Feel Pain, So Suck It Up Jimmy McTwo-Legs speech, "do you really think that that particular statement deserved to be prefixed with "Guess what?"? Really?"
She frowned. "Don't you like potatoes?"
"Oh, sure, I love potatoes. Obsessive about them. In fact, I take them instead of painkillers most days. Gives me that dizzying carbohydrate high."
-
As Julie turned to leave the room, James studied the material of their couch, which he'd never actually given a huge amount of attention (if anyone had asked him, he would have said, "Uh, kinda rectangular shaped? Some pattern? Flowers. Swastikas. Something."). There were a lot of nondescript blobs which were either meant to be clouds or sheep covering the material, and they were symmetrical, which was nice.
"Hey, Janie -- Jenny -- Julie!" called House (Wilson looked up from the couch and saw a million floating sheep-clouds filling the room). "I'm crippled, I'm a cripple. This cane's not for acts of sexual deviance - entirely. I can't walk without it, unless I want to invite an unnecessary degree of lying on my back into my life (and that's what I have a Jimmy for). Just so you know."
"What?"
He grinned. "It's always funnier when the people who hate me actually secretly feel sorry for me and find themselves racked with guilt. Makes for more entertaining viewing. How racked are you, Jimmy The Female?" He turned to Wilson and stage-whispered, "talking of racks, not bad, man. Definitely an improvement on Number Two - she was the one who looked like her chest had suffered a nasty accident with a steamroller when she was a child, right?" (And then, turning to Julie): "Where are those potatoes? I'm awfully excited."
Julie had shot a panicked look at Wilson, who shrugged.
"A bastard with a cane is a bastard indeed," he said, sagely.
-
four. (nothing else exists)
"Okay, okay." Robert Chase shifts and is half-swallowed by the couch (Wilson winces, and hopes that the regurgitation process won't be too messy). "Say, there's nuclear armageddon, right? And the whole world is just this ball, this huge ball of flames and all your friends - they're gone. They've burnt up, or got shot, or spontaneously combusted, or whatever it is you do to pass the time during a nuclear holocaust, I dunno - and so you're alone. Dead alone, last person alive. And then, suddenly, you come across this really big volcano, and there's an animal on the top."
"You are aware that this is nuclear armageddon, and not How The Dinosaurs Died, right?" It's best to check, thinks Wilson.
"Yes, thanks. And there's two animals on the top."
"There was only one a minute ago!"
"They reproduced while you were talking. And suddenly, out of nowhere, a great big meteor starts falling through the sky, and these animals are going to get squashed."
"You should write sci-fi."
"And you can only save one of them! You rush towards them, right, and you see that one's a dog, and one's a cat, and they're crying, 'Help me! Help me!'. Which one d'you save?"
"You do realise that you just won some kind of award for the most long-winded way ever of asking, 'Which fluffy-wuffy animal do you prefer?'?" He paused. "Wait, no. Which talking fluffy-wuffy animal you prefer."
Someone knocks on the door.
Wilson's brain activates its emergency plan, which involves ripping itself into tiny little shreds and pretending it's not there. The issue at hand, foot, leg, arm and assorted other limbs, though, is oh Christ, what if it's Julie?, and he considers shaking into a paper bag and smothering himself in a blanket so that he hardly exists anymore. Until, that is, common sense ram-raids his ass.
Julie is in Toronto. Julie is visiting her mother in Toronto. Julie, who has some difficulty being in both Canada and the hallway at the same time, though no one could say she doesn't really try, is visiting her mother in Toronto.
House had warned Wilson about this the night before his wedding, for hours and hours outside some bar until the evidence of their breathing hung heavy in the air and blurred what they said. House had been dangling, upside-down, from an iron railing. It was only a matter of time, he said, before they started sending people into Space as a reward for being supremely awesome, and it would be remiss of him not to start preparing for the sudden disposal of gravity forthwith ("Yes," agreed Wilson, "you certainly wouldn't want to be remiss about zero-gravity. You've functioned pretty well with zero-brain, though, so I really do have the utmost faith").
And, in between mooning passers-by and sniggering and insisting that, no, he really hadn't had anything to drink, he lectured James on the consequences of romantic entanglement with creatures who believed that tree branches were fine cuisine (it always took House a long time to recover from Julie's dinner parties), and who possessed absolutely no telekinetic powers whatsoever.
Wilson sighs.
There is another knock - louder, this time. Except that it's not really a knock as such, more a valiant murder attempt, and it shakes the door in its frame, which is now less of a door frame and more of a hospice.
And another crash, and another, and then -- shit, and then a key twists in the lock, and Wilson figures that he was possibly slightly hasty in dismissing Julie as an option. After all, it's not entirely implausible that she's managed to invent some manner of instantaneous teleportation device since he last saw her, is it? Although he's not sure whether you generally announce your presence with a friendly warning knock when you discover your husband with another man -- a friendly warning slap around the face is possibly more traditional.
Then, the door is kicked open by House's good leg, and House's bad leg and bad face peer around its edge. He pats it consolingly, in a kind of, "Well, sorry for beating you to within an inch of your life - I'll send some flowers to your family and make sure your knob gets donated to medical science, isn't that nice of me?" way, and nods at Wilson, who is being cut in half by the kitchen door.
"I would've just used the key in the first place," House explains, "but my therapist tells me that the best way to accept this limp thing is to continually take advantage of the fact that I have --" (he twirls his cane) "-- a really big stick."
There is a snort from the kitchen. Wilson winces.
"I thought you said you were going to take the sniggering toaster back to the store?"
"I did. It was damaging the morale of my toast."
"And so you took it back and replaced it with, what, a chortling oven?"
Robert emerges sheepishly and clears his throat, standing next to Wilson.
"Doesn't look much like an oven," comments House. "Too hairy."
"This is Robert."
House rolls his eyes laboriously. "Jimmy! We said we were going halves on human playthings! What were you thinking of?"
"I'm from Australia," Robert explains, helpfully.
"Don't tell him that!" hisses Wilson.
"You don't think he might have noticed that by listening to me?" Robert mutters back.
Ah, grasshopper, thinks Wilson, so much to learn, so much to learn.
House eyes Wilson thoughtfully. "You've changed. You look different. You've got that weird... look on your face, somewhere between smug, constipated and abject terror. Stop looking so vacant, or they'll start using your face as a commercial for When Drugs Go Wrong." His face breaks into a grin. "Oh! Oh! My boy got laid!"
"I."
He points at Robert. "Either that, or you finally achieved your lifetime ambition of creating an over-haired creature from a fraction of nature's resources in your basement. In which case, good on you."
"Probably more likely than the sex option," comments Robert.
House face crumples and contorts, and Wilson thinks he's either going to collapse into tears or just rip his face off to reveal some sort of mutant bionic creature (they've been expecting it for years now - there's a pool going in the office), but, oh God, this is worse. Infinitely worse. He's smiling.
Wilson grabs him by the collar and asks him politely whether he would like to perhaps move into the next room with him (well - he doesn't ask him, so much as yank him, but he's willing to bet that he gets the gist).
"What?" he asks.
"Oh, nothing. I was just deciding whether to take pictures on my cell phone and send them to Cuddy, or to simply stand and smirk cruelly."
"You're quite good at smirking, if that helps."
"Yes, but then you manhandled me and gently implied that I should leave the room, and I am hurt. Hurt." He giggles, and it's unnerving. "Oh, Jimmy!"
"Why are you acting so surprised--"
"Not surprised. Mildly enthused."
"--about this. You know I... you know I've done this kind of thing before."
"Jimmy. I don't think you've ever done this before."
"One tiny mistake!"
"Tiny? That's like saying that Hitler invading Poland was a minute tactical error!"
"Okay. Maybe it wasn't the greatest idea, but..."
"Nazism wasn't the greatest idea? Is this a typical Jewish belief, or are you just special?" He sniggers. "And you screwed a British guy, too! Poor show."
Robert bursts into the room, indignant. "I'm not--"
"Hey, you go to Oxford?"
"No, because I'm not--"
"Cambridge?"
"No--"
"You row?" He turns to James. "They all row in Britain, you know."
"Might come in handy, it being an island."
"No. I don't... row," mutters Robert.
Plucking an apple from a bowl on the side and taking a bite, House grimaces. "In that case, I'm not surprised your parents don't love you."
"What!"
Greg throws the apple down onto the floor in ultimate disgust. "Does this contain any artificial sweeteners?"
"Um. No?" Wilson replies.
"How many E numbers?"
"Er, none to speak of."
"And you let this pass my lips why?" He clutches a hand to his chest. "This is now in my bloodstream!"
"Hey, hey. What were you saying about my parents?" interjects Robert, who doesn't seem to be bothered that House is being poisoned by Nature.
"If I tore out any single page from any single textbook from anywhere in the universe, it would read, 'Hey, British Robert! Here's why your parents don't love you!'."
"That... I have problems, okay? Other problems. It's not that simple."
"Sure, sure. I empathise. I know how hard it is just to restrain yourself from hurling yourself off Daddy's yacht when the blind Mongolian nuns make your diamond-encrusted slippers a size too small, but, well. That's not your real problem, is it?"
"No?"
"No. Your real problem is that you currently have an enormous erection."
Robert appears to have run out of those useful word things.
"Which is kinda weird, really, because you'd think you might notice that you were tripping over things a metre in front of you..."
-
seven. (you occasionally cross my mind)
Time passes, and Robert becomes Chase, and for an infinity - or, more accurately, an amount of time that isn't actually infinite, but can't actually be pinned down exactly by either of the people involved in it, people who think that infinity sounds better than "You know, I'm not actually sure", Chase doesn't let himself within a few kilometres of Wilson's house.
A year, maybe two, just to be safe.
This is fairly difficult for a couple of months, because he is dating Wilson's next door neighbour, and he finds explaining why he has to drop her twenty blocks away from her house every time needlessly complicated -- then again, that relationship is complicated enough as it is: she is a part-time kindergarten teacher, full-time fetishist, and Chase finds himself subject to some uncomfortable chafing. So he lets her drop, because "I have sensitive skin" is easier than explaining a lifetime.
They can't ignore each other at work (James is still two parts Wilson, five parts House) - still, they try to avoid conversations that don't include the words vasculitis and pustular boils. They nod at each other frequently instead, in a way that only two people who've slept together and then discussed the intricacies of modern lampshades can pull off. House, who finds this all hysterically funny, takes great delight in accidentally locking them into exam rooms and watching through the window. Wilson keeps getting neck strain.
The bad news is (the bad news is, the bad news is, and he's already said that at least seventeen times today - he should really try and shake it up a bit: I'm Terribly Sorry, You're Going To Die: The Remix), Dr Robert Chase isn't really the main problem, more of a small annoyance, and you're not particularly bothered by a small itch on your neck when there's a million-strong swarm of rabid vampire poison bees lodged inside your underpants, really.
The million-strong swarm of rabid vampire poison bees -- or Gregory House, as it prefers to be called (it's snappier and easier to remember for insurance forms) -- bares his teeth at Wilson now.
"You're taking me out for dinner tonight, Jimmy."
"I... was planning on staring desolately into a can of beer and weeping, if it's all the same. I thought that someone could write a song about it."
"Well, you can do it with me instead!" he shouts jovially, and Chase's head shoots up.
-
seven point five. (and we share a name)
Chase's problem, really, is that he fancies everyone.
Naturally, Wilson can't empathise.
-
nine. (words are spoken)
Sometimes Wilson pretends he's someone else to stop his head from collapsing in on itself or on him. Or he closes his eyes for long enough that he disappears and no one can trick him into believing in his own existence, or he gets so drunk he can't even remember who he grew out of or into. It's become trickier now, now Princeton-Plainsboro have expressly banned the use of IVs to pump alcohol straight into your system and bypass all that complicated business with bottles and aiming for your mouth, but he finds ways, and those ways lead to bars, and in those bars reside enormous vats of beer.
He's sitting on a barstool now, wondering how an intrinsic inability to cut four sticks of wood the same length and avoid creating chairs that hurl people off them can possibly be carried by every single carpenter in the country. It's a mystery for House to solve, he thinks, and tells himself that he really does know that House isn't actually a TV detective, really.
He twists a cell phone between his index and forefingers and, fuck, this morning he was elbow-deep in a patient, and the specks that covered his hands called him hero and fixer. Now, there's liquid dripping clumsily from his chin and he's disgusting and wrong and -- oh, would you look at that. He's landed on self-loathing at least half-an-hour ahead of plan, and now the entire schedule's been messed up, and what happened to self-pity, anyway? He likes self-pity, and now he's going to have to skip ahead, skip straight to the Ridiculously Stupid Idea stage, which is invariably less fun, and leads to things like compromising situations with inebriated raccoons (which was, incidentally, a one-off thing).
He crushes a tissue, or some ice, or something, and hammers at the phone keypad.
-
It isn't until they're in the back of the car park, up against some boy racer's car, and Wilson's ramming things in Chase's mouth to stop him from talking, and he's trying to think of a way to word "Hey, can you move to the left a bit, please, I've got an aerial stuck up my ass?" that no one could say, "But I thought you liked it like that!" to, when Chase looks up and sees House looking into him, House with his knee nestling in his thigh, House masquerading as Wilson.
"What the -- Who are you?"
"Shut up, just... shut up." He grimaces. "You bastard." He rattles his car keys and tugs Chase along with him.
Wilson is really very good at the Stupid Idea stage.
-
eleven. (beyond his own two sails)
"Okay, kids!" crows House. A patronising grin is smothering his face, and Wilson wonders, for at least the fourteenth time today, why no one's accidentally mowed him down with a tractor yet. "Uncle Greggy says it's competition time!"
The level of unamusement stagnating inside the room is palpable.
"Open to everyone in the room," (and here, he helpfully points at everyone in the room with his cane in case they have misplaced their brains, and are staring at him and thinking, 'What! Everyone in the room? What the hell does he mean!', because he's all about customer service), "the person in here most likely to have starred in a gay porno wins a fine reward. Namely --" (he rummages in his pants, and Wilson has a horrible idea he might know what the prize is) "-- twenty five cents. And three arachnids, deceased." He grins at them all. "Any questions?" And he frowns. "Why are you being all quiet? What happened to my cheerful team of talkative minions?"
Cameron imagines writing "he is INSANE." in her journal tonight.
"It's hard to talk when you're busy bating your breath and inwardly rejoicing," explains Foreman. "Takes up a lot of brain power."
"Oh, give it up!" says House, faking insult. "I know it must be hard, being secretly in love with your boss, but you don't have to be so mean about it!" ("really, REALLY REALLY insane", amends Cameron). "Okay. Cameron, you can be our friendly neighbourhood judge."
"Why can't I be in the gay porno too?" demands Cameron, and does that irritating "Ha, would you look at that! I actually do have a backbone! I just choose to only get it out for religious festivals and birthdays!" thing.
"That," House screws up his nose, "is icky. Anyway, I didn't say this before because I was being characteristically nice, but I don't want you as my judge." So there floats, unspoken, in the air. "We'll get Cuddy to do it. She probably knows more about homosexual pornography, anyway - God knows, she's put in the research."
"No! Wait!" protests Cameron.
"No. Forget Cuddy. If you want the job done properly... I am the sole judge."
"What if you need a second opinion?"
"I'll ask myself twice. Next?"
"That's not --" begins Chase.
"Shut up, you're in the lead," growls House. Chase shuts up.
"I'll be judging you on the following factors: number one, niceness of nose. Number two, stamina - and, number three... uh, proximity to door."
There is a brief pause. House scribbles on a piece of paper. "Okay. Chase wins. Here is your prize." He presents the 25 cents and dead spiders with a flourish. "Spend it wisely. Buy something nice -- like, for instance, some brownies for Daddy House!"
"Daddy House?" Wilson asks, dryly.
"It's a new thing I'm trying," explains House, and Chase snorts.
"Run along! Chocolate brownies! Not that half-assed chocolate chip crap: when I prick it, I want it to bleed rivers of pure cocoa. Got it?"
"Sure," Chase replies and looks at House for just a second too long, and Wilson wonders who the fuck he's meant to be envying, anyway.
-
eleven point seven five. (the water runs away)
No one's perfect, no one's perfect, no one's perfect.
Someone really needs to send House the memo.
-
infinity. (well are you?)
Chase walks to Wilson's house and it's reasonably dark. It either takes him a very long time or a very short time or a middling time, depending on whether he started off a very long way away, a very short way away, or a middling way away. When James opens the door and doesn't know whether to smile or when to smile, Chase is very wet. It isn't raining. James assumes that it's better not to ask.
"My dad died," Chase says and Wilson thinks, well, yes, but that doesn't explain why you're turning my doorstep into a scale model of the Atlantic Ocean.
He thinks: "Ohgodohgodohgodcomehere." He says: "Are you sure?"
There are narrowed eyes now. Narrow, wet eyes. "Yeah, pretty sure. I mean, the doctors didn't know if he was just sleeping or not at first, but we've poked him a couple of times and he doesn't seem to be moving, and. Oh, yeah, his heart stopped. That too."
"Okay."
"My dad died."
"Chase."
"I bought you a tie."
"Are the two statements related?"
Chase shrugs. "Maybe. Everything's related, if you want it to be."
Wilson's head hurts. Chase sounds like House. (Wilson's head hurts more.) Chase hasn't shaved in a few days and now he even looks like House. Wilson needs to sit down for a while, at least until humans have devolved back into single-celled organisms, and none of them have even the slightest hint of stubble or Australian accents.
"Give me my tie, please."
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Legal Disclaimer: The authors published here make no claims on the ownership of Dr. Gregory House and the other fictional residents of Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital. Like the television show House (and quite possibly Dr. Wilson's pocket protector), they are the property of Fox Television, David Shore and undoubtedly other individuals of whom I am only peripherally aware. The fan fiction authors published here receive no monetary benefit from their work and intend no copyright infringement nor slight to the actual owners. We love the characters and we love the show, otherwise we wouldn't be here.
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