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Jim Jimmy James
by leiascully
He was Jimmy to House when House was in a good mood or a nasty one, and Jimmy to baseball stars, and he liked being Jimmy. Jimmy was comfortable. Jimmy was boyish and he could almost forget that he spent his day doling out death sentences and the rare brief reprieve.
As Doctor Wilson he was kind and competent and very knowledgeable, but rarely comfortable. He gave lectures. He wrote prescriptions for antihistimines and ordered chemotherapy. He ate lunch with House. He taught now and again. He worked long hours and he liked his job, heartbreaking as it could be.
With Stacy he had always been James and that was how he knew he would never have her. But he introduced her to House, and within a couple of weeks she was living with him, saying "Greg" in that soft adoring drawl. So it went. Wilson shrugged and prepared himself for a lot of three-person dinners where he would sit and smile through the codetalk of people in a relationship. He was James to Cuddy, too, at least when she wasn't calling him Wilson, and he knew if Cuddy was capable of a drawl, it wouldn't be his name rolling off her tongue. But that was all right. She had met House in college, when complicated, witty men were still what she liked best. He had never had even a chance with Cuddy. He wondered if she knew it.
To his wives he was Jim. Just the one syllable: curt but intimate, very 50s man-of-the-house style. Not relaxed, but stable. Jim played the cordial host at dinner parties and bought nice jewelry for always-remembered anniversaries and was present, if not necessarily exciting, in bed. It was never enough to keep him interested. It was never enough to keep them interested either, and he wondered where the romance had gone.
Jim was lonely. James Jimmy Wilson (Doctor or not) was lonely.
He wondered how many lives he was leading. At least House was always House, even when he was Greg. He suspected Cuddy was different as Lisa, but she had a professional face to keep up, and he knew it was harder for a woman to do her job, even if he couldn't imagine anyone better for it. She could go home and kick off her shoes and be someone else, but even in his sockfeet he was awkward, uncertain.
It was an uncomfortable revelation that the most significant relationship of his life was with a man. Not just any man, either, the most cantankerous, impossible man he knew, and none of the rewards were the familiar sexual gratifications. There was no romance to it: for all House's jokes, they would never be lovers that way. It was an endless platonic mindgame that tied him up in knots and he didn't know why he stayed. In the new apartment he tidied aimlessly and missed the mindless hours spent watching tv on House's couch, even though he imagined he could smell his urine weeks after he knew the cushions had been thoroughly cleaned. Julie was gone and Grace was gone and he was almost tired of the string of nurses and clerks that poured out their woes and kissed him out of gratitude for the way he listened.
Now and again he went out for dinner or drinks with Cuddy, just casual and friendly because there was no way to shake that look from her eyes when she was thinking about House, and they always ended up talking about House because he was their life. Wilson had decided years ago that it was tragicomic, the way he and Cuddy acted like parents splitting custody of a provocative and precocious child, talking strategy as he admired her figure from an almost academic perspective and she gestured with her salad fork.
Life went on. House stole his lunches out of the oncology lounge refrigerator because Wilson should never have given him a key and Wilson never had the heart to prank him back. He had dinner with Cuddy and watched her across the table, glowing in the low light of the restaurant, her lovely fine hands flying around her face as she talked and her thin shoulders holding up the weight of the world, so impossibly in love with Gregory House that Wilson found it hard to breathe around her some days because he knew how that went.
There was loneliness and then there was loneliness. He and House watched General Hospital in a different room every day, on the coma patient's tv or House's tiny portable one. Wilson got a kitten and resisted the urge to name it House; instead, the little ball of fur became Roger Moore because House insisted that it would never be the best Bond. Cuddy rolled her eyes and uncorked the bottle of wine she'd brought for the housewarming party she'd insisted on throwing when she found out Wilson moved, and Wilson thought that it would be all right, that they were strung together by these friendships like the supports on a suspension bridge and someday House would say the right thing to Cuddy, and someday someone would look at him with that love in their eyes and he would find the continuity in his life again, padding up behind her in his sockfeet.
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A/N: A tiny exploration of how odd it must feel to be called by so many different names, to be so many different people. Poor Wilson.
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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 NBC/Universal, 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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