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The Honeymoon is Over
by Evilida
Dr. Gregory House, renowned diagnostician, was temporarily at peace with himself and the world. He has just solved a very unusual and difficult medical puzzle, one that totally stumped his two fellows, Rosemary Lum and Tony Crane. Lum had been convinced the patient had lupus and Crane had accused the boy's mother of Munchausen's syndrome by proxy. Both totally wrong of course, but House found that the interplay of their ideas had helped him clear his mind and come up with his own - correct - diagnosis.
House popped a Vicodin, grabbed his coat and cane, and left his office. He went to the office of his best friend, Dr. James Wilson, and opened the door without knocking. Wilson was not alone. Wilson's stepdaughter, Emily, was playing quietly on the couch in Wilson's office. She had recently acted as a flower girl at her mother's wedding, and was re-enacting the ceremony using a Barbie doll for the bride and My Little Pony for the groom. Wilson was reviewing his patients' files. He had just returned from a three-week honeymoon in Costa Rica and needed to catch up.
Wilson looked up. He was more relaxed than House had seen him in years. The constant tension that he carried in his neck and shoulders seemed to have eased.
"I was going to ask you to play hooky with me, but I see Cuddy has you on babysitting duty."
"Hello, House."
"She's the Chief of Medicine and you're the head of the oncology department. I'd think the two of you could scrape together enough to afford a babysitter. Or has Cuddy spent all your money on cheap rum and cabana boys?"
"Emily's nanny has the flu and Lisa has a board meeting. We couldn't find a babysitter on such short notice."
"Would you and Emily be interested in an evening of The L Word, beer, and Chinese takeout? I bet Cuddy only lets her watch educational television. It's my duty to expand her horizons."
"I don't think Lisa wants her horizons expanded quite so wide yet."
"She's marrying Barbie to a horse. I don't think anything on The L Word is going to shock her."
"I've got loads of paperwork to catch up on and I promised to make Emily macaroni and cheese for dinner."
"The real kind," Emily said, "out of the box. Not the home-made kind!"
"Would you like to come to our place for dinner?" Wilson asked, knowing House would refuse. He had invited House to dinner several times since he began living with Lisa Cuddy, but House never came.
"I can see that you two have a wild evening planned," House said. "I'll let you get on with it."
House's good mood had evaporated. The satisfaction he felt in solving a medical mystery was always fleeting. He needed distraction to keep his mind from his pain, and if Wilson was not willing to provide it, he would have to find it elsewhere.
Three thirty in the morning is a terrible time for the phone to ring. A call at that hour is always bad news. People think that you need to know about bad things as soon as they happen, but they wait until a more reasonable hour to tell you anything good. As he groped for the telephone, Wilson thought about motorcycle accidents, drug overdoses, strokes and heart attacks. When he found out that it was only House asking to be bailed out of jail again, Wilson was relieved. He tried to sound angry, but he knew House wasn't fooled.
The telephone woke Lisa as well.
"It's House," Wilson said. "He's in jail and I have to go to bail him out."
Lisa's anger was unfeigned. "What's he done this time?"
"Some dispute at a bar. I don't know the details, and I don't want to know."
"Come back to bed. House can wait until morning."
"I might as well go now. I won't be able to get back to sleep anyway."
Wilson wore a suit and tie when he went to pick up House at a police station. He wanted to look like the respectable doctor he was. However, it was awfully early in the morning, so Wilson's sartorial standards had slipped somewhat. He was wearing yesterday's wrinkled shirt and his tie was stained; he hadn't shaved and his hair was a mess. (Wilson had combed his hair, but it took him forty-five minutes with a blow-dryer every morning before his hair looked decent.)
House, in contrast, seemed positively cheery. House had picked a fight with a drunk who claimed that The Young and Restless was better than General Hospital. Although he was middle-aged and walked with a cane, House had been an athlete and was still fit. As a doctor, House knew all the places on the human body where a little bit of pressure could produce a lot of pain, and he was also very dextrous with his cane. House had plainly come out on top in the fight.
As they walked to his car, Wilson said, "It's not like you to get into a bar brawl. Your criminal escapades usually have more class."
"The man was insufferable. You didn't hear what he said about Genie Francis."
"I'm sure she appreciates your gallantry; let's hope the judge feels the same way."
"They'll drop the charges," House said confidently."He swung at me first."
"In the meantime, you owe me fifteen hundred bucks."
House expected Wilson to lecture him about his behaviour, but Wilson didn't say anything else. Secretly, House was a little disappointed. He didn't actually enjoy being lectured to, but Wilson was so fun to watch when he was angry. House thought that his friend's exaggerated gestures and rapid clipped speech were hilarious, although he was always careful not to laugh.
Dawn was breaking as Wilson pulled up in front of House's apartment building.
"Come on in," House said. "You might as well sleep on the couch."
"I should go home to Lisa."
"Cuddy won't appreciate being woken up at five in the morning. She'll figure out where you are."
Wilson was tired and it was a half-hour drive to Cuddy's house. He got out of the car and followed House into the apartment. House threw him a pillow and a blanket as he headed towards the bedroom.
Wilson woke up with a crick in his neck. For a few seconds he was disoriented and nearly fell off the couch on to the coffee table. Then the events of the previous night came back to him and he sat up. His cellphone was on the coffee table and he picked it up to call Lisa. He thought he had only been napping a few minutes, and that it still might be too early to call her, so he checked his watch. It was 8:25 a.m. and his shift at the hospital started at 8:30. He had slept longer than he thought. Wilson phoned home but no one answered; then telephoned the departmental secretary to tell her he would be late. Before he left, he opened the door to House's bedroom to check on him. House had been combining alcohol and Vicodin, which could be disastrous. Fortunately, House was sleeping normally, so he left quietly.
Wilson was angry with himself. When he had married Lisa Cuddy, he had promised to put her first before all others. Yet the first time House had turned to him, he had come running, eager to save his friend from the consequences of his reckless, self-destructive actions.
"I'm an idiot," he thought. "I have to stop obsessing about rescuing him when he shows no signs of wanting to be rescued. If I can't be his friend without letting myself be sucked into his problems, then we can't be friends at all."
Lisa had the right attitude. She valued House as a diagnostician. Wilson was a competent and compassionate doctor, but if he were to leave there were a hundred other doctors who could take his place. Lisa knew that House could not be replaced, that he saved people that no one else could save, and she was willing to put up with a lot of nonsense from House for the sake of his genius. However, she seldom allowed herself to become part of House's continuing drama the way that Wilson did. She had a certain detachment that Wilson envied.
Wilson pulled his car into the driveway and went in to Lisa Cuddy's house to shower and change before work. Wilson had spent most of his life living in other people's houses - first his parent's house, and then the houses and apartments of his various wives and girlfriends. He actually preferred it. In those rare periods where he had lived alone, his apartment had been an anonymous space in which to sleep, little better than a college dorm room or a hotel room. One of the pleasures of entering into a new relationship had been exploring and becoming part of the other person's living environment. Their homes reflected their personalities. Cuddy's house, for example, was tidy, well-designed and practical, but with unexpected touches of luxury.
As soon as House opened his eyes, he knew it was a mistake. He was impaled by beams of sunlight. Every part of his body ached to some degree, but his head and his leg were competing for top honours. He could hear the rumble of a garbage truck, which must have woken him. House grabbed the bottle of Vicodin from the nightstand, took two, and then staggered toward the bathroom. When he came out, he saw that Wilson had left his pillow and neatly folded blanket on the couch. House hadn't expected Wilson to make his fabulous macadamia pancakes - his friend had been too upset with him to do that - but he had expected a morning cup of coffee at least. Instead, Wilson had left without a word.
Rosemary Lum and Tony Crane caught up with Wilson just before noon. They knocked on his office door and then entered without waiting for a reply.
"Where's House?" Crane asked abruptly. He did not even have the good manners to say hello first.
Wilson was annoyed. Why did everyone consider him the expert on all things House? Just because Crane was rude did not mean that Wilson had to be rude as well.
"Hello," he said. "I'm busy dictating patient notes at the moment. Would you come back later?"
"We can't wait," Lum said. "The patient's failing fast and no one can figure out what's wrong with her. We've done all the tests that we could think of, but the results don't make any kind of sense."
"Did you try his cellphone?"
"Of course we tried his cellphone!" Crane said.
"He's probably just decided not to answer any calls. He's in his apartment. If you want to check, I have a set of keys." He took the keys from a drawer in his desk and tossed them to Lum.
"Thanks."
"Give the keys back to House when you're finished with them. Tell him I don't need them anymore."
Wilson went to meet Lisa for lunch in the cafeteria. Giving House his keys back was a clear signal of his renewed commitment to putting his wife and his marriage before his friendship with House. Besides, he had another set in a drawer at home.
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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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