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Head of Oneirology
by bammel
As they wait for the elevator to arrive, House turns an appraising eye on his silent friend.
Wilson looks tired, puffy, and pale, and he's pointedly ignoring House's most penetrating gaze. House's eyes can practically turn hawks into doves and shit into gold, or so Cameron's led him to believe, and he's a little ruffled by Wilson's lack of response. Clearly, the Bitch has been keeping him up too late attending to her twisted whims, and the thought fills House with revulsion.
"Good morning," he prompts Wilson after a couple of seconds. "Customarily, that's what we say to people when we greet them before the big hand and the little hand point straight up. Didn't your mother tell you that?"
"Morning," Wilson echoes. He looks dead on his feet. Even though House raises his eyebrows expectantly and waggles his head, Wilson says nothing else, doesn't even look at him, and House is forced to poke him rather forcibly in the gut with his cane.
"Jesus Christ," Wilson says, knocking the cane aside impatiently, almost upsetting House's balance. "The hell's gotten into you?"
House smirks to cover his surprise at Wilson's, well, somnolent bitchiness, and redistributes his weight with deliberate, unnecessary care. "Nothing approaching what's gotten into you," he says as they step into the elevator. "You're expanding." He is definitely fatter. House tries to keep his brain from veering off into worst-case-scenario diagnoses: major depression, thyroid issues, brain tumors, cancers, no, no. Wilson's just been stuffing his pudgy cheeks in pseudo-wedded bliss. Well, pseudo-wedded something.
The doors glide shut and the metal deathtrap lifts House and Wilson toward the usual hordes of despairing, infirm, and irrepressibly annoying.
"Haven't been sleeping through the night," Wilson says, and before House can even be horrified by the obscene threat of any more too-detailed explanation, or start pondering various dyssomnias, he adds, "and for some reason, I can't get back to sleep unless I eat."
Eating his feelings, whatever they are. Boring. Obviously, the best solution is for Wilson to break it off with the Bitch, but House is trying to be good and not bring it up. "Didn't your mother tell you you'll have nightmares if you do that?" he says instead. "She seems to have neglected your upbringing like woah."
Wilson's only reply is a weird, sleepy, wonky-eyed smile as he exits the elevator. If he makes it through the day without terrifying any dying children, it'll be a miracle.
"And your face will freeze like that!" House calls after him.
He avoids Wilson for the rest of the day in order to communicate his displeasure. Or Wilson avoids him, but he pretends otherwise.
*
House wakes up in the middle of the night, his leg's insistent griping sending him to the bottle of Vicodin next to his bed. He pops a pill in his mouth, perfecting his dry-swallowing technique, and lies there in the dark for a few minutes, curious. Tempted.
He's not really hungry, but after counting a few sheep, bears, walruses, and Tila Tequilas, he gives up on sleep for now and pads unevenly to the kitchen, where he contemplates his almost-bare cupboards.
A couple of potato chips will do, he figures. He takes a handful with him back to bed, crunching in the dark, and eventually falls asleep.
It's a familiar scene from the past, nothing special. He's in front of the whiteboard, which is covered in gibberish, and Chase is there, being unhelpful, and Foreman is there, glowering and judging, and Cameron is there, caring about something or other and being self-righteous, when she suddenly gets too close and somehow puts a very bold hand on the zipper of House's jeans.
He yelps in surprise as he falls backward, realizing with mounting panic that he doesn't have his cane. Chase stands over him in a silent rage, his shoe hovering over House's throat.
Waking up in a small pile of crumbs, House decides not to eat potato chips for a while.
*
No one else needs to know about this very private absurdity. There's no scientific basis for any of it, no link between food and brainwaste, obviously, and the very idea is ridiculous, but he decides to keep a log of what he eats and what he dreams, if only for entertainment. If House is lucky, he'll end up with some masturbation fodder, and if he's unlucky, maybe he'll be thankful to be awake. For once.
Another night, the next time his leg wakes him up especially nastily, he downs some Vicodin and hobbles over to the refrigerator, which he's decided to keep stocked for the sake of his research. A few slices of Swiss cheese this time, because he's done with crumbs.
Climbing back into bed, he shoves the cheese in his mouth and swallows, and he tries to relax; sleep finally deigns to visit him after he imagines Megan Fox doing interesting things with his cane. She would be too much for him, for sure.
He comes home from work to find Cuddy waiting in his bed, and this doesn't surprise him at all. Of course Cuddy's there. Why wouldn't she be? He'd be more surprised if she weren't.
Cuddy delivers his performance review while they have sex, and her talk of work is punctuated with grunts and moans and curses. She really is beautiful, but it's terrible, awkward, and his leg aches, and if all sex were like this, he would never bother again, not even with himself. Castration is the only answer.
Afterward, she recites the names she's picked out for their children.
"Oh my god," House gasps. The sun is peeking through the blinds.
Freud was obviously a dumbshit, not that anyone's ever questioned that.
No more cheese.
*
Another time, he stands in front of the fridge at 2:13 a.m. and sucks down three pickles, his hands wet with brine. He juggles some obscene analogies in his mind while endeavoring futilely to remain engineer of a train of thought that has nothing to do with Wilson, licks his fingertips, and flops into bed as carelessly as he can with that goddamn leg.
House gets out of bed and walks stiffly to the bathroom to start the day with a satisfying piss. Ridiculously Old Fraud—Henry Dobson, House corrects himself, surprised he can remember—and Taub are fucking in House's shower. No mistake. They're fucking fucking.
"Put the shower curtain in there!" House scolds them. "You're getting water everywhere, you bastards."
"Hey, Dr. House," Dobson sort of moans.
"Good morning," Taub says, sounding a bit preoccupied. "We were just looking for mold when—"
"I don't want to hear it," House tells them, averting his eyes, suspecting that he's being unusually calm. "Don't talk. Just get the hell out of there. But rinse everything first! That includes the ceiling."
When House heads to work in the morning, the real morning, none of this false awakening bullshit, he takes the pickle jar with him and throws it in a dumpster.
*
He's kind of apprehensive about continuing his experiment.
1:57 a.m. Maybe something sweet is warranted. Cookies are pretty benign, right? House plucks six raspberry butter cookies out of the package, dropping one on the floor on his painful journey back to bed. He'll get it in the morning.
Crumbs are welcome again. Anything to tell him he's awake when it's over. He eats the cookies, chewing in the sickly green glow of his new alarm clock.
He's tense. Sleep is a long time coming.
Wilson is in House's office, sitting on House's desk. His shirt's partially unbuttoned and he's smiling at something House can't see. Steve McQueen is stretched out on his lap. Amber is there, reciting a dirty limerick, grinning, and House, mysteriously, doesn't want to murder her.
Cuddy, Stacy, and Thirteen enter the room holding hands and giggling, with Kutner and Foreman following. Kutner is openly fascinated, and even Foreman seems... not unhappy.
Thirteen looks excited, and House isn't at all intrigued by this unusual animation on her part. "When everybody's here, we can play Spin the Bottle!" she says. And why not?
He's about to address Stacy when Tritter walks in, completely nude and holding a thermometer, and House can't help his startle reflex.
It's then that Wilson notices him. "Shit. He's here."
They all stare at House accusingly.
Those cookies were stale anyway. He shoves the remainder down the garbage disposal.
*
For a change of pace, he pours himself some cereal at 1:42 a.m., and adds a splash of skim milk. He eats slowly because he's wide awake, and his fucking thigh feels like it's stuck in some kind of medieval torture device. At least he has other things to think about while he waits for the Vicodin to kick in, stuffing his face with healthy whatever that'll make him shit wet bricks for three days, minimum.
House lowers himself onto the couch and flips channels for a few minutes. Porn, porn, torture porn with Elisha Cuthbert, shitty Sam Neill movie, infomercial, blah blah.
Dinner at the Wilson household, but the Wilson household is a bowling alley, and they're seated at a bar. All of Wilson's ex-wives are there: whatsherface, Bonnie, and Julie. The three of them are talking and laughing, probably sharing stories about Wilson's hairy ass—not that House has ever seen it, but somehow he knows anyway—or his pitiful and famous erectile dysfunction. CB is sitting next to Wilson himself, down at the other end, and he can't hear what they're saying over the cackling and the clanking of silverware and dishes.
"Speak up!" he shouts at them. "Share with the class." Either they're ignoring him or they can't hear him any better than he can hear them, and both scenarios are unacceptable.
Someone tugs on his sleeve, and he turns.
It's Grace? Grace, yeah, that's it. She's sitting on his other side. "Can't you leave him alone just for once?" she asks. She doesn't look too bad.
"I'll leave him alone when I'm as dead as you," House says, turning back to Wilson and CB. "And only because I won't have a choice."
He wakes up with the television still on and the bowl of cereal in his lap. He limps to the kitchen to rinse it out before its contents can turn into a really smelly glue, and decides to sleep in a bit today.
*
"You look like hell," Wilson says. It's been a couple of weeks, and he still looks bloated and avuncular; they make quite a pair of old-ish farts. "And smell like it, if I had to make a guess."
"Thanks," House replies. He has a mirror, and he's peered into it lately with the usual puzzlement and self-loathing. He knows how he looks. Red-rimmed eyes with new baggage, crazy hair, slept-in clothes, wrinkling skin. "Rachel Zoe's not accepting new clients." He hopes his fly is zipped.
"Do you wanna talk about it?"
After a couple of silent breaths, House says, "What do you think?"
Wilson can't possibly be surprised, because there are far more things that House doesn't want to talk about than he does want to talk about, but House refuses to meet his eyes, which, he knows, are worried and possibly full of doglike devotion. Or should be.
*
House studies the banana suspiciously in the moonlight. It peels easily enough. He chews it slowly as he makes his way back to the bedroom, trying to focus on positive things for the sake of his unconscious mind, but he can't really think of any that don't involve the deaths of his enemies. He falls asleep pondering how much he likes the word peel, his brain soothing him with a disjointed slideshow of various perversions.
Wilson is lying on House's bed, without House, of course, and it's completely normal. He's being straddled by that dwarf mother and they both look pretty happy about it.
"You," she says as House approaches. "We've been waiting for you, you jerk. Get over here."
"Okay," House hears himself reply. Sure, why not? No one's gonna believe this anyway. "Is Tila Tequila coming by?"
Wilson extends a hand and House takes it, and the three of them resort themselves into a pile of hot weirdness.
Just as Dwarf Mom gets busy down below and Wilson begins kissing House's neck, Cutthroat Bitch appears and starts jumping on the bed. She's laughing, and House can see fangs in her mouth. Why hasn't he noticed that before?
The phone rings.
House's alarm is going off. He considers trying a banana again sometime, but probably not next time.
*
His leg is really adamant about getting crazy on drugs tonight, and House inhales a Vicodin without a second—well, any, really—thought. He considers chasing it with a bellyful of whiskey, but then he pictures Wilson's dismayed expression and gives the bottle the cold shoulder on his way to the food.
Dark chocolate. He can't remember why he has it at first, because he rarely has to worry about the embarrassment of patients (or anybody else) giving him anything, but then he recalls Wilson's enormous chocodonation to House's chocofund after the last Valentine's Day. Chocolate may not cause cancer, but cancer, at least indirectly, seems to cause a lot of chocolate.
This time, House is going to do it up right. Chocolate is probably what Cuddy eats while she ruminates on her thankless, loveless existence and pines for House's shriveled manflesh, so it's as good as anything as far as emotional crutches are probably concerned.
After swallowing six pieces, he has enough presence of mind to rinse his mouth out a bit before crawling back into bed at 3:02 a.m.
"What's this?" House rips the prescription out of Wilson's hand without bothering to wait for a reply. All Wilson's medications should be submitted for approval, obviously.
Wilson says nothing, his face disturbingly neutral, and places his hands on his hips while House squints in disbelief. House moves the script farther away from his eyes, bringing the text into sharper focus, but it doesn't make any more sense at any distance.
It's a prescription written by Dr. Amber Volakis.
"She prescribed you me?!" House does not squeak, because he would never do something so undignified and unguarded, but his voice does, admittedly, rise noticeably in pitch and volume.
Dr. C. Bitch has covered the tiny paper in pretentious Latin abbreviations. She wants Wilson to use House immediately, liberally, around the clock, every day; the number of refills is a big, fat, cheery 8, and the dosage form is unspecified, which kind of leaves a lot to the imagination. House doesn't know whether she should be praised or scolded for this particular act of negligence. At the very bottom is scrawled, "Brand name medically necessary." There is also a crude phallic doodle. Big points for that.
"The generic wasn't working for you?" House asks carefully, studying Wilson's nose, his right eyebrow, his left ear—anything to avoid his actual eyeballs, which are looking back.
Wilson shakes his head and smirks a smirk that's rather suggestive of amusing illicit activities and sore orifices. "Well, they aren't really... bioequivalent."
Obviously, the Bitch is a better doctor than House previously thought, and her advice is probably pretty sound. He grabs Wilson by the tie and is about to bring their faces together enthusiastically and ineptly when there's a knock on the door and House notices that they're in his living room.
"Pizza!" Wilson says, breaking away and running to get the door. No wonder he's puffed right up.
"Fucking asshole," House mutters, flipping the covers off the bed to get to his squealing alarm clock. "Trust him to choose pizza over me." His leg is inexplicably quiet and happy.
Score two for Freud, the lucky quack, but even a stopped clock gets stuff right unfairly often. House is done with the entire crazy thing. Or, rather, he will be when he finishes the rest of the chocolate.
*
He and Wilson step into the elevator again. Wilson's looking a bit better, more cheerful. More likely to lose weight, thank god.
"You still look like shit, and I know better than to ask you what's going on," Wilson says, sidling a bit closer as the doors close, "but I'm going to do it anyway: What's going on?"
House shoots him what he hopes is a withering glance, but Wilson doesn't wither, which is probably fortunate for the Bitch. "The usual horrors. You're looking offensively chipper," he replies. "What's up with you?"
Wilson is unusually close—which is really, really close—now. "I slept on the couch last night," he says. "Finally got some sleep."
And House is torn, because although he's really eager to hear about CB being deprived of Wilson in any way, he's also wary of stumbling into a minefield of Too Much Information That Will Make Him Unhappier Even Though He Can Never Admit Exactly Why.
He's opening his mouth to attempt to navigate the situation with his usual wit and scorn when Wilson kisses him.
Wilson has grabbed House's head and tugged and is kissing him. Wilson has thrown an arm around House's back and is kissing him. With tongue and everything. While not the coolest dream (and it must be one, seriously, even though he hardly ever has lucid dreams) that House has ever had, because that one had Wilson, a dwarf, Brock Sterling, and Tila Tequila, this one is pretty great despite the lack of a dwarf. He throws his arms backward to keep his balance and his cane goes thwak! against the wall.
House is about to pull away and ask Wilson where the dwarf is and whether he's swapped the boring, depressing, and almost-thankless field of oncology for the much kookier and just-as-thankless oneirology when the elevator doors open with a ding! and he sees Cutthroat Bitch over Wilson's shoulder. Her face demonstrates the stunning alchemy of rage when it transforms from unpleasant into absolutely terrifying. She must've called the elevator. Beyond her, he can see Kutner and Taub.
If it's not a dream, he's in some fucking trouble that he probably won't be able to extricate himself from with his usual bluster and brinkmanship, especially if Cuddy hears about this, and she will. And he can't make CB disappear by wishing it, can't fly, suddenly needs to eat a fistful of Vicodin, and Wilson hasn't turned into an adorable, fat baby seal, so it's most definitely not a dream. House pushes Wilson backward with one hand and steadies himself against the wall with the other.
"Cruising in the elevator?" the Bitch says, looking them over.
"It was him," House says, still breathless, pointing with his cane, looking for fangs. "Blame him."
Turning toward his girlfriend, Wilson shrugs and ducks his head, and the fucker doesn't even have the decency to look genuinely ashamed, thank god.
"I despise you," CB spits at House before swinging her gaze to Wilson. "And I always knew. I want your stuff gone by tomorrow."
"Dr. Wilson moves fast!" Kutner says, laughing, but his face goes blank when the Bitch whirls on him. House thinks he sees Taub hand Kutner some money before the elevator doors close again.
"That went pretty well," Wilson says a couple of seconds later. "I'm already packed. Most of my stuff's in the car."
House wants to shake him, but decides that touching Wilson at this moment, while his own sanity hangs in the balance, is unwise. He's not accustomed to feeling... slow. "What the hell is going on?"
"We split up last night. I just wanted to see something I've always dreamt about."
Split up? So unceremoniously? Then again, House is more accustomed to Wilson's divorces, which, as a rule, are a bit more complicated. Things aren't getting any less surreal. House is nervous and drunk on neurochemicals, and he vaguely wonders if he's being fucked with, because he probably deserves it, but it's well into April. He just wants to go home and lie down, and so he hits the button for the ground floor. There's still time to call out sick with intractable diarrhea today. Yes, I've got the fluids under control, he'll say. Yes, 247,643,468 clinic hours. Fine.
"What's that?" he hears himself ask warily.
"Forgot already? I'm hurt," Wilson says, stepping closer again. "This."
And when the elevator doors open on the ground floor and they're still exchanging goofy, imperfect, all-too-real kisses, Wilson's hands tracing electric patterns on his back through his jacket, House turns his head away in an effort to disguise what he would normally term pathological euphoria and says, "Oh. That. Whatever."
Wilson looks like the self-satisfied bastard that House knows he really is. And he looks almost as dazed as House feels. "Where are we going?"
"I am going home to convalesce and work this out," House says. "And probably accumulate clinic hours. Wipe that fucking look off your face! You are welcome to join me at your convenience after you've brought hope and joy to the sick and dying. I'm not helping you carry your shit, though. Crippled."
"Fair enough," Wilson says, lifting his hands in a gesture of surrender. He has the courtesy to be slightly pink in the face.
House gathers himself slowly as he limps toward the exit, ignoring slack-jawed onlookers, Wilson at his side, where he belongs. "If this is all a ploy for you to get a decent night's sleep on my Tempur-Pedic," he continues, trying to strangle his doubts, "I have to tell you that you've made a miscalculation somewhere."
"That wasn't exactly my plan," Wilson replies, smiling, and House finally completely understands how he gets all those women. "But close."
"Never mind, then. Just making sure your intentions are pure. Because one misstep and you're on the couch." He leaves Wilson at the curb and starts toward the Honda.
"Later," Wilson calls after him.
Wilson will probably frighten more people today when he's grinning like a retarded mooncalf than he ever did when he was chronically sleep-deprived and tortured, House figures.
"Wait," he says, spinning a one-eighty on his left foot. He can't resist checking one more time. "Is Tila coming with you?"
Wilson tilts his head and narrows his eyes, his formerly perverted gaze turning clinical. "Who?"
House suppresses a deep sigh of relief. "Forget it. I just wanted you to know she's not invited," he says, hoping his simpering victory over his enemies isn't too evident from his less-gimpy gait, because that would be unsportsmanlike. He about-faces again, tapping his merry way across the pavement.
When he gets home, he puts all the chocolate in the trash. He doesn't need it.
And later, when Wilson arrives, they don't order a pizza.
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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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