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His phone was ringing. He pouted and buried his head under his pillow. It didn't work; his phone was still ringing. With a muffled grunt, House leaned over Wilson – no, Wilson wasn't there. It was after seven, then.
House took a blind guess at who it was – it was too early for caller ID – and mumbled incoherently into the receiver.
"How'd you know it was me?" Wilson's bright morning voice, House decided, was… an acceptable thing to wake up to. He hummed low in his throat, sleepily content and knowing Wilson would get the point. He could practically hear the Indulgent Wilson Smile oozing through the phone with its cuteness.
"I figured I should wake you up," Wilson continued.
"Wottimezit?" House slurred, burrowing deeper into the covers as if to escape from the prospect of getting out of them.
"Uh… eight fifteen."
"S'too early, Jimmy," House whined. It was a quiet groggy whine, though, so it wasn't as Bad News as most of House's other whines.
"You have a patient," Wilson bribed, sing-song, 'ha-ha' style.
"S'too early for those, too." Now it was the Indulgent Wilson Chuckle's turn to come out and play. House didn't smile at that. He didn't.
"Sickness never sleeps," Wilson said, in a deep, jokingly foreboding voice. Then he sighed. "Please come in to work, House. Your team is whining loudly enough for me to hear them through the walls, and Cuddy's getting agitated."
"Oh, let her be, Jimmy," House replied. "She deserves a little stress in her life. What with a baby at home, she's bound to get so little outside of work. I'm doing her a favor."
"Yes, and she appreciates it so much, she's begging me to start bringing you to work with me in the mornings, so you're here early." House groaned in agony at the thought.
"Tell her I said, 'yeah, fuck you, too,'" he grumbled, pulling himself into a sitting position and reaching for his pills. "I'll be there in a few minutes." They hung up in sync.
"Symptoms," House demanded as he limped impressively (as impressively as you can limp, anyway) into the conference room. Foreman immediately listed them.
"Rash, fever, enlarged lymphs, headache, fatigue." House nodded.
"Differential."
"Lupus," said Thirteen, just as quick on the uptake as Foreman. What a perfect match they were.
"Or erysipelas," Taub added. House nodded again.
"Test for 'em, figure out which it is." The three shuffled one after the other out the door past House. "And while you're at it," he called after them. "Figure out why you needed me for that."
House was glad when Wilson picked him up from his office for lunch. He'd been bored since nine o'clock, and he felt too lazy to go pester his best friend (lover) and his cancer patients.
"How's your patient?" Wilson asked as they meandered toward the elevator. House snorted.
"It was lupus."
"Oh." The elevator ride was quieter than usual, as the two of them thought over the anomaly that was one of House's patients actually having lupus. In the lunch room they sat along the wall and flirted. House snatched a fry.
"House! Why don't you ever get your own?" Wilson slapped House's hand away playfully, with a hidden indulgent Wilson smile. Two giggling female doctors passed them, whispering.
"Do you think they'll ever notice all that sexual tension between them?" one asked the other, thinking she was being discreet when really she wasn't. The other giggled.
"No." House snatched another fry. He smirked over at his friend (lover).
"Do you think they'll ever notice we've already noticed?" he murmured, using his Sexy Voice even thought he wasn't supposed to at work. It wasn't as if he'd never done it before, usually he used it every time he called Wilson a name for screwing with him.
"House!" Wilson scolded, with a small blush and a small smile. But then he smirked, too. "No," he answered, also using his Sexy Voice. House snatched another fry.
Sometimes House wished he was as selfish as most people thought he was. He was so bored, waiting for Wilson until five. Five! Actually, he only waited until four, but still. It was an accomplishment. He didn't directly bother his friend (lover) all day!
So at four when he barged into Wilson's office to find him slaving over paperwork and without any patients to speak of, House suggested they go home early and have massive amounts of hot sweaty sex. A bubble of disappointment sparked when Wilson sighed, dropped his pen, and rubbed his eyes.
"Not tonight, House," the tired oncologist muttered. "My back is killing me." House pouted pathetically, widening his bright blue eyes and forcing them to tear up for extra measure. "Killing me," Wilson repeated deadpan. Well, that put an end to that. If the puppy-dog eyes didn't work, nothing would.
"Okay." House shuffled his good leg a little and dug his cane into the floor. "Well, I'm gonna go home early, 'kay?" Wilson nodded and picked his pen back up, turning back to his papers. "Maybe better posture would help," House said by way of farewell. Wilson rolled his eyes like usual, but the Indulgent Wilson Smile failed to make an appearance. His back really was hurting.
His phone was ringing. He pouted and buried his head under his pillow. It didn't work; his phone was still ringing. With a muffled grunt, House leaned over Wilson and grabbed the offending devise off the night table.
"Huh?" he grunted at it.
"Hey, House. Is Wilson with you?" It was Foreman. House groggily sat up halfway.
"Why?" Question not answer, not a confirmation, not a denial. The perfect sidestep.
"A patient's asking after him. Apparently they had a consult meeting half an hour ago."
"Half an hour ago?" House's eyes widened. Wilson was never that late. "I'll call you back." He snapped the phone shut and turned to his bed mate. "J –"
"I know," Wilson groaned. "I'm not going in." House just stared at his lover (friend), shocked beyond words, for once, momentarily.
"Why?" The only reply House got was a whimper and a snuggle. He rolled his eyes. "Your back?" Wilson nodded, and then burrowed his head into House's undershirt-clad stomach. House sighed, running his phone-less hand through Wilson's fluffy bed-hair. "You realize I can't stay here with you, right?"
"Since when do you care about going to work? Call in sick." House chuckled (he never admitted it to anyone else, and Wilson never told, so it was okay to do every once in a while), and wriggled his way – somewhat painfully because of his leg – out from under his lover (friend) and popped a pill. Limping his way into the bathroom, House redialed Foreman.
"Hello?"
"He's not coming in."
"What, on such short notice?" A suspicious and dramatic pause. "What'd you do to him?"
"What makes you think I did it?" House demanded with faux affront. "I'm not evil if that's what you're thinking, Dr. Foreman."
"Uh-huh." Foreman sounded doubtful. "Are you coming in?"
"Of course!" Again with the over-acted indignation. "Why ever would I not?"
"Right. How long?" House popped another pill before maneuvering into his jeans.
"'Bout half an hour."
"That early? House, what are you up to?" House hung up with a loud snap.
"Mid-thirties male, debilitating lower back pain. Go." House demanded as he limped less impressively than yesterday into the conference room.
"Herniated disc," Foreman popped out. "Sciatica, degenerative disc disease. It could be anything."
"Viral or bacterial prostatitis." Thirteen continued the list. "Chlamydia –" ("Better not be," House growled under his breath.) "– Copper toxicity. What other symptoms are there?"
"Could be kidney cancer," Taub put in.
"That would be ironic," House muttered, and limped out again.
"Herniated disc, Sciatica, degenerative disc disease, viral or bacterial prostatitis, Chlamydia, Copper toxicity, kidney cancer." House limped noisily into his and Wilson's apartment, dropping his keys and popping a pill.
"What are diseases that cause lower extremity pain or discomfort?" Wilson guessed, scratching his thigh as he lounged farther into the cushions of the couch, remote in one hand and a beer on the coffee table.
"Yup," House plopped down roughly on the couch next to Wilson and stole the remote, flipping away from whatever the oncologist was watching without glancing at it. "Lower back, mostly. If it's Chlamydia, you're dead, just so you know."
"House, I'm not sick," said Wilson, exasperated. "I probably just slept on it wrong after being on my feet or bent over a desk all week." House nodded, not believing it for a second, flipping through channels much too fast to see what he was skipping past. Wilson shifted uncomfortably, rubbing the back of his neck, sliding a hand up and down his thigh.
"Do you have Chlamydia?" House settled on a reality show he knew Wilson would probably find annoying.
"Not unless I got it from you. Which only begs the question, 'where did you get it?'"
"House, I don't have Chlamydia. I think I would have noticed by now. And besides, if you don't, I don't. You're the only person I've slept with in almost three years."
"Honored, I'm sure." He really was, but he wasn't about to say that in a way that showed he meant it. Gregory House did not tell people he was thrilled to be with them. Unless he was being sarcastic.
Wilson wiggled deeper into the cushions again, flinching, hissing, and hugging his sides. House froze, then slowly turned to look at his lover, calculating look in place. Wilson leaned away from him cautiously.
"What?" Deftly and with grace, speed, and precision that no one ever expected of him (the morons), House poked Wilson gently in the side, between his hip and his ribs, in the general area of the love-handle.
"Ow, House!" House sat up straighter, his calculating look turning to a diagnostic one, and he looked at Wilson down his nose like he was a specimen for examination under a microscope.
"Lower back and side pain," he said. Wilson raised a condescending eyebrow.
"Yes, and exasperation. Is that a symptom, too?" House thoughtfully moved his mouth over to one side of his face, wrinkling up his cheek.
"Don't think so," he muttered, looking Wilson over, searching for another clue. "You're always exasperated."
"I always have lower back pain!" House ignored him, instead thinking up easy, here-and-now tests that Wilson couldn't really prevent him from doing. Ah, there was an idea! House grabbed Wilson on either side of his face, leaned forward, and pressed a kiss against his forehead.
"House, what – ?"
"You have a fever!" House proclaimed triumphantly. "Which means you're sick."
"It could just mean I'm too hot," Wilson argued with half a heart, self-consciously scratching his thigh and pouting. House narrowed his eyes.
"Take off your pants," he demanded. Wilson looked at him incredulously.
"You just declared me sick, and now you want sex?" House glared at him, scowling.
"No. I want to see what's making you itch."
"Nothing's making me itch except you, House." But he got up and (gingerly) pulled of his pants anyway. House gestured for him to remove the underwear, too, and after a second of indignant glaring, Wilson slipped out of those as well.
House got all up in his personal space (not that that was unusual) and figuratively poked and prodded, finally finding a small rash on the inside of Wilson's upper thighs that looked like it could've come from wearing too-small underwear or something. He narrowed his eyes at it. Not wet, but not overly dry. Raised bumps, but it didn't look like there was any pus. They'd do a test. But first they'd have to think about it. This was Wilson, after all. Caution was a requisite here where it wasn't with other patients.
House was early to work. He got there only fifteen minutes after Taub.
House limped into the conference room noisily but not impressively. He immediately set a course for the white board and began writing. When he was done he stepped away, and waited. When nothing was forthcoming, he looked pointedly at his fellows, then pointedly at the white board and said, "Go."
"Back pain, side pain, fever," Foreman read. "Could be a kidney problem. Any urinary symptoms?"
"Are there any urinary symptoms up there?" House asked with a roll of the eyes.
"No."
"Then… no." House really did love being condescending, but it wasn't quite as fun when they asked for it like that.
"Could also be pelvic bone-marrow infection or inflammation. Lupus, juvenile diabetes. We still need to know more symptoms," Thirteen provided.
"It could still be prostatitis or Chlamydia, too. Or maybe a bladder infection. Has the patient been excessively sexually active recently?" Taub wondered. House held up a finger as he pulled out his cell phone, leaning on his cane with his elbow.
"Hang on, lemme ask." The phone rang four times before Wilson picked up. "Have you been excessively sexually active recently?"
"House, I told you I didn't cheat on you."
"Is that a yes or a no?" The fellows raised their collective eyebrow.
"You've had all the sex I've had. Do you think it's excessive?"
"That's a no. 'Kay, bye." The fellows all gave each other significant looks, wondering who House would say goodbye to instead of just hanging up.
"Wait, House, are you having your team diagnose me?" House snapped the phone shut and turned back to the ducklings, Taub in particular. "That's a no," he repeated.
"Okay, then it's probably not Chlamydia, and he would've had to have gotten prostatitis or a bladder or kidney infection some other way," concluded Foreman decisively.
"Grave's disease causes pretibial myxedema," Thirteen continued. "How itchy is the rash?"
"Relatively mild," House replied. "But it keeps getting worse."
"Could be eczema, we should get a history and look for recent triggers. We're not diagnosing you, are we?" said Taub, giving House a sideways suspicious look.
"Do I look like I'm in my mid-thirties to you?"
"Ah, no, definitely not."
"Then you're definitely not diagnosing me. Keep going. Gimme everything you got."
"Cushing's could cause the rash, or Conn's disease," Thirteen mumbled.
"Cystic fibrosis could, too. Hemochromatosis…" Foreman branched off for her, then trailed off into thoughtfulness.
"I still think it's kidney cancer. Wait, when did the itch start, and how bad is it now?"
"About twenty-four hours after the back pain. Just beginning to get annoying." The three lapsed into silence, and House decided that while they were scratching their heads, he'd go figure out how to get Wilson in to do some tests.
His phone was ringing. No, that was someone else's phone. Wilson's phone. Shut up, Wilson's phone, I'm trying to sleep. Didn't work. Damn.
"House." Wilson's voice was scratchy and weak, and House was immediately awake. "House, will you get that, please?" House grabbed the chirping device flipped it open – "He'll call you back." – snapped it closed.
"Is it worse?" Wilson wasn't facing him, and the other doctor didn't move to look at him, but House saw him nod, just barely, and then flinch.
"Ow," the oncologist whispered. House chewed the inside of his lip in thought. Obviously this was more serious than House had originally presumed. Maybe it was kidney cancer. House cringed at the thought, hating idea and hating even more how much it terrified him.
"I have to pee," Wilson croaked, still without moving at all.
"Do you need help?" House asked. He really had no idea what to do when someone else was in pain. Well, someone else that he actually gave a damn about. And he was kind of freaking out. This was Wilson. Wilson was hurting. It was an unacceptable situation to House, so as a result things weren't registering correctly.
"Just to get up," mumbled Wilson, with obvious effort and pain lacing his voice. House gritted his teeth as he helped Wilson up, the role reversal somewhat confusing to both of them. Whatever was doing this to Wilson had better be scared, because House was coming after it with a vengeance now. He was going to find it, and he was going to kill it dead.
House set Wilson up in front of the TV, propped on dozens of fluffy pillows saved from Wilson's various marriages. He gave Wilson plenty of beer from the fridge, lined up and easy to reach.
"Here, have some Vicodin," House even offered. Wilson shook his head. "Why not? You're always saying I should take less. Help a guy out here, it's the least you could do." With a snort that was almost a laugh but turned into a grimace at the last second, Wilson took a few pills from House's hand. House handed Wilson the remote, and a book for when there was nothing on. Then he left, riding his bike to the hospital.
Today he was ten minutes before Taub. And he entered the conference room neither impressively nor noisily.
He quickly (and with worse handwriting than usual) wrote 'slight urinary burning' on the board and added 'severe' in front of 'back pain.' He spun around on his heel and the rubber end of his cane and raised a challenging eyebrow at his team.
"That definitely points to a kidney or bladder problem," Thirteen pointed out.
"Could still be Chlamydia, though, too," Taub contradicted.
"Which, when gone untreated, can affect the kidneys and bladder," Thirteen replied heatedly. "And I thought you were sticking with kidney cancer?"
"Well, that could be it, too."
"Congratulations! You've reverted back to being pre-meds! We don't want to know what it could be, we want to know what it is." House didn't quite understand why he was so upset. They did this all the time. This was white board time, this was how they figured it all out. But it was different this time. They needed to know now. Wilson was in pain, and beer and Vicodin could only do so much, House knew that from personal experience.
"We can't do that without taking some tests, House. We need to actually see the patient." House cursed and began to pace. It hurt his leg like a motherfucker, but he gritted his teeth and ignored it. He was used to pain, he could deal with it. But Wilson… Wilson couldn't handle this.
"If he's immobile, we could go to him." Thirteen's voice was gentle, as if she suspected House might be touchy on the subject of mobility and she was walking on eggshells just in case. But… Going there…
That would out them.
"No." House paced faster. They needed to do tests. Wilson was already painfully bedridden. They couldn't go to him. What the fuck were they going to do, then? "I'll figure out a way to get him here."
They spent hours like that. House paced while Foreman and Thirteen asked him questions to get 'the patient's' history, and a better grasp on his symptoms. Taub wrote down all the possible diseases, syndromes, and disorders the current symptoms added up to, and a description of them all.
At around eleven o'clock, there was a shuffle at the door and a sweaty, grayish-pale, limping Wilson appeared in the doorway of the conference room. The other four doctors in the room turned, and gaped at him. He listlessly gestured to the white board.
"Fev'r induced h'lucinations," he mumbled. With a sharply raised eyebrow, Foreman wrote it down.
"Did you drive here, you crazy son of a bitch?" House demanded of his friend (lover) incredulously. "What the fuck were you thinking? Were you thinking?"
"Nehsomuch, no," Wilson slurred, his upper lip shining. "My brains're kinda boiling." House swore again and limped over to Wilson, helping the oncologist sit down at the table, over which the fevered doctor collapsed onto his arms.
"You probably shouldn't slouch with back problems," House suggested uselessly. All he got in reply was a lot of unintelligible (and pathetic) whining. He sighed, and turned to his team. "Well. Get a gurney and do your tests."
"Which ones?" Thirteen asked.
"Everything," House told her. "RAST. Take a scraping, check for bugs and fungi. And do a Patch to make sure he's not having an allergic reaction. Do a skin biopsy, look for everything. Take all the cultures, and check his Ig E and gamma globulin levels. Get an MRI, check for tumors, shadows, light patches, anything. And do it quick." He headed toward the door.
"Where are you going?" Foreman demanded.
"To pay for lunch," House answered, without looking back.
In the elevator, when he'd stopped moving, House realized his back hurt.
The next several hours were spent testing, eating, and (after the blood tests were done) administering – or taking, in Wilson and House's cases – pain meds. A few hours more, and Thirteen, Taub, and Foreman traipsed into Wilson's spiffy new hospital room bearing result papers and charts.
"He's pyelonephritis, cystitis, and prostatitis positive, but everything else came back negative," Thirteen informed the two impatiently waiting doctors.
"Pyelonephritis and…" House repeated.
"Yes, and."
"And there were a few pretty inconsequential shadows inside the kidneys on the MRI," said Foreman. "Probably just clusters of bacteria from the pyelonephritis showing up." House nodded and went back to ignoring them, but looked up again when a heavy silence fell.
"And… There were traces of Vicodin… in his blood…" Taub muttered uncomfortably. House raised his eyebrow and one side of his mouth in a smirk. Wilson, miserable and drugged up though he was, glared in righteous anger.
"Just because you gave me some doesn't mean I took it."
"Your blood tells a different story," House argued smugly. With an indignant pout, Wilson (grunting slightly in pain) reached over to his hospital-bedside table, grabbed his pants, and dug into his pocket, pulling out a handful of white pills.
"Count them," he said. "I'm sure you know exactly how many you gave me." House counted, proving… Wilson right. The oncologist hadn't taken any of House's Vicodin. Stumped, House turned back to Taub.
"What were the levels?"
"At least two pills worth." House chewed the inside of his cheek, trying to ignore the fact that he felt guilty and resisting the urge to ashamedly rub the back of his neck. He couldn't help scuffling his foot a little, though.
"I think – whatever you've got – I think I gave it to you," he told Wilson quietly. Wilson gave him one of those 'House-are-you-high-again-you're-talking-nonsense' looks, the one that wrinkled up his nose and raised one eyebrow while smooshing the other down on top of his eye.
"Why?" he demanded, but then his face smoothed out again. Epiphany. "Wait. House, are you having symptoms?" House shifted… well, shiftily.
"It's just back pain," he mumbled. "It's probably a coincidence."
"You don't believe in coincidences," Wilson pointed out. House was about to protest, when he was distracted by a cool, gentle hand on his forehead.
"You have a fever," Thirteen proclaimed softly. "That means one of two things – you were a carrier but then your body couldn't take any more, or you got it from Wilson. Either way it's contagious, and until we figure out how you managed to spread a drug like it was a pathogen…" She trailed off.
"We're going to have to quarantine you two," Foreman finished. Aw, finishing each other's sentences. How cute.
"Do all the tests you did on him on me before you do that, just in case it is a coincidence." House really hoped it was. He was pretty sure he'd given this thing to Wilson, not the other way around.
House tested positive for prostatitis, but not cystitis or pyelonephritis, which told them the disease was a progressive and a travelling one. And his Vicodin levels were higher than they should've been, even taking into account his overuse and long-term addiction.
So now, House was in one big glass room with nothing but a teeny little off-shoot bathroom (toilet and sink only, and a door that just barely closed) and a hospital-bed for when his pain got as bad as Wilson's. Wilson was in an identical glass room right next to Houses, already in his bed, with three extra pillows so that he could sit up.
Meanwhile, Foreman and Cuddy took turns watching their little glass rooms. Taub and Thirteen had gone tattling to Chase and Cameron (who couldn't really be called Cameron anymore, but everyone did it anyway), and now those two were working on House and Wilson's case too. So, Foreman and Cuddy took hour long shifts annoying the two quarantined doctors, Taub and Thirteen paced around the conference room in front of the white board and bouncing markers off their chins, Chase bit his lip and pulled his hair, and Cameron took a closer look at House and Wilson's blood.
"Robert!" Chase looked up from his worrying at the sound of his wife's distressed voice calling him. Cameron came rushing over to where he was sitting, her lab coat flying helter-skelter behind her and her blonde hair escaping mutinously from her bun. She skidded to a halt, crouching and scattering papers over his knees.
"Look at what I just found!" Chase nervously picked up the charts and microscope prints Cameron had strewn across his lap, looked them over, looked again, and narrowed his eyes. Chase's mouth fell open, when he realized he really was seeing what he thought he was.
"Oh my God," he hissed.
"Do you think we can fix it?" Cameron asked him, her huge brown, watery eyes begging him to say yes. Chase shook his head.
"I don't know."
Wilson scratched his thighs madly, glad that at least the itch was somewhere he could reach without having to bend at all.
"Wilson, stop scratching," House's deep voice told him through the glass. "It's not going to help at all, the itch is coming from whatever's causing all this inside not an external irritant." Wilson ignored him, scratching harder, trying to get some relief.
"It's driving me insane, House!" he snapped, feeling his nails dig painfully into his skin, but still itching, still scratching.
"Don't pay attention to it," House suggested. "Pay attention to the morphine." Wilson gritted his teeth and put his arms above his head, digging his now bloody finger nails into his scalp and pulling his hair in frustration, trying not to twitch.
Cameron rushed around, showing her charts to Cuddy, Foreman, Taub, and Thirteen in turn. Chase rushed around, asking every doctor he could find with more experience than them 'what happens when' questions. Husband and wife met back up on the second floor, in front of the elevator.
"They all said what you said," Cameron told Chase. "Did you find anything useful?" Chase shook his head.
"Nobody had anything for us."
House had never made a habit of begging to die. He was always careful what he wished for. It wasn't that he believed anything he wished for would come true, but there were psychological cases where a person thought they had what they wanted. So, all in all, this was only the second instance in House's life that he wanted death.
His back hurt beyond words, his leg hurt worse. It hurt to pee, it hurt to hold it. His thighs itched so bad it was like nails on a chalkboard, directly in his ear. Or like someone poking him in the brain. Either one.
With eyes clouded with pain, House watched helplessly as Wilson vomited off the side of his bed and then curled up into a ball and shivered.
It hurt to be helpless. It hurt to feel guilty. It hurt to be separated from the one person he couldn't live without, even if it was only a Plexiglas wall that divided them. It hurt to see Wilson suffer. It hurt to be in so much pain.
House had never felt so horrible in his life.
Cameron, Chase, and Foreman paced back and forth in the conference room by House's office while Taub and Thirteen stared helplessly at the unchanged white board. Not a single doctor in PPTH had had any possible cure for 'hypothetical disease A' and, according to Foreman and Cuddy's observations and calculations, they were running out of time to find a fix before House and Wilson's bodies gave up on fighting.
"What if we just give them all of the trachomatis antibiotics?"
"All of them?" Foreman demanded. "Are you crazy? They'd overdose! Total system fail."
"Okay, alright. Foreman, calm down. Robert, quit being stupid. Let's just… There's gotta be something we can do. They can't just die," Cameron said decisively, gesturing with her hands, then running them through her hair (which had aspired from escaping the bun strand by strand, and staged a mass breakout).
The three went back to pacing. Cameron folded her arms beneath her breasts, Foreman rubbed his soul patch with the back of his forefinger, and Chase ran his hands through his hair. And they paced.
House refused to lie down in the bed. He leaned against the Plexiglas closest to their watchers instead. He started out at slightly less than his normal height, but now he was slumped so low he only reached about Cuddy's waist. The rate he sank, and the fever making him sweat buckets, gave the illusion that he was melting.
House almost wished he was.
The fever induced hallucinations were starting. Plain old everyday delirium came first. Taub and Thirteen outside his hell talking to Cuddy sounded like a swarm of bees, and then like lava-lamp bubbles. The glass gained a green tint, then a pink one, then blue, purple, red, brown, yellow, back to clear. Up was down and down was up. Vertigo, nausea, heat. Too much.
He hurt all over. He itched all over (even though the rash was still focal to the inner thighs, he'd checked). He was hot all over. He could practically hear his body systems succumbing to the fever and beginning to shut down, like an electrical machine that had been on and in one place for too long.
It was when his dad showed up that House really decided they were figuring this thing out too slow.
"Look at you," John spat in disgust. "Slouching like you're a nobody. Stand up! You look like a failure." He paused, then glared. "You are a failure, aren't you? You can't even find a cure to your own disease."
"What the hell is this?" House shouted through the Plexiglas, making Taub, Thirteen, and Cuddy jump. "You're doctors, figure it out!"
"You're a doctor too, you figure out what it is," Taub shouted back. Apparently House had ruffled his feathers a little. But House didn't answer Taub, not really. He answered his dad.
"I've got it, that means I'm exempt." Wilson pulled his blankets closer, watery eyes staring ahead blankly.
"What if." Cameron cut herself off, stopped pacing, and picked up a marker.
"What if?" Foreman repeated. "What if what?" Cameron chewed on her lip a bit before writing as she spoke.
"If acetaminophen-hydrocodone plus trachomatis equals whatever it is that they've got, shouldn't something else plus a trachomatis antibiotic equal the cure to it?" Cameron's loopy, cursive handwriting contrasted almost artistically with House's chicken scratch, but none of the doctors paid it heed.
"It's a theory," Chase said slowly. "We'd have to make sure the drugs didn't react so they did exactly what they were supposed to and nothing more or less…"
"And what's our 'something else' going to be in this equation," Foreman asked, arms folded, skeptical look in place. There were a few moments of silence in which Cameron and Chase thought hard, but then Cameron snapped her fingers.
"Narcan! Narcan should work. Right?"
Hot.
Cold.
Burning.
Freezing.
Heatstroke.
Frostbite.
House's body couldn't make up its mind about exactly what end of the temperature spectrum it wanted to die at. He hoped a decision wasn't necessary for the end result.
For the first time since he'd been expelled from his second med school, House prayed to God. He prayed for it to stop. In any way. Even death. Especially death. Death would be two birds with one stone – no sickness, and no leg pain. No nothing. Or maybe something. Maybe heaven. And Wilson.
But nothing would be great too.
Foreman did math, Cameron thought science, and Chase measured doses. Nobody told Cuddy. They suspected that – even with both House and Wilson on the line – she would disapprove and make things difficult.
Foreman's head was covered, Cameron's hair was back up, and they all wore face masks and gloves and goggles.
Chase held things, handed things, took things, recorded things. Foreman told things, measured things, directed things. Cameron mixed things, studied things, rated things.
Eventually they managed to find a relatively non-reactive balance of narcan and azithromycin.
Cuddy tried not to be suspicious or worried when Foreman didn't show up to relieve her at the hour.
Cuddy stood, shocked, as Foreman, Cameron, and Chase came barreling toward her, decked out in full body gear used to avoid infection in quarantined areas. They rushed right past her without an explanation despite her protests, and charged into Wilson's room first. The oncologist slowly forced his eyes to open.
"This is going to hurt like hell, Dr. Wilson," Cameron told him, her voice weird through her mask. "But you only have to do it twice, and we're hoping it'll make you better." Wilson tried to say, "You don't have to talk to me like I'm just a patient, Dr. Cameron," but it came out more like, "Dun hafuh tukuhmeyike j'patient, derkamrin."
"Okay, Dr. Wilson," she said. He gave up and closed his eyes again. It was testament to how completely awful he felt that he didn't open them again or even flinch when a needle was stabbed into his left buttock.
"House's turn," Foreman muttered, and they all grimaced in fear, squared their jaws in determination.
Improvement was slow, but it was there. Exactly twenty-four hours after the first dose, the second was administered. House did his himself this time, though all other doctors present were reluctant to let him do so. They were lucky only two doses did it. If it hadn't, they would've had to go back to the drawing board so as not to overdose the two sick, valued doctors.
About three days after Cameron looked at their blood (a little longer for House, because of his withdrawal from Vicodin), the 'patients' were let out of quarantine, permitted a shower, a shave (in Wilson's case), and a trip out into the world for good food.
When everyone was assembled back in the Diagnostics conference room, House demanded an explanation. What did they have? What had they been given? And why the hell wasn't his Vicodin doing a damn thing? Nervously, Cameron cleared her throat.
"I took a closer look at your blood samples," she told them. "And found a mutated bacteria strand."
"And?" Cameron handed over the microscope photos, and House squinted at them. "The bacteria reacted with, what is that – some sort of man-made chemical mixture?"
"You of all people should recognize those chemicals together," Chase muttered. House squinted again.
"Vicodin." Foreman nodded.
"And Chlamydia. What we're thinking is, somehow some of House's sweat or skin or something got inside Wilson's system. The Vicodin in it then reacted with chlamydiatrachomatis bacteria that Wilson was carrying, and they mutated together."
House and Wilson gaped in horrified shock for what seemed like forever, before Wilson burst into hysterical laughter.
Their own personal STD.
"We gave you a combo of narcan and azithromycin. That's why Vicodin isn't working for you – the narcan still in your system is absorbing it. We had planned on trying to give you a little methadone to help with withdrawal when we realized that Vicodin played a part in this, but we didn't know how it would react with the narcan and azithromycin. And you were already having all the symptoms anyway." Chase shrugged at the end of his speech, and House glared at him.
"Well, that's all fine and well, but my fucking leg hurts!" Cameron jumped at his shout, and then handed a bottle across the table. House grabbed it, threw his empty Vicodin bottle at her, and took three of whatever she'd given him.
"What is it?" he asked. Cameron, with a disapproving look, answered, "Tramadol." House nodded, and then laid his head down on the conference table to wait for the meds to kick in.
"So what are we calling this thing?" Wilson asked Cameron, while House slept at his desk. Cameron looked pointedly toward the white board. Their symptoms were listed in House's handwriting, and below that was:
Vicodin + Chlamydia = House + Wilson Syndrome
? + antibiotic = cure
"I don't think so," Wilson said. Chase, Foreman, Taub, and Thirteen all grinned at him, while Cameron looked on apologetically.
"You don't get to decide these things, Wilson," Foreman sneered. "You got the disease, you didn't discover it."
"Yeah, yeah," Wilson muttered. "Very funny." When nobody stopped grinning, or looked away, or brought up another subject, he started getting nervous. "You're not actually going to name it that, are you?"
House and Wilson attended a seminar and gave speeches about the disease's symptoms (but not how it came about), and were given small awards for their 'medical diligence' whatever that was. Cameron got the credit for discovering the disease, and Chase and Foreman got credit for the cure (which they named narcozithodone). Taub and Thirteen also got an award for 'medical diligence' and Cuddy was commended on her excellent doctors.
The disease – predictably – was not called House Plus Wilson Syndrome, but Cameron's Disorder (even though she wasn't really Cameron anymore).
House was glad they weren't giving out an award for inventing Cameron's. He was pretty sure he and Wilson had had enough attention already.
Cuddy gave them time off to recover. The first thing they did was go home had have massive amounts of hot sweaty sex, despite having an STD all their own. It didn't matter, they wanted to make each other feel good, and this was the easiest, quickest, most instant-gratification-full option they had at their disposal.
They fell asleep tangled together, fevered but in a good way.
His phone was ringing. Annoyed, House grabbed it off the bedside table with more force than necessary.
"Gaaahh," he groaned into the receiver.
"House, our leave is over. Come in to work." House smiled. Wilson's bright morning voice, he decided, was a brilliant thing to wake up to.