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The devil is real, and he’s in expensive leisurewear, leaning against a bright red car at a rest stop in Arizona. “I’ve heard about you,” he tells House.
It’s not the first time he’s heard this, on the road. Three months in and he’s already something of a legend, the traveling healer on the back of a motorbike, presumed to have gathered his medical knowledge not so much from any real training but from years of tending to his dying lover.
“Here we go again,” Wilson mutters, who is alternately amused by the role he’s been cast in - in this part of the country, everyone presumes he’s dying of AIDS, because what else could it be for a man of his age, traveling with another man? - and irritated by it, depending on his energy levels that day.
House sighs. “What’s wrong with you? Don’t lie to me. You’ve got two minutes.” He isn’t impatient on his own behalf, but on Wilson’s. He’ll need to rest up properly before they hit the Grand Canyon.
“I’ll need more than two minutes,” the man says, and it’s only then House gets his first rush of knowing that this is an atypical patient. “But I think you’ll give it to me, Dr House.”
The use of his real name - a dead man’s name - is what makes Wilson groan. For House, it barely registers. He’s more attentive to the vial the guy’s pulled out of his pocket, the label on it, the long chemical name underneath the trademarked logo.
“Get yourself a room,” he says to Wilson. “I’ll find you at breakfast.”
Wilson looks at him. “You sure?”
“Yep.” He glowers at the guy. “Start talking.”
“Not here.” And so they end up inside his car, on plush seats, with the devil chirping along about the weather and the scenery and anything other than the crucial thing.
“Just get to the point,” House snaps impatiently.
“All in good time.”
“I’m done.” But he doesn’t move.
“You’re not done. You want this.” The devil takes out the vial again. “Very experimental, of course. Very risky. But you’ve heard of it.”
Of course he’s heard of it. He’s been waiting for Big Pharma to come up with something that could fix his leg, his pain, for over a decade now. He’s kept a close eye on research, on trials, on anything that might make things a little less unbearable.
This is when he knows who - or what - he's dealing with.
“Or maybe you’ve been on the road too long, Dr House. You might have missed the latest reports. The results we’ve seen with dead muscle… men in wheelchairs walking again, like they’ve been touched by God.”
“You’re not God,” House snaps.
“You don’t believe in God. Of course. But you do, I think, believe in me.”
“You’re an asshole in a tracksuit that cost more than my bike. Start listing symptoms or I’m out of here.”
“In a moment.” His voice is silky as he asks, “Have you told him you’re going to kill yourself after he’s gone?”
The question sears through him. “He doesn’t need to know,” House mumbles.
“You’re lying to him, if you don’t tell him. But he won’t die peacefully, if he knows. Quite the moral dilemma.”
It’s not a moral dilemma. He’ll lie to Wilson as much as he needs to. His conscience is clear on that front. “We’re done here.” And yet he's still frozen in place.
The devil strokes the vial lovingly. “Imagine waking up pain-free,” he says. “Can you imagine that, Dr House? No drugs, no helpful hookers to massage the ache away - can you imagine being free?”
“What do you want from me?” he explodes. “It can’t be a diagnosis. You’re -” He stops short of saying what he genuinely believes, of admitting he knows that this is something beyond the human realm, beyond the scientific, and yet somehow makes perfect sense.
Why wouldn’t the devil exist? Look at the world.
“You believe,” the devil says, and grins. “Excellent. But you’re wrong. I do want a diagnosis. I want you to diagnose Dr Gregory House.”
“Easy. He’s dead.”
“We both know that’s not true.” The devil slides the vial back into his pocket once more, and puts his hand under House’s chin, tilting his face toward him. “Symptoms. Go.”
“Impatience,” House snaps. “Irritation. Wondering why the fuck he’s still listening to you.”
“Anything else?” Smooth, teasing now. His fingers trace over House’s cheekbones. It shouldn’t send anything down his spine, but of course it does.
“Vaguely horny, actually. Any chance of a handjob?” House can see Wilson’s expression in his mind at this, a you’re-coming-onto-Satan look of disbelief; he can almost hear the exasperated sigh of “House!” coming from his lips.
“I think I should leave that for your - companion,” the devil says.
Something clicks inside House. “Oh, tell me this isn’t about - that.”
“Of course it’s about that.” He chuckles. “Isn’t everything? Don’t you know how humans end up mine, and not - His?”
“He doesn’t exist.”
The devil leans in and kisses him lightly on the lips. “Oh, I do like you.”
House takes it as a compliment. “Does this mean the handjob’s back on the table, or is loving Wilson going to get in the way?”
The devil hisses, and sits back in the seat, sulking. “Well, now you’ve ruined it.”
House stares at him. Loving Wilson. It can’t possibly be that simple. “You idiot, ” he says.
“I was sure I’d keep you out here all night,” the devil muses. “Might have even got you to step up those little suicidal plans of yours.”
House shoves his hand into that pocket, retrieves the vial. “Thanks for the meds,” he says cheerfully, opening the door.
“Break a leg,” the devil says pointedly.
“Not going into the leg,” House says, blowing a kiss as he gets out and slams the door behind him.
He’s not too surprised to hear the other door open and shut behind him, and the devil call after him. “Wait! You’re not seriously going to -”
“Can’t hear you!”
But, on account of him being the actual devil, he reappears before House reaches the neon lights of the hotel. “There’s only one dose. You can’t both take it.”
House sighs. “I learned how to count in med school, thanks.”
“On dead muscle, the chances of a positive outcome are eighty-three percent. With a tumor -”
“Do you think I don’t know?” He stares at the devil now, who looks more and more human by the minute. Does this supernatural entity not understand that everything about exciting new wonder drugs is now filtered through a single, Wilson-coloured lens? “Twenty-nine percent. Yeah. I know.”
He can’t quite be sure, because this conversation is exhausting him, but he thinks the devil might be sad, now. “Love above reason, above all else… you’re a fool.”
House recognizes the words, the tone. And he doesn’t know where the gentleness in his own voice comes from - maybe it’s that he sees he is a doctor, here, still, with this creature - as he says, “So be a damn fool.”
“It’ll hurt.”
“Everything hurts.” He limps past, into the hotel. Wilson’s left a key for him at the desk. When House gets up to their room, he’s snoring on the bed, but he stirs slightly when House joins him.
“You help that guy?” Wilson murmurs sleepily.
“No idea.” House waits until Wilson’s unconscious again, and then he maneuvers himself off the bed as unobtrusively as he can. He opens up his private little stash of drugs and equipment, and picks up the syringe he’d imagined using with morphine, for one or both of them, a little down the line.
As he directs the single dose into Wilson’s chest, he wishes. Hopes. An outsider might even call it praying.