Chapter Text
The cosmically wretched overlap of House’s brush with mono with husband number two ousting Wilson from the homestead culminates in House jerking awake on his couch at 8:13 in the evening, shirt plastered to his back with sweat and the patient shrieks of the doorbell going tachycardic through the apartment. When several minutes of ignoring the noise doesn’t result in whoever it is taking mercy and picking the lock like a compassionate citizen, House is finally forced to drag himself up from the wet spot he’s greased into the couch and stump over to the door to receive the burglar himself.
The bell is still shooting off at a textbook 120 bpm when House manages to jerk at the lock until it gives, and he revises his expectations from the forty thieves come to chalk the cripple’s door to Cameron with boy-girl in her system and a body — House’s professional guess is Foreman’s, with a copy of the offending article stuffed ritualistically down his throat — to dump. So it’s to House’s mild surprise that he finds himself standing face-to-face with Wilson, who squints at House over the top of the glasses she only puts on when she’s sure nobody she’s interested in inveigling herself with sexually is around in a two-block radius.
“You have a key,” House croaks vengefully, because this has been true for six years now.
“I didn’t want to impose,” Wilson says dutifully, even as her eyes widen as they take him in. “You look like shit,” she adds, which House thinks is possibly something only Wilson can manage to make sound solicitous.
“It’s this little something called Epstein–Barr,” House tries to wit, but he’s interrupted by a fit of dry coughing that sends him staggering against the doorframe. Distantly, House hears something heavy hit the floor and then the sweep of air as the front door shuts on its hinges, and he has three seconds to think that Wilson has finally done everybody else sane a favor and left him to die when suddenly, Wilson reappears at his side, rubbing warm circles into the damp back of House’s t-shirt until the rattling in his chest slowly dies down.
House opens his mouth to make a deeply tasteless joke about hands-on healing when Wilson says patiently, “House, please, for once in your life, do yourself a favor and shut up.” House pauses, considers this, and then obediently closes his mouth with a click.
Wilson sighs, but then moves closer as she reaches House’s arm over her shoulders, and House basks half-feverishly in triumphant imaginings of coughing germs on Dr. Cuddy’s pillows as he recounts this latest episode of Dr. Wilson’s tender concern for Dr. House over the PA system until Wilson bluntly puts her foot through that particular stained-glass narrative by unceremoniously dumping House on his bed.
“Jesus,” House hisses as Wilson pokes at his ribs until he’s arranged to her satisfaction under the covers. Through the bilious haze of the fever, House hears Wilson pad into the living room before she comes back dragging something behind her, and his hopes of seeing Foreman’s body stuffed into a sack and schlepped around by an attractive woman are dashed for the second time that day when he blearily opens his eyes to find Wilson rummaging inside a ratty suitcase she’s unzipped on the floor.
“You idiot,” House rasps. “You told him.”
Wilson’s ear turns pink. From somewhere beyond the clammy pale of the fever, House’s heart gives a suspiciously botulinial twitch.
“He told me,” Wilson says, as she rifles through a stack of t-shirts House remembers helping her pick out of the rosebushes after Bonnie, weeping, had emptied them drawer by drawer into the lesbian garden she’d been cultivating while Wilson had been off rediscovering dick with one of the — oh irony of ironies — male nurses from radiology. “Things have been crappy at home lately. I figured I wasn’t spending enough time there. I figured…” Wilson trails off as she holds up a bottle of Arm and Hammer, and when House opens his eyes next, she’s watching him patiently with a tray — did House own trays? — of something ginger and steaming balanced expectantly in her hands.
Instead of cooperating, House croaks:
“You figured?”
Wilson gives him an unimpressed look. “Turns out you’re right — it’s always about sex. He’s been having an affair.”
Today, Wilson’s dressed down in worn flare jeans and a dark brown polo shirt open at the neck, her hair — bent softly in the middle from the tie she puts around it whenever she visits one of her bald, dying waifs — falling around the collar in brown waves. It’s one of those gestures that House had at first thought naive, then surely masturbatory, because nobody with a passing grade in Capitalism Versus Dying Children Medicine could be that earnest without getting off on their own schtick. Now, after eight years and one memorable encounter with Wilson’s actual Japanese cordless, House simply regards it as part and parcel of Jennifer Wilson: kind because kind, here because here, loving because — and lesser men than House have been bowled over by this mystery, the mystery that is Wilson — it is in her to love, and for no other reason.
Wilson loves all her patients the way she loves her ex-husbands and ex-wife and everybody else she’s ever let into her linens: easily and without expectation of reward. But whereas Wilson’s ability to adore her patients without burdening them with the mercenary expectation that they will repay her commitment by surviving and staying makes her an excellent and well-loved oncologist, House finds that people who are not cancer patients often want things expected of them, to be reassured of their irreplaceability by being made — put a ring on — to stay.
And House surmises that Wilson’s particular kind of love — warm, sincere, yet utterly unpossessive — must make lesser people afraid, to be given so much of something precious without being asked to mortgage something like a ring, a mortgage, two children, and shared rooms at a San Tan Valley retirement community in return. It’s one of the reasons he sneers at the idea of making trigger finger jokes to Wilson. Not because they’re low hanging fruit, which has never stopped House from doing anything ever, but because he suspects the real issue lies not with Wilson but her partners-in-copulation, who’ve never seen Wilson cry to an egg timer before stepping out to meet her next patient with a smile, who don’t know that loss — for better and for worse — is something Wilson interacts with in a way yet unknown to House’s science, like a rare stress protein that endures where it should winkle and deform.
Fortunately for the pair of them, House’s default mode of engaging with the world is exploitation of those weak enough to be exploited. So after Wilson makes him drink the tea and hobbles him to the toilet to wash out his throat with baking soda water and finally digs out a worn Breast Cancer Awareness Month blanket from a corner of her suitcase to tuck over House for the fever, he feels no qualms at all about croaking at her, “You’ll have to go to a hotel — I vomited on the couch.”
Wilson just frowns at him, looking worried. “You threw up? That’s not usual for mono — did you mix any corticosteroids with the Vicodin?”
“Oh, tons,” House wheezes back as glibly as he can. “Cleaned out the entire cabinet. Cuddy’s put out a premium on my head for their recovery.”
“You mean she’s raised the premium,” Wilson says mildly, but she sounds relieved, anyway, which makes House feel uneasy in the gut in a way that has nothing to do with the virus that’s crawled up his arteries. Before he can dwell on it, however, there’s a brief press of something cool against his forehead that House recognises only belatedly is the back of Wilson’s hand, and after a moment, Wilson says, “All right — try to sleep. I’m going to get somebody from the hospital to bring over some Naprelan.”
House glowers at her as best he can while his head feels like it’s being simmered open. The healing mental image of Wilson bored and alone in an overpriced hotel room, watching herself to sleep on her traditional post-divorce diet of the original Sabrina and karaoke-sized Funyuns, does its best to console him.
“You’re taking this sudden revelation rather well,” he snips meanly.
“Cuddy told me you were sick,” Wilson says.
House scowls reflexively. “Interferess.”
Wilson just smiles at him, easy. “You not stopping by to steal my lunch also helped.”
“By which you mean you had that mentorship lunch with Cameron after all,” House coughs disgustedly. “And here I thought if you were going to seduce anyone into lesbianism, it’d be Cuddy.”
Rolling her eyes, Wilson says, “I was going to come over earlier, but then I thought I’d swing by the house, first, to let Julian know I was going to check up on my dying colleague and make sure he hadn’t fallen asleep on his bum leg.” She makes a rueful face. “And then this happens.”
“Fascinating,” House croaks, and finally lets his eyes slide shut at the behest of whatever laudanum adjacent that Wilson had doused him with in between dumping him on the wrong side of the bed and forcing hot fluids down his throat. “Really riveting story, Jimmy. You can tell the rest of it to the hookers at Four Seasons. They’ll love it.”
Wilson yawns. “I’m sure they will,” she says. And then, instead of leaving, she opens her suitcase again.
“What are you doing,” House hisses in alarm as Wilson squirms into shorts and an overlarge t-shirt before burrowing under the covers that she’d denied House on account of his ‘102 degree fever’ and ‘dehydration can kill’ and ‘my God, House, it’s like they never held you down in freshman year and berated you into learning this stuff — aren’t there any self-respecting bullies in Baltimore?’ “Wilson.”
Wilson just yawns again. “Good night, House,” she tells him peacefully before she reaches over and turns out the bedside lamp.
“I didn’t actually throw up on the couch,” House says desperately. “And my floors are very nice. They’re carpeted and everything.”
House can make out a faint butterfly movement in the dark as Wilson’s eyelashes drift shut. “I hid your cane,” Wilson sighs as she wriggles deeper into the bed. “If you eat floor while you’re trying to escape, I’m taking photos for Cuddy.”
House grits his teeth, and feels the dead muscle in his leg make a miserable attempt to jab at his nervous system past the disappointingly legal mezcla of painkillers that Wilson had blurred him with. He lies there listening to Wilson’s breathing gradually even out a dizzying fifteen inches to his right, mind wrying inside and out with every soft invent and exvent until he’s been rigid for so long his body forgets it’s supposed to be in pain and starts resetting itself into a confused, catatonic sleep. The last thing he remembers before the ginger pulls him down is thinking, frantically, that something should feel wrong about this — but before he can dwell on it, Wilson makes a sudden, soft noise as she shifts under the covers, and the sudden reality of her presence bodies House with such paralysing emotions that he blacks out from sheer terror in a heartbeat.