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The guy in the bar is cute, but there are a lot of cute guys at this convention. Three thousand doctors, and Greg House has assessed them all. This guy has made the shortlist not just for cuteness but for interestingness. He is clever, but that doesn't mark him out as special, not here. No, what's fascinating about this guy is how he moves between personas. Charming as hell to whoever he's just met, and sharp enough to remember some detail about them - a paper they've published, or an institution they're associated with - and it'd be sickening if it wasn't for what happens to this man's face when he walks away.
He doesn't look pleased with himself for networking effectively. He looks weary of the whole thing, but there's something else going on there, something House figured out yesterday when getting within sight range of the guy and the bundle of papers he's been carrying around all weekend.
He's not the only one with paperwork to hand. House himself is supposed to be catching up on his notes. Others are reading journal articles, or have copies of a recent publication to share. The younger cohort often have copies of their CVs to distribute. But this guy isn't carrying anything related to medicine. It's personal.
He's carrying around divorce papers, or rather an envelope that clearly contains divorce papers, but he hasn't let himself open it yet.
And yet it's there, a visible wound for anyone who's looking. Open.
House wants to know more. What's happened to this guy, who can't be more than twenty-five, to make him this way? What's his deal?
Following him to the bar, maybe a little creepy. But he'd have been going for a drink anyway.
The jukebox starts another round of that damn Billy Joel song and the guy slams his glass down on the bar counter. “Not again,” he says.
House watches intently.
“Pick another song,” the guy implores the jerk sitting two stools down. “Please.”
“Sure,” the jerk says, and the cute guy seems to believe him, but House doesn’t buy it. Sure enough, it's just made things worse; the jerk shuffles over to the jukebox to punch in another request, and then smirks.
The guy sighs, and looks as if he’s about to burst into tears. Understandable, House thinks, given his situation, but faintly pathetic. Predictable.
Then suddenly there’s a bottle flying through the air, and a fight breaks out, and House thinks, oh. You. I want to know more about you.
*
He means to get to the guy before the cops do, but it all happens so quickly and House has no interest in getting himself arrested. He settles for hailing a cab and following them to the station. The guy’s been in a cell less than ten minutes when House bails him out, emerging blinking and bewildered. “Why did you -” the guy asks, squinting, trying to figure him out.
“Needed a drinking buddy,” House says, shrugging.
The guy eyes him up, as though this is the most insane thing he’s ever heard, as though he can’t wait to get away - and then he bursts out laughing.
From then on, they are friends.
*
House has never had a friend like this, the sort he makes an effort with. He moved around too much as a kid to make long-lasting friendships. When he was younger, he really believed that his friends would stay in touch, that they’d write letters to each other, that they’d maybe see each other again. He wrote a lot of letters before he learned to give up on people, learned to keep to himself.
At college, and then again in med school, he fell into proximity-related friendships - guys like Crandall who were just around, who were convenient. He also fell in and out of beds, women and men, mostly meaningless hookups, and when he thought there might be someone worth actually sticking around for, he got kicked out of med school - cosmic punishment for daring to hope, he thinks sometimes, when he’s drunk enough to believe in that kind of shit.
Wilson is different. They swap numbers, call each other to talk late at night when they’re both too tired to go out to a bar but they want the company. They want to talk to someone who gets it, and neither of them have found that person at work. When a job opens up in Princeton, House calls and says, “Hey, you should look into this” when really he wants to say, “please move here”, because they are guys. He’s pretty sure Wilson knows what he means, anyway, and he’s happy when Wilson is offered the job, happier still when he accepts it.
His first official day of work, House plants a whoopee cushion on Wilson’s desk chair - lame, sure, but this is just an opening gambit - and Wilson responds by interrupting a consult to loudly, pointedly hand House a prescription for syphilis meds. House grins. It’s on.
*
There are a couple of years where they are not as in each other’s pockets as they have been. Wilson meets Bonnie. House meets Stacy. They still see each other at work, eat lunch together, and even sometimes manage a double date, but mostly they’re holed up with their significant others, doing coupley things. No more late night phone calls.
And then a group of doctors fail to diagnose muscle death and House limps out of hospital forever changed. It makes him bitter, because how can it not? It makes Stacy leave him. It makes his life shrink into a quest for whatever will alleviate the pain. At work, that’s the newly-founded department of diagnostics, blood money for their failure to help one of their own but at least it reduces the number of idiotic colleagues he has to interact with. He can pick his cases, let his brain tackle the problems in its own way.
Outside of work, it’s monster trucks and drinking beer on the couch with Wilson. He knows he’s asking a lot of the guy who’s already writing his prescriptions, who frowns less than anyone else when he ups the dose. James Wilson is a genuine got-into-medicine-to-help-people doctor, rather than the for-my-own-ego kind (which is most of them, when you get down to it, House thinks), and he doesn’t want his best friend to be in pain. But he’s also a married man and he probably shouldn’t be spending quite as much time on his best friend’s couch - except, House comes to realize, he wants to be avoiding home.
It doesn’t surprise him when the marriage breaks up, or when Wilson comes to stay on his couch for a couple of weeks. He plays wingman when they go to bars and watches Wilson hook up with cute girls, cheers him on, and hangs around long enough to figure out if they’re going to screw in the bathroom - another drink for House, while he’s waiting - or go back to her place - in which case he’ll go home. Occasionally - hey, he can’t be too nice - he takes the car home and leaves Wilson stranded, and there’s one night where a furious Wilson, having had to take a cab, storms into House’s bedroom and flings the covers off. “Get out. I’m taking the bed tonight,” he growls.
House turns over. “Nope.”
Wilson slams his body down on the bed anyway, and tugs the covers over himself, with a little huff. He’s looking for a fight, House thinks, or for House to be freaked out by another man in his bed, but he’s forgotten about House’s laziness. He’s in bed now, there’s no way he’s moving.
A few minutes of grumpy silence later, Wilson relents and extends some of the duvet over House, and House doesn’t even try stealing the whole thing back. He fake-snores instead, and Wilson laughs, knowing it’s fake, and House falls asleep smiling.
*
In the morning he thinks: Wilson knows that’s not the first time he’s had a guy in his bed, right? Not that anything happened, but - he’s been obvious enough about his anyone-who’ll-have-me policy, hasn’t he?
He wonders if he should say something, but he doesn’t want it to get weird. He hasn’t been subtle about it, so if Wilson was hoping to gross him out, it was the friend-ness, rather than the man-ness, wasn’t it?
He groans and tells himself to stop being such a girl. It’s not worth worrying about.
*
The new wife is wary of House, as she should be, and Wilson spends the first year of his marriage trying to do all the right things before letting things slide again. When House gets Christmas two years running, eating takeout and laughing, just the two of them, he knows it won’t last. Wilson will cheat, he thinks, and so it’s a shock when Julie gets there first.
It’s gloomier than the last time. At least if Wilson had been the one to end it, he’d have let himself indulge in his sluttiness a little bit. House could get on board with that. But she’s taken that option away, and so he pines, and then he does the profoundly stupid thing of falling for his goddamn patient, and House remembers just why he finds this guy so fascinating. He suspects he’s the only one who knows just how not-normal Wilson is, beneath the gentle, professional exterior.
There’s a part of him that thinks he’s the only person who could ever make him happy, and another part that shrieks at how delusional he must be, to imagine that he, Greg House, could ever make anyone happy.
*
And then there’s Amber - beautiful, brilliant, and a bucket of cold water splashed over House’s head when he realizes that Wilson is dating someone like him, only blonde. With girl parts.
It’s the thing, he thinks, that could crack their friendship in two. He and Amber are already circling each other like wild animals, ready to attack. There’s a temporary ceasefire, an agreement, and then the whole thing cracks in a way none of them could have ever imagined and all House wants is to have his best friend back.
When Wilson comes back, he knows he can’t ask for anything more.
*
And then for a while he doesn’t know what’s real and what’s not. And it’s bad, the worst it’s ever been, worse even than the leg, and he forgets to tell Wilson thank you until he’s out of Mayfield, because everything hurts too much and he’s too selfish to remember how much this must be hurting him too. How lucky he is to have a friend who wants to help him.
He is grateful, even though it also makes him feel pathetic, to need that help. And then Wilson buys a condo with two bedrooms and it stops feeling like House is staying with him, starts feeling like they live together.
*
“Everyone in our building thinks we’re gay,” Wilson mutters, and House blinks.
“We're grown men over the age of 30 who moved in together,” he points out. “We're two tigers away from an act in Vegas. They'll figure out -” He pauses for a second. “- you’re straight eventually.”
“Eventually is not when I want to go out with the cute girl in 3-B.”
House blinks again. The drug dealer whose friend is his current patient is asking for water, but he can’t quite focus. “You’re an idiot.”
“What, because I want to go out with the cute girl?” Wilson puts his hands on his hips, in a gesture which is, House thinks, unlikely to convince anyone of his heterosexuality.
“Because -” House sighs. “Forget it.”
“Oh my god. You just - came out to me. Didn’t you?”
That’s what he likes about Wilson. If he misses something, it’s not for long. “Well spotted.”
The drug dealer coughs pointedly. “Seriously, guys, could I get some water?”
“We’re having a moment here,” House snaps.
“Do you - want people to think we’re -” Wilson gestures between the two of them.
“No!” House scoffs. “I have better taste.”
“You think you could do better than me?” Wilson raises an eyebrow.
House laughs. Within mere seconds, Wilson’s gone from being alarmed people might think he’s gay to being genuinely offended House isn’t secretly in love with him. The lunatic. “Way better,” he says.
“Screw that. Date. Tonight. Pizza. At - Gino’s. Or Gina’s.” Wilson furrows his brow. “One of them. I’ll text you the address.” He leaves, and House turns back to the drug dealer.
Might as well give the guy a glass of water. He wants this case solved before dinner.
*
He thinks about dressing up, but in the end he doesn’t have time, which is a relief. Doesn’t want to look like he’s making too much of an effort. This is probably just Wilson messing with him. He’s probably not even going to - oh, no, okay, there he is, at a little booth in the back.
House feels oddly shy. They’ve shared so many meals together - not just takeout on one couch or another, but meals like this, out in restaurants - but this is different. Maybe. “Hey,” he says.
“Hey,” Wilson says. A tiny smile. “I’ve just lost a bet with that waiter. I said I didn’t think my boyfriend was coming.”
“And he said, no, gorgeous, there’s no way anyone’d stand you up,” House supplies.
“Pretty much.”
“Whore.”
“Him or me?”
“Both of you.” House plays back the tape in his head. “I’m not your boyfriend.”
“You’re kind of my boyfriend,” Wilson points out.
“True,” House says, impatient to get to his actual point, “but I think that bet was made under false pretences. You owe him nothing!” He grins, gleefully.
“My boyfriend is so unethical,” Wilson says wearily.
“Your boyfriend wants pizza.” House opens up the menu, but he also knows he needs to do something. Something to move this from the realm of their usual bantering and into reality. And if it’s all just a massive prank, he needs to know. His hand spiders its way across the table, finds Wilson’s. Slides their fingers together.
His heart beats impossibly fast. He watches Wilson look down at their hands, and then back up at him. “I guess we’re doing this,” Wilson says quietly.
“Yep.” House squeezes slightly. “You wanna split a large, or -”
“Extra-large. I missed lunch.”
“Cool.”
*
Back in their condo, Wilson hovers awkwardly once they close the door. “How do we - do this?”
“Couch. Beer,” House says matter-of-factly, already moving there.
Wilson frowns. “You’re - you’re messing with me. You’ve been messing with me all night?”
House turns. He’s tempted to say something cutting, but Wilson’s eyes are just that little too wide, too hurt, and anyway - he wants this. He wants to not mess this up. “No, you idiot. We’re going to make out on the couch. We can figure it out from there.”
Yes, there are two perfectly good beds within close range, but he’s pretty sure Wilson’s not ready for that yet. He’s not sure if he is. It’s been a while. Wilson falls onto the couch beside him, turns to him, says, “Hey.”
House barely lets him finish the word, his mouth pressing against Wilson’s hungrily. He tastes of pizza - they both do - and garlic knots, and it’s just enough of a hint of grossness for it to feel real. They go at it for a while, like teenagers, grasping at each other above-the-waist only, and then Wilson pulls back. “Wow,” he says.
“You okay?”
Wilson laughs. “You’ve never asked me that in my life.”
House shrugs. “Yeah, but I’m trying to get into your pants, so…”
Wilson leans in to kiss him again, softly, briefly. “This is insane.”
“We prefer the term bliblibliblib,” he says, putting a finger to his lips and wobbling between them to make the sound.
It earns him a chuckle. “I’m gonna grab a beer. You want one?”
“Sure, honey,” House says cheerfully.
Wilson returns with two in hand, and settles down next to him. “I don’t think I’m ready for - pants yet.”
“We’ve got time.”
*
Wilson’s idea of not being ready for pants action yet means, as it turns out, that his stay on while he lowers himself to the ground between House’s thighs and proceeds to deliver what can only be described as an epic blow job. It’s not that he’s done it before - though House asks him, repeatedly, afterward, if he’s sure he hasn’t - but he pays attention. Every little shudder House makes, Wilson notes. Anything that doesn’t quite do it for him is set aside. He asks, too - is that good? Do you want more of that?
Wilson is all breathless dark eyes and wet, willing mouth, and House is no stranger to giving instructions. When he finally sags back, post-release, he thinks distantly that he should return the favor, when his body works again, but then Wilson’s kissing him again, grinding up against him, and all it takes is a palm pressed up against him, still through his pants, for him to come.
“You’re doing the laundry,” Wilson says.
*
A few weeks in, they have their first fight as a couple, something stupid about a clinic patient, and House realizes he’s ruined everything. He’s lost everything. His leg aches more than it has in months and he wants something stronger than this half-assed stuff he’s been making do with. He thinks about asking Cuddy to write him a prescription, or one of his fellows, and then Wilson is at the door to his office.
“I’m still mad,” Wilson says. “But I’m driving home, if you want a ride.”
House nods silently.
When they get home, he asks, “You too mad to watch a plastic-surgery-gone-wrong marathon?”
Wilson shakes his head silently.
After three spectacular, gory, medical-ethics-be-damned episodes, House gets up and says, “I’m going to bed.” There is a loud pause after it, he thinks.
“You want company?”
“Yeah.”
It’s the first time, since that night all those years ago, they’ve slept together as in just-slept, no funny business. Arms around each other. It’s a little sappy. It’s nice.
This is it, House thinks, amazed. This might actually work out. He might not deserve happiness, but it’s come for him, quiet and sure, and he’ll let it stay, here, in his arms. Wilson. His. He doesn’t believe in much, but he will let himself believe in this.