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The case had been a nightmare.
Not the dramatic, heart-racing, nerve-wracking kind. Worse. The slow kind. The kind where every test contradicted the last one, where the patient crashed at least thrice, where no one had slept more than an hour at a time in nearly a week.
By the end of it, they were running on pure stubbornness and muscle memory.
The patient lived. Barely. House solved it. Obviously.
And sometime around eleven that night, long after the paperwork was signed and the adrenaline had evaporated, three young doctors realized something important.
They had no food.
The automatic doors of the grocery store slid open and in shuffled Chase, Cameron, and Foreman like exhausted ducklings in wrinkled lab coats they had not bothered to change out of.
Chase grabbed a cart.
Foreman leaned on it immediately.
Cameron blinked at the bright lights like she’d just surfaced from underwater.
They stood there for a solid ten seconds.
“…What do we need?” Cameron asked faintly.
“Food,” Foreman said.
“Good start,” Chase muttered.
They began moving.
It did not go well.
They threw things into the cart without discussion. A single loaf of bread. Three different kinds of cereal. Exactly one banana. Frozen waffles. Canned soup. A bag of marshmallows. Pasta with no sauce. Sauce with no pasta. Four cartons of almond milk.
They did not notice that they were all placing everything into one cart.
As if they shared a kitchen. Which they most certainly did not.
Did they even know why they were shopping together?
They were too tired to question it.
Chase stood staring at a display of granola bars for an unsettling amount of time.
“Are these… dinner?” he asked no one in particular.
“Food is food,” Foreman replied, eyes half closed.
Cameron dropped a family-sized bag of shredded cheese into the cart like she was performing a medical procedure.
That was the moment House, also doing some nightly shopping (though more of the drink kind), turned the corner.
He stopped and took in the scene.
His three sleep-deprived idiots in hospital scrubs. One single overloaded cart. Zero coordination. Cameron gently swaying where she stood. Foreman blinking at a price tag like it had personally offended him. Chase holding a box of toaster pastries with deep philosophical concern.
House sighed.
“Tell me you’re not all living together now,” he said.
Three heads turned toward him slowly.
“House,” Cameron said, with the fragile joy of someone seeing a mirage.
Chase squinted. “Are you real?”
“Unfortunately.”
Foreman gestured vaguely at the cart. “We’re… shopping.”
“Yes,” House said. “I can see that. For what appears to be a college dorm.”
They looked down at the cart.
There was a long pause.
“…We needed groceries,” Chase offered weakly.
“Idiot. The only thing you need is supervision,” House corrected.
He limped forward, took the cart handle from Chase without resistance, and began the audit.
“Why do you have one banana?”
Silence.
“...And why do you have four almond milks??”
Cameron frowned at the cart like she had never seen it before. “No one even likes almond milk.”
“Exactly.”
House began removing items with surgical precision. Marshmallows. Two cereals. The random cheese mountain. The banana.
“Hey,” Chase protested faintly, “I was thinking about that banana.”
“I really don't think you were thinking,” House said flatly.
And just like that, it became his problem.
He steered them through the store aisle by aisle, muttering instructions.
“Protein. Vegetables. No… put that down. Those aren't vegetables. And get some actual meals.”
Foreman obediently added chicken. Cameron grabbed spinach. Chase followed House with quiet focus, occasionally zoning out and having to be gently redirected with a cane tap to the shin.
They were completely wrecked, to an extent House didn't often get to see. They'd learned to hide any vulnerability from him very early on.
And yet, someone needed to explain to House right now why his twenty-five+ year old fellows looked about nineteen.
By the time they reached checkout, the cart contained real food. Ingredients that made sense. Enough for three separate humans who did not, in fact, share a fridge.
Chase reached for his wallet.
House smacked his hand away without looking.
Chase accepted the reprimand quietly and started zoning out again. House snorted. The other two hadn't even noticed yet.
That ended it.
House paid.
They were simply too tired to argue properly. And it wasn't any fun mocking people who could currently barely understand what he was saying.
In the parking lot, the logistical issue of cars presented itself.
They all stared at their respective vehicles like the concept was new.
“You drove separately?” House asked.
“We always do,” Cameron said softly.
House pinched the bridge of his nose.
“Keys,” he ordered.
Three sets were handed over with concerning obedience.
He pocketed them immediately.
“You are not driving,” he informed them.
None of them argued. That was the truly alarming part.
Instead they just sort of… stood there. Chase leaned against a shopping cart return. Cameron blinked slowly at a streetlight. Foreman rubbed his eyes like sand had gotten into them.
House sighed.
He divided the groceries into three equal bags with meticulous fairness, plus one for himself. Then he ushered the three of them toward his car like a disgruntled shepherd with extremely tired sheep.
The backseat situation required negotiation.
Foreman folded himself into one side. Cameron slid into the other. Chase ended up wedged awkwardly in the middle, already half asleep before the door shut.
House's mouth quirked as he realised that none of the three had even requested the passenger's seat.
He tossed the grocery bags into the trunk and got in the driver’s seat.
The drive across Princeton was quiet.
Not because they were being polite. He had them trained better than that.
This was because two of them were asleep on each other before the first red light and the third wasn’t far behind.
House dropped them off one by one.
At each stop he limped around the car, pulled a grocery bag from the trunk, and placed it firmly into their hands.
“Home,” he said. “Sleep. Do not attempt to cook anything that requires more than two steps. I'll pick you up for work at 11 tomorrow.”
Chase blinked at the bag like it had appeared magically. “Did we get pasta?”
“Yes.”
“With sauce?”
“Yes, Chase.”
“Oh.”
Foreman nodded once in approval, already halfway asleep standing up.
Cameron gave House a soft, exhausted smile. “Thank you.”
“Go,” he said gruffly.
He waited until each of them disappeared safely inside their buildings before driving off.
Their cars stayed in the grocery store parking lot.
House would deal with that problem tomorrow.
Only then did he drive himself home. God, how he needed Wilson right now.
The next morning.
Chase stood in his kitchen, staring into a surprisingly full refrigerator.
He frowned.
“…Did I buy all this?”
Across town, Cameron had the same thought while holding a carton of eggs. A different brand than she usually buys.
Foreman opened his pantry, saw neatly divided groceries, and went very still.
There was a pause.
Three separate realizations.
Chase checked his wallet.
Foreman checked his balance.
Cameron checked her meticulous book of receipts.
Nothing.
Chase slowly closed his fridge door.
“…Did he—”
In his own home, Foreman leaned against his kitchen counter, staring at the grocery bags like they might explain themselves.
“He did,” Foreman scowled.
Cameron sat at her kitchen table with the receipt book still open, fingers resting on the blank space where a grocery entry should have been.
“But he didn’t say anything,” she murmured.
Another silence.
Chase opened his fridge again, looking at the pasta and sauce like it had personally betrayed him.
Foreman shook his head once, still processing.
Cameron exhaled softly.
“…We were really tired.”
Across Princeton, Gregory House sat on his couch with a bowl of cereal.
Wilson had once said House did nice things the way other people committed crimes: quietly, with no witnesses and immediate denial afterward.
House crunched his cereal thoughtfully.
Then he reached for the remote.
If three of his sleep-deprived ducklings happened to be eating actual food that morning instead of granola bars and marshmallows, that was purely coincidence.