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His serfs were having one of their more bogglingly stupid conversations when he walked in, and House paid attention just long enough to hear Chase say, "Of course you think kangaroos are cute. You've never had one take a suicide leap into the road at you while you're driving 80 kilometers an hour," before he tuned them out, flipping through his mail.
There were letters from desperate families and rich people Cuddy would—inevitably—ferret out of the Princeton-Plainsboro medical waste dumpster and implore him to cure. There were thank you notes from the particularly old and old fashioned patients, and his weekly love letter slash update from his syphilitic granny. And then there was a padded manila envelope, hand addressed from Emma Hawthorne with too many stamps and something heavy inside.
He was debating the relative likeliness of her either sending him (a) a dead animal to express her probably-strong feelings about his saying he would have killed her baby or (b) a shriveled, dried umbilical cord in gratitude for his saving the baby—which would have, ironically enough, been more than enough reproach for his efforts when Cameron peeked round the conference room door.
"You know it's glass." And whispering, checking left and right for spies, House added, "It's see through and hear-through—you don't even need to open it! But don't tell the others."
She only pursed her perfect lips at him, glasses gleaming in the late morning light. "We have a patient."
Setting down the envelope, House mourned another day wasted hemorrhaging valuable time seeing one rich patron or another instead of following up on the continuing saga of Jax and Carley. "One day," he told Cameron, shoving past her into the conference room, "you three will become bright enough to pull a monkey-see, monkey-do."
Chase stared at him blankly, his expression a mask of Attractive Australian In Repose. Foreman ignored him in favor of the latest New England Journal of Medicine—which explained why that hadn't been on his desk.
"By which I mean, since I don't volunteer to take patients..." he said with elaborate patience, waving his hand for them to continue the mantra.
"Since you don't volunteer to take patients," Cameron retorted, pouting, "then Cuddy gives them to us whether we want them or not."
"You might not be afraid of losing your job but we are," Chase announced.
Cameron handed him a file. "She's 32 years-old, presenting with abdominal pain, impaired vision, and respiratory distress."
"You're all fired," House told them, and snatched the file out of her hands.
*
It was long after lunch by the time House got a chance to sit at his desk and catch up on Go Fug Yourself and search frantically for recaps of that day's General Hospital. Their patient was dying in a disinteresting and unoriginal way, and for that he felt extra spiteful, so instead of recommending one of the nice oncologists (read: Wilson), he sent Carmichael, who probably raped children for breakfast. House was trying not to feel somewhat depressed that Brenda still hadn't returned from the dead (again) to slap Carley for stealing her man when he tore Emma's package open—braced for anything from a thank you note and a stack of $50s to a dead rat.
Instead, he got photographs, a glossy ocean of black and white prints that slid with a soughing sound across his desk. There were dozens—monochrome freeze-frames of boring, everyday hospital life. There was House in repose playing Bejeweled on the computer, Wilson in House's armchair, legs propped up, reading a journal. In another, it was Cameron, Chase, and Foreman staring at an X-ray with intense eyes while House and Wilson smirked at one another in the background. Another was of Wilson heading out for the day, tugging on a coat as he fell into step with House, their shadows long on the hospital wall.
In between the photos was a note, torn from a legal pad.
Your secret's showing, Emma had written, and signed it, E.
"I hate liberal arts majors," House told the note, and pushed it aside.
House flipped through the first ten or so and frowned. There were no secrets there, just reinterpretations of things House saw every day. He stuffed them back into the remains of the envelop and sets them aside, wishing Emma hadn't taken quite so many photographs of Chase and Cameron and Foreman, and more of Cuddy's spectacular bazongas while she'd been bending over Emma—conveying her womanly sympathy.
But Emma, for all that she was irritating and obfuscating, was a good photographer, too, and everything looked different, in an entirely different frame of reference than House has ever seen. The hospital looked modern and full of curves, like a cosmopolitan woman, and the black and white make all the shadows jump—made the gleam of Foreman's teeth against the deep color of his skin a smear of half-moon.
*
On Tuesday, Wilson was honor-bound to give the interns a lecture on the many challenges and exciting changes in modern cancer treatment. And since Wilson had that beleaguered, dashing I Petition For Cancer Kid Playrooms look going, there were always an abundance of stupid med students of either gender present to stare at him in open sexual longing. House made it a point to attend each time and sit in the front row; it was the best vantage point in the auditorium for smirking meanly.
"I'd like to apologize preemptively," Wilson said to the crowd, pulling off his white doctor's coat. "The redoubtable Dr. Gregory House is in attendance."
A murmur went up through the crowd, and Wilson gave House a warning look. House wondered when Wilson had turned into his mother, and also if the entertainment value of getting to his feet to wave at the class and bow was worth the hassle of getting to his feet.
"So you'll have to forgive any outbursts he might have, ignore the inappropriate comments, and prepare to be insulted," Wilson finished as he took off his lab coat, rolled up his sleeves, voice unaccountably fond. "That said—let's get started."
Wilson had three stand-by lectures he offered to the unwashed masses that passed through the hospital: Most Of You Won't Become Oncologists, But It's A Noble Calling; Medicine, Like My Marriages, Cannot Live On Romance Alone, Eventually, There Will Be Complications; and House's personal favorite, Let Me Talk Endlessly About Death, Because Mine Is An Essentially Inefficacious Field Of Medicine And Nothing Is As Fun As Trying To Dodge The Inevitable.
"My name is James Wilson. I'm head of oncology at Princeton-Plainsboro," Wilson said, leaning against the podium to survey the crowd. House had cased them on sight: collectively entering puberty, all over-eager, none of them with an ounce of common sense or rational fear—but the worst was the row of straight-A students he was sitting near, and House had a vivid image of how bad a hit it'd be the first time they fucked up.
"In September, I'll have been at the hospital for 15 years—so if you see me around and have any questions, feel free to ask. We're a resource to you," Wilson added, and House gagged elaborately—earning him a glare from the blond thing sitting next to him. Wilson ignored him and went on:
"Now, I know most of you won't be going into oncology—but..." which was about the part that House tuned out and decided to start the psychological warfare.
In the past, Wilson had capitulated beautifully under Plan Stare Meaningfully At Wilson's Crotch and Plan Blow Him Kisses From The Front Row, but House was an innovator, so he searched around his pockets until he found a receipt. He was nearly done creating an arsenal of tiny wads of paper to throw at Wilson's crotch when there was a sudden break in Wilson's droning. He looked up to see the blond thing glaring, and before House could confide, "I have a nervous disorder," Wilson said:
"One last thing, before I let you all get out of here—I have a friend at the hospital, another doctor." Laughing, Wilson went on, "Now, I don't want to be overly cruel about this, but he's a dick."
And as the auditorium burst into laughter, House sent his first volley of paper balls, missing by a mile but considering ammunition well spent on principle alone.
"Now, the thing is," Wilson continued, grinning, "he's also a genius—absolutely brilliant. The best in his field and one of the best doctors I've ever known—but I met this guy at a Doctors Without Borders Meeting—"
House shuddered at the sudden rush of estrogen in the room.
"—that he'd crashed to grab food from the reception; his own conference on how we're all going to die in a global pandemic was downstairs."
House tried to figure out some way to be righteously angry about Wilson airing their dirty laundry given the fact that he'd told the maggots about his and Wilson's Gentleman's Agreement the last time he'd been bullied into a lecture.
"He stole from the Doctors Without Borders meeting?" someone in the crowd asked, sounding horrified and just high-pitched enough to be self-righteous.
Nobody looked at House—which was by turns comforting and a little insulting, since it cemented Cuddy's theory that nobody really thought Wilson and House were friends; to be fair, sometimes House didn't even think he and Wilson were friends.
"Well, if you call eating the club sandwiches and egg salad stealing, then yes," Wilson agreed, wry. He crossed his arms over his chest. "But the point of the story—beyond the fact that being a doctor doesn't preclude you from being morally corrupt—"
There were titters throughout the crowd, because none of them had to steal oxycotin back from a morally corrupt friend yet. House imagined it'd be less funny through the filter of 20-odd years.
"—is that this friend of mine is a jerk, but that he's still an amazing doctor. That said, at current count, he's been punched by three different patients and kicked in the nuts twice ," Wilson concluded, still smiling through his students' shock and giving House a sideways look—a private joke, and House slouched down further in his seat because there was always something unsettling about the implied intimacy in a shared glance; he and Wilson were going to have to have a long conversation about what kind of grievous embarrassments were appropriate for revealing to a class of baby doctors, and why anything that involved his testicles were always going to be off limits.
"Oncology, on the other hand, is a medicine of management," Wilson said, voice firm, the same soothing lull that had people thanking him for their death sentences. "We're doing better every day, and chemotherapy, radiation, and advancements in medication have brought us a long way from the old days where a diagnosis of cancer was an immediate death sentence—but the reality is that our ingrained fear of cancer is rational, it's reasonable."
Wilson gave them all a comforting smile, and House wondered if, with the correct technology, could he somehow see the physical form of Wilson's ingenious emotional manipulation, floating through the air from his benevolent smile to his captive audience.
Wilson tugged at his tie, his smile going lopsided. "My friend, for all that he's an ethical black hole—" House threw another one of his paper balls, and missed by another mile "—is unparalleled in his field of specialty, people request him from all over the country, all over the world, because he's sometimes their last, best hope."
The interns looked betrayed, and House felt somewhat compelled to draw them a chart showing the coefficient of correlation between "nice doctor" and "good doctor" as the zero sum it was—but he figured eventually they'd haul Birch in here to talk about pediatrics and the little monsters could figure that one out on their own.
"The weird thing is," Wilson was saying, "I hand people death sentences every day—I've told more people they were dying kindly than my friend has cured patients with his particular brand of tough love—but while they pile on angry letters and black eyes for him, they thank me for telling them they're going to die. They tell me thank you."
The look Wilson leveled to the room was wry and ironic and a little hard around the edges, and when he spoke again, he said, "Medicine is, ultimately, about healing the sick, yes—but the reality is that we can't possibly help everyone, some people are beyond saving. So medicine is also about bringing comfort to the dying." Wilson gave all of them the look again. "Don't forget that."
Later, House cut in front of Wilson in the lunch line, fixing him with a thoughtful stare. "You said nice things about me," he said, accusing.
"Well," Wilson prevaricated, shoving House along toward the register, "you didn't interrupt, mostly."
House frowned. "You also talked about my testicles."
"I talked about angry patient reactions, yes," Wilson answered, voice mild. The trouble with having a friend was that eventually they started to pick up on your mannerisms—and House was annoying as fuck. "Is there a larger point to this line of questioning?"
"Something's not adding up here," House told him, reaching for a pudding cup.
Wilson rolled his eyes. "I'm allowed to give you a compliment. Not everything's a puzzle, House."
"No, not everything," House agreed. Most thing were boring, average, unremarkable.
But House thought about Wilson, and the Wilson in Emma's photographs, with laugh lines and worry lines and House in his periphery; Wilson had always been a puzzle, and all the more fascinating because he was so well hidden beneath the illusion of a whole.
*
House taped the photographs up on the lightboard in his office: 29 in all, black and white and some of them blurry. The hospital was quiet, lonely, the night shift making their rounds and voices murmuring in the distance like ghosts at tea, and House sat in his chair and frowned. He had known Emma would be a formidable enemy when she'd fought him tooth and nail every step of the way, and when she'd failed to break down into hopeless sobs even once through the entire ordeal. Women, when they were dangerous, were extremely dangerous, House knew, and Emma had seen something House had missed, hadn't noticed, didn't pay attention to.
*
On Wednesday, their patient was shunted off to Wilson's department to be handed a fast and painful death sentence and lots of words like "pain management" and "neoplastic syndrome." House watched it all go down through the window of his office, peering across the stretch of concrete balcony and seeing Wilson offer up his kindest smile, press a hand onto a knee, offering warmth—House knew Wilson's routine, and it was down to an art, the methodology of shaped silences.
Cuddy kept his minions busy with meaninglessly stupid cases, one after the other, and after a few days they even stopped giving wayward glances to the photos on the light board. They solved three unsolvable cases and saved a toddler from a life of blindness, Wilson got roped into giving his "cancer is the funnest type of suffering!" lecture, and House was in a worse mood than ever when he got trapped in clinic hours instead of showing up to ask questions about rectal thermometers and accidental erections during prostate exams.
If House was frustrated about coming no closer to solving his own mystery, at least he was comforted by the fact that nobody else seemed to have come round the side and ahead of him—at least until Friday, when he walked into his office shaking rain off of his coat and saw that somebody had been by with a Sharpie and a rotten sense of humor.
The list of people who House knew and who'd seen Brokeback Mountain enough times to be able to copy out a significant portion of the movie's dialog amounted to exactly nil, so he forgave himself when almost half an hour of staring at the pictures later, he still didn't have a plausible suspect.
But then he was just left staring at a photograph of Wilson giving him a pissy look, with a word bubble saying, "I wish I could quit you," drawn over his head, and House said, "Oh, crap," in realization.
House debated sending Emma hate mail through the email link on her official website, but he feared that even if he called her a yenta and an interloper and a hack she might only write back with best wishes. Emma was the type of woman, House was sure, who could send a smirk via electronic means.
*
House had been prepared for some kind of mid-life crisis that night, he'd laid in booze and pornography (straight and gay, since apparently he needed to be prepared for both, now), and waited for the lightning bolt of homosexual terror to strike him. Instead, he ordered in Chinese and watched the Daily Show and, bored, went to bed midway through the Colbert Report. He didn't even dream about cocks—not even Wilson's. It was all very anticlimactic, which meant either that Emma was filled with shit or this wasn't a new development, and House had an uncomfortable feeling he knew which was the correct answer.
*
When he got in to work the next morning, the ducklings were gathered around the lightboard admiring the unknown and suicidal calligrapher's work with genuine awe—immediately discrediting any of them from taking credit for it. They were appalling liars, all of them.
House cleared his throat, thumping his cane twice when that failed.
"Something interesting?" he asked, when they turned around.
"You realize if this parable holds true," Chase said, "Wilson gets beaten to death and you live in a trailer for the rest of your life. Alone. Smelling his clothes."
House narrowed his eyes. "How many times have you seen that movie?"
"Two," Chase said, unashamed.
"Three," Cameron sighed.
"None," Foreman said. "You made me do your clinic hours when they went."
House tried not to think of the three of them spending time together in their off hours and how they spent it. Quilting? In a prayer circle? Crying over why House didn't love them? If they wanted a maternal influence, that was why House let them talk to Wilson.
He was no further in his investigation by the time lunch rolled around, and he spent it sitting in the cafeteria listening to Wilson talk about his latest cancer kid, some soon-to-be-non-tow-headed kid named Nathan and how he had giant gray eyes and had copped a feel from at least half the oncology nurses already.
"I honestly don't know whether to be mad or proud of him," Wilson said, helpless.
The oncology nurses fell into two categories: battle-axes that looked like trannies or babes. "Probably call him a psyche evaluation," House said. "If he's hitting on Betty or Laverne, that kid's clearly gone of the rails early or has a bright future in being Liza Minnelli's next gay husband."
"Laverne is not that bad," Wilson said.
House could feel the toe of Wilson's expensive French leather shoes underneath the table and he wondered why he found accidental touches like that bearable when they came from Wilson. Maybe it was just process of elimination: Chase never touched him unless House had been shot; Cameron always did it with some sort of tragic, pre-death seduction in mind. Foreman mostly looked like he wanted to punch House in the face.
"And yet, you knew immediately I was referring to her," House said, and after a moment of indecision, added, "If you were beaten to death, I would neither give up my apartment or smell your clothes."
Wilson frowned at him, taking a sip of coffee. "Why would you have my clothes?"
House opened his mouth to say something biting, but all that came out was silence.
"And the only person who'd try to beat me to death is you, anyway," Wilson said, and after a pause, asked, "Wait a minute, this isn't about those photographs in your office, is it?"
While House knew intellectually that gossip about him was the highest form of hospital currency, and got around faster than Paris Hilton on E, he hadn't thought that Wilson already heard tell of their torrid and tragic love affair. House wasn't planning on bursting out of a supply closet with a giant musical number, but he'd been hoping for some time to reconcile these feelings he apparently had.
"No," House lied, snatching the remains of Wilson's egg salad sandwich.
"Of course," Wilson allowed, smiling indulgently. "Besides which, I've willed all my worldly belongings to charity."
Choking, House asked, "What?"
Wilson shrugged. "It just seemed easier than having to change my will with every successive divorce."
Like with the gossip, House knew that Wilson was just as terrible a person as he, but sometimes there were these wonderful, crystallized moments of clarity were House really knew it, and it was in those moments that House thought that if Wilson really was beaten to death, maybe—just maybe—House would keep the lab coat.
By the time House got back to his office, somebody had come by and taped little cowboy hats to the photographs of him and Wilson, and House stared at them for a long moment before peeling them off.
"What, too much?" Cameron asked, grinning.
"Inaccurate," House decided. "Wilson's not going to be beaten to death."
She smiled, reaching for one of the discarded hats and came back with it attached to the tip of her slender finger. "Unless his ex-wives form a caucus," she said.
House considered that. Sure, they liked him individually, but if they got together and compared stories, it'd be an entirely different ballgame. "Good point," he said. "Put the hat back on Wilson."
*
That second night, Wilson came over and got his ass handed to him in Halo 3 by a bunch of snot-nosed 9th graders that had usernames all tertiary to their reproductive organs, and House sat back and watched Wilson trash talk like a little kid, arms jerking around as he threatened to teabag their moms. House waited for a swell of romantic, tragic music, that tremulous moment when they kissed—Wilson better have shaved—but instead, Wilson made them mimosas (how could House have made these obvious, giant gay signs?) and got bored and baked a pie.
"I think we're doing it wrong," House sighed.
"Doing what wrong?" Wilson asked, cutting him a slice, dark blueberries oozing out from the crust.
"Being desperately gay for each other," House explained, and held out his plate.
Wilson just smirked at him. "House, I don't think there's a set right or wrong way."
"I suppose," House said. "And mimosas are pretty gay."
Wilson scowled at him. "Those are my favorite cocktails."
"I rest my case," House intoned, and hesitating, he added, "It just seemed she was pretty certain she saw something in those photographs she took."
"Maybe she did," Wilson allowed with a shrug, but he was blushing. "Give it time."
Give me time, was what House heard.
House knew he was possibly the most impatient person in the world, and that Wilson knew it, too, so House just huffed and attacked his pie, breaking Wilson's perfectly-sliced wedge into a mush of berries and flakes of pastry.
"Fine," he said, "but I get to tell your ex-wives if it takes."
*
The next morning, his so-called employees were talking about Rory the night pharmacist's tragic love affair with Heather, the front receptionist for day shift, gathered in a little coven around the conference room table. There were still stacks of mail from the rich and the desperate, and there were still photographs depicting Brokeback Hospital all over his office. Nothing had changed. Except later, on his way to stick midget porn into Cuddy's patient files, House passed walked past the opened door to Wilson's office and lingered just long enough to see him flush, dark red across his pale skin. Maybe Emma had been right—there was still time for something to develop.