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In the first one, he never meets him.
His childhood is a nightmare, but he wades through its thickets almost unscarred. He shoves the memories of ice baths and hungry nights in the courtyard to the farthest corners of his mind. He lies to himself that the only thing that’s left is the termless loathing of his first name.
“It should teach you something, Gregory,” he remembers his father's voice above him as he was adding more ice to the bath.
Gregory, you’re late for dinner again — and the all-consuming hunger devours his insides for the endless night. Gregory, that won’t do — and a heavy fist meets his solar plexus, sending him suffocating on the floor where he swims among half-lucid questions about why ninety-three percent on his math test wasn’t enough. Gregory, you didn’t earn the bed — and he hides under the bush from a terrible rainfall, soaked to the core of his bones, praying for this to end but never catching even a fever.
Gregory, Gregory, Gregory.
He makes it through med school, scaring everyone away with his manners and snaps. He starves himself through the exams and jumps away from the very sight of the cold water. He knows that he has to earn his place because nobody’s going to tolerate him just like that — so he finds his escape in puzzles and mysteries, solving cases nobody else ever could, proving his worth with almost masochistic force.
He settles in the Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital, the only place where they could tolerate his rule-breaking attitude. He gets sent to the medical convention in New Orleans as an act of revenge for a broken contract with an investor. Sincerely, Lisa Cuddy must have something for him, because nowhere else would he be able to get out so easily.
The convention is even more boring than he expected, but he makes it through the first days unusually decently, ruining only two objectively catastrophic speeches.
On the evening of the second day, he spots a figure of a young man laughing at some joke made by an old professor of genetics. He recalls the professor for making an almost endurable speech about possible medical solutions for the flaws of the XY combination, which House found just hilarious.
The man who laughs is handsome, pretty even, and House’s gaze darts to him naturally. He is tall, his shoulders are wide, and his brown hair is neatly styled. House can’t make much of his face since he stands sideways, and he represses the urge to come closer. He notices that his laughter is rather fake, and that he anxiously wrinkles an unopened envelope in his hands.
“I’m going to the bar two streets away, would be glad if you joined,” he hears a soft, low voice.
For a tiny, reckless flash, he makes an uncertain step forward. Then he comes to his senses, turns on his heels and rushes towards the exit. He hurries and almost knocks the waiter down, urgently running away from that voice and that man without any rational reason. On his way to the closest party club, he forces himself to think of the ice baths instead of the glimpse of the face he saw, and the crackling of ice cubes washes the soft, low voice away from his memory as quickly as acid would.
When he fucks a random blond man whose name he doesn’t remember into his bed, the memory of the soft voice is washed away completely. In the morning he doesn’t even remember the incident; that was too irrational and stupid to even call it so after all.
He finds Stacy, and he is happy, really. He has avoided medical conferences successfully ever since, he is getting his own one-person department, and Stacy’s love seems to heal the wounds he never even knew he had. But then an infarction happens, and then he loses the muscles in his leg, and he is crippled and miserable and done.
“I’m done with you,” Stacy shouts at him a month after, when he finally breaks something inside her with all his loathing and misery and pain.
And then she leaves him shattered and alone, just a ghost of a man he used to be, just a miserable cripple. He howls at night and trips on Vicodin, his chest torn apart and opened, all his insides shattered, the feathers of his carved wings scattered all over the floor. His leg seems to heal, but he only gets worse — he dreams of ice cubes and rainfalls, and the day he is supposed to go back to work he doesn’t.
He swallows fifteen Vicodin pills, one after another, washing each down his throat with the most expensive whiskey he has ever bought. It’s not half as good as he expected, and he smirks at the thought of how good of a metaphor for his life it is. The dose starts to kick in, his vision goes blurry and the ceiling heavily falls onto him, pinning him irreversibly to the floor with the weight of his useless life. He hopes to lose his consciousness before all the physical downsides of an overdose would break his body, and he’s lucky because he does, and the last thing that crosses his mind, absolutely unexplainably and irrationally, is not Stacy or Cuddy or the hospital or even his dad, but a blurry memory of a silhouette with unclear features and low, soft voice. He doesn’t have time to recall who this is, and he smiles cause the afterlife probably exists, and they send an angel to bring him there.
He is found only two days after, with nobody to check on him these days. There are two newspapers on his porch, one lying open in the middle by the wind. From the bottom of the page, a handsome, even pretty man smiles at the ceiling cheerfully. The headline informs how shocked the public is by the unexpected suicide of a young and promising Head of the Oncology Department in Philadelphia. The man shoved a bullet up his head, never leaving a proper note except for ‘there is nobody on Earth’ scribbled in his daily planner on a page with a date two weeks prior to his suicide. “He was so bright and cheerful,” his ex-wife is cited, “I believe it was a framed murder.”
House would disagree with her if he had the chance to read the article, because it was all written in the man’s gaze, really. Hollow, suffocating loneliness mixed with freezing despair looked out from under his pupils, as legible as if written in block letters. House would ask them all if they were blind, if they really couldn’t see a thing? He would laugh bitterly and say that there is nobody on Earth indeed, because there wasn’t anyone, really.
But he didn’t, because the first one ended.
There is just fog in the between, where he wakes up on an endless green field. He jumps to his feet, not really scared or perplexed, just relieved at the absence of a tearing pain. He wanders around, his gaze gliding through the dark green grass and dark green grass, not able to find anything else to look at.
there is nobody on Earth, a soft, low voice rings in his head, sending goosebumps down his nape.
He freezes when he discerns a silhouette far away in the fog. His heart speeds up, his legs push him forward and he finds himself running breathlessly towards the person. He can’t make out a single feature of theirs, but his heart pounds loud as he speeds up. The silhouette stands still, and House realizes they can’t see him. He thinks hey why did you never find me without even knowing what he means, and the silhouette turns around to face him, and then something pulls him up with what feels like a crook in his abdomen, and suddenly there is light, light and only light.
In the second one, he chases a weird silhouette in fog in his dreams.
It’s all over again — the terrible childhood with John House and his mother — never interrupting, never doing a thing to protect him. When he is seven, he believes it to be exactly how it should be, but when he turns thirteen, he wants to scream at her face, to ask her why, why have you never done anything?
He understands that he is different from others quickly enough to learn how to blend in. He learns that other dads don’t give their kids ice baths and nights full of hunger, so he logically figures that there must be something wrong with him. He must be flawed in some irreversible, vital matter, otherwise it just didn’t make sense at all. He must be unworthy of love, he understands, and he tries to learn to live with that. He bites at anyone coming close, he hisses loathing and neglect at his peers and teachers, and soon enough, he finds himself in the comfort of isolation.
The second one is identical to the first, except for the dreams.
They jump him awake in the middle of the night, making him grasp at the thin air in pathetic attempts to catch that someone, to catch them or at least see them, but his fingers are always empty. Sometimes he wakes up screaming and calling for them without even knowing the name — he is always one step behind and an inch away, and his whole essence is shaken inside out by the absence, that never-ending absence of something.
“Gregory, that’s a shame,” his father walks in at night after he cries himself awake with a hysterical where are you. His own scream is still ringing in his ears.
He is thirteen then, so he takes it without a single muscle twitch. John keeps him in the bath for longer than usual; he keeps him there till the sun starts to rise, and drops the words filled with poison down his spine.
“Gregory, who were you calling for?” John asks, trying to dissect his cry. “Have you created an imaginary friend?”
And it goes and goes, one painful ice cube after another, one poisoned sentence after another, and by the end he is not quite sure if he hasn't imagined it all. His mind is frozen by the ice, and he can’t even shield himself from John’s words, and they slide down into the depths of his subconsciousness.
Gregory, there is no one and nothing for you, Gregory, who would ever love you, Gregory, you are unworthy even of kindness, who will ever be crazy enough to need you, you must be made of stone Gregory.
Gregory, Gregory, Gregory.
He loses his consciousness by the end of it and finds himself in his own bed with a horrendous fever in the morning. He thinks that he must have imagined it all, because John was never trying to break him but to make him stronger, wasn’t he?
Since then, he has never let John perform any torture on him again. He fights and bites, runs and screams like a wounded animal. He protects himself in any possible way he has, because he must be made of stone.
He makes it to the med school and to Princeton-Plainsboro, which feels oddly familiar to him. He jolts the feeling off, irritated by the deja vu. He ends up going to the medical convention in New Orleans, where he makes it through the first days almost without interrupting any speeches. On his second evening there, he steals a glass of wine from a waiter's tray and stops near the window when he hears a chuckling, soft laughter.
His head turns in the direction of the sound on its own accord, and he spots a young man. He is handsome, pretty even, and House is just unable to look away. The man stands sideways so he can't make much of his face, and he suppresses the aching urge to come closer. He knows that his laughter is fake. The man anxiously squeezes an unopened envelope in his hands.
“I’m going to the bar two streets away, would be glad if you joined,” he hears a soft, low voice, and it sends terrible goosebumps down his neck.
He wants to run away, but his legs stick to the spot.
“Oh, thank you for the offer, but my wife waits for me,” the professor excuses himself, and House smirks at the almost obvious relief of the man.
House watches him make it through the exit and follows. He wants to grab another drink, anyway.
‘The bar’ turns out to be a shitty hotel bar, where he watches the man from the corner of his eye. He can make out his face now, young and pretty — to the level of absurd. His features hypnotize him, and he finds himself staring. The man rants about something passionately to the bartender, clearly drunk now — House can’t really discern the words, but the rare echo of his raised voice rings with open wounds. He wants to come closer.
The man must feel the weight of his gaze, because suddenly he turns his head at him, and their eyes meet.
It feels like being punched in the guts.
The song that has been played three times goes for the fourth round, and the man turns to a guy standing in front of the jukebox.
“Would you please stop playing that?” he asks with irritation and turns back to House to roll his eyes with a smirk.
you must be made of stone Gregory, his father’s voice rings in his head, and he feels the sudden and vital need to splash himself with cold water.
He rushes to the bathroom, where he spends ten minutes staring at his reflection. He attempts to silence his father’s voice; instead, he hears the sound of the shattered glass. He wants to forget it and never recall it ever again, he wants to tear John’s words apart from his essence like thorn branches, he wants to go and introduce himself to the man and he can definitely do that, because he either is or is not made of stone.
He leaves the bathroom with forceful determination, but he finds the spot at the bar harrowingly empty. The floor is strewn with shattered glass, and it is beautiful in its own way — dark green intersecting with red, rare spots of colors reflected thousands of times in the shards of the mirror. He sees the red and blues of the police car dancing in the shards on the floor, projected on the walls, but the car leaves, and it feels like there is no light at all anymore.
“The man who was sitting here,” his voice is more hoarse than he expected it to be as he speaks to the bartender, “Where is he?”
“Oh, that freak just shattered the antique mirror!” The bartender splashes his hands in the air, clearly pissed. “Police took him away.”
“Where?” he asks.
“To hell hopefully,” the bartender hisses.
His legs are numb when he leaves the bar, and half an hour later he finds himself pointlessly wandering around the area, as if looking for something. The air is knocked out of the world, he can't feel his own inhales, and he searches the streets with a piercing gaze, lost and so desperate as if he is thirteen again, gasping at thin air between his fingers, a mere foot behind and just an inch away. But whatever he looks for he fails to find, and after almost an hour of suffocating wandering, he opens the door of a random bar. He ends up knocking himself deadly drunk just to forget. He doesn’t remember a thing the next morning, as if there was something to remember anyway.
He meets Stacy, and he’s happy, really. The silhouette in his dreams now has some fuzzy facial features and brown hair. He surprises Cuddy by willingly going to any medical conference she sends him to, and he even volunteers for some in New Orleans.
He doesn’t try to find anyone there. He doesn’t scan the crowd like a fog; he doesn’t flinch at the sight of tall young men with broad shoulders and brown hair.
In the second one, he never survives the infarction.
His last day is a blur of pain and fog, the distant echoes of screams and sirens of the ambulance, the sharp bites of electricity and pain, the unbearable swirls of darkness, darkness and only darkness.
Floating in the void, he sees Stacy calling him back. He’s pretty sure that she really does, since the voice is strangely distinct and clear, but it is washed away by the silence soon enough to believe that it was never there.
there is nobody on Earth, he hears a soft, unbearably sad voice and turns around in the fog to see the familiar silhouette. The darkness shatters its layers around him, and he sees the greens and reds of broken glass under the silhouette's feet.
And then there’s Stacy’s voice again, but he mutes it down, eager for the silhouette to keep talking. It doesn’t.
He can’t make out his facial features — he just knows that the silhouette belongs to a tall young man, and that he is beautiful. He recalls chasing him for years and lying to himself that he wasn’t. He recalls calling for him in his dreams, and he thinks he recalls him from his past lives.
He makes an uncertain step forward, but the silhouette is as distant as it was. He tries to remember Stacy’s face, but he can't do it in that all-consuming darkness. He thinks about turning around, about going back to her voice, but he is not sure if he can hear it anymore.
It’s like there is nobody on Earth.
He makes another step towards the silhouette, the only source of light and color in that terrible fog. Suddenly, he hears the distant crackle of ice cubes from the depths of the darkness, sending chills down his spine. He takes another step, but his father laughs at him from behind, bringing the smell of freezing rainfalls and his condemnation to never-ending, deafening loneliness, the corrosive smell of his natural defects. John laughs louder, spitting out you are worthy of neither kindness nor love, you are nothing more than a stone. The crackle intensifies, and the waves of immense, primeval terror splash through his bloodstream, making him break from the spot and run. He races towards the silhouette, to his only source of protection from that darkness, runs towards the warm colors and light around it because he just can't take it anymore, and suddenly there is light, light and only light.
When Cuddy states the time of his death, a man across the country freezes behind the wheel of a speeding car from sudden chest pain. The piercing blue gaze appears before his eyes, obscuring the sight of the road in front of him. The gaze he can’t really place on anyone he knows, the gaze he’s been chasing in his dreams for almost a decade, the gaze he’s been looking for in strangers but never found. He gasps and loses control for mere seconds, which is enough for the car to crash into the concrete of the chipper of a roundabout. He never has the chance to scribble there is nobody on Earth in his daily planner at the moment of desperation, he never has one to buy a gun and to feel the cold metallic pressure against his temple. When the metal meets the concrete time ends — there are no memories or faces, there is no lonely childhood among painfully uninteresting peers, and only a piercing blue gaze crosses his mind in that tiny instant when he realizes that this is how it ends — stupidly and unreasonably, but really, there wasn’t much to live for anyway.
He is the first and only thing House sees in the endless dark-green fields of the between . The man lies in the grass far away from him, and there is no way of seeing who it is. Somehow, he just knows. He attempts to move through the fog, but it is as hard as if he were moving through the water.
House feels a crook in his abdomen pulling him back, and he knows what’s gonna come next, but he can’t let it happen, he can’t go back again, and he screams a silent no and races through the fog.
The snatch of the crook weakens, and after a breathtaking eternity, House falls onto the grass near the man with a loud, exhausted gasp.
The man opens his eyes. They are brown and hurt and infinitely exhausted, and House wouldn’t be able to look away even if he wanted to.
i’m so tired , he hears a soft, low voice ring in his head, but the man’s lips do not move. where the hell were you?
have we met, House wants to ask, but he knows that they did and they did not, and he recalls his first one and his second one, and he is just tired.
i can’t do it all again , the voice rings in his head, man’s lips are as still as they were before. i just want to go further.
we can’t, he knows it from somewhere, and the knowledge hurts.
They just lie there for hours, a couple of feet away from each other. The man never looks away. House knows that soon the life will start again, and he will have to go back instead of just lying there with him forever, instead of looking in his eyes, instead of crossing their fingers.
And when he moves his palm, the sky is intersected with lightning, and the thunder rumbles angrily. The shards of silence fall onto them, threatening to dissect their faces with broken glass, but only soft pink petals touch their faces gently. Man’s eyes widen, and House can see his palm crawling towards his among all these petals, and he moves forwards as quickly as he can to just cross their fingers, but a bare instant before their hands meet, the crook pulls him upwards, and there is light, light, so much light.
In the third one, he finally learns his name.
It’s the same childhood and the same med school, only this time he’s tired. The stupid, unexplainable exhaustion follows him on the heels wherever he goes, as inseparable as his own shadow. John House no longer surprises him with his tortures — he can’t explain it, but he thinks that he knows them by heart.
He dreams of dark-green, endless fields spangled with gentle, pink petals. He dreams of a hand reaching towards his own, and he always wakes up a moment before he can curl his fingers around it.
He dreams of a soft, low voice, but he can never recall it when he wakes up.
His father still teaches him masochism and isolation. His mother still does nothing to protect him.
In the third one, he learns that John House is actually not his father.
It hits him when they are camping in the mountains for his birthday. He doesn’t like it, but he has no choice, and he spends a lot of time watching the dark-green grass of the field they rest on. It’s almost identical to the one in his dreams, and maybe if it wasn’t for that, he would actually pay attention to the view. He scans the grass with the laser focus, imagining pink petals falling on it. He tries to recall the voice from his dreams, but he can’t. Instead, he recalls the words.
where the hell were you?
John approaches him all of a sudden when his gaze is fixed on the grass right below him. John’s bare feet suddenly are in the center of his attention, and he just stares indifferently, and then his eyes widen. His father’s second toe is taller than his first one. His own one is not.
He is twelve, but he knows enough about genetics to jump to the only possible conclusion. He checks his mother’s feet just to be sure. He informs John about his breakthrough as soon as he’s certain. John doesn’t talk to him for the next two months at all, and it is both an agony and a relief.
The knowledge makes him more stubborn. It makes him both stronger and weaker. He spends hours delving into the depths of his own head, trying to detect and uproot all the poison John has ever injected into his bloodstream. He notices his mother’s love, and sometimes he lets himself feel it. He learns that she is a victim, too.
He makes it to the med school and to Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital. All the staff sincerely hate him, but they always end up listening to him anyway. He gets sent to the medical convention in New Orleans. He makes it through, trying to play decent just not to piss Cuddy off any further — she seemed on the edge of really firing him because of that contract he disrupted. Whatever they say, he knows where to stop.
On the evening of the second day, he spends some time wandering around the halls. He takes a glass of wine from a waiter and stops near the window to check the room for something interesting. He hears a soft, chuckling laughter.
His head turns towards the sound as if it weren’t a burst of laughter but an explosion.
He spots a handsome young man, pretty even, standing sideways near the other window. His laughter is painfully fake. He holds an unopened envelope in unsteady hands. He is fucked up, and that must be obvious to everyone on Earth, but House knows that it isn’t.
All these thoughts are weirdly familiar.
“I’m going to the bar two streets away, would be glad if you joined,” he hears a soft, low voice, and it sends terrible goosebumps down his neck. He thinks that he’s heard it somewhere before.
Professor whose name House doesn’t remember says something in return, but House doesn’t listen. The man seems relieved as he heads towards the exit. House follows, not quite able to explain why.
They end up in a shitty hotel bar, where he watches him from the corner of his eye. The man rants about something passionately to the bartender, clearly drunk now — he can’t really hear the words, but the rare echo of his raised voice rings with open wounds. The man is pretty to the level of absurd, and House can’t help but stare.
Their eyes meet. He thinks of dark-green grass and pink petals.
“Would you please stop playing that?” the man blurts with irritation when the song that has been played three times already goes for the fourth round. He returns his gaze to House and rolls his eyes with a smirk.
you are no more than a stone Gregory, his father’s voice rings in his head, but he mutes it because his words are poison.
He feels like this was before.
The man looks down at the envelope he continues to crumble. He runs a hand through his hair, sighs tiredly, and mumbles something to the bartender. House empties his glass of whiskey.
The song goes for the fifth round.
What happens next is so quick it mixes into a blur — the man jumps to his feet and snatches the glass of whiskey from the bartender, and with a roaring “fuck you!” he throws it at the person standing in front of the jukebox. He misses by no less than a foot, and it crushes a fancy mirror that was hanging peacefully on the wall.
The floor is strewn with shattered glass, and it is beautiful in its own way — dark green intersecting with red, rare spots of colors reflected thousands of times in the shards of the mirror. The man looks down at his hands in disbelief.
House can’t help but laugh.
Some people gasp in shock, someone clearly calls the police and someone starts throwing glasses too and fighting, and the man just stands there, lost and visibly embarrassed. He looks around, confused and still drunk, unable to believe what he has done. His gaze lands on House, who is still laughing hysterically, the corners of his mouth twitch, and a mere second later, he bursts out laughing too. This one is different from the one House witnessed at the conference — it is genuine and heartfelt, open and inappropriately shameless. House raises an empty glass at him, and the man smiles.
He catches himself with the weird thought that he has never seen anyone that interesting.
The party is interrupted by the police. They handcuff the man, which House finds inappropriate and excessive since his guilty look suggests he would follow them anyway. House takes a cab and follows them to the station, where he pays the loan without even looking at the number on the list. He spends some time clearing bureaucratic issues with a random lawyer working at the station, and then it’s all done.
“I took care of it!” he exclaims, standing up from the bench when the man finally exits the station. “Welcome back from prison, mom’s been missing you!”
“Are you…” he shakes his head in confusion and narrows his eyebrows, a finger pointing at House. “Are you the guy who paid my loan?”
“Gregory House, actually,” he answers sarcastically, watching the man closely. “‘The guy who paid my loan’ is the middle name, but I find it dull. Who would name a beloved child like that? Clearly, mommy loves you more.”
He’s drunk and probably talks too much. The man looks at him in confusion, and House suddenly realizes how stupid this is.
“James Wilson,” the man says, his lips widening into a genuine smile. “The middle one is ‘the guy who shattered an antique mirror’, but that’s dull too.”
House grins when he reaches out for a handshake. He grins and grins, not quite able to stop himself and explain that weird, huge relief washing through his whole body.
They end up drinking for the rest of the night in two different pubs. House finally learns the secret of the envelope — Wilson vents about how cruel his wife is to inform him about wanting a divorce through a lawyer. Looking at his lap, he quietly admits that he has never been able to open the envelope and actually read the letter, although he knows perfectly well what is inside. They talk like they’ve known each other forever, and Wilson does not seem to be bothered by all the snappy comments House makes — instead, he laughs genuinely at each one, and House thinks that he missed him.
“No-no-no,” House grabs Wilson by the shoulders and pulls him out of the third bar before they even have the chance to enter. “There is a mosaic window inside. I don’t have the money for another loan.”
Wilson bursts out laughing, hanging on House’s shoulders for balance. House laughs back, and he thinks it’s the happiest he has ever been.
He enters the bar alone, leaving Wilson leaning unsteadily against the wall to buy a bottle of whiskey. When he exits the bar, he spots Wilson grinning widely.
“So what, you refuse to go to nice bars with me from now on?” he asks, but House hears only from now on.
“Wanna job in New Jersey?” he asks in reply, heart skipping a bit. “Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital. Nice oncology department. Sexy boss with a juicy ass. Salary is not—”
“Yes,” Wilson interrupts him, voice soft and low. “Nice change of scenery.”
And he smiles at him, young and genuine and so fucked up, and House wants to kiss him.
They wander the streets, emptying the bottle and looking for House’s hotel. They find it by miracle, and a girl sitting at the reception narrows her eyes at them when they rush through the hall, giggling uncontrollably and hanging on each other for balance, trying to pretend that they are not drunk.
Wilson can’t remember the number of the room he is staying in.
“We can deduce it,” House takes on a serious face. “I’m a medical Sherlock Holmes.”
“Deduction is — good,” Wilson answers, taking on a concentrated expression too.
They stare at each other for a minute, trying to hold onto looking concentrated and determined. House rubs his chin. Wilson narrows his eyebrows and places his hands on his hips.
“Any ideas?” he asks with a very clever expression on his face.
“Nope,” House answers, not quite able to recall what they are trying to deduce. “You?”
Wilson shakes his head, lips pursed in a thin line.
“Got it!” Wilson shouts out enthusiastically after another minute of concentrated staring. “I must have a key!”
“What key?” House asks, completely lost.
“Room key!” Wilson states with a victorious expression. “The number must be written on it!”
They spend another five minutes searching Wilson’s clothes for the key. House helps because Wilson is too wasted for the task. Their hands are all over each other, and Wilson checks House’s pockets for some reason too, and when House’s hand slips into the back pocket of Wilson’s jeans, he can’t quite recall what exactly they are looking for.
“Aren’t you staying in the hotel where you shattered your mirror?” he asks, holding on to Wilson’s shoulders.
Wilson straightens up and looks around, face genuinely perplexed. “It’s not that one?”
House can’t hold back a giggle. “Come with me, idiot.”
He pulls him forward by the sleeve towards his own room. They spend another five minutes looking for his key, and Wilson’s hands all over him make House blush. Finally, Wilson pulls it out of his coat, and with an incredible joint effort they manage to open the door.
“You’re staying here,” House states and falls on the bed, too wasted to take his shoes off.
“You’re not Sherlock Holmes,” Wilson informs him accusatively and falls asleep as soon as his head touches the pillow.
He wakes up with a terrible hangover. His head feels like an overheated stone, his mouth is dry and sore, and there is a shoe not very far away from his face.
“James Wilson,” he grunts, rolling onto his side to shake another body on the bed. “Wake up.”
Wilson makes a hurt, dissatisfied sound. He doesn’t open his eyes. He looks unforgivably young.
With an awful effort, House crawls out of the bed and makes it to the sink, where he eagerly gulps two glasses of water in a row. Drops are running down from his mouth onto his T-shirt, but he couldn’t care less. He fills another glass.
“James Wilson,” he grunts again, shaking him. “You’re dehydrated and late. Wake up.”
Wilson finally opens his eyes. He looks at House hovering above him on unsteady legs with a glass of water with utter confusion.
“Do you remember who I am?” House asks, raising an eyebrow.
“You’re not Sherlock Holmes,” Wilson smiles through the hangover, and House smiles back.
They survive the morning by taking horse doses of Ibuprofen, washing it down with strong coffee. They don’t attend the convention that day, nor any of the next, preferring to just drink together in various bars. On their last evening, House suddenly thinks that he has never had anyone come this close to him for his whole life.
He clears his throat.
“About Princeton,” he says, voice as steady as he could manage. “I was serious.”
“Me too,” Wilson looks up at him. “Just after I do my internship.”
And then it’s settled. They call each other from time to time when Wilson does his internship, which House never does with anyone else. When the internship is done, he informs Cuddy that he has got an oncologist coming in, and soon enough, she is manipulated into offering Wilson a job. Wilson moves to New Jersey, and he likes the hospital and the city, and the other staff are ' nice’, so House breathes out, relieved that Wilson is not going to run away.
He wants to kiss him though, which isn’t a good idea. Wilson is interesting and Wilson is fun, and Wilson became his best friend even before he learned his name, and House can’t risk that over a kiss. Having Wilson leave would be dissatisfying, which is why he decides to kiss him later. When they are more settled, probably.
And then he meets Stacy and falls in love, and Wilson gets married for the second time. Cuddy approves of starting a diagnostic department, and he makes Wilson go through the bunch of CVs he gets, and Wilson whines but does it anyway, just for the sake of the show of House running a team of real human beings. He announces to House that it’s going to be both hilarious and a disaster, and then the infarction happens.
He loses muscles in his leg and turns into a cripple. He snaps at Stacy and Wilson and Cuddy and whoever gets around, because that’s more than he can get through. Because he didn’t ask for that, because he would rather die than become a miserable cripple, and she did it to him.
“I’m done with you,” Stacy informs him a mere month after.
And then she leaves him shattered and alone, just a ghost of a man he used to be, just a miserable cripple. He howls at night and trips on Vicodin, his chest torn apart and opened, all his insides shattered, the feathers of his carved wings scattered all over the floor. Wilson’s second marriage is falling apart because he is always with him — he blurts some shit about cheering him up, but House knows that he just wants to make sure he won’t kill himself.
And he probably would if it wasn’t for Wilson hovering above him like a mother hen. House shouts at him and snaps at him — he turns the words into knives and shoves them at Wilson, making him a perfect target — he does his best to scare Wilson away just because he should, but it doesn’t really work.
Two months after the infarction, Wilson buys him a cane. It’s nice and fancy, and House is broken and miserable, and they shout at each other for no reason, again.
“You’re a fixing maniac!” he shouts and waves the stupid cane at him, leaning against the kitchen counter and pointing at his leg. “Can you fix this? Because if not, you won’t fix me. Just give up already and let me go!”
“It’s not about fixing you, you idiot!” Wilson narrows his eyebrows and waves his arms from his hips, pointing a finger at House. “It’s about being with you when you are getting through this. You need someone, House. And you can’t do it alone.”
“Well, then I don’t need you !” House snaps and accidentally puts his weight on the bad leg. On the leg.
He shrieks involuntarily and reels to the side. Wilson breaks from the spot immediately to catch him, but House swings the cane forcefully to keep him away and steadies himself with his left hand. When he looks up, Wilson’s hand is pressed against his forehead. He lowers it and stares at the blood on his fingers.
That’s it, House thinks. He’s crossed the line.
“I meant it,” he says, following the masochistic urge to make it worse, to make it easier for Wilson to leave. “I’ll hit you again if you come any closer.”
Wilson just stares at him with an unreadable face. He stares and stares, and House can see all the layers of disbelief and hurt Wilson thinks he can hide from him. And then, he turns on his heels and heads towards the door without a single word. It slams shut with a terrible rumble behind him.
He slides down against the kitchen counter and buries his head in his hands. He thinks about a razor on his bath shelves and about twenty-five Vicodin pills he currently has; he thinks about the most productive way of destroying himself completely. He can’t come up with a single one better than what he has just performed.
Losing Wilson was inevitable — he knew it from the very beginning. They were too different and too alike in completely incompatible ways — both too fucked up to last long. He knows that a bet about when Wilson would dump him was always there in the oncology department. He knows that Wilson would be better off without him.
He knows all that, but he can’t hold back a hysterical sob — just one erratic inhale, too human to be blamed on the leg pain.
He’s never even kissed him.
Something solid is pushed boldly against him. He raises his head and sees Wilson with an unreadable expression on his face, handing him a car first-aid kit. House takes it, bewildered, and Wilson drops to the floor by his side without a single word.
House stares at him, perplexed and not sure about what Wilson expects from him. He is leaning back against the counter, head tilted back, eyes closed. After no less than a minute of screaming silence, he opens one eye and points a finger at the dissection on his forehead, and says, “Stitch it, you moron.”
House opens the kit and searches it for the instruments he needs. He disinfects the wound and applies an anesthetic, concentrating on all these things he knows how to do. He picks up the stitches and gets to work, trying to hold his hands as still as possible.
“Now listen to me,” Wilson says and winces at the needle, his eyes still closed. “I’m not going anywhere. That’s my final word. You can—”
“But Wilson,” House starts.
“Stitch — it — and shut — up,” Wilson says firmly, in the voice he uses at those rare occasions when it's physically dangerous to contradict. “I am not going anywhere. That’s it,” he winces again as House makes another stitch. “You can whine and argue as much as you want, but it won't change anything. You can cripple me as well, if you really want to, but that won't change it either. You can shout at me and beat me, and I won’t go anywhere, but I will have to sedate you if you become too aggressive,” he opens his eyes and locks their gazes. “So please, let’s skip the scaring me away part. Just…" he looks down at his hands. “Please.”
Wilson looks back at him, and House notices how tired he is. He has terrible bags under his eyes, he probably lost a couple of pounds during the last weeks, and he is exhausted.
“Okay,” he says quietly, looking anywhere but at Wilson. “Okay.”
And he lets him stay. He learns how to walk with the cane, he yells at Wilson after he offers him to find a therapist, he goes back to Princeton and makes Cuddy’s life as unbearable as it was before the infarction. Wilson becomes the Head of the Oncology Department while House swallows Vicodin pills as candies, but neither Wilson nor Cuddy can do anything about that.
'The department' plans come back to life, and after a couple of months of terrorizing Cuddy into giving him the room that used to be orthopedics for his department, he starts interviewing.
He picks Chase, Foreman, and Cameron, which is a better combination than he expected. They are more intriguing than other applicants, and he probably enjoys studying and manipulating and playing with their young, fragile psyches too much.
He thinks about kissing Wilson during the times of his third divorce, but he’s still not over Stacy's second coming. He thinks about kissing Wilson when he moves in with him, but then Wilson finds this dying girl he needs to fuck into blissful last months of life. He thinks about kissing him after he gets shot, but then Wilson and Cuddy come up with a traitorous plan of not telling him that he actually cured his patient, so 'his wings wouldn't melt', and after that he doesn’t think about kissing Wilson at all for a year.
Years fly by in an undistinguishable blur, years get sucked into the vortex of the past. His first team falls apart, and then he gets his second, and he would never admit that he actually likes them better than the first one. And then Amber dies and Cutner kills himself, and he ends up in the fucking asylum.
He thinks that he and Wilson will kiss eventually when Wilson gets them a condo after House is released from the ward. He is sure about that when Wilson gives him an obscenely expensive organ. He even considers acting on it when he finds Sam in the kitchen one morning.
And then Wilson kicks him out.
And that’s OK, really. It’s not like he needed a babysitter. It’s not like Wilson has promised anything to him.
His affair with Cuddy is the most logical and illogical thing that has ever happened to him. He is as happy as he was with Stacy, and for a blissful and ignorant year he believes it to be his happy end. But she dumps him, and he crashes her house — because she crashed him — and spends more than a year in prison.
He is fucked up to a level of giving up.
But he has always been a fighter, so after prison he quickly gets his life back. And then he thinks about kissing Wilson again, and now it’s finally the time, really, because everything else seems to have already happened to them. He smiles one day when he comes to work, because he knows that he is ready.
On this day, Wilson tells him that he has cancer.
Just as if he hadn’t been beaten up unconscious by life already. Just as if he wasn’t a walking bag of broken bones.
And of course, Wilson refuses chemo.
He wants to laugh hysterically when Wilson attempts to prepare him for life without him. He wants to laugh to tears when Foreman invites him to a match that is supposed to happen after Wilson’s death. They all act like there is gonna be anything after it, and he wonders if they are just stupid or that naive.
When they hit the run, he has two ampoules of morphine on him. He makes sure Wilson never finds out about the second one, because he would throw a tantrum and probably break it, and House would have to rob some small town hospital for another one.
Because there’s no way he’s gonna live without Wilson.
He's got nothing else.
On the road, he’s the happiest he’s ever been. They care about nothing; they speed on the highways and share rooms in shitty motels or luxury hotels, just because they can. He thinks about kissing Wilson annoyingly often, but he can't risk Wilson kicking him out of what remains of his life and dying alone in agony. Just what they have is enough. Just Wilson is enough. It has always been enough, really.
Four months on the road, they stay in the presidential suite of the best hotel in New Orleans. They just wander around the city for two days, coming back to the hotel only to sleep. They visit the bar where Wilson broke the mirror two decades ago, and they try to recreate their path from the police station to the hotel where House was staying. They drink a twenty-year-old scotch right from the bottle, and then they find it.
Wilson just stares at the building for no less than ten minutes, completely silent. It obviously looks different — more modern and fancy now, and they hand each other a bottle, watching the lights go on and off in the windows.
“Do you think…” Wilson clears his throat. “Do you remember your room number? From the day we met?”
His heart drops to his feet for no obvious reason.
“I don’t remember the room number, but I think I can remember where it is.” his voice is rough, and he washes down the lump in his throat with scotch.
“I want to see it,” Wilson’s voice is firm and determined, and he doesn’t like it.
Anxiety hits him hard when they go in, and Wilson smiles at the receptionist in his charming way. He doesn’t listen to their conversation, but she eagerly sends another girl to help them find the room. They pass the corridor where they were looking for Wilson’s key, hands all over each other. His legs seem to remember the path, and they lead them to the room on their own accord. Wilson seems happy, and they come back down to the reception.
He feels nauseous when the receptionist hands Wilson a key, and he leaves her a tip of ten times the room price with a wide smile. “We’re gonna smoke there,” he says to her and winks, “Don’t wanna be disturbed by fire alarms.” The girl smiles and nods, clearly not caring about them smoking with such an amount of money falling on her out of nowhere.
That’s when the thought comes.
For all these months, he avoided it with stunning success. It was easy to pretend that they were just on a long and well-earned vacation. It was easy to ignore the cough Wilson developed in the course of the last weeks because it wasn’t that cough yet.
It was easy to pretend that Wilson wasn't dying.
House heads to the couch as soon as they enter the room, and falls on it tiredly. Wilson sits on the opposite one — across the coffee table, not next to him — and this is a terrible sign. Wilson closes his eyes.
“House, it’s time,” he simply says.
He wants to scream that it’s not. He wants to jump to his feet and howl that there is still time for them to live, there is still time for them to visit hundreds of other places, there is still time for Wilson to agree to chemo.
“You know that it’s time too, you just don’t want to face it,” Wilson smiles, looking him in the eyes.
“No,” House grunts, fingers tensing on the couch pillow. “Wilson, it’s not, you’re still—”
“House,” Wilson cuts him off with a wave of a hand, “It is. You can hear the cough yourself. The chest pain is getting worse, and I've been vomiting every morning for the last two weeks. I get dizzy all the time, and it's not safe to ride a bike anymore.”
He can hear the bumping of his heart in his ears. His breath is cut off by the adrenaline, and he thinks he can feel it running through his bloodstream. The world slows down and speeds up all at once.
“I’ve seen this before. You know I did,” Wilson says, voice blank. “Any time this week the agony will start. I know what I’m saying.”
He reaches down for his backpack, and after a quick search, he hands House an ampoule of morphine and a syringe.
"I don't want to find out what it... what it feels like," he mumbles, looking at the carpet.
House wants to fall down to Wilson’s legs and howl.
The outstretched hand still hovers in the air.
“I brought my own,” he says roughly.
Wilson nods and takes his hand away.
“This is why you brought us to New Orleans?” House asks, not caring to hide the shakiness of his voice anymore. “This was your plan all along?”
Wilson just smiles at him, “You seem to like metaphors.”
All he can do is just nod.
Wilson lights a cigar with a one-hundred-dollar bill, and they pass it to each other, slowly filling the room with gray smoke. House lets it all go, and they laugh and talk nonsense while finishing the bottle for what feels like an instant and an eternity.
"I was afraid we wouldn't make it here before I..." Wilson says suddenly, staring at his lap.
"You did," House grunts, voice rough and shaky. "We did."
And then he watches Wilson get up to his feet and head toward the bed. Everything is unbearably slow and deafeningly fast — he rolls the sleeves of his shirt and falls onto the sheets, arms spread.
House’s hands start to tremble. He wants to get up and run away, he wants to call the ambulance and make Wilson do chemo again, he wants to fall asleep and forget Wilson has ever existed.
Wilson looks at him and smiles.
“Come on,” he says in a soft, low voice. “It's okay. Everything is okay.”
Hypnotized, House limps towards the bed. He tries not to think about what he’s doing when he fills the first syringe with twice the deadly dosage. He shields his hands from Wilson's gaze with his back and fills the second syringe too, leaving it lying ready on the floor.
He settles on his knees by Wilson's side, right on the bed. He watches his own hand holding the syringe slowly move towards Wilson's arm.
Something very sharp sticks his heart with utter, primeval panic, and the needle freezes a mere inch from the vein.
He can hear his own bloodstream. He can hear Wilson's bloodstream.
“They say you need to truly love someone to kill them,” Wilson whispers in a soft, low voice, making House shiver. “You’re the only one who would do that for me, Greg.”
The sirens of the ambulance passing by are so loud it deafens. Wilson is solid and alive in front of him — not so young but infinitely pretty, much prettier than the day they met. House breathes in and out and he notices the wires of Wilson's veins which sway the blood through his bloodstream, sway it to his lungs so his chest would rise and fall and he would breathe, sway it up his brain so he would joke and smile and down his legs so he would run, sway it scrupulously and purposefully, sway it to make Wilson possible, sway it invariably to keep Wilson alive.
"There is nobody else on Earth," Wilson whispers.
He pierces the vein and pushes on the piston.
Wilson loudly exhales in relief, and before he can do anything, House rolls onto his side and reaches for the syringe lying on the floor, and pushes on another piston, and sends morphine down his own bloodstream.
“House! Did you just—” Wilson exhales in disbelief when House rolls back to him, so they would lie facing each other.
“We have five minutes to live,” he exhales, rapidly moving closer and curling his arm cautiously around Wilson’s waist. “Pick another topic.”
“You were supposed to move on!” Wilson exclaims, brazenly grabbing his shirt and pulling him closer with undisguised, breathtaking urgency.
He feels a gentle arm on his waist and pushes a leg between Wilson’s.
“You didn’t seriously believe it, did you?”
“You’re an idiot,” Wilson whispers, pressing their foreheads together. His hands are on his back, his hands are on his waist and hips, his hands are everywhere, just like they were the day they met. Gasping for air, Wilson resolutely, greedily pushes him even closer, and it seems to House that they touch with every single cell of their bodies.
“You always believed there’s something else,” House murmurs, palm caressing Wilson’s back. “How could I let you go there alone, James?"
Wilson gasps.
“All my life, I've always wanted to—”
“Me too,” he whispers and finds Wilson’s lips with his own.
They are soft and warm, and House can still taste scotch on them. The kiss is slow and gentle, lazy even, which doesn’t feel like a first kiss at all. Wilson sobs in it, lips parting and inviting him in. He can feel Wilson’s tongue sliding across his lower lip, and he whines at the sensation, because there’s nothing to be scared of anymore.
Because Wilson is kissing him.
He wants to pull away and say all those things he never said.
“I know,” Wilson whispers right into his mouth, not allowing their lips to part for even a second. “Everything — I know.”
House just sobs in reply, euphoria starting to slowly wash him away. His grip on Wilson’s back intensifies, and he smiles into his mouth when he feels a firm grip on his waist. Wilson kisses him as if they have all the time in the world — unbearably gently, carefully, lovingly.
The kiss blossoms into eternity, covering the room with soft, pink petals.
They kiss for hours that turn into days. They kiss for weeks, building up on other weeks, brick by brick, forming years. They kiss for what feels like an eternity, and which probably is.
“We must have died by now,” Wilson smiles into his mouth, holding his face gently. “Was it morphine or just another trick of yours to convince me to do chemo?”
“Would it work?” House asks, eyes still closed, lips brushing against Wilson’s as he speaks.
“I don’t know. Was it?”
“No.”
“Maybe that’s heaven then,” Wilson whispers, palm gently running through House's hair.
“You get so sentimental on your deathbed, another minute and you’re gonna start throwing confessions”
“Actually, that’s rather on you,” Wilson laughs, his head tilting back. “But don’t worry, I won’t tell anyone.”
He feels the grass under his fingers when he slides his hand down Wilson’s back. His eyes shut open, but he sees only Wilson and the grass under him.
“I must be hallucinating on morphine,” he says, still not willing to move further away from Wilson to take a look around.
Wilson slowly opens his eyes. He notices the grass under House and frowns in such a Wilson manner that House can’t hold back a giggle.
He looks younger — almost as young as he was the day he met him.
They lie on an endless field of dark-green grass, the wind blowing around the flocks of soft pink petals. House catches one with his fingers.
“And how could I let you go to that flower paradise alone?” he asks sarcastically, and Wilson smiles.
Memories start to slowly fall on him, and he remembers the first one and the second one as bright as he remembers the third.
“I met you,” he whispers, tracing Wilson’s jawline with his fingers. “I have finally met you.”
Wilson's eyes are so filled with warm light he could lighten up the streets.
His fingers draw unsteady circles on House’s chest. “I wish I kissed you the night we met.”
The wind suddenly gets stronger, making pink petals swirl in small hurricanes. House urges Wilson closer, wrapping his arms around him, clinging to him as hard as he can. Wilson presses him into his chest, hands firmly wrapped around his back.
“James,” House whispers into him, but no matter how hard he holds Wilson’s shoulders, he feels the crook in his abdomen pulling him upwards, and then there is light, light and only light.
The fourth one is the last one.
After the cold baths, he curls in his bed and tries to recall these weird dreams of a field filled with dark-green grass. He doesn’t dream about it often — only on his worst days. He can’t explain it but the dream makes him happy in a way he’s never been. Soft pink petals dance in the hands of the wind, and he can hear a soft, chuckling laughter.
There is someone else in this field with him, but he can never remember their face.
The dream becomes his secret talisman, his odd protector. He thinks about the field when John pours poison into his ears, he thinks about someone from that dream, who would never let John hurt him. And weirdly, this works — that shadow is always with him, it stands right behind his back and sleeps next to him under the bush when the rain falls, it runs a calming hand through his hair, it never leaves him.
He never acknowledges these thoughts fully. After all, it is just embarrassing.
But the shadow goes to med school with him, filling his heart with unexplainable hope. He can’t tell exactly what he hopes for.
But he finishes med school, and it still feels like there is nobody else on Earth. He makes it to Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital, where he makes Cuddy’s life as unbearable as he can manage. When he scares away one of the potential investors with his attitude, she frets and fumes. She definitely has something for him, though, because he gets off with just attending a medical convention in New Orleans.
He gets unusually nervous on the plane. He washes down the anxiety with the most expensive whiskey — just to piss Cuddy off with the trip bill even more.
The convention is as dull and boring as he expected, but he's making it through almost decently, ruining only two objectively catastrophic speeches. On the second night, he walks down the hall listening to people’s conversations indifferently. He finds a lonely spot in front of the window, where he steals a glass of wine from a waiter’s tray.
He hears a soft, low chuckle somewhere on the right.
He almost jumps on his feet, head turning towards the sound. There is a handsome young man, pretty even, standing sideways near the other window. He has an unopened envelope in his hands, which he wrinkles anxiously. He looks painfully familiar, but he can’t remember ever seeing him before.
The heart starts to hummer in a frantic rhythm, the heart aches with an inexplicable urge, and House takes great effort to remain standing still.
“I’m going to the bar two streets away, would be glad if you joined,” he says in a soft, low voice to the old professor he’s talking to.
Professor excuses himself, and the man seems relieved. He turns on his heels and heads towards the exit.
House thinks that he has seen this a million times before.
The heart screams so loudly, the heart painfully urges forward. He thinks of soft pink petals and dark-green grass.
The heart urges him forward. He catches up to the man before his hand reaches for the door handle.
“Dr. Gregory House,” he jumps in front of the door, not letting the man open it. “The service of salvation from getting drunk in solitude.”
The man looks at him in confusion, and House suddenly realizes how terribly stupid this is. The heart skips a beat in panic.
“Dr. James Wilson,” he says, suddenly breaking into a wide, sincere smile. “I already thought that you missed my order.”
House smiles madly at him, unable to help it.
On their way to the bar, House looks at him from the corners of his eyes. His features are soft and firm, and his tidy hair gets messier with the blow of the wind. They sit in the bar where Wilson vents about his sudden divorce and how he hasn't been able to open the envelope for days, and House vents about Cuddy and the hospital, and he feels like he has known him forever.
When the same song starts to play for the fifth time, Wilson snatches a glass from House’s hands, and with a roaring “fuck you!” throws it at the man standing in front of the jukebox. He misses by no less than a foot, and a fancy mirror hanging on the wall shatters with a terrible crackle. Shards fall onto the floor, reflecting the lights of the bar and people’s shocked faces millions and millions of times.
Wilson stares down at his hands in disbelief.
House acts on pure instincts. Before anyone has a chance to react, he reaches out and grabs Wilson’s palm, pulling him forcefully towards the exit. Wilson follows him — they storm out of the bar and speed up the streets, hand still in hand, without even realizing it. When they stop at least five streets away, House puts his palms on his knees and thinks he’s gonna spit his lungs out.
“What — the hell,” he breathlessly says, and looks up at Wilson. “Was that?”
Wilson is in no better shape — he leans against the building, his face red in the yellow light of street torches. “It was a shitty song.”
Their gazes intersect, and the corners of his mouth twitch. An instant later they burst out laughing, Wilson folding in two against the wall, hiding his face in his palms. They laugh and laugh, House’s head brushing against Wilson’s shoulders, and maybe that’s hysterical, but he thinks that's the happiest he has ever been.
They buy a bottle of twenty-year-old scotch just because it seems appropriate. They wander the streets and hand it over to each other, and House learns that Wilson is an oncologist seeking an internship and that he has two brothers, one of whom disappeared two years ago. He learns that Wilson likes Pink Floyd and Sherlock Holmes novels, he learns his parents’ names, and how lonely his childhood was.
He thinks he learns how it feels to be falling in love.
“Oh my God!” Wilson exclaims, his hands flying up to his head when they cross the river. “I left my divorce letter there!”
They are in the middle of the bridge. House leans back against the railing, watching Wilson panic with a small smile.
“I thought you’d learned the cover by heart,” he asks, raising an eyebrow in a fake surprise.
“There is my name on it, you idiot!” Wilson hisses, his hands now resting on his hips. “They’ll know that it’s me!”
“Come on,” House says, reaching out to grab Wilson by the shoulder in an attempt to call him down. “They won’t send you to jail for breaking a mirror. We can call my lawyer in the morning and ask what we should do.”
Wilson stares at him. House bites his tongue.
“Sounds reasonable,” he blurts out, blushing just a little. House sips on the scotch, just to occupy himself with something and stop staring.
Wilson forgets about the envelope soon enough and leans back against the railing too, their sides now touching. He laughs at House’s snappy comments and finds his hospital stories just hilarious, and House accidentally places his hand on Wilson’s lap, not quite able to control himself.
i wish i kissed you the night we met.
Wilson falls silent and looks at House’s palm on his knee. House sends it all to hell and leaves it there, heart hammering in his chest.
Wilson stands back upright from the railing, House’s hand dropping down on its own accord. He wants to stop him and say that he didn’t mean it, but he actually did. He expects Wilson to leave and that something House doesn't know the name of with him, but instead, he turns on his heels to face House, and slowly crowds him against the railing, hands pressing on the cold metal on both of his sides.
Wilson watches him cautiously, carefully, looking for any sign of protest. House locks their gazes, and a wall of glass crashes loudly inside of him, its shards fall into the rives, and he says something that he wanted to say this whole time.
“Have we met before?”
Wilson smiles at the question, something warm and heavy lighting up brightly behind his eyes.
“I feel as if we have,” he whispers in a soft, low voice.
House leans in to kiss him.
His lips are warm and soft against his, and House smirks into the kiss when he tastes scotch on it. Wilson moves his lips softly and gently, lazily even, which doesn’t feel like a first kiss at all. House thinks he quietly sobs in it, which makes him shiver. He can feel Wilson’s tongue sliding across his lower lip; he can feel his hand cupping his face and the other one curling around his waist, sending sparkles of warm electricity through his body, and he leans in closer. It feels like there’s nothing to be scared of anymore.
“I feel like I've missed you,” he whispers into Wilson’s hair when they part. James shudders and grabs his back erratically, locking him into a crushing embrace, murmuring something against the crook of his neck in that impossible soft low voice of his, making House melt like an ice cube in his arms.
They never separate after it. House manipulates Cuddy into offering Wilson an internship, and he moves in with him without even attempting to rent his own apartment. This is unnecessary, really. Cuddy would find it all insane if she ever found out, but he makes sure she doesn’t. And she really doesn’t, for some time.
In the fourth one, he just calls him James.
Three years into their relationship, they spend Christmas with his parents, because his mother asked them to, and he could never miss an opportunity to enrage his homophobic military father by presenting Wilson to him. Christmas ends with James punching his father in the face after one of his snappy comments about always knowing that House “was actually his daughter”. John punches Wilson back, and Christmas is ruined, but House has never enjoyed any holiday this much before. Wilson has a bruise under his eye from his father’s fist, but it even suits him.
House proposes to him the day after, just because this man is his end-game.
In the fourth, the leg never happens.
Wilson is always by his side, and one morning, he just calls an ambulance without providing any coherent explanation, just because House was trying to tear his own chest apart through the shortness of breath in his sleep. He finds it unnecessary, dull even, but in the ambulance his chest starts to feel like it is shrinking in size and burns all over at the same time. When they arrive at the hospital, James is all cold determination and alertness — he threatens people in the ER into checking him in for surgery right now, he fills in all the necessary papers, and never lets House out of his eyesight. House doesn’t know, but he’s in the operating room from the beginning to the end, watching every surgeon’s movement with the vigilance of a hawk.
This is how Cuddy finds out.
“I was trying to kick him out, but he didn’t pay attention,” Cuddy says to him when she comes to visit. “I thought he was gonna set Evans on fire. He looked… scary, actually. I hope I never have to see him like this again.”
In the hospital, Wilson never leaves his side for more than five minutes. He meticulously looks through his charts and sleeps in the armchair next to his bed. He doesn’t care to use his charming smiles and scares all the nurses with his heavy, watchful gaze. House knows that the rumors about him finally making Wilson lose his mind spread with surprising speed.
He is discharged a week after the surgery, and Cuddy sends them both home without even trying to hide her relief. Wilson cooks him disgustingly healthy meals and watches him doing his physiotherapy. House tries his best not to mock him for that, but two weeks into it, he fails.
“Are you gonna hover above me like a mother hen for the rest of our lives?” He asks when he notices that Wilson is actually watching him while pretending to read his book.
“Yes, I’m gonna hover above you like a mother hen for as long as I need to make sure that you won't attempt dying again,” Wilson answers calmly, turning a page demonstratively.
“It was just a mild stroke,” House mumbles under his nose.
“It was mild just because I was there to catch it in time!” Wilson explodes all of a sudden, rapidly jumping to his feet and pointing a finger at him. “You called me stupid for even calling an ambulance!”
“I changed my mind,” he replies, watching Wilson start to pace the room back and forth.
“You could have died just because you were too stubborn to admit that something was wrong!” Wilson accuses, clearly giving away everything that was bothering him for weeks. “If you were admitted just half an hour later anything could have happened!”
“But it didn’t,” his voice is rough as he speaks. He catches Wilson by his sleeve to make him stop pacing. “Because you didn't let it.”
James kneels in front of the armchair, carefully taking both of his hands in his. He clears his throat and looks up at him, suddenly so piercingly vulnerable that House flinches.
“You are not alone, Greg,” he says painfully slowly. “You can’t do that. You can’t just ignore the symptoms of a stroke, you can’t cross a road at a red light, you can’t get into a reckless fight and get stabbed,” he signs, and then continues. “Because you’ve got me. And you can’t do that to me like I can’t do that to you. You are responsible for staying alive and healthy. Your life is… ” he pauses to clear his throat again. “There is nobody else on Earth.”
A hard lump forms in his throat, and he swallows rapidly to get rid of it.
“Okay,” he answers, cupping Wilson's chin carefully. “Of course, James.”
Wilson slowly leans in to kiss him — so carefully, so gently, so lovingly. His hands are on his cheeks and in his hair, his hands are sliding up his back and waist, his hands are grabbing the fabric of his T-shirt, and even though there is at least a foot between their bodies, House feels like they are touching with every single cell. He smiles into the kiss, thinking that this is more than he could ever ask for. This is more than he could ever hope for.
James. Just James.
Probably, forevermore.