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Staring up at the popcorn ceiling of his hotel room, James Wilson wondered if he was starting to lose his touch.
It took him until he and Stacy were seated in the little French bistro she chose for them to meet at for dinner to realize House had followed him. All he did was catch a streak of orange out of the corner of his eye, but it was enough. He knew it was a bad idea to bail on video game night, but it was the only night Stacy was in town and it had been months since they'd last seen each other. They were friends, he had every right to see her and he wouldn't apologize for it.
If only his Jewish guilt would get the message that he was unrepentant.
Wilson rolled onto his side to check the time and determined he'd been tossing and turning for upwards of two hours. Sighing, he was about to give up and start going through his TiVo backlog of El Fuego del Amor, when he heard a hesitant knock at the door. Assuming someone had accidentally knocked on the wrong door, he ignored it until a series of very purposeful knocks cracked through the silence. He knew that knock. It was the very loud, obnoxious sound of wood on wood.
Only House could make a cane as annoying as himself.
Rolling out of bed, he started rubbing his eyes to get rid of the faint traces of drowsiness that had clung to him unsuccessfully for hours and absentmindedly flipped on the desk lamp. Lazily making his way to the door, Wilson undid the latch and swung open the door to reveal House, cane mid-swing and inches from his face.
"In some cultures, it's rude to keep a friend waiting."
"In every culture, it's rude to knock on a friend's door in the middle of the night," he retorted easily and stood aside, letting House in.
House smirked as he walked past. "Unless it's a booty call."
"Did your latest hooker bail on you? I told you kissing on the lips was a no no."
"But I just miss the intimacy so much," he cried sarcastically, tossing his helmet onto the bed and walking to lean against the desk. "She lets me kiss her other lips!"
Wilson cringed and leaned against the armoire. Close to House, but not too close. "Ew, House. You don't actually -." He flailed his hand out in some ineffectual gesture. "- you know, do you?"
"God, no. I haven't given head in years, which is a real shame. I can feel my finely tuned oral skills slipping through my fingers after each cheap and empty thrill."
Given his oral fixation, Wilson could believe he'd turned oral into an art form. Blinking rapidly, he quickly got that image out of his head. That was a path he didn't need to travel down at that precise moment.
"I'd hardly call them cheap," he quipped. It was best they stuck to steady and well-trodden ground.
House chuckled, but the sound was subdued. He looked away from Wilson and started beating a tattoo into the ground with his cane. "But they are empty."
Knowing how hypocritical it was, considering he was the one always trying to make House open up more, Wilson hated when he unexpectedly dropped something deep like that. It always took him by surprise and he never knew what to do with it. As revelations went, it wasn't the deepest, but it did reveal that House did miss intimacy... and giving head. Also kissing, but Wilson was hung up on the other two items. Before he could formulate a reply, House continued.
"How's Stacy?"
Ah. That explained the revelation. He'd been reminiscing about old times.
"She's good. Made partner at her firm and is taking a case before the Supreme Court next month. Something about gay rights," Wilson recited dutifully. He'd been impressed and told her so, making her blush beautifully at the praise as she brushed it off. House looked impressed, too, he noted. It took a lot to impress him and Stacy was pretty damn impressive whatever way you looked at her. No wonder House still loved her. "Mark's -."
"What makes you think I give a shit about Mark?"
"I assumed you'd want all the dirt possible on your arch nemesis."
House rolled his eyes and turned to glare at him coldly. "Yeah, because I'm just itching to get her and push her away a third time. My next goal is to see if I can do it more times than you've had wives."
Wilson bit into the soft flesh of his cheek to keep from volleying back, in no mood to duke it out with House at 2 a.m. after being awake for nearly twenty-four hours. There was a reason House came over and it wasn't to talk about hookers and what he missed doing with his mouth, but it was connected to Stacy somehow, that Wilson had no doubt about. He wasn't about to let House deflect his own reason for coming over just to get in a few low-blows. After glaring at each other for a few more seconds, House relented and looked away. Apparently, he wanted to stay on topic, too. Usually he'd bitch and moan for a bit longer on principle alone, but something was bothering him and he wanted to get to it fast, like ripping off a bandaid.
Which meant that the coming conversation was going to hurt. Wilson felt his insides clinch in anticipation, ready for a hit.
The silence spread, awkward and stilted around them. Remarkably - considering it was House and Wilson involved - silence wasn't an unusual thing for them. They could sit around for hours doing and saying nothing. Silence was a comfortable thing for them. That silence was different though, loaded with millions of questions which weren't getting asked, but were begging for answers. At least another minute passed before House seemed to come to a decision, swallowing and rolling his lips between his teeth.
"What would you have done?" he asked, his voice vulnerable and bleeding insecurity.
Not wanting to send him scurrying back into his shell, Wilson matched his tone. "Done when?"
"My infarction. What would you have done?"
Wilson felt his eyes widen and a cold sensation immediately chilled every inch of his skin. The prickling sensations it left behind as it crashed over him in waves made him flinch and his chest grow tight, Wilson belatedly realizing he hadn't taken a breath since House spoke. He was lightheaded and his throat constricted. As if observing from outside himself, he noted that it was a fear response.
The infarction was something they didn't talk about. Ever. Through mutual, unspoken agreement, they never talked about the intimate details of those hellish days and the year following it. It had made the silence between them jagged and hard for awhile, but those edges dulled over time. At least for Wilson they did.
"Please don't make me answer that," he pleaded - begged - quietly, his throat choking around the words.
They weren't supposed to talk about that. He didn't want to talk about that. He'd rather House went on a weeks long diatribe about his failed marriages than answer that single question.
"Answer me."
"I can't."
"You can and you will," House insisted, steel returning to his voice. He moved into Wilson's personal space and for a wild second, Wilson considered punching him in the face to get him out of it. "What would you have done?"
That was a question Wilson had asked himself God knows how many times since the infarction. He wondered what he would have done after Stacy had called him tearfully and told him what she had done, again when he first saw House and how he looked at Stacy with nothing but betrayal and contempt, during physical therapy, on bad pain days, when he discovered that House had shoved all of his athletic equipment into the closet, every time he saw him absentmindedly pop a handful of Vicodin. Most people contemplated the existence of the afterlife, what their role was in the universe, the meaning of love. Wilson wondered what he would have done if he'd been in Stacy's position.
"What does it matter?" Wilson said, shooting for dismissive but missing by a mile. He turned away from House and backed away from him. "You wouldn't even let Stacy call me when you were in the hospital. You didn't want me making any decisions then, why would you want me to make one now?"
"Because I need to know where you stand."
"You don't need to, you want to. You're angry and you want a target for your anger. You just want to know if you get to throw more anger at Stacy or if you get to finally turn it on me!"
And that was the point Wilson always got stuck on, what made his heart ache and his palms sweat. House, for all his faults, was actually pretty difficult to anger. Irritation was one thing, House didn't tend to hold onto irritation for long, but anger festered in him like flesh eating bacteria until it spread and destroyed every good thing he ever thought about the person who angered him. As much as he'd once loved Stacy, Wilson knew that the first emotion House felt when he thought of her was anger. Wilson didn't want that for himself or for House, for him to think of him and have to weave through layers of anger before he could remember anything else.
"I'm already plenty angry at Stacy," House confirmed, then flippantly added, "It's what keeps me warm when I'm alone in bed at night."
"Speaking of beds, mine's right here and yours is across town. I'd offer to share, but you come with more wood than I think I can handle."
House twirled his cane and pointed it at Wilson, a smirk twitching at the corner of his mouth.
"I always knew you wanted to handle my wood."
Wilson spotted a potential exit and he seized the opportunity.
"Well, now that we've finally worked in our requisite dick joke into this conversation, it's time for me to turn in."
House nodded. "Sure... as long as you answer my question."
Yet again, House was walking into his personal space and this time there was no escape available. House had seen his weak attempt to end the conversation for what it was, had played into it just long enough to let him think he might get away with it, and then pulled it out from underneath him. His focus was unwavering and intense as he stared at him dead on and Wilson knew, with a sinking sensation in his gut, that not only was there no escape, but there was no lying his way out of it either.
"There's no way your self-righteous ass hasn't come up with a million solutions and a million justifications for each of those million solutions. You've defended Stacy's choice, you defended my logic to her. It's about time you picked a fucking side and stuck to it."
Wilson knew he was trying to get a rise out of him, but that didn't stop the anxious feeling buzzing through him from mixing with the frustration he'd always felt towards the entire situation, making his hands clinch and for him to close the distance between him and House to get right in his face.
"I would have amputated your entire fucking leg."
For a horrible, crushing second, House looked like was going to cry, his face crumbling and his blue eyes widening, but it was gone in the blink of an eye, replaced with a more controlled, but equally hurt expression. Normally, Wilson would crack and apologize, try to rewind the conversation to make it hurt less, but House had pushed him into a corner he had spent a decade avoiding. He was angry.
"I'm not Stacy. Unlike her, I went to med school, so I know that the 'middle ground' she chose was no middle ground at all. I would know that the chronic pain isn't just a shooting sensation every once in awhile or a pinprick; it's a screaming, searing pain that is debilitating at the best of times. I would've looked at you in that bed, thought of what would happen to you-." Wilson paused, taking a deep breath to calm the emotions rattling through his chest. "And I would have told Cuddy to amputate the entire fucking thing. I would have let her knock you out, knowing what I was about to do... knowing that you would wake up angry and furious and... and I never would have regretted it. Not for one goddamn second."
House looked gobsmacked, like he had no idea who Wilson was and why he was practically yelling at him. Wilson knew that he probably should've stopped there, but he figured that since he was already telling the truth, he might as well go for broke.
"I never would have wished this pain on you - never - so I would've kept you from feeling it in the first place. You would've gone on, happy with Stacy, saving a lost life once a week, adjust to living with a prosthesis, and hating me with every breath you took. And I could take that because I... I love you enough to let you hate me."
With everything laid out for House to see in all of its ugliness, Wilson stepped away from him and rubbed his hand along the back of his neck, suddenly tired and unable to look at him.
"I'm not sorry... I don't even wish I was. And even though I know you're probably mad at me, think about this for me: would you have let me die? Because that's what you were asking Stacy to do; you were asking her to let you die. If you can look at me and honestly tell me that if it was me in that bed and you would've let me die, maybe I'll understand your anger then. Maybe I'll even start to feel sorry, I don't know. But until you can answer that question, you don't have the high ground. You never had it in the first place."
It was only after Wilson finished that he realized the extent of his sugar coating in day-to-day life, the way he always told the truth but then tried to soften it. Not once during his tangent did he try to sugar coat anything; he wanted House to feel all of it. He wanted House to feel the pain he caused Stacy, to understand that Wilson wasn't on his side and never had been when it came to the choice she made, and most of all, he wanted him to understand how much he hurt everyone with his insistence that they should have risked letting him die.
Wilson was so drained and focused on his tumultuous thoughts that he didn't notice House grab his helmet and leave, only heard the soft click of the door shutting behind him. Shaking his head at himself, Wilson collapsed into bed and before long, was sleeping better than he had since his wife left him. He awoke surprised by how refreshed he felt, only for the previous night's conversation to crash into him.
For the first three days after that night, Wilson didn't see so much as the tip of House's cane disappearing around corners. He would have thought House wasn't there at all if Thirteen, Foreman, and Taub hadn't come into his office and begged him to fix whatever had happened because if House wasn't ignoring them, he was tearing into them with no clear goal except to hurt them. He started to explain that the situation was more complicated than they could know, but Kutner, who had been acting as watch-out, called to let them know House was coming back up and they ran for it, literally ran, with Foreman leading the charge, which was a red flag if he ever saw one. Under normal circumstances, he would have reached out, but he knew House well enough to know that if there was any chance of reconciliation, it had to be on his terms.
Two weeks passed without so much as a friendly glance between them when Wilson heard a knock at his door. It was loud, so House was using his cane to knock, but it wasn't obnoxious, which meant that he was just making sure Wilson heard him no matter where he was in the room. He paused his recording of the Bachelor, which would hopefully amuse House if he saw it, and he went to open the door.
House didn't waste time with awkward hellos, just walked past Wilson and into the room where he caught a glimpse of the TV. Wilson would bet his original Psycho poster that House smirked at the TV before shuttering his expression and turning it off.
Wilson wasn't sure how long they stood there awkwardly not looking at each other or speaking, but House was the one to break the silence.
"I wouldn't let you die."
He was looking at the ground as he said it, tapping his cane against the floor, but Wilson knew it was no less sincere than if he had looked him in the eye and held his hand as he said it. House was taking a leap of faith by saying that, knowing that he was admitting to so much more than a mere desire to see Wilson live.
"I would be angry at you suggesting I let you die. I would remove your leg... I would never want you to feel what I feel, even for a second." House turned to look at him and said, barely loud enough for Wilson to hear, "I love you enough to let you hate me, too."
Not knowing what he should do, but knowing he had to do something, Wilson walked over to House and wrapped his arms tightly around him. For all that they seemed to lack personal boundaries, showing affection was something they just didn't do. For a second, House didn't seem to know how to respond, but then he felt his arms wrap around him to hug him back.
"I think I owe Stacy an apology."
Wilson smiled and leaned back to look to House. "I think that can be arranged."
"Think you can also arrange to have your stuff moved back into my place? This room gets uglier every time I see it."
"You want me to move back in?" Wilson asked, surprised, considering that they hadn't been speaking as of sixty seconds earlier.
House shrugged and looked away. "If you do, I might even make you dinner."
Wilson felt heat rising in his cheeks. "Are you asking me on a date?"
"Don't get cute. I'm just giving you an opportunity to see if you can handle my wood."
They held eye contact for a second before they burst into laughter, their relationship restored but with the potential for so much more.