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House gets sick on a Monday morning, presenting with fever, chills, cramps and nausea. In the four minutes it takes for House to realize he’s ill, Wilson probably loses three years of his life trying to convince him to take it easy.
“I need to get to work,” House says, trying weakly to push himself out of bed, his damp sheets clinging to his sweaty body. Wilson pushes him back onto the mattress, and he goes, more easily than he should considering his upper body strength. He looks terrible, gaunt and shaking, dark half-moons under his eyes, pit stains showing through his vintage Tommy t-shirt.
“You need to stay in bed until you feel better,” Wilson insists. “You don’t have a case right now, so you’d just be missing out on clinic duty.”
“Cuddy will-“
“I’ll handle Cuddy,” Wilson interrupts. ”She’ll believe you’re sick if she hears it from me.”
“This is bullshit, I don’t get sick, I just-“ House cuts himself off, his stomach warbling ominously, his face whitening.
Wilson crouches down and gets a shoulder under House’s, in spite of House swatting him. “We’ll get you to the bathroom, and then get a Vicodin in you, and everything will get easier,” he says, shuffling House out of the bedroom and down the hall as fast as he can. “I’ll take the day off too, I don’t trust you not to do something stupid.”
“Dick,” House grumbles, but he doesn’t fight Wilson on it, so Wilson takes the win for what it is.
Wilson deposits him on the floor in front of the toilet, and goes out into the living room to get him a couch cushion for his leg. He also gets his pills and some saltines from the pantry, along with a glass of water he deposits by House’s side.
“I’m gonna make some calls, okay?” Wilson says. “Yell if you need anything.”
House just makes a groaning sound, hunched over the toilet, looking frankly pitiful. Wilson can’t help himself, gets down on his knees and wraps an arm around his waist while he’s too miserable to fend him off. House won’t ever admit it, but he leans into Wilson’s body for a few seconds.
Those few seconds could keep Wilson going for months.
*
Once the Vicodin kicks in and the initial cramps subside, House gets a little less combative. Only a little though.
“I’m not an invalid,” House bites, as Wilson levers him off the bathroom floor and walks him to bed. “I can take care of myself.”
“I know you can,” Wilson says, refusing to relinquish him, “but would it be so bad to let me help?”
“You’re not helping me, you’re coddling me,” House says, as they enter the bedroom. House almost trips over something on the ground, and Wilson grabs onto him tighter to keep him on his feet.
“Again, would some coddling kill you?” Wilson asks, depositing House not so gently onto the bed. House maneuvers himself into a more comfortable position, making a face of grudging appreciation at the new sheets Wilson put on the bed while he was dry-heaving.
“It might,” House says, grumpy.
“Well, we’ll try it as a course of treatment until your kidneys start failing and reevaluate from there,” Wilson says. “That’s how you treat your patients, it should be good enough for you too.”
“I don’t even know how I got sick in the first place,” House says, turning his ludicrous mind to the puzzle his symptoms present.
Wilson grimaces. “Try not to kill yourself finding an obscure diagnosis because food poisoning isn’t interesting enough for you.”
“This isn’t just regular food poisoning,” House says. “The symptoms don’t match.”
“The nausea and the chills aren’t enough for you?” Wilson asks, drawing the blinds to shut out the light.
“It doesn’t make sense,” House grouches. “Everything I’ve eaten for the last forty-eight hours you’ve eaten too, but you’re fine.”
“Maybe I have a stronger constitution,” Wilson says, fluffing House’s pillow. “I’m younger than you, and healthier too.”
“It doesn’t make sense,” House repeats, his voice taking a strident tone. “There’s something I’m missing.”
“You’re only saying that because you’re cranky,” Wilson says, pulling the sheets up around House’s shoulders. “Try to sleep for a little bit, okay? I’ll make some soup in the meantime, that should soothe you.”
“I’m serious, Wilson,” House insists.
“I’m sure you are,” Wilson responds, ducking down to press a quick kiss against House’s clammy brow before House can stop him. “Do you want me to stay until you fall asleep?”
“What, so I can sweat on you?” House asks, caustic. “I think I’ll make it alone, I haven’t wet the bed in months.”
“I can grab you a Depends from the store if you’re not sure,” Wilson offers, faux helpful.
“I’d rather you hook me up to a catheter,” House grouches, before flipping onto his side, pointedly away from Wilson. Wilson sighs, running his fingers through House’s hair before leaving the room, turning the lights off as he goes. “You don’t have to do this, you know.”
Wilson turns, the words floating small and weary in the darkness to meet him in the doorway. “I know,” Wilson says. He doesn’t tell House that being here soothes a dark insatiable part of him, doesn’t crawl into bed with him and lick the sour fever sweat off his neck, doesn’t even get on his knees and beg House to never leave him. “I’ll be here when you wake up.”
House doesn’t respond. Wilson shuts the door behind himself on the way out.
*
As Wilson suspected, a nap does wonders for House’s mood. Wilson crawling into bed with him and slipping a Vicodin into his mouth with his tongue may also contribute to the cause, as well as the thermos of spicy chicken noodle soup he fixed up while he was sleeping. After all of that, House is downright biddable, or at least as biddable as House ever gets.
House decides that he wants to watch General Hospital and Wilson is loathe to deny him anything in this state, so he swaddles him in blankets on the couch and insinuates himself into his space, poking fun at the plotlines and pretending not to be seriously invested in any of them. House only grumbles a little bit at Wilson’s shameless snuggling, going so far as to wrap an arm around Wilson’s waist and nose at his neck during the boring scenes.
They pass the hours wrapped up in each other, watching stupid soaps and monster truck competitions, even a few cooking shows for Wilson’s amusement. The nausea comes over House in waves, but the chills subside under the weight of Wilson’s body, and the Vicodin helps manage the fever and the cramps.
Wilson tries to hide it, but he feels like a cat in a sunbeam, basking in House’s undivided attention. The previous few weeks had been sparse on that, and while Wilson had realized he was missing something at the time, he didn’t know exactly how much. He wonders whether or not House is the only addict in the relationship, if his own unbearable need is just less obvious to well-meaning observers.
House dozes off in the afternoon, waking only for soup before shuffling off to bed and passing out again. Wilson wraps himself around House like a weighted blanket and follows him under.
*
The next morning House is doing better, but only marginally. Wilson fixes him breakfast and they eat it together in bed, House’s head on Wilson’s shoulder, their ankles overlapping. House barely puts up a token protest, and once the tray is off the bed, actually pulls Wilson in for a quick make out session, which is more progress than Wilson thought to hope for in just two days.
Wilson gets a call around noon about a patient that Stein is covering for him, and he excuses himself from the bedroom to take it, discussing the next stages of treatment for Gemma Fletcher, a sixteen year old with melanoma. Wilson takes the opportunity to take stock of the pantry, resolving to keep an eye on the cracker and ginger ale situations. He stocked up recently, but with any stomach illness, those are always the first casualties.
Near the end of the call, House emerges from the bedroom with a strange look on his face, his eyes sharp and watchful.
Wilson makes his excuses and shuffles off the call as fast as he can. “Everything okay?” he asks, moving towards the living room. House ignores him, sitting heavily on the middle of the couch and popping a pill.
“Everything is peachy,” House says, getting comfortable. “I just got off the phone with Cuddy.”
Wilson doesn’t freeze, because he’s not an idiot. “How are things at the hospital?”
“It seems like they were able to cover for us pretty easily. No new cases, and the ducklings are splitting my clinic hours between themselves. Nothing out of the ordinary,” House says. Wilson hums but doesn’t offer anything else. “She did say something else that I found interesting.”
“She’s been known to do that on occasion,” Wilson replies.
“She said she was sorry I got sick the first day of my vacation,” House says, in that voice he uses when he’s toying with his prey. “Apparently, you and I were scheduled to be out of the hospital for this week, which I imagine played a role in how easily they were able to cover for us.”
“I see,” Wilson says, swallowing heavily.
“Which made me wonder,” House says, tilting his head like a curious dog. “How would you know we’d be out of commission this week, when I only got sick yesterday?”
Wilson doesn’t say anything now. House is a lot like a cop, when he gets like this. Anything Wilson says can and will be used against him. He wonders if Tritter recognized that in House, if there was something deeper in that whole debacle that he never saw.
“So I ran a quick differential on yours truly,” House says. “Fever, chills, cramps, and nausea. Consistent with food poisoning, but the symptoms fit honey mushroom poisoning better. There were mushrooms in that casserole you made me two days ago, weren’t there? The one you didn’t eat because you said you ate a big lunch?”
“I don’t recall,” Wilson says, but the jig is up.
“You poisoned me.”
“That’s quite an accusation, House. You should add paranoia to your differential,” Wilson tries, a last ditch attempt. He knew he shouldn’t have arranged for time off with Cuddy beforehand, but he really didn’t want to inconvenience all of his patients. Hoist by his own well-meaning petard.
“Cut the crap, Wilson, you poisoned me,” House says, and Wilson shuts up. “The only question is why?”
“Maybe I thought you deserved it for being an ass,” Wilson says. As House can attest, offense is the best defense.
“I’m always an ass,” House says, that horrible martial light in his eyes, the focus that only comes when he’s narrowing in on his prey, when the thrill of the hunt drowns out everything else in his mind.
“You’ve been more of an ass than usual,” Wilson retorts, exasperated. “Maybe I thought you needed to be taken down a few pegs.”
“That’s not it,” House says, dismissing Wilson’s increasingly pathetic defenses like gnats around his head. “You’re more subtle when you play god with me, and you usually rope in more people, make it into a grand conspiracy. This is personal, close quarters.”
“Have you considered that I wanted to be up close and personal to your pain?” Wilson asks, feeling extremely cornered. “It’s less satisfying when it’s at a distance.”
House grins, the way he always does when Wilson shows his teeth. “That would make sense, closet sadist that you are, but you’ve been working hard to make the pain go away. Hurting me isn’t getting you off right now, making me depend on you is. It’s the same pathology as always, just a different symptom. The only question is, why now?”
Wilson swallows a few times, looking away. He breathes through his nose, trying to calm down. Then he turns, grabbing his keys from the coffee table. “I need to go to the pharmacy,” he says. “I’ll be back in an hour.”
“Running away?” House asks, that glint still in his eyes.
Wilson ignores him. “I trust that you won’t do anything too stupid while I’m gone,” he says, heading out the front door.
“Don’t count on it,” House calls, just before the door shuts.
*
Wilson gets the drugs from the pharmacy and then drives around the city for half an hour, eventually parking in front of the apartment and sitting in silence, his head in his hands. He doesn’t know what happens next, but he knows it’s not good. He gives himself fifteen minutes to stave off the inevitable, attracting a couple of odd looks from passersby, before getting out of the car and heading inside.
When he gets in, House is in bed again, sitting up against the headboard and reading a medical journal.
“You’re back,” House says drily upon his return. “I thought maybe you’d spend the night in a hotel, or in the bed of one of your terminal cases.”
“I come bearing dramamine,” Wilson says, ignoring that jibe, shaking the pill bottle before tossing it at him. House grabs it out of the air and dry-swallows two pills in a familiar well-practiced motion.
“What was the plan?” House asks, as Wilson sits down on the side of the bed. “You return with the spoils of war and hope that I don’t push the issue?”
“Not so much of a plan as a hope,” Wilson says wistfully, scrubbing his hands over his face. “A fading dream.”
“You don’t get to be long-suffering right now,” House says, acerbic. “You’re the poisoner here, not me.”
“That’s debatable,” Wilson says.
“And you’re stalling,” House responds. “The worst part is already over. The cat is out of the bag and halfway to the border by now. Better confess quick before I start coming up with motives for you.”
“Motives like what?” Wilson asks, curious despite himself.
“You have a nausea fetish,” House offers. Wilson rolls his eyes. “You’re trying to give me an eating disorder. You’re running a study on the usage of poisonous mushrooms on patients with chronic pain but you’ve run out of funding, Cuddy paid you to do it so she can spend a few days not completely wracked with lust at the sight of me--”
“Okay, I get the picture,” Wilson says, cutting him off. “Your imagination is a diseased place.”
“Tell me,” House says, and this time his tone brooks no argument. Wilson fiddles with the seam of his pants, tries to collect his thoughts.
“Something happened two weeks ago,” Wilson eventually says, “after we spent that weekend upstate in that little bed and breakfast. I don’t know what it was, but it triggered something in you. You started lashing out more, you got angry with me when I tried to help you. You stopped stealing my lunches and barging into my office, you started eating in the morgue.”
“You poisoned me because I had some bad pain days?” House asks.
“Those weren’t bad pain days,” Wilson says, standing up to pace, the agitation making it hard to sit still. “I know your bad pain days, House, this was different, worse. You were cutting me out, pushing me away. I saw you do it with Stacy, and I knew that if I let you keep doing it, you’d ruin this, and it wouldn’t even be because of me or anything I did.”
“Is that so?” House asks, but his voice has gotten quiet now, contemplative.
“Yes, House, obviously,” Wilson says, fed up. “It would be about you and your addiction to your own pain. You’ve been popping less pills since you’ve been with me, which means you’ve been happier, which means I make you happy, which means because of your twisted relationship with self-loathing, you have to cut me out until you’re back at your preferred level of misery. You weren't just hurting me, you were hurting yourself and I may be an enabler, but I’m not going to let you use me as your method of self-harm.”
“You’ve got an inflated view of your role in my life,” House says, but his tone is mild, almost curious.
“Oh please, spare me the cutting words and calibrated insults,” Wilson says, advancing on his prone form, his voice rising as he loses control. “You’re the one who insinuated yourself into every part of my life, pushing and prodding and provoking until there was nowhere I could go to escape you, and now that you finally realized you might be in too deep, you want to pull away? Because it’s more comfortable for you to give up on me? On us?”
Wilson can hear his voice warping, can feel his muscles tense like he’s about to throw a punch, but he can’t stop now. “Nice try. You’re not getting rid of me that easy, House, in fact, you’re stuck with me, and if that means I need to remind you who you belong to when you forget, then that’s what I’ll do, as many times as it takes to make it stick in that radioactive wasteland you call a brain!”
There’s a long, terrible silence in the bedroom, as Wilson reckons with the sick confession he just let loose into the still air of the bedroom. He’s still breathing heavy, outrage sticking to the backs of his teeth. This wasn’t how this was supposed to go. It was just supposed to be one bad week, and then at least a month of good days, and it was working, House was thawing, they were getting back to normal, before House decided to ‘solve the puzzle’.
He looks away from House, staring at the bedsheets over his long legs. That isn’t fair, Wilson thinks. This was all his fault, the shattered antique mirror in the bar, the inevitable snap of his tenuous self-control, the pathetic reality of a man so desperate to not be alone that he ruins everything before it has a chance to leave him.
“So you’re telling me,” House rasps eventually, breaking the silence, “that you got a dose of firsthand knowledge that I, a miserable cripple a decade older than you, am withholding and emotionally negligent in my relationships, and instead of cheating on me with Donna D-Cups in Accounting and getting the hell out of dodge, you poisoned my food so you could play Florence Nightingale for me at my crankiest and most annoying?”
“Well, when you put it like that, it sounds insane,” Wilson says, still avoiding eye contact. He waits in dread for House to skewer him for his savior complex, for his addiction to need, for his inability to maintain stable relationships, for the litany of endless flaws in Wilson’s character that only House ever seems to notice.
It doesn’t come. Instead, House stays silent, which is alarming. House never shuts up, he’s like one of those wind-up monkeys with the cymbals, an endless cacophony of noise and activity. Wilson looks up at House tentatively, confused, and is struck by the tender expression on House’s face, soft and delighted like Wilson has pulled off a minor miracle in front of him. Even in his pale, sweaty, shivering state, he seems to glow, lit up from inside with something that almost resembles devotion, if Wilson thought House was capable of it.
“House?” Wilson asks.
“I need more soup,” House says.
Wilson blinks at him in shock. “That’s it?” he asks, dumbfounded. “You’re not going to yell at me, or kick me out?”
“Why would I kick you out?” House asks, as if Wilson is the unreasonable one between them. He gestures to his prone form under the covers. “I don’t know if you noticed, Wilson, but I’ve just been poisoned. I'm an invalid. I need someone to take care of me.”
“And that person is me?” Wilson asks, still wary. “Your poisoner?”
“Who else?” House asks.
Wilson blinks again. “You’re not going to ask me not to do this again?” he asks.
“I could,” House says, “but what would be the use? Next time I push you away, you’d have to come up with a new way to keep me on your leash, and this one seems to work just fine.”
“Next time you push me away,” Wilson repeats. “So you plan on doing this again?”
House narrows his eyes in that particular scathing way that always communicates exactly how profoundly stupid he thinks Wilson is being. “Have you met me?”
Wilson finally smiles, a little disbelieving at first. “Okay,” he says, standing up. “I’ll get your soup.”
“And crackers,” House adds.
“And crackers,” Wilson agrees.
“And a ginger ale,” House adds again.
“And a ginger ale,” Wilson says, at the door.
“And a blowjob,” House says.
“Only if you finish your soup,” Wilson says, fake stern, relishing House’s grin as he walks to the kitchen to take care of his ornery patient.
*
House is absolutely insufferable for the rest of the week, attaching himself to Wilson’s side in a remarkable impression of a limpet when he’s not sending him off to run ridiculous errands, citing cravings like he’s in his second trimester of pregnancy. He makes Wilson get them pho from a hole in the wall Vietnamese restaurant inside a fish market where nobody speaks English, initiates a twelve-hour classic movie marathon that leaves Wilson’s head aching and sore, cajoles Wilson into watching porn in front of him, whispering in his ear that since his libido is diminished, he has to live vicariously.
All in all, Wilson has a better time than he did on all of his honeymoons and a few trips to Atlantic City combined, even though he spends most of the time waiting for the other shoe to drop, not really trusting House to have let go of the whole poisoning thing so quickly. Sometimes he can see something brewing under the surface, a quick grimace here, a slightly delayed reaction there, a moody piano piece played in the late hours, when Wilson has dozed off. The moments always flicker away as soon as House realizes he’s being observed and returns to Wilson’s side with a wicked smile and a new idea to spice things up or get them committed to some institution.
By the time their ‘vacation’ ends and they’re due to go back to work, Wilson is more hickey than skin and has to sit down very gingerly to prevent obvious wincing. House, the bastard that he is, is fit as a fiddle thanks to his liberal application of Vicodin to all his ailments. Wilson drives them in together, taking advantage of House’s prime parking spot.
Before they get out of the car, House puts a hand on Wilson’s thigh and stops him.
“What’s up?” Wilson asks, turning to him.
House grimaces the way he always does when he’s about to engage in genuine emotional honesty. It’s an incredibly endearing expression, though Wilson would never say that out loud. “You were right,” he says.
“About what?”
“I was pulling away,” House responds. “On purpose. And it wasn’t because of anything you did.”
“House, it’s fine--”
“Shut up for a second, would you?” House asks. Wilson nods, not sure exactly where this is going. “You took me up to that stupid bed and breakfast upstate, and I thought it was going to be a way for you to live out those stupid heterosexual fantasies of a stupid loving wife that you always had, and I thought it was going to be terrible and I’d have to disabuse you of all of those asinine dreams until you realized that you were never going to get them with me.”
“You had a great time on that trip,” Wilson says, nonplussed.
“I know, that’s the point,” House grouches. He looks away out the window, his face screwed up. “It didn’t suck. You did everything right, and I had a great time, and I counted my pills at the end of the trip and realized that I had taken far fewer than I ever had before, something like four pills a day. You were making me happy, just like you said, and I freaked out, because that meant I was losing the balance I had before. Pain to feed the pain addiction, pain relief to feed the pain relief addiction. You were the pain relief, but I was running out of pain, and if you ever left me, I would crash harder than I ever had before. All pain, no relief.”
“I feel like I said all of this to you already,” Wilson says, a little confused on why they’re having this conversation at all.
“The thing is,” House says, plowing forward, “I read you wrong. You don’t just want to make me happy, you want to make me miserable too.”
“Oh come on—“
“More specifically, you want to be in control of when I’m happy and when I’m miserable. You like to hurt me, and you like to make me feel better after you hurt me, and you resent anything or anyone that does either of those things to me, because you see them as usurping your position.”
“That’s a pretty ungenerous way to interpret how I feel about you,” Wilson says. He’d deny it more in any other situation, but only a week after poisoning House, he figures he doesn’t have much of a leg to stand on.
“The point I’m making,” House says, clearly frustrated that Wilson isn’t understanding him, “is that when I pulled away, I thought you were only offering one of those things, and now I know you want to give me both. And I’ve decided that I’m okay with that, because I finally realized that you’re just as addicted to me as I am to you. And I figure if that’s true, you won’t take either of those away once I get comfortable.”
Wilson blinks twice as House scowls out the windshield at the front of the hospital. “So what does that mean?”
“Christ Wilson, what do you think it means? It’s like you're being intentionally thick, and not in the fun way that makes me scream,” House snaps, completely fed up. “It means that I’m full Brokeback for you, Thelma and Louise for you, that if you cheat on me with someone, I’ll firebomb her house and mail anthrax to her family, and god help you if you ever try to leave me, because I’ll slash your tires and put you on the national sex offenders registry so fast your head spins. It means I’m in love with you, you moron. Does that make sense to you? Does that penetrate the brick wall you call a skull?” Wilson nods, shellshocked. “Good.”
House puts his head on his hand and stares out the passenger side window, his body language as unwelcoming as physically possible. They sit in the wake of that outburst for a few tense seconds before Wilson pulls his phone out and dials a familiar number.
“What are you doing?” House asks.
“Shut up,” Wilson says, quick and sharp, waiting until he hears the tone. “Hi, Cuddy, it's Wilson, sorry to get your voicemail. I really hate to say this, but House still isn’t feeling well enough to come back to work and I don’t feel good about leaving him at home, you know how he gets. We should be back tomorrow though, and I’ll take some extra clinic hours this week to make up for it. Sorry again.”
Then he shuts the phone and tosses it in the backseat, before pulling out of the lot.
“What are you doing?” House asks again, this time a weird edge of fear in his voice.
“I’m taking us home,” Wilson says, indicating a lane switch.
“Why?” House asks.
“So I can fuck you until you cry,” Wilson responds coolly, merging lanes.
House nods shakily, subsiding back into his seat.
“Oh,” he says. “Well. Good.”
*