Filling In (R)
Posted to gate_house and housefic
Title: Filling In
Author: Dee Laundry
Pairing: House/McKay
Rating: R
Words: 1939
Summary: When what you order is unavailable, you might be surprised what you get as substitute.
Notes: Crossover with an AU of Stargate Atlantis in which Rodney McKay is Earthside and has a... job on the side. Custom-written for radiobroadcast as a thank-you for donating to The Robert Sean Leonard Birthday Charity Drive benefiting Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS. Thank you to bironic and daisylily for the beta.
The doorbell rang at 8:23, which should have been weird because House’s apartment didn’t have a doorbell. But it did have a cell phone with a ring tone that sounded exactly like a doorbell when a call came through from a certain preprogrammed number, so it wasn’t weird, only annoying.
It was annoying because the doorbell-call was supposed to have come at 8:15 sharp. Eight minutes late, in all of the crappy-ass service-industry jobs House had ever had the misfortune to work, rounded up to fifteen minutes late, which meant your goddamned check got docked. Of course that had amounted to chump change, a mere pittance, because those jobs had paid for crap, but when you got into the kind of service for which House was now paying, a quarter-hour meant some serious moolah, which House was going to refuse to pay.
House had had a couple of drinks tonight and a pharmaceutical charlatan’s sample of an awesome new pain pill to boot. Except he hadn’t booted it, he’d kept it down and that was probably why his head was so floaty and he kept forgetting where he was going.
Eighth-fourth-sixteenth-half was the rhythm of the knocks now sounding on his door, and he was tempted to detour to the piano and accompany the percussion with a jaunty little tune. It occurred to him, however, that there was more enjoyment to be had - physically, anyway - by answering the door and escorting the six-foot-three, blond, tanned... escort into the apartment.
With that in mind, he swung the door wide and reached out for a forearm. “Tyler, you lazy -- not Tyler.”
His hand dropped back to his side. It wasn’t Tyler at the door. Not six-foot-three, not blond, not tanned. Not young. Not in possession of a full head of hair. Blue eyes, sharp-ish features, asymmetrical mouth, traces of jowliness. And scowliness, with the odd mouth twisted and the brow growing wrinkly-crinkly.
“I am most definitely not Tyler,” not-Tyler said. “However, I am a... friend of his.” ‘Friend’ had come out like it had stuck in the guy’s craw. “Tyler couldn’t be here, so he sent me to... check up on you.”
Again with the reluctant scowly craw-stuck words. Interesting. At least enough so that House chose not to slam the door in his face. “I take it you don’t like the script the agency handed you.”
“I prefer expressing my own sentiments; it’s true.” The man crossed his arms, his expression determinedly haughty. “Are you going to invite me in so we can discuss this further, or should I stand here and raise my voice so all the neighbors hear?”
“Raise away.” One hand on the edge of the door, House leaned against the doorjamb. “Currently the only other tenant in the building is deaf. Helpful when Tyler screams my name in ecstasy. Where is he?”
“He can remember your name? I would’ve thought that beyond his cognitive capacity.” The guy shifted his weight from one foot to the other. Potential energy converting to kinetic: a fidgeter. “He’s ill.”
“Anything interesting?”
“Syphilis-induced dementia.”
An absolute lie; the agency would’ve called for any STD. But House had to give the guy credit for his moxie. Any unobservant fool, i.e., almost everyone, seeing his face would’ve thought he was completely serious.
“Oh!” House replied, with eyes exaggeratedly wide. “I’m horrified!”
“Yes, yes,” not-Tyler replied, waving a hand in the air dismissively. “That was a joke. I don’t know if it’s actually even any of your business, but the buffoon has chicken pox. Not fatal, and I’m told he’s past the contagious stage, but not terribly attractive to look at, either. ‘He ain’t pretty no more,’ as the erudite Moe Szyslak once said. And one of my regulars cancelled at the last minute -- honestly, the woman’s already dead, I don’t see why he couldn’t have waited until the morning to fly out -- so here I am. Your hallway is drafty; let me in.”
The mild misanthropy was amusing -- and Tyler was definitely a buffoon -- but House had ordered Young Gorgeous Stud, not Older Twitchy Chatterbox.
“You’re not getting your money refunded,” the guy sighed.
House hated being obvious. “Bullshit.”
“God’s honest truth,” the man said, raising one hand in some funky approximation of the Boy Scout pledge. “Well, if you believe in God. If you don’t, then I don’t suppose that aphorism would offer you any reassurance whatsoever. In fact, it would be the opposite, wouldn’t it? Because if you find the claim that that kind of a higher power even exists to be fraudulent, then declaration of such a sham’s honesty would be beyond irony and oxymoron, all the way into the territory of the deliberatively deceptive.”
Chatterbox. But not stupid. And the way that mouth moved was highly intriguing. “Got a name?”
“Most of my clients call me Dr. McKay.” Did the guy seriously think House was going to -- “But you can call me Rodney.”
“All right, McKay; you can come in.” House headed back toward his couch; let the hooker shut the door. “Make sure you tell Katherine I’m going to demand a discount.”
“You’re already getting a discount.” McKay was wandering the apartment, checking out everything with a startling intensity.
Annoyed, House barked, “You said --”
McKay interrupted him without even so much as a glance in House’s direction. “I’m a specialist, so my rate is substantially higher than the plebeians you’re accustomed to. Roxie sends her best, by the way. But since you’re such a long-standing client, no pun intended, the agency decided to make up the difference to get me over here.” Inspection apparently over, McKay turned back toward him. “See? Discount.”
“You’re a specialist? In what, insomnia cures?”
“Hilarious.” McKay finally sat his ass down -- in House’s armchair. “I tutor math.”
“I wasn’t aware I’d called Sylvan Learning.”
“Oh, God, I’m going to charge you extra if I have to listen to that lame excuse for humor the whole time.”
McKay glared from the chair; House glared from the couch; they were at stalemate for over a minute until House realized he was, in essence, burning money. (Incidentally, he was never taking whatever this fucking pain pill was again, if it made him this slow on the uptake.) Wilson’s credit limit was high but it was, in fact, a limit.
“OK, Mr. Tutor,” House said finally. “Come toot my horn.”
McKay rolled his eyes but got to his feet. He crossed the room and stopped in front of House, looking down at him sternly. “All right. You want to do this with bad jokes and no finesse, fine. I have things to do anyway. You come; I go; got it?”
“Who do you --” House began, but McKay’s hands were on House’s fly, McKay’s knees were on the ground, and McKay’s weird slanty lips were getting licked by a strong-looking tongue, and what the hell.
What the hell indeed, House thought a few minutes later, because McKay was talented. He couldn’t hold a candle to Tyler looks-wise, but if the way his mouth was moving, contorting, fucking shape-shifting over House’s prick now was any indication, he could probably hold a candle upright on the tip of his motherfucking tongue.
“Shit!” House barked as orgasm rolled over him, a steamroller chugging right on by and leaving him flattened. “Damn,” he breathed at the end, and melted into the couch.
“Well then,” McKay said off-handedly. “Another satisfied customer. See ya.”
House heard one of McKay’s knees crack as the man stood. How old was he? No matter. “Sit your ass down,” House ordered.
McKay’s eyes widened in what looked like deeply felt affront. “You come; I go. That was the deal,” he insisted.
“That was what you said. I didn’t agree to anything.” House ignored the disapproving sneer and gestured toward the far end of the sofa. “I paid for my time, and I’m getting my time. Sit and tell me about your math specialty.”
“To be precise, my specialty is astrophysics.” McKay sat where he’d been directed, his eyes alight and his jaw working. House had seen this look before, on his father, on Clinic patients, and horrifically often on Wilson: the look of a man about to go on a very long, very tedious speechifying homily. “Undergraduate, I did have joint honors in mathematics and physics, and pure mathematics is, of course, the basis for --”
“The hooker specialty.”
A disgruntled twist to the lips made them almost straight. Amusing.
“People,” McKay began, “aren’t very good at math.”
“People aren’t very good at a lot of things,” House pointed out.
“Yes, yes,” McKay said with a flap of his hand. “Truer words never spoken, and so on. When it comes to math, which is the point you asked to hear about, most people are content to walk around in their ignorance, happy to have left behind them the soul-crushing experiences of consistently failing to reach the mark when it comes to the most elegant and intrinsic construct of mankind, the closest humans have ever come to knowing the face of God.”
House raised an eyebrow.
“A select few,” McKay continued, head held high, “are willing to pay to have more of those experiences.”
“People pay you to yell at them.”
McKay sighed and settled back into the corner of the couch, arms crossing across his chest. “If you want to be simplistic about it, yes.”
“And then you suck their dicks.”
“Generally, no. They usually want to make up for their failings and absorb some of my genius, so I end up topping them. Some of my clients don’t even want me to make them orgasm.”
This was twisted, a freakish, demented perv show of the highest order. Intriguing.
Just to be sure, though, House had to clarify: “You tell them they’re stupid, fuck them, and leave?”
“It’s more complicated than that,” McKay insisted. “An entire psychology behind the experience that necessitates --” He stopped at House’s skeptical glare, and sighed, “Yeah. And I make them feed me at some point. Almost everybody seems to want to schedule over the dinner hour; I have no idea why.”
Flogging, fucking, and food. Damn. “Are all your clients men?”
“Almost all. Women don’t seem to have the same hang-up about math. They’re equally bad at it, overall; they just don’t care as much.” He stroked his chin. “I have had a couple, though. Throw in a few ‘Now see here, young lady’s, and you can push their daddy buttons nicely.”
McKay looked up at House, his eyes shining intelligently. “You’re not just asking out of curiosity, are you?”
House smiled.
***
The doorbell rang at 6:23, eight minutes late, but Chad didn’t mind. Service like this was worth the wait. He crossed to the door in four quick strides and flung it open. “Professor McKay!” he said eagerly, but the man at the door wasn’t Professor McKay. The man was taller, older, grayer, with a cane he was leaning on heavily.
The disapproving scowl, though, looked very familiar.
“McKay had better things to do tonight than deal with you,” the man said as he stomped past Chad into the apartment. Reaching the dining room table, he pulled out a pair of reading glasses, snatched up Chad’s assignment notebook and began flipping through it.
“So who are you?” Chad asked, a little bewildered and more than a little turned on.
The man looked haughtily down at Chad over his reading glasses, startlingly blue eyes cold and hot at the same time, and said, “You can call me Dr. House.”
Title: Filling In
Author: Dee Laundry
Pairing: House/McKay
Rating: R
Words: 1939
Summary: When what you order is unavailable, you might be surprised what you get as substitute.
Notes: Crossover with an AU of Stargate Atlantis in which Rodney McKay is Earthside and has a... job on the side. Custom-written for radiobroadcast as a thank-you for donating to The Robert Sean Leonard Birthday Charity Drive benefiting Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS. Thank you to bironic and daisylily for the beta.
The doorbell rang at 8:23, which should have been weird because House’s apartment didn’t have a doorbell. But it did have a cell phone with a ring tone that sounded exactly like a doorbell when a call came through from a certain preprogrammed number, so it wasn’t weird, only annoying.
It was annoying because the doorbell-call was supposed to have come at 8:15 sharp. Eight minutes late, in all of the crappy-ass service-industry jobs House had ever had the misfortune to work, rounded up to fifteen minutes late, which meant your goddamned check got docked. Of course that had amounted to chump change, a mere pittance, because those jobs had paid for crap, but when you got into the kind of service for which House was now paying, a quarter-hour meant some serious moolah, which House was going to refuse to pay.
House had had a couple of drinks tonight and a pharmaceutical charlatan’s sample of an awesome new pain pill to boot. Except he hadn’t booted it, he’d kept it down and that was probably why his head was so floaty and he kept forgetting where he was going.
Eighth-fourth-sixteenth-half was the rhythm of the knocks now sounding on his door, and he was tempted to detour to the piano and accompany the percussion with a jaunty little tune. It occurred to him, however, that there was more enjoyment to be had - physically, anyway - by answering the door and escorting the six-foot-three, blond, tanned... escort into the apartment.
With that in mind, he swung the door wide and reached out for a forearm. “Tyler, you lazy -- not Tyler.”
His hand dropped back to his side. It wasn’t Tyler at the door. Not six-foot-three, not blond, not tanned. Not young. Not in possession of a full head of hair. Blue eyes, sharp-ish features, asymmetrical mouth, traces of jowliness. And scowliness, with the odd mouth twisted and the brow growing wrinkly-crinkly.
“I am most definitely not Tyler,” not-Tyler said. “However, I am a... friend of his.” ‘Friend’ had come out like it had stuck in the guy’s craw. “Tyler couldn’t be here, so he sent me to... check up on you.”
Again with the reluctant scowly craw-stuck words. Interesting. At least enough so that House chose not to slam the door in his face. “I take it you don’t like the script the agency handed you.”
“I prefer expressing my own sentiments; it’s true.” The man crossed his arms, his expression determinedly haughty. “Are you going to invite me in so we can discuss this further, or should I stand here and raise my voice so all the neighbors hear?”
“Raise away.” One hand on the edge of the door, House leaned against the doorjamb. “Currently the only other tenant in the building is deaf. Helpful when Tyler screams my name in ecstasy. Where is he?”
“He can remember your name? I would’ve thought that beyond his cognitive capacity.” The guy shifted his weight from one foot to the other. Potential energy converting to kinetic: a fidgeter. “He’s ill.”
“Anything interesting?”
“Syphilis-induced dementia.”
An absolute lie; the agency would’ve called for any STD. But House had to give the guy credit for his moxie. Any unobservant fool, i.e., almost everyone, seeing his face would’ve thought he was completely serious.
“Oh!” House replied, with eyes exaggeratedly wide. “I’m horrified!”
“Yes, yes,” not-Tyler replied, waving a hand in the air dismissively. “That was a joke. I don’t know if it’s actually even any of your business, but the buffoon has chicken pox. Not fatal, and I’m told he’s past the contagious stage, but not terribly attractive to look at, either. ‘He ain’t pretty no more,’ as the erudite Moe Szyslak once said. And one of my regulars cancelled at the last minute -- honestly, the woman’s already dead, I don’t see why he couldn’t have waited until the morning to fly out -- so here I am. Your hallway is drafty; let me in.”
The mild misanthropy was amusing -- and Tyler was definitely a buffoon -- but House had ordered Young Gorgeous Stud, not Older Twitchy Chatterbox.
“You’re not getting your money refunded,” the guy sighed.
House hated being obvious. “Bullshit.”
“God’s honest truth,” the man said, raising one hand in some funky approximation of the Boy Scout pledge. “Well, if you believe in God. If you don’t, then I don’t suppose that aphorism would offer you any reassurance whatsoever. In fact, it would be the opposite, wouldn’t it? Because if you find the claim that that kind of a higher power even exists to be fraudulent, then declaration of such a sham’s honesty would be beyond irony and oxymoron, all the way into the territory of the deliberatively deceptive.”
Chatterbox. But not stupid. And the way that mouth moved was highly intriguing. “Got a name?”
“Most of my clients call me Dr. McKay.” Did the guy seriously think House was going to -- “But you can call me Rodney.”
“All right, McKay; you can come in.” House headed back toward his couch; let the hooker shut the door. “Make sure you tell Katherine I’m going to demand a discount.”
“You’re already getting a discount.” McKay was wandering the apartment, checking out everything with a startling intensity.
Annoyed, House barked, “You said --”
McKay interrupted him without even so much as a glance in House’s direction. “I’m a specialist, so my rate is substantially higher than the plebeians you’re accustomed to. Roxie sends her best, by the way. But since you’re such a long-standing client, no pun intended, the agency decided to make up the difference to get me over here.” Inspection apparently over, McKay turned back toward him. “See? Discount.”
“You’re a specialist? In what, insomnia cures?”
“Hilarious.” McKay finally sat his ass down -- in House’s armchair. “I tutor math.”
“I wasn’t aware I’d called Sylvan Learning.”
“Oh, God, I’m going to charge you extra if I have to listen to that lame excuse for humor the whole time.”
McKay glared from the chair; House glared from the couch; they were at stalemate for over a minute until House realized he was, in essence, burning money. (Incidentally, he was never taking whatever this fucking pain pill was again, if it made him this slow on the uptake.) Wilson’s credit limit was high but it was, in fact, a limit.
“OK, Mr. Tutor,” House said finally. “Come toot my horn.”
McKay rolled his eyes but got to his feet. He crossed the room and stopped in front of House, looking down at him sternly. “All right. You want to do this with bad jokes and no finesse, fine. I have things to do anyway. You come; I go; got it?”
“Who do you --” House began, but McKay’s hands were on House’s fly, McKay’s knees were on the ground, and McKay’s weird slanty lips were getting licked by a strong-looking tongue, and what the hell.
What the hell indeed, House thought a few minutes later, because McKay was talented. He couldn’t hold a candle to Tyler looks-wise, but if the way his mouth was moving, contorting, fucking shape-shifting over House’s prick now was any indication, he could probably hold a candle upright on the tip of his motherfucking tongue.
“Shit!” House barked as orgasm rolled over him, a steamroller chugging right on by and leaving him flattened. “Damn,” he breathed at the end, and melted into the couch.
“Well then,” McKay said off-handedly. “Another satisfied customer. See ya.”
House heard one of McKay’s knees crack as the man stood. How old was he? No matter. “Sit your ass down,” House ordered.
McKay’s eyes widened in what looked like deeply felt affront. “You come; I go. That was the deal,” he insisted.
“That was what you said. I didn’t agree to anything.” House ignored the disapproving sneer and gestured toward the far end of the sofa. “I paid for my time, and I’m getting my time. Sit and tell me about your math specialty.”
“To be precise, my specialty is astrophysics.” McKay sat where he’d been directed, his eyes alight and his jaw working. House had seen this look before, on his father, on Clinic patients, and horrifically often on Wilson: the look of a man about to go on a very long, very tedious speechifying homily. “Undergraduate, I did have joint honors in mathematics and physics, and pure mathematics is, of course, the basis for --”
“The hooker specialty.”
A disgruntled twist to the lips made them almost straight. Amusing.
“People,” McKay began, “aren’t very good at math.”
“People aren’t very good at a lot of things,” House pointed out.
“Yes, yes,” McKay said with a flap of his hand. “Truer words never spoken, and so on. When it comes to math, which is the point you asked to hear about, most people are content to walk around in their ignorance, happy to have left behind them the soul-crushing experiences of consistently failing to reach the mark when it comes to the most elegant and intrinsic construct of mankind, the closest humans have ever come to knowing the face of God.”
House raised an eyebrow.
“A select few,” McKay continued, head held high, “are willing to pay to have more of those experiences.”
“People pay you to yell at them.”
McKay sighed and settled back into the corner of the couch, arms crossing across his chest. “If you want to be simplistic about it, yes.”
“And then you suck their dicks.”
“Generally, no. They usually want to make up for their failings and absorb some of my genius, so I end up topping them. Some of my clients don’t even want me to make them orgasm.”
This was twisted, a freakish, demented perv show of the highest order. Intriguing.
Just to be sure, though, House had to clarify: “You tell them they’re stupid, fuck them, and leave?”
“It’s more complicated than that,” McKay insisted. “An entire psychology behind the experience that necessitates --” He stopped at House’s skeptical glare, and sighed, “Yeah. And I make them feed me at some point. Almost everybody seems to want to schedule over the dinner hour; I have no idea why.”
Flogging, fucking, and food. Damn. “Are all your clients men?”
“Almost all. Women don’t seem to have the same hang-up about math. They’re equally bad at it, overall; they just don’t care as much.” He stroked his chin. “I have had a couple, though. Throw in a few ‘Now see here, young lady’s, and you can push their daddy buttons nicely.”
McKay looked up at House, his eyes shining intelligently. “You’re not just asking out of curiosity, are you?”
House smiled.
***
The doorbell rang at 6:23, eight minutes late, but Chad didn’t mind. Service like this was worth the wait. He crossed to the door in four quick strides and flung it open. “Professor McKay!” he said eagerly, but the man at the door wasn’t Professor McKay. The man was taller, older, grayer, with a cane he was leaning on heavily.
The disapproving scowl, though, looked very familiar.
“McKay had better things to do tonight than deal with you,” the man said as he stomped past Chad into the apartment. Reaching the dining room table, he pulled out a pair of reading glasses, snatched up Chad’s assignment notebook and began flipping through it.
“So who are you?” Chad asked, a little bewildered and more than a little turned on.
The man looked haughtily down at Chad over his reading glasses, startlingly blue eyes cold and hot at the same time, and said, “You can call me Dr. House.”