Lorelai and Wilson: Sockpuppeting! And also, an owl.
((Warning: tl;dr-ness and excessive use of the phrase 'Chunky Monkey'.))
"Chunky monkey."
There was a short beat before Wilson raised his eyes from the textbook under his crossed arms, blinking a few times as if he was certain he had imagined the words. People didn't just approach strangers and utter statements so random as 'chunky monkey', even in a magic school, did they? ...He was friends with House; he shouldn't have been a slave to such naivety. Although that WAS his problem, in the end, in this moment, wasn't it? House. The reason he had spent about three hours walking to House's door, fist raised to knock before he scuttled back off to his room like a wounded animal. The reason he was hiding out in the damned library.
"I'm... sorry?" he asked in return, slowly, and actually managed to flinch a bit as this strange woman in front of his very eyes proceeded to sidle into the chair just across the oak table. Dear God, she was going to join him. He couldn't help but make known the nearest door, if not only because women who randomly approached him to discuss overweight primates deserved duly noted emergency exits.
She wasn't leaving any time soon on her own, that much was certain. Tugging on the sleeves of her sweater and sliding her chair closer into the table, she splayed her hands matter-of-factly onto the surface, hard enough to make Wilson jump once more. "Chunky Monkey," she repeated again, as if the statement was normal, her own 'hello' in some far-off planet. But she sounded so very stoic and Buddha-like, just for a moment, with that nod of her head, that Wilson... almost followed for a minute. 'Almost' being the operative word there. An explanation was severely needed.
"Okay," she started off with another nod, tapping against the table top with one nail, still sporting a bit of Revlon's Cherry Rain, some Red #5 or another. Was this woman 30 or 12? Honestly. "So, you know in all these chick flicks, how whenever a girl gets upset, depressed, dumped, whatever, she goes for the ice cream half pint?" Her statements were so obviously questions, and yet she wasn't pausing for validation or even recognition as to the possibility that he was even paying attention. She just kept going, freight engine with no brakes. "Yeah, you know. Course you do. Half pint of Ben and Jerry's, which is SO much better than Haagen Dazs, don't listen to those filthy Germans and their expensive ice cream. I'm telling you. Creamy, yes, delicious, yes. So high in price. Not worth it!"
She had a point here, somewhere, Wilson knew it.
"But, anyway, so, ice cream. I vote - well, not vote, should be a God-given right, you know - that everybody should be entitled to their own half-pint of ice cream when they're upset about something. So, I like - well, not LIKE, really, but DO - find people who look upset, and guess their favorite ice cream flavor! And maybe provide. I've got a knack, I'm telling you. And you, sir, are REEKING of kicked puppy and Chunky Monkey." She gave a decisive nod then, if not only to make this paragraph NOT entirely dialog and.... wow. There really was no stopping her.
There was more blinking on Wilson's part, as if this new revolution was taking a few moments to sink in. Respectively, it HAD been a lot of information to eat off, and... given with such a fast delivery, it had screwed with his head a bit. "I... oh," he started to mumble, eyebrows knitting in his apparent confusion. Chunky Monkey? ...Did he look like a Chunky Monkey kind of person? He didn't think he'd even ever tried Chunky Monkey ice cream.
"Oh, God," the woman exclaimed out of nowhere, much too loudly for a library, and some random student shushed her from another table. She stuck out her hand, ignoring said shushing child. "I'm Lorelai. Gilmore. Sorry. I like... talking."
Really? he hadn't noticed.
Wilson returned the handshake nonetheless, giving a weak sort of smile. "I'm, uh. Wilson. James... Wilson. And I didn't mean for that to sound so Golden Eye, sorry." Lorelai laughed, held up two hands in a passive manner and grinned.
"It has Pierce Brosnan involved," she replied solemnly, nodding once. "I am not complaining."
With that same, wry, half-smile back, he went quiet for a moment, rubbing at his chin, bemusedly. She wasn't all that bad. Random, and definitely of questionable sanity, but... amusing. Really. He could use this kind of distraction, maybe - it was better than reading over some various potions textbook. God, he hadn't even been paying attention. He didn't know the name of the thing, and he was pretty sure he'd been reading the same paragraph over and over again for a good few hours now. Lorelai was watching him, patiently, almost like he was some kind of science project for her to ace.
"So I'm a Chunky Monkey, huh?" he finally asked, raising softened brown, puppy eyes to her again. She replied with a stoic nod, leaning her chin onto a fist. "I've never had Chunky Monkey," he admitted with a shrug. "I'm... not sure what that is."
Lorelai quite literally gasped aloud, eyes flying open. "What?" she cried indignantly, and that kid from the other table promptly shushed her again. "Stow it, Pinky," she snarked back, and turned back to Wilson, hands splayed on the table, mouth opened to respond when she paused. "'Pinky'? ...Never mind. This has to be remedied. You... never... Chunky Monkey, man! And... where are those... HOUSE ELF."
And one appeared out of nowhere. Wilson looked faintly dumbstruck, wondering just what the hell he was getting himself into as Lorelai asked the thing for two half-pints of Ben and Jerry's and some spoons. And fast, because, apparently, 'the man needs it'. When she reverted back to Wilson again, he tried not to look completely paranoid. Seriously, who the hell was this woman? There were a brief few mildly terrifying moments of silence, in which she simply folded her arms on the table and watched him, expectantly. He managed to stare back for the first few twenty seconds or so, but after that, dear Lord. He just started attempting to read into the text book again. Aconite, an extremely poisonous plant, also go--
A loud crack sounded in the air, Lorelai was receiving more filthy looks from that poor student at the table behind her, and she pushed a container of ice cream towards him and dug into her own, content. He glanced around briefly, as if afraid the librarian was going to leap out of nowhere and beat him about the head. When no one came, he slowly opened the container. Banana ice cream and nuts? What kind of phallic ice cream flavor WAS this? Still, she was watching him again, expectantly, and he felt obliged to take a bite.
Not half bad.
"So," he heard announced as he wrapped his mouth around a second spoonful, and let his eyes flicker to hers, scared again, just for a moment. Dammit, free ice cream? He should have known there was going to be a catch in there somewhere. He nodded once, eyebrow raised in question as he finished off that bite of ice cream. "This still doesn't negate that whole, you know, kicked puppy look," she added knowingly, swirling an ice-cream laden spoon at him and widening her eyes expectantly.
Hell and damnation. He pulled the innocent act, automatically, poking his own spoon idly into the carton. "What kicked puppy look?" he asked slowly.
"Uh, man, the one that's got you currently hunched over a half pint of Chunky Monkey Ben and Jerry's, that's what," Lorelai automatically prompted back, knowingly, giving a laugh that was anything but amused. "Seriously. I'm curious. I like helping people." She dumped her spoon into her carton, ice cream forgotten for a moment and she clasped her fingers into a mock position of meditation. "Confess me your sins and you'll be freeeee," she offered in a bastardized Jamaican accent, and, good God, there was no way he was sharing a single THING with this woman.
"I'll... pass. Thanks."
She let her hands fall into her lap again, reclaiming her ice cream and picking at some of the banana on the top. "Aw, come on," she insisted, pulling herself cross-legged into the chair. "I seem like some kind of crazy hobo on the street, I know. Some hairy old guy tellin' you the Apocalypse is comin' in two days, three hours and thirty-nine minutes. I know! But I'm good. At this whole advice thing? And grown men should not be reduced to scouring the same page in a Potions text book for about three hours now."
The woman definitely had him pegged, and he could feel himself hunching his shoulders slightly, a wry, bitter smile playing at his lips as he stabbed into the ice cream more. It was tempting, really. He'd been pining for somebody to talk about, somebody neutral between him and House, but in a school where he'd only spoken to and held conversations with about five people... it made things extremely difficult. After a few moments of respective silence, Wilson cleared his throat, gaze darting up to Lorelai again.
"Can... you keep a secret?" he asked slowly, sounding almost desperate, like this woman was his Holy Grail.
"Definitely," she offered back with a nod. And she could. Honestly. As long as said secret wasn't hers. She made a quick zipper motion across her lips, lifting another spoonful of ice cream. "Secrets safe with me, Jimmy."
It was so ironically, perfectly timed, that nickname, that Wilson gave a sort of bitter laugh, half-considering the notion of asking her to please, not call him 'Jimmy' right now, but... it wasn't worth explaining. "I..." he started out slowly, mushing his ice cream into a thick paste. "My friend. My best friend, for over ten years. He..." This was even difficult to get out. He had no idea why he was telling a perfect stranger, this Lorelai Gilmore whom he'd never met before and had a strange fetish for Ben and Jerry's ice cream, but maybe this was just the kind of clarity he needed. "He said he had feelings for me," Wilson finally finished, blurting out the sentence quick, like ripping off a band-aid, and Lorelai paused, spoon halfway to her mouth.
She let out a low whistle, dropping the utensil back into the ice cream carton and raising an eyebrow. "Man. Awkward," she mumbled, propping up her chin on that fist again and giving Wilson a halfway-sympathetic look. Oh, yeah. Luke? She'd been in a similar situation, definitely - they'd danced around each other for years. "Just outta nowhere? You had no idea? Damn." The expression on her face was almost impressed, and she hardly paused for his validation or even her own breath between her sentences. "Well, I mean, wow. That's kind of a big one, huh?" And, miraculously, a beat of quiet, in which she mashed around her own ice cream and quirked her head, curiously. "How about you? I mean, are you...? Do you feel... For him too?"
The mood had shifted to quiet, out of nowhere. None of her random babbling about ice cream or kicked puppies to distract him like before; it was just the facts. Wilson hesitated for a few long seconds, spoon swirling around idly in the ice cream, which had been reduced to nearly pudding in his wait and his spoon-mushing. "I," he started to say, and automatically stopped, staring down at the ice cream carton and frowning, before he dropped the utensil inside, uselessly. "I don't... know." He sounded so helpless for a moment that he let out a sarcastic laugh, leaning back in his chair. "I've been married three times, all failed marriages. Dated more woman than I can count. I'm always being accused of being a serial monogamist, and yet when I'm confronted with an actual issue like this, with..." Another frown, one that knitted his eyebrows together and downward, as he scrubbed at his chin. "I just really... don't know."
There were another few, respective seconds of quiet, before Lorelai's mouth twisted up into a slow, wicked grin. She was onto something, definitely, and he didn't look so distraught over his for nothing. "Yeah, you do," she replied finally, her own eyebrows nearly raised to her hairline. "You so know. You don't 'not know' and get upset and depressed and confused and all that crap if you don't like the guy. That would just be... No. Doesn't happen! Trust me. I know. I totally know. And you, mister." More spoon-pointing. Wilson watched the thing, with a bit of paranoia, and he was honestly surprised she hadn't dripped any onto the table yet. Knock on wood, because a glob fell off just then, and she swiped it up with a finger and licked it clean.
"You like him too," she finished, knowingly, with a nod so matter-of-factly that you would think she knew all of the answers in the universe. Which was simple, forty-two, but that was beside the point. He paused, spoon held limply in his grasp as he blinked at her, confusedly.
"How do you...?"
"Call it special girl senses. I read Cosmo. I know."
More information to take in. Wilson sat back in his chair a moment again, rubbing at the back of his head and staring down at the surface of the table. Did he really? Should he trust some random stranger with this, to know what he was feeling? She looked so damned genuine that he wanted to believe her, but he didn't know. He'd just had so many failed attempts at love that he was overly cautious going into anything remotely related to it, at this point. Anna, Bonnie, Julie. Not to mention the college girlfriends, the flings, the affairs. Did he really want to toss House onto that list, just another notch in his bedpost or something? That was ten, long years of build-up to throw away if this all fucked over, it really was, and that concept, frankly, terrified him. Way longer than he'd been with anyone else. Longer than he'd been with all of his wives combined, nearly. "You really think so?" he asked nonetheless, hesitantly, like a middle-schooler trying to muster up the courage to ask his crush to the dance.
"Definitely," she concurred with finality, nodding again and sucking down more ice cream. She watched, almost confusedly, as Wilson stood, muttering something to himself and nodding.
"Okay," he said lowly, glancing half to Lorelai and starting off out of the library. He was hunched over again, talking to himself, almost like he was giving a pep talk, and didn't even say goodbye or... even thank her. She blinked after him a bit nonetheless, head cocked, and shrugged, reaching for his ice cream carton and pushing the two side-by-side with a bemused grin.
"More for me."
---
(The writing is fast, and shaky, almost like he scratched it off quick and sent it before he could change his mind.)
House,
I d
We sho
Really don't know wh
Can we talk?
Wilson.
"Chunky monkey."
There was a short beat before Wilson raised his eyes from the textbook under his crossed arms, blinking a few times as if he was certain he had imagined the words. People didn't just approach strangers and utter statements so random as 'chunky monkey', even in a magic school, did they? ...He was friends with House; he shouldn't have been a slave to such naivety. Although that WAS his problem, in the end, in this moment, wasn't it? House. The reason he had spent about three hours walking to House's door, fist raised to knock before he scuttled back off to his room like a wounded animal. The reason he was hiding out in the damned library.
"I'm... sorry?" he asked in return, slowly, and actually managed to flinch a bit as this strange woman in front of his very eyes proceeded to sidle into the chair just across the oak table. Dear God, she was going to join him. He couldn't help but make known the nearest door, if not only because women who randomly approached him to discuss overweight primates deserved duly noted emergency exits.
She wasn't leaving any time soon on her own, that much was certain. Tugging on the sleeves of her sweater and sliding her chair closer into the table, she splayed her hands matter-of-factly onto the surface, hard enough to make Wilson jump once more. "Chunky Monkey," she repeated again, as if the statement was normal, her own 'hello' in some far-off planet. But she sounded so very stoic and Buddha-like, just for a moment, with that nod of her head, that Wilson... almost followed for a minute. 'Almost' being the operative word there. An explanation was severely needed.
"Okay," she started off with another nod, tapping against the table top with one nail, still sporting a bit of Revlon's Cherry Rain, some Red #5 or another. Was this woman 30 or 12? Honestly. "So, you know in all these chick flicks, how whenever a girl gets upset, depressed, dumped, whatever, she goes for the ice cream half pint?" Her statements were so obviously questions, and yet she wasn't pausing for validation or even recognition as to the possibility that he was even paying attention. She just kept going, freight engine with no brakes. "Yeah, you know. Course you do. Half pint of Ben and Jerry's, which is SO much better than Haagen Dazs, don't listen to those filthy Germans and their expensive ice cream. I'm telling you. Creamy, yes, delicious, yes. So high in price. Not worth it!"
She had a point here, somewhere, Wilson knew it.
"But, anyway, so, ice cream. I vote - well, not vote, should be a God-given right, you know - that everybody should be entitled to their own half-pint of ice cream when they're upset about something. So, I like - well, not LIKE, really, but DO - find people who look upset, and guess their favorite ice cream flavor! And maybe provide. I've got a knack, I'm telling you. And you, sir, are REEKING of kicked puppy and Chunky Monkey." She gave a decisive nod then, if not only to make this paragraph NOT entirely dialog and.... wow. There really was no stopping her.
There was more blinking on Wilson's part, as if this new revolution was taking a few moments to sink in. Respectively, it HAD been a lot of information to eat off, and... given with such a fast delivery, it had screwed with his head a bit. "I... oh," he started to mumble, eyebrows knitting in his apparent confusion. Chunky Monkey? ...Did he look like a Chunky Monkey kind of person? He didn't think he'd even ever tried Chunky Monkey ice cream.
"Oh, God," the woman exclaimed out of nowhere, much too loudly for a library, and some random student shushed her from another table. She stuck out her hand, ignoring said shushing child. "I'm Lorelai. Gilmore. Sorry. I like... talking."
Really? he hadn't noticed.
Wilson returned the handshake nonetheless, giving a weak sort of smile. "I'm, uh. Wilson. James... Wilson. And I didn't mean for that to sound so Golden Eye, sorry." Lorelai laughed, held up two hands in a passive manner and grinned.
"It has Pierce Brosnan involved," she replied solemnly, nodding once. "I am not complaining."
With that same, wry, half-smile back, he went quiet for a moment, rubbing at his chin, bemusedly. She wasn't all that bad. Random, and definitely of questionable sanity, but... amusing. Really. He could use this kind of distraction, maybe - it was better than reading over some various potions textbook. God, he hadn't even been paying attention. He didn't know the name of the thing, and he was pretty sure he'd been reading the same paragraph over and over again for a good few hours now. Lorelai was watching him, patiently, almost like he was some kind of science project for her to ace.
"So I'm a Chunky Monkey, huh?" he finally asked, raising softened brown, puppy eyes to her again. She replied with a stoic nod, leaning her chin onto a fist. "I've never had Chunky Monkey," he admitted with a shrug. "I'm... not sure what that is."
Lorelai quite literally gasped aloud, eyes flying open. "What?" she cried indignantly, and that kid from the other table promptly shushed her again. "Stow it, Pinky," she snarked back, and turned back to Wilson, hands splayed on the table, mouth opened to respond when she paused. "'Pinky'? ...Never mind. This has to be remedied. You... never... Chunky Monkey, man! And... where are those... HOUSE ELF."
And one appeared out of nowhere. Wilson looked faintly dumbstruck, wondering just what the hell he was getting himself into as Lorelai asked the thing for two half-pints of Ben and Jerry's and some spoons. And fast, because, apparently, 'the man needs it'. When she reverted back to Wilson again, he tried not to look completely paranoid. Seriously, who the hell was this woman? There were a brief few mildly terrifying moments of silence, in which she simply folded her arms on the table and watched him, expectantly. He managed to stare back for the first few twenty seconds or so, but after that, dear Lord. He just started attempting to read into the text book again. Aconite, an extremely poisonous plant, also go--
A loud crack sounded in the air, Lorelai was receiving more filthy looks from that poor student at the table behind her, and she pushed a container of ice cream towards him and dug into her own, content. He glanced around briefly, as if afraid the librarian was going to leap out of nowhere and beat him about the head. When no one came, he slowly opened the container. Banana ice cream and nuts? What kind of phallic ice cream flavor WAS this? Still, she was watching him again, expectantly, and he felt obliged to take a bite.
Not half bad.
"So," he heard announced as he wrapped his mouth around a second spoonful, and let his eyes flicker to hers, scared again, just for a moment. Dammit, free ice cream? He should have known there was going to be a catch in there somewhere. He nodded once, eyebrow raised in question as he finished off that bite of ice cream. "This still doesn't negate that whole, you know, kicked puppy look," she added knowingly, swirling an ice-cream laden spoon at him and widening her eyes expectantly.
Hell and damnation. He pulled the innocent act, automatically, poking his own spoon idly into the carton. "What kicked puppy look?" he asked slowly.
"Uh, man, the one that's got you currently hunched over a half pint of Chunky Monkey Ben and Jerry's, that's what," Lorelai automatically prompted back, knowingly, giving a laugh that was anything but amused. "Seriously. I'm curious. I like helping people." She dumped her spoon into her carton, ice cream forgotten for a moment and she clasped her fingers into a mock position of meditation. "Confess me your sins and you'll be freeeee," she offered in a bastardized Jamaican accent, and, good God, there was no way he was sharing a single THING with this woman.
"I'll... pass. Thanks."
She let her hands fall into her lap again, reclaiming her ice cream and picking at some of the banana on the top. "Aw, come on," she insisted, pulling herself cross-legged into the chair. "I seem like some kind of crazy hobo on the street, I know. Some hairy old guy tellin' you the Apocalypse is comin' in two days, three hours and thirty-nine minutes. I know! But I'm good. At this whole advice thing? And grown men should not be reduced to scouring the same page in a Potions text book for about three hours now."
The woman definitely had him pegged, and he could feel himself hunching his shoulders slightly, a wry, bitter smile playing at his lips as he stabbed into the ice cream more. It was tempting, really. He'd been pining for somebody to talk about, somebody neutral between him and House, but in a school where he'd only spoken to and held conversations with about five people... it made things extremely difficult. After a few moments of respective silence, Wilson cleared his throat, gaze darting up to Lorelai again.
"Can... you keep a secret?" he asked slowly, sounding almost desperate, like this woman was his Holy Grail.
"Definitely," she offered back with a nod. And she could. Honestly. As long as said secret wasn't hers. She made a quick zipper motion across her lips, lifting another spoonful of ice cream. "Secrets safe with me, Jimmy."
It was so ironically, perfectly timed, that nickname, that Wilson gave a sort of bitter laugh, half-considering the notion of asking her to please, not call him 'Jimmy' right now, but... it wasn't worth explaining. "I..." he started out slowly, mushing his ice cream into a thick paste. "My friend. My best friend, for over ten years. He..." This was even difficult to get out. He had no idea why he was telling a perfect stranger, this Lorelai Gilmore whom he'd never met before and had a strange fetish for Ben and Jerry's ice cream, but maybe this was just the kind of clarity he needed. "He said he had feelings for me," Wilson finally finished, blurting out the sentence quick, like ripping off a band-aid, and Lorelai paused, spoon halfway to her mouth.
She let out a low whistle, dropping the utensil back into the ice cream carton and raising an eyebrow. "Man. Awkward," she mumbled, propping up her chin on that fist again and giving Wilson a halfway-sympathetic look. Oh, yeah. Luke? She'd been in a similar situation, definitely - they'd danced around each other for years. "Just outta nowhere? You had no idea? Damn." The expression on her face was almost impressed, and she hardly paused for his validation or even her own breath between her sentences. "Well, I mean, wow. That's kind of a big one, huh?" And, miraculously, a beat of quiet, in which she mashed around her own ice cream and quirked her head, curiously. "How about you? I mean, are you...? Do you feel... For him too?"
The mood had shifted to quiet, out of nowhere. None of her random babbling about ice cream or kicked puppies to distract him like before; it was just the facts. Wilson hesitated for a few long seconds, spoon swirling around idly in the ice cream, which had been reduced to nearly pudding in his wait and his spoon-mushing. "I," he started to say, and automatically stopped, staring down at the ice cream carton and frowning, before he dropped the utensil inside, uselessly. "I don't... know." He sounded so helpless for a moment that he let out a sarcastic laugh, leaning back in his chair. "I've been married three times, all failed marriages. Dated more woman than I can count. I'm always being accused of being a serial monogamist, and yet when I'm confronted with an actual issue like this, with..." Another frown, one that knitted his eyebrows together and downward, as he scrubbed at his chin. "I just really... don't know."
There were another few, respective seconds of quiet, before Lorelai's mouth twisted up into a slow, wicked grin. She was onto something, definitely, and he didn't look so distraught over his for nothing. "Yeah, you do," she replied finally, her own eyebrows nearly raised to her hairline. "You so know. You don't 'not know' and get upset and depressed and confused and all that crap if you don't like the guy. That would just be... No. Doesn't happen! Trust me. I know. I totally know. And you, mister." More spoon-pointing. Wilson watched the thing, with a bit of paranoia, and he was honestly surprised she hadn't dripped any onto the table yet. Knock on wood, because a glob fell off just then, and she swiped it up with a finger and licked it clean.
"You like him too," she finished, knowingly, with a nod so matter-of-factly that you would think she knew all of the answers in the universe. Which was simple, forty-two, but that was beside the point. He paused, spoon held limply in his grasp as he blinked at her, confusedly.
"How do you...?"
"Call it special girl senses. I read Cosmo. I know."
More information to take in. Wilson sat back in his chair a moment again, rubbing at the back of his head and staring down at the surface of the table. Did he really? Should he trust some random stranger with this, to know what he was feeling? She looked so damned genuine that he wanted to believe her, but he didn't know. He'd just had so many failed attempts at love that he was overly cautious going into anything remotely related to it, at this point. Anna, Bonnie, Julie. Not to mention the college girlfriends, the flings, the affairs. Did he really want to toss House onto that list, just another notch in his bedpost or something? That was ten, long years of build-up to throw away if this all fucked over, it really was, and that concept, frankly, terrified him. Way longer than he'd been with anyone else. Longer than he'd been with all of his wives combined, nearly. "You really think so?" he asked nonetheless, hesitantly, like a middle-schooler trying to muster up the courage to ask his crush to the dance.
"Definitely," she concurred with finality, nodding again and sucking down more ice cream. She watched, almost confusedly, as Wilson stood, muttering something to himself and nodding.
"Okay," he said lowly, glancing half to Lorelai and starting off out of the library. He was hunched over again, talking to himself, almost like he was giving a pep talk, and didn't even say goodbye or... even thank her. She blinked after him a bit nonetheless, head cocked, and shrugged, reaching for his ice cream carton and pushing the two side-by-side with a bemused grin.
"More for me."
---
(The writing is fast, and shaky, almost like he scratched it off quick and sent it before he could change his mind.)
House,
I d
We sho
Really don't know wh
Can we talk?
Wilson.