The Boy Next Door CH16
Author: resm
Pairing: None. House-Wilson strong friendship
Disclaimer: do not own
Summary: House trying to adjust to a regressive Wilson after misc. accident
Unbeta'd so please forgive me. Hopefully not too OOC
This is largely inspired by / borrowed from a clip of one of RSL's films (Boys Next Door) which you can find here:
www.youtube.com/watch
Previous chapters: One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven, Eight, Nine, Ten, Eleven, Twelve, Thirteen, Fourteen, Fifteen
~ Chapter 16 ~
Wilson deliberately doesn’t keep in step with Thirteen as she leads him quietly to Dana’s room, and if he’s grateful that she’s refusing to pander to his slow pace because it’s restricting their conversation to a minimum then he’s even more grateful to her for recognising why he can’t afford to get distracted from the impeccable white of her lab coat billowing behind her.
For if he so much as takes his eyes off her, God only knows where he will end up and who will end up talking to him. It’s the perfect excuse not to make eye contact with the rest of the hospital staff as they move through the congested nursing station outside of the clinic. There will be no repeat performances of former colleagues who he can’t even remember all that well approaching him to ask of his well-being if he’s busy concentrating on tailing House’s fellow.
By the time Thirteen reaches the aforementioned patient room, all but Chase have left. He ignores her at first to continue fumbling with the catheter bag hanging on the plastic bedrail, “You know, this is the thing of nurses,” he says arrogantly, finally looking across the bed.
“The clinic’s backed up with patients because of House unfortunately. It’s mad down there,” she tells him without her patented woe-is-me manner. Chase momentarily staggers for clarity until he sees an unwilling Wilson bringing up the rear of the team.
He holds his breath instead of sighing but it truly escapes him why she’s trying so hard to make their newly neurologically disabled acquaintance - and he’s nothing more than an acquaintance - like her. It’s not as if House is suddenly going to start treating her any better just because she can pull a begrudging smile from Wilson here or there. If that.
House doesn’t do brownie points. Cuddy, maybe. House, no. And even if he did, he isn’t necessarily nice to Wilson at the best of times himself. Sometimes he can be downright horrible to the poor guy. If Thirteen really wants to satisfy House then she shouldn’t do so indirectly, she should fix Wilson with a nice straitjacket and muzzle and shut him away somewhere out of House’s hair. Well, Chase reconsiders, perhaps not.
“Hey, Wilson,” he says anyway, slipping into the same breezy air that Thirteen has. “How was clinic duty?”
Wilson shrugs, not particularly liking that yet another of House’s lackeys seem to have their heart set on making idle chitchat with him. He’s not so simple as to forget that it was only Cameron who properly made the effort with him when she worked under House and again when Amber died. And only to a degree.
When he and House had their differences over the whole Tritter thing a few years back, Cameron practically led the manhunt and they all enjoyed sitting together to bitch and slander him in a bid to help glorify House. He doesn’t dislike them, he never did. But being forced against his will to sit through their collective pity party now is as hard to swallow as it was when they had all happily cast him as Judas and actively pitied House instead. Whether he’s in his right frame of mind or not.
He doesn’t have the capacity to fully rationalise why being pitied annoys him, but his limited understanding of his situation and his friendship with House has led him to come close enough. He isn’t so much hostile towards the team’s advances as he is irritated by the hypocrisy of it all and being subject to attention makes him deeply nervous at the best of times.
The same way he was when they all rallied around him after Amber’s death, a woman, he reminded them, that no one even liked. Wilson, by nature, is a people-person, though, confidence lacking, he isn’t now. But even at his best, he was still a closed book to those who tried to reciprocate his kindness. He didn’t have time for it - he liked being needed, House was ever the first to point out, but he loathed having to need. And as House’s primary dependent since being discharged from PPTH, he’s living out his own worst fear.
“So you got seeing your old patients then?” Chase asks, figuring that if he appeals to Wilson’s detrimental sense of duty to others then it’s a way of humouring him.
“Mmhmm.”
“And how did that go for you?”
“Was fine,” Wilson mumbles, feeling his hands starting to sweat up on him as he presses his fingernails into the palms of his hands.
They need another differential diagnosis and until House is a little less distracted with Wilson or his soaps or whatever the hell, then the case is going to have to grind to an inevitable halt. For want of anything better to do, Chase pretends to busy himself with making a notation on the patient chart but the fact that he’s hanging around Dana’s room when they have only just sedated her proves how stumped they are. And when he thinks Wilson can’t see him, he turns his face away and rolls his eyes at the far wall, feeling a little frustrated with Wilson’s curt answers.
He feels a twinge of something - not quite sympathy, but something nonetheless - for House having to put up with this ill, unfixable, frayed-round-the-edges best friend. He can’t imagine himself being so loyal to so much as a cousin let alone a friend, and he’s pretty sure if he had a brother, the effort wouldn’t extend all that far either.
Wilson, now, is either hard work or deathly boring - neither avenue Chase is particularly interested in exploring and yet House, who isn’t supposed to care about anyone, is dedicating every minute of every day into not just exploring said avenues but exhausting them to try to turn up more positive results. And what’s more, he does it all without a smile on his face as if nothing has changed between the two men at all.
When he turns back he catches Thirteen’s glare and notices Wilson dipping his head and shuffling his feet. They clearly noticed the eye-roll.
“Uh, I believe your brother’s in town?” Chase changes the subject completely, knowing that there’s little he can do to recover from the insensitive blunder. Thirteen touches Wilson’s elbow and he startles, then looks up at Chase. He folds in on himself by wrapping his arms around his torso to stave off further contact from her and then nods back at Chase.
“Are you seeing him after work?”
“He does - doesn’t really get along… mmm with House,” Wilson says, surprising himself with the admission. “We have set days.”
“But he’s only here for two weeks,” Chase feels more confident in their conversation now.
“We have set days,” Wilson repeats distantly as the unconscious patient in the bed begins to occupy his attention. Thirteen remembers in the exam room how he had been less uncomfortable with her when he didn’t have time to consider the imponderables and so, using his distraction as her opening, she produces his forgotten stethoscope and places a hand to the small of his back.
He tries to freeze up and dig his heels into the ground when the slightest pressure of Thirteen’s hand guides him closer to Dana, but Chase catches on and swivels her monitors in his direction, “Right, enough small talk, Wilson. If you’re here you may as well be helpful. Are you going to read her vitals for me or not?”
“She… she’s breathing,” Wilson says simply, though it doesn’t feel simple to him. He doesn’t know what to immediately make of Chase’s onset no-nonsense attitude and before his foggy mind can catch up with the change of pace, he realises too late that Thirteen has indeed shoved him into the other side of the bed. He stumbles a little and clamps a sweating hand around a fistful of his sweater-vest.
“Just make sure she’s breathing fine for us then,” Thirteen’s voice drifts over his shoulder and washes right through his body. He allows himself for once to hear the hope and not just the pity in her voice and accepts that even if he deserves as much, they aren’t going to criticise him for his new stupidities. Thin fingers reach right around his wrist to detach his hand from plucking the vest and the stethoscope makes up for the absence of the material in his shaking left hand.
Before plugging his ears, his right hand travels to the back of his neck and, even with the splinted middle finger, he manages to rub out the knot of tired muscles there. He leans into his own touch wearily, sighs, and bends over Dana to do as he’s told.
“She’s breathing fine,” Wilson concludes as much or merely repeats Thirteen’s words without knowing what to listen out for. He hangs the stethoscope around his neck before she has chance to take it back and steels himself away from the bed far enough until he’s no longer in front of her.
“You’ve got another thing coming if you think you’re getting off that easily,” she warns him, and, without his tie, however inappropriate anyway, she improvises and grabs both ends of the stethoscope awkwardly. But despite her actions, she isn’t terribly forceful, “You’re not finished yet,” she says, dragging him back to the bedside and Chase has to marvel at how playful she makes it look when any other time Wilson would have rightfully freaked out.
When he calms down long enough to still his trembling hands, they talk him through a proper examination and the conversation, much to their relief, especially Chase’s, actually comes effortlessly to them.
“So what else do you know?” Chase asks incredulously after Wilson expels rumours that one of the auxiliary nurses from Paediatrics dated the hospital’s resident tranny nurse as being untrue, but that Nurse Jeffrey was instead involved and Nurse Brenda had found them in the janitor’s closet together and how it was a whole big sexual harassment lawsuit waiting to happen. “And how do you know this?”
Wilson shrugs noncommittally, referring to his past, “People just tell me stuff.”
“Please tell me you have dirt on House,” Thirteen laughs and luckily or unluckily for Wilson, before he can answer or deflect, Dana’s head flies unnaturally to the side and her whole body starts to convulse.
“She’s seizing!” Chase states the obvious in a panic and tries to hold her down before she pulls out her IV line or rolls off the bed. Wilson is pushed unceremoniously aside and quickly forgotten so Thirteen can help Chase in his ministrations. “Just page the others,” he demands through gritted teeth and she does so as the monitors go off in a frenzied disharmony.
They struggle with Dana for a further two minutes before Foreman and Taub pour into the room, panting. Wilson backs into the far wall, as far from the team as possible, with his tongue pushing at the inside of his bottom lip anxiously. He has about as much control over his own body as Dana does, though at least his condition is less overt about it.
“Psst! Boy Wonder,” House’s head suddenly appears around the door by the time their patient’s seizure finally passes and the team, breathless and relieved, greet House with statistics now that she’s stabilised again.
He limps into the room and moves not for Dana but Wilson who is cowering with his arms wrapped around himself again. House pries his friend’s whitened knuckles away before he can bruise his own arms and shakes the hand he’s taken hold of lightly, “Hey, hey. Earth to Casanova. Have you gone deaf or something?” he whispers kindly. “Or were you always this stupid? I’m talking to you.”
Wilson smiles serenely at him for encouraging him to push the chaos of the patient crashing to the back of his mind. House tuts in disgust when it registers with him how clammy the hand he’s wilfully holding is and wipes it down Wilson’s trouser leg to dry it of residue sweat before clasping it in his own again.
“I’m going to take Jimmy off your hands here,” he addresses Thirteen directly. “He’s just dead weight. He’ll only be in the way otherwise. Isn’t that right, huh?” he pulls on Wilson to get some sort of rise out of him, taking his whole arm now. “That’s what all your wives said about you, you know. They have this secret club, see. Even your own mother’s a member.”
“Least I know,” Wilson starts, unaffected by House’s mocking.
“Know what?”
“Enough people for them to form a club,”
“The ‘Wilson’s a Waste-of-Space Foundation,’” House pretends he hasn’t heard him, then invites his fellows to ridicule his best friend as well. “Just as pithy as the Make a Wish Foundation, don’t you think?”
“Don’t you think,” Taub seems unimpressed, but he sizes up Wilson anyway, “that we should be running another differential? Or would you rather we redo all of the tests just to waste our time and hospital resources for good measure? Seizures shouldn’t be conducive to-” but his rant is cut off at the pass.
“Foreman,” House delegates, nodding towards his most competent doctor. “Lead the DDX. We’ll join you in about half an hour.”
“Why, where are you going?” Chase flaps an arm. “She had a seizure!”
“And that’s why I have four supposedly halfway decent doctors to monitor patients so I don’t have to. I can’t help it if she has a seizure. What I can help is figuring out what’s killing her - preferably before she actually dies,” he lectures them heatedly.
“Now you can either stay here arguing with me until she does seize again or you can argue productively with each other to remind me why I hired you all in the first place. Go,” he spits with finality, reserving a hard glare for each of them as they retreat from the room in single file, obediently but reluctantly.
“Where are we going?” Wilson dares to speak up when he finds them alone save for Dana in the room.
House looks him dead in the eye, pivots and stumps out of the room wordlessly. Wilson blinks in confusion before skidding across the polished floor after him.
“House! House, where are we going?”
But the diagnostician strides on deliberately and unevenly down the corridor, completely and fervently indifferent to him.
“Aw, House just tell me!” Wilson huffs and then stops dead in his tracks. He crosses his arms and snaps petulantly after him, “Fine then. I - I’m not following you this time!”
Still, House limps onward.
But Wilson’s coup d’état gives way to curiosity within seconds. The linoleum screeches under his shoes when he starts forward in an impressive sprint, covering the distance between them in next to no time. He pulls on House’s elbow, shucking and shaking him and hoping the explanation will tumble right out of his mouth and put pay to the suspense.
But his efforts, however annoying, are to no avail.
Seventeen
Pairing: None. House-Wilson strong friendship
Disclaimer: do not own
Summary: House trying to adjust to a regressive Wilson after misc. accident
Unbeta'd so please forgive me. Hopefully not too OOC
This is largely inspired by / borrowed from a clip of one of RSL's films (Boys Next Door) which you can find here:
www.youtube.com/watch
Previous chapters: One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven, Eight, Nine, Ten, Eleven, Twelve, Thirteen, Fourteen, Fifteen
~ Chapter 16 ~
Wilson deliberately doesn’t keep in step with Thirteen as she leads him quietly to Dana’s room, and if he’s grateful that she’s refusing to pander to his slow pace because it’s restricting their conversation to a minimum then he’s even more grateful to her for recognising why he can’t afford to get distracted from the impeccable white of her lab coat billowing behind her.
For if he so much as takes his eyes off her, God only knows where he will end up and who will end up talking to him. It’s the perfect excuse not to make eye contact with the rest of the hospital staff as they move through the congested nursing station outside of the clinic. There will be no repeat performances of former colleagues who he can’t even remember all that well approaching him to ask of his well-being if he’s busy concentrating on tailing House’s fellow.
By the time Thirteen reaches the aforementioned patient room, all but Chase have left. He ignores her at first to continue fumbling with the catheter bag hanging on the plastic bedrail, “You know, this is the thing of nurses,” he says arrogantly, finally looking across the bed.
“The clinic’s backed up with patients because of House unfortunately. It’s mad down there,” she tells him without her patented woe-is-me manner. Chase momentarily staggers for clarity until he sees an unwilling Wilson bringing up the rear of the team.
He holds his breath instead of sighing but it truly escapes him why she’s trying so hard to make their newly neurologically disabled acquaintance - and he’s nothing more than an acquaintance - like her. It’s not as if House is suddenly going to start treating her any better just because she can pull a begrudging smile from Wilson here or there. If that.
House doesn’t do brownie points. Cuddy, maybe. House, no. And even if he did, he isn’t necessarily nice to Wilson at the best of times himself. Sometimes he can be downright horrible to the poor guy. If Thirteen really wants to satisfy House then she shouldn’t do so indirectly, she should fix Wilson with a nice straitjacket and muzzle and shut him away somewhere out of House’s hair. Well, Chase reconsiders, perhaps not.
“Hey, Wilson,” he says anyway, slipping into the same breezy air that Thirteen has. “How was clinic duty?”
Wilson shrugs, not particularly liking that yet another of House’s lackeys seem to have their heart set on making idle chitchat with him. He’s not so simple as to forget that it was only Cameron who properly made the effort with him when she worked under House and again when Amber died. And only to a degree.
When he and House had their differences over the whole Tritter thing a few years back, Cameron practically led the manhunt and they all enjoyed sitting together to bitch and slander him in a bid to help glorify House. He doesn’t dislike them, he never did. But being forced against his will to sit through their collective pity party now is as hard to swallow as it was when they had all happily cast him as Judas and actively pitied House instead. Whether he’s in his right frame of mind or not.
He doesn’t have the capacity to fully rationalise why being pitied annoys him, but his limited understanding of his situation and his friendship with House has led him to come close enough. He isn’t so much hostile towards the team’s advances as he is irritated by the hypocrisy of it all and being subject to attention makes him deeply nervous at the best of times.
The same way he was when they all rallied around him after Amber’s death, a woman, he reminded them, that no one even liked. Wilson, by nature, is a people-person, though, confidence lacking, he isn’t now. But even at his best, he was still a closed book to those who tried to reciprocate his kindness. He didn’t have time for it - he liked being needed, House was ever the first to point out, but he loathed having to need. And as House’s primary dependent since being discharged from PPTH, he’s living out his own worst fear.
“So you got seeing your old patients then?” Chase asks, figuring that if he appeals to Wilson’s detrimental sense of duty to others then it’s a way of humouring him.
“Mmhmm.”
“And how did that go for you?”
“Was fine,” Wilson mumbles, feeling his hands starting to sweat up on him as he presses his fingernails into the palms of his hands.
They need another differential diagnosis and until House is a little less distracted with Wilson or his soaps or whatever the hell, then the case is going to have to grind to an inevitable halt. For want of anything better to do, Chase pretends to busy himself with making a notation on the patient chart but the fact that he’s hanging around Dana’s room when they have only just sedated her proves how stumped they are. And when he thinks Wilson can’t see him, he turns his face away and rolls his eyes at the far wall, feeling a little frustrated with Wilson’s curt answers.
He feels a twinge of something - not quite sympathy, but something nonetheless - for House having to put up with this ill, unfixable, frayed-round-the-edges best friend. He can’t imagine himself being so loyal to so much as a cousin let alone a friend, and he’s pretty sure if he had a brother, the effort wouldn’t extend all that far either.
Wilson, now, is either hard work or deathly boring - neither avenue Chase is particularly interested in exploring and yet House, who isn’t supposed to care about anyone, is dedicating every minute of every day into not just exploring said avenues but exhausting them to try to turn up more positive results. And what’s more, he does it all without a smile on his face as if nothing has changed between the two men at all.
When he turns back he catches Thirteen’s glare and notices Wilson dipping his head and shuffling his feet. They clearly noticed the eye-roll.
“Uh, I believe your brother’s in town?” Chase changes the subject completely, knowing that there’s little he can do to recover from the insensitive blunder. Thirteen touches Wilson’s elbow and he startles, then looks up at Chase. He folds in on himself by wrapping his arms around his torso to stave off further contact from her and then nods back at Chase.
“Are you seeing him after work?”
“He does - doesn’t really get along… mmm with House,” Wilson says, surprising himself with the admission. “We have set days.”
“But he’s only here for two weeks,” Chase feels more confident in their conversation now.
“We have set days,” Wilson repeats distantly as the unconscious patient in the bed begins to occupy his attention. Thirteen remembers in the exam room how he had been less uncomfortable with her when he didn’t have time to consider the imponderables and so, using his distraction as her opening, she produces his forgotten stethoscope and places a hand to the small of his back.
He tries to freeze up and dig his heels into the ground when the slightest pressure of Thirteen’s hand guides him closer to Dana, but Chase catches on and swivels her monitors in his direction, “Right, enough small talk, Wilson. If you’re here you may as well be helpful. Are you going to read her vitals for me or not?”
“She… she’s breathing,” Wilson says simply, though it doesn’t feel simple to him. He doesn’t know what to immediately make of Chase’s onset no-nonsense attitude and before his foggy mind can catch up with the change of pace, he realises too late that Thirteen has indeed shoved him into the other side of the bed. He stumbles a little and clamps a sweating hand around a fistful of his sweater-vest.
“Just make sure she’s breathing fine for us then,” Thirteen’s voice drifts over his shoulder and washes right through his body. He allows himself for once to hear the hope and not just the pity in her voice and accepts that even if he deserves as much, they aren’t going to criticise him for his new stupidities. Thin fingers reach right around his wrist to detach his hand from plucking the vest and the stethoscope makes up for the absence of the material in his shaking left hand.
Before plugging his ears, his right hand travels to the back of his neck and, even with the splinted middle finger, he manages to rub out the knot of tired muscles there. He leans into his own touch wearily, sighs, and bends over Dana to do as he’s told.
“She’s breathing fine,” Wilson concludes as much or merely repeats Thirteen’s words without knowing what to listen out for. He hangs the stethoscope around his neck before she has chance to take it back and steels himself away from the bed far enough until he’s no longer in front of her.
“You’ve got another thing coming if you think you’re getting off that easily,” she warns him, and, without his tie, however inappropriate anyway, she improvises and grabs both ends of the stethoscope awkwardly. But despite her actions, she isn’t terribly forceful, “You’re not finished yet,” she says, dragging him back to the bedside and Chase has to marvel at how playful she makes it look when any other time Wilson would have rightfully freaked out.
When he calms down long enough to still his trembling hands, they talk him through a proper examination and the conversation, much to their relief, especially Chase’s, actually comes effortlessly to them.
“So what else do you know?” Chase asks incredulously after Wilson expels rumours that one of the auxiliary nurses from Paediatrics dated the hospital’s resident tranny nurse as being untrue, but that Nurse Jeffrey was instead involved and Nurse Brenda had found them in the janitor’s closet together and how it was a whole big sexual harassment lawsuit waiting to happen. “And how do you know this?”
Wilson shrugs noncommittally, referring to his past, “People just tell me stuff.”
“Please tell me you have dirt on House,” Thirteen laughs and luckily or unluckily for Wilson, before he can answer or deflect, Dana’s head flies unnaturally to the side and her whole body starts to convulse.
“She’s seizing!” Chase states the obvious in a panic and tries to hold her down before she pulls out her IV line or rolls off the bed. Wilson is pushed unceremoniously aside and quickly forgotten so Thirteen can help Chase in his ministrations. “Just page the others,” he demands through gritted teeth and she does so as the monitors go off in a frenzied disharmony.
They struggle with Dana for a further two minutes before Foreman and Taub pour into the room, panting. Wilson backs into the far wall, as far from the team as possible, with his tongue pushing at the inside of his bottom lip anxiously. He has about as much control over his own body as Dana does, though at least his condition is less overt about it.
“Psst! Boy Wonder,” House’s head suddenly appears around the door by the time their patient’s seizure finally passes and the team, breathless and relieved, greet House with statistics now that she’s stabilised again.
He limps into the room and moves not for Dana but Wilson who is cowering with his arms wrapped around himself again. House pries his friend’s whitened knuckles away before he can bruise his own arms and shakes the hand he’s taken hold of lightly, “Hey, hey. Earth to Casanova. Have you gone deaf or something?” he whispers kindly. “Or were you always this stupid? I’m talking to you.”
Wilson smiles serenely at him for encouraging him to push the chaos of the patient crashing to the back of his mind. House tuts in disgust when it registers with him how clammy the hand he’s wilfully holding is and wipes it down Wilson’s trouser leg to dry it of residue sweat before clasping it in his own again.
“I’m going to take Jimmy off your hands here,” he addresses Thirteen directly. “He’s just dead weight. He’ll only be in the way otherwise. Isn’t that right, huh?” he pulls on Wilson to get some sort of rise out of him, taking his whole arm now. “That’s what all your wives said about you, you know. They have this secret club, see. Even your own mother’s a member.”
“Least I know,” Wilson starts, unaffected by House’s mocking.
“Know what?”
“Enough people for them to form a club,”
“The ‘Wilson’s a Waste-of-Space Foundation,’” House pretends he hasn’t heard him, then invites his fellows to ridicule his best friend as well. “Just as pithy as the Make a Wish Foundation, don’t you think?”
“Don’t you think,” Taub seems unimpressed, but he sizes up Wilson anyway, “that we should be running another differential? Or would you rather we redo all of the tests just to waste our time and hospital resources for good measure? Seizures shouldn’t be conducive to-” but his rant is cut off at the pass.
“Foreman,” House delegates, nodding towards his most competent doctor. “Lead the DDX. We’ll join you in about half an hour.”
“Why, where are you going?” Chase flaps an arm. “She had a seizure!”
“And that’s why I have four supposedly halfway decent doctors to monitor patients so I don’t have to. I can’t help it if she has a seizure. What I can help is figuring out what’s killing her - preferably before she actually dies,” he lectures them heatedly.
“Now you can either stay here arguing with me until she does seize again or you can argue productively with each other to remind me why I hired you all in the first place. Go,” he spits with finality, reserving a hard glare for each of them as they retreat from the room in single file, obediently but reluctantly.
“Where are we going?” Wilson dares to speak up when he finds them alone save for Dana in the room.
House looks him dead in the eye, pivots and stumps out of the room wordlessly. Wilson blinks in confusion before skidding across the polished floor after him.
“House! House, where are we going?”
But the diagnostician strides on deliberately and unevenly down the corridor, completely and fervently indifferent to him.
“Aw, House just tell me!” Wilson huffs and then stops dead in his tracks. He crosses his arms and snaps petulantly after him, “Fine then. I - I’m not following you this time!”
Still, House limps onward.
But Wilson’s coup d’état gives way to curiosity within seconds. The linoleum screeches under his shoes when he starts forward in an impressive sprint, covering the distance between them in next to no time. He pulls on House’s elbow, shucking and shaking him and hoping the explanation will tumble right out of his mouth and put pay to the suspense.
But his efforts, however annoying, are to no avail.
Seventeen