First fic for housefic50Denial's Taste is Bittersweet
Title: Denial's Taste is Bittersweet
Characters/Pairing: House/Wilson implied, Wilson & Cameron friendship
Prompt: Denial (written for housefic50
Word Count: 2609
Rating: G
Spoilers: Cameron has a theory.
Author's Notes: Just some random thing that popped up in my head. Wilson and Cameron talking about his relationship with House. My first attempt at a female POV.
Wilson's wide-eyed stare is almost enough to drive Cameron from the room, just from sheer embarassment. She's not sure what possessed her to ask him, or what exactly it was that drove her into his office. Curiosity, certainly, but something else, something she can't quite place her finger on.
Neither can be sure who is the more shocked when he actually answers her. It takes a moment for the shocked feeling to clear, leaving her breathless but vindicated. "I knew it," she whispers, and Wilson jerks his head up, eyebrows drawn. She puts out a hand, lightly brushing his sleeve with her fingertips, but he walks away, retreating behind his desk, slim shoulders hunched in defeat.
How long?" she asks, her voice barely above a whisper, as if she expects House to appear at any moment.It wouldn't surprise her, he always seems to show up when he's being spoken about (like a dog, or a child, or the devil himself, or perhaps a combination of all three). Wilson drops heavily into his chair, and his hand immediately rises to pinch the bridge of his nose. He sighs, and she almost feels guilty.
Again, he surprises them both by answering. "Since the day we met, I suppose. You'd have to ask him for an exact date." He is angry, his words are clipped, but that doesn't stop him from talking. Perhaps he's been waiting for someone to ask him all this time, and now that she has, the floodgates are opened.
Knees shaking, Cameron sits in one of the comfortable chairs, the ones usually occupied by families' receiving Dr. Wilson's verdict. She feels as if she's already received hers, and now the time has come for sentencing. "But you two, you aren't....", she stumbles over the word, "together..." It's not a question. She would know, she's certain of that, just like she knew this.
"Of course not," Wilson growls, and the barely-repressed rage lurking in his tone is frightening. She's never seen him this upset, but her innate curiosity won't let her leave it alone. She asks quietly, her voice soft and soothing, her patient voice, "Why not?"
She is not prepared for the look he gives her. If looks could kill, as the saying goes, and for the first time in her life, she wishes that she could take back a question. Wilson speaks, and she listens, but she is scared. She has only ever seen him look that way at House, a mixture of disappointment and frustration and naked pain, and Cameron realizes that she may have just stumbled upon the very thing that she's been looking for all this time, that unspoken thing that keeps House and Wilson together.
All this time searching, and even though she suspected it the entire time, she isn't sure she wants to know anymore. She has awoken something deep and dark and old, the cause of the pain that lurks behind every conversation between the two men, every word of banter, every look and smirk and smile. Whatever there is between them, it's not only keeping them together, it's also ripping them apart.
Cameron drops her eyes to avoid his gaze, and silence settles around them. Minutes pass, and yet she does not leave. She knows that she should, leave and forget this exchange, go home and eat dinner and pass out on the couch, but she can't make herself stand to walk out the door.
Sneaking a glance at Wilson, she wonders if he will speak, and if, when he does, he will make her leave. He is not looking at her anymore, his eyes are unfocused, and she knows that he's no longer thinking of her at all.
After a bit, he begins to speak, his quiet voice harsh with emotion. "He's not in love with me. He just thinks he is." A pause, and then, "And I'm not in love with him. I'm straight, for one thing, and married, for another." He says married as if it is an afterthought. Perhaps it is.
"Then why?" she interrupts, before she can stop herself. She knows that he's cheated on his wives, he's admitted it to her on more than one occasion. There's something more here, something he's hiding, or maybe something he's hiding from.
He looks at her sharply, as if he'd completely forgotten her presence. "Why are we still friends?"
"Yes." Cameron wishes she could stop herself, could stop this conversation, because she has an idea that this knowledge will break her heart. She aches for them both, and yet, she still wants to know, to know everything about them she can.
A bitter laugh, and then, "I'm not in love with him, but that doesn't mean I can live without him." Wilson's face is in his hands, and he is scrubbing at his forehead as if to clear away the headache settling behind his eyes. "The same is true for him, I think. Again, you'd probably have to ask him."
She won't ask House, and they both know it. She will press her luck with him from time to time, but this is too personal, too painful, and he will destroy her if she corners him. He may still destroy her, when he finds out what she's done here, but Wilson is talking, the words pouring from his lips unbidden, swelling around her, threatening to pull them under.
He tells her about the first time they met, in a tiny little bookshop off the highway, not too far from the hospital. This was in the days before Julie, before Stacy, before Cuddy and the hospital, before the cane and the Vicodin and the misanthropy. "Not that he was ever particularly social," he explains, "but he was able to function in social situations to some degree. Not like now." She nods in understanding, urging him to go on.
He continues, telling of their shared interests, a list which had "grown over time", but at the time of their meeting had included, "medicine and mysteries, bad movies and bad dubbing, Chinese food and domestic beer." Funny, the things that interested guys enough to bring them together, Cameron thought, but didn't interrupt.
He had been buying a replacement of a beloved Campion novel, "it was either 'More Work for the Undertaker', or 'The Casebook of Mr. Campion'", he couldn't remember which, and the ever-inquisitive House had struck up a conversation in the stacks over the relative worth of Campion as a detective compared to the (in his not-so-humble opinion) vastly superior Lord Peter Wimsey. House, strangely enough, seemed to prefer character over plot. The irony is not lost on Cameron.
A conversation that had turned into a debate, which then led to an invitation to dinner, which had, in turn, led to a beer at the bar (they would later refer to it as 'their' bar), and an exchange of numbers. This would foreshadow virtually every pointless conversation of their entire friendship, but neither had known it at the time.
Cameron couldn't help but point out how very obvious the whole thing was, and Wilson couldn't deny it. "I knew that he was interested in me. I should have stopped it then, I guess, but I couldn't. I had never met anyone like him, and I wanted to get to know him better."
No matter what he said, the attraction between them had been there from day one, sexual or otherwise. House had been pursuing a lover, and Wilson had known, but it hadn't stopped the friendship from growing, flourishing even. She wanted to say that Wilson had obviously wanted something more, too, or he wouldn't have let it go on, but she had a feeling that his denial was so fully involved that he could not be made to see it.
Wilson had been entirely too grateful for the attention lavished on him, and their conversations, while not always the most intelligent or even the most interesting to anyone who was not them, had been comfortable and fun and unique. He had never made friends easily, no more than House did, and the value of having someone to talk with who actually understood him was not to be taken lightly.
This was in the days of Wife the Second, as House laughingly referred to her, and in her final days at that. She had been hell-bent on making his life miserable after his admission of infidelity (more than half the reason he told his wives of his adultery), and had been succeeding admirably. With the advent of House in his life, he had found he didn't really care any more, his guilt assuaged by her increasing bitchiness, and when the divorce papers were served, he had signed them without even a second thought.
"That didn't tell you something?" Cameron asks incredulously, but he continues on doggedly, as if he doesn't hear her. Perhaps he doesn't. He's caught up in the story now, and with a willing audience, he is able to speak of things that have never been spoken of, at least not to anyone else besides House.
There were more book stores, and more dinners, and more visits to the bar. Everything under the sun was discussed, taken apart, evaluated, assessed, and picked down to the bone. More often than not, House played Devil's Advocate, but it was not unknown for Wilson to take the opposing view just to start an argument. They had more in common than not, and it didn't take long for one to drag the other into sharing a previously unheard-of interest.
No matter how strange the hobby, it wouldn't be long before they both took it up. House despised squash, but they would meet up a few times a week at the gym after work. Wilson hated golf with a supreme passion, but he would invariably be out on the green, baking to death with House and Cuddy and whatever poor bastard they had roped in as a fourth. Over the years, Wilson gained an appreciation for lacrosse, House an appreciation for antique shops. House turned him on to sudoku, Wilson introduced him to the internet. Music, television shows, movies, books, whatever, they shared it all.
And even with House working at Princeton General (and frankly, chafing under the heavy hand of the strict and humor-impaired administrator), and Wilson working unnatural hours at Princeton-Plainsboro, they still managed to spend an unusually large amount of time together. There were no wives to interfere, and neither had a girlfriend, excepting a one-night stand here and there, or the occasional short-term relationship, that lasted just long enough for the sex to still be interesting, but not long enough for anyone to get any ideas of matrimony.
Nearly a year passed, and they were as close as two straight guys could be...closer, even. People were beginning to take notice, if only because House was such an incredible bastard, and no one could figure out what the draw was for Wilson.
"I had people approaching me all the time, asking if we were having sex," Wilson admits, "I still do, actually." Cameron can't believe it. She figured she was the only one to wonder about it, to put all the little pieces of this immense jigsaw puzzle together. It doesn't seem fair, somehow. "Are you?" she asks, then quickly corrects herself, "I mean, were you?"
Wilson shakes his head, but he doesn't answer her outright. She waits a moment, then prods him gently, "It's okay, you know. I won't tell anyone." She won't either. It's not for anyone else to know, she's decided, but she's earned the right. Dealing with House on a regular basis, being accused of having an embarassing middle-school crush, all the jokes and teasing and ribbing she's taken for her feelings for him, she should get something out of it. Even if it's just the knowledge that someone else loves him, too. It would be nice to have someone around similarly afflicted.
"It has nothing to do with sex." His voice is flat, and she's fairly certain she won't get anything more out of him on that subject. She doesn't push. He's already spoken more than she ever thought he would, and if she's patient, perhaps he'll open up to her about it, after all. She nods, and waits.
"What you have to understand is that we do love," he stumbles over the word a bit, "each other. And the fact that we're both guys does nothing to change that. But what he wants..." Wilson's voice trails off meaningfully, but Cameron isn't sure if he's referring to sex, or something more.
She opens her mouth to ask, but his cell phone rings, and he answers it immediately. She realizes that it's House, not because he says the name, but because of the change in Wilson's voice. She's never really noticed it before, but it's there just the same, a softening in his tone, a note of laughter behind every word. His back is turned to her, but even the set of his shoulders has changed, the tension that cramped his movements bleeding away as they talk.
Cameron might as well be alone in the room. Wilson is so far away from her right now, so wrapped up in whatever nonsense House is speaking, that she could say or do anything, and he would barely even register her presence. "This is what his ex-wives felt," she thinks, "This is what Julie lives with every day." She finds herself saddened by this knowledge; sad for the women in his life, sad for him, but most especially, sad for House.
Their conversation drags on, and Cameron knows that her conversation is over. Whatever rapport she had with Wilson has been interrupted, and he will probably not appreciate her presence when he gets off the phone. With a small sigh, she reaches for her purse, stands, and heads for the door. She stops at the door, waiting for something, an acknowledgement of some sort. Wilson is still caught up, never looking in her direction, even when she mutters a quick goodbye. She waits for a moment, and time passes, and she knows that she has been completely forgotten.
On the way to her car, Cameron reflects on what she's been told, and wonders just how much she wasn't told. "There's more to this story," she thinks, and she knows that she won't be satisfied until she's gotten to the bottom of it. House would say it is her strongest attribute, her dogged persistence, especially in the search for truth. It's the one thing they have in common.
She mutters to herself as she starts the car, "That's probably all he'll tell me...but maybe one of the others..." As she drives home, she collates theories, putting together information, piecing together snippets of her conversation with Wilson and the dropped hints that House leaves behind in his wake, a trail that she can't help but follow. Cameron has a new project.
Waiting at the intersection in front of her house, she comes to a decision. She knows that she promised Wilson that she wouldn't tell anyone else, but this is an emergency. Hearts hang in the balance. If there's something she can do for them, anything, then she would be a terrible friend, a terrible person, if she didn't do everything in her power to help them.
"They'll thank me for it," she tells the air, as she dials her cell phone. She almost believes it. The light changes, and she hits the accelerator, just as the call is answered. The voice on the other end seems tired, the words clipped with ill-disguised annoyance.
"Lisa Cuddy..."
End
x-posted to my journal, house_wilson, and housefic
Characters/Pairing: House/Wilson implied, Wilson & Cameron friendship
Prompt: Denial (written for housefic50
Word Count: 2609
Rating: G
Spoilers: Cameron has a theory.
Author's Notes: Just some random thing that popped up in my head. Wilson and Cameron talking about his relationship with House. My first attempt at a female POV.
Wilson's wide-eyed stare is almost enough to drive Cameron from the room, just from sheer embarassment. She's not sure what possessed her to ask him, or what exactly it was that drove her into his office. Curiosity, certainly, but something else, something she can't quite place her finger on.
Neither can be sure who is the more shocked when he actually answers her. It takes a moment for the shocked feeling to clear, leaving her breathless but vindicated. "I knew it," she whispers, and Wilson jerks his head up, eyebrows drawn. She puts out a hand, lightly brushing his sleeve with her fingertips, but he walks away, retreating behind his desk, slim shoulders hunched in defeat.
How long?" she asks, her voice barely above a whisper, as if she expects House to appear at any moment.It wouldn't surprise her, he always seems to show up when he's being spoken about (like a dog, or a child, or the devil himself, or perhaps a combination of all three). Wilson drops heavily into his chair, and his hand immediately rises to pinch the bridge of his nose. He sighs, and she almost feels guilty.
Again, he surprises them both by answering. "Since the day we met, I suppose. You'd have to ask him for an exact date." He is angry, his words are clipped, but that doesn't stop him from talking. Perhaps he's been waiting for someone to ask him all this time, and now that she has, the floodgates are opened.
Knees shaking, Cameron sits in one of the comfortable chairs, the ones usually occupied by families' receiving Dr. Wilson's verdict. She feels as if she's already received hers, and now the time has come for sentencing. "But you two, you aren't....", she stumbles over the word, "together..." It's not a question. She would know, she's certain of that, just like she knew this.
"Of course not," Wilson growls, and the barely-repressed rage lurking in his tone is frightening. She's never seen him this upset, but her innate curiosity won't let her leave it alone. She asks quietly, her voice soft and soothing, her patient voice, "Why not?"
She is not prepared for the look he gives her. If looks could kill, as the saying goes, and for the first time in her life, she wishes that she could take back a question. Wilson speaks, and she listens, but she is scared. She has only ever seen him look that way at House, a mixture of disappointment and frustration and naked pain, and Cameron realizes that she may have just stumbled upon the very thing that she's been looking for all this time, that unspoken thing that keeps House and Wilson together.
All this time searching, and even though she suspected it the entire time, she isn't sure she wants to know anymore. She has awoken something deep and dark and old, the cause of the pain that lurks behind every conversation between the two men, every word of banter, every look and smirk and smile. Whatever there is between them, it's not only keeping them together, it's also ripping them apart.
Cameron drops her eyes to avoid his gaze, and silence settles around them. Minutes pass, and yet she does not leave. She knows that she should, leave and forget this exchange, go home and eat dinner and pass out on the couch, but she can't make herself stand to walk out the door.
Sneaking a glance at Wilson, she wonders if he will speak, and if, when he does, he will make her leave. He is not looking at her anymore, his eyes are unfocused, and she knows that he's no longer thinking of her at all.
After a bit, he begins to speak, his quiet voice harsh with emotion. "He's not in love with me. He just thinks he is." A pause, and then, "And I'm not in love with him. I'm straight, for one thing, and married, for another." He says married as if it is an afterthought. Perhaps it is.
"Then why?" she interrupts, before she can stop herself. She knows that he's cheated on his wives, he's admitted it to her on more than one occasion. There's something more here, something he's hiding, or maybe something he's hiding from.
He looks at her sharply, as if he'd completely forgotten her presence. "Why are we still friends?"
"Yes." Cameron wishes she could stop herself, could stop this conversation, because she has an idea that this knowledge will break her heart. She aches for them both, and yet, she still wants to know, to know everything about them she can.
A bitter laugh, and then, "I'm not in love with him, but that doesn't mean I can live without him." Wilson's face is in his hands, and he is scrubbing at his forehead as if to clear away the headache settling behind his eyes. "The same is true for him, I think. Again, you'd probably have to ask him."
She won't ask House, and they both know it. She will press her luck with him from time to time, but this is too personal, too painful, and he will destroy her if she corners him. He may still destroy her, when he finds out what she's done here, but Wilson is talking, the words pouring from his lips unbidden, swelling around her, threatening to pull them under.
He tells her about the first time they met, in a tiny little bookshop off the highway, not too far from the hospital. This was in the days before Julie, before Stacy, before Cuddy and the hospital, before the cane and the Vicodin and the misanthropy. "Not that he was ever particularly social," he explains, "but he was able to function in social situations to some degree. Not like now." She nods in understanding, urging him to go on.
He continues, telling of their shared interests, a list which had "grown over time", but at the time of their meeting had included, "medicine and mysteries, bad movies and bad dubbing, Chinese food and domestic beer." Funny, the things that interested guys enough to bring them together, Cameron thought, but didn't interrupt.
He had been buying a replacement of a beloved Campion novel, "it was either 'More Work for the Undertaker', or 'The Casebook of Mr. Campion'", he couldn't remember which, and the ever-inquisitive House had struck up a conversation in the stacks over the relative worth of Campion as a detective compared to the (in his not-so-humble opinion) vastly superior Lord Peter Wimsey. House, strangely enough, seemed to prefer character over plot. The irony is not lost on Cameron.
A conversation that had turned into a debate, which then led to an invitation to dinner, which had, in turn, led to a beer at the bar (they would later refer to it as 'their' bar), and an exchange of numbers. This would foreshadow virtually every pointless conversation of their entire friendship, but neither had known it at the time.
Cameron couldn't help but point out how very obvious the whole thing was, and Wilson couldn't deny it. "I knew that he was interested in me. I should have stopped it then, I guess, but I couldn't. I had never met anyone like him, and I wanted to get to know him better."
No matter what he said, the attraction between them had been there from day one, sexual or otherwise. House had been pursuing a lover, and Wilson had known, but it hadn't stopped the friendship from growing, flourishing even. She wanted to say that Wilson had obviously wanted something more, too, or he wouldn't have let it go on, but she had a feeling that his denial was so fully involved that he could not be made to see it.
Wilson had been entirely too grateful for the attention lavished on him, and their conversations, while not always the most intelligent or even the most interesting to anyone who was not them, had been comfortable and fun and unique. He had never made friends easily, no more than House did, and the value of having someone to talk with who actually understood him was not to be taken lightly.
This was in the days of Wife the Second, as House laughingly referred to her, and in her final days at that. She had been hell-bent on making his life miserable after his admission of infidelity (more than half the reason he told his wives of his adultery), and had been succeeding admirably. With the advent of House in his life, he had found he didn't really care any more, his guilt assuaged by her increasing bitchiness, and when the divorce papers were served, he had signed them without even a second thought.
"That didn't tell you something?" Cameron asks incredulously, but he continues on doggedly, as if he doesn't hear her. Perhaps he doesn't. He's caught up in the story now, and with a willing audience, he is able to speak of things that have never been spoken of, at least not to anyone else besides House.
There were more book stores, and more dinners, and more visits to the bar. Everything under the sun was discussed, taken apart, evaluated, assessed, and picked down to the bone. More often than not, House played Devil's Advocate, but it was not unknown for Wilson to take the opposing view just to start an argument. They had more in common than not, and it didn't take long for one to drag the other into sharing a previously unheard-of interest.
No matter how strange the hobby, it wouldn't be long before they both took it up. House despised squash, but they would meet up a few times a week at the gym after work. Wilson hated golf with a supreme passion, but he would invariably be out on the green, baking to death with House and Cuddy and whatever poor bastard they had roped in as a fourth. Over the years, Wilson gained an appreciation for lacrosse, House an appreciation for antique shops. House turned him on to sudoku, Wilson introduced him to the internet. Music, television shows, movies, books, whatever, they shared it all.
And even with House working at Princeton General (and frankly, chafing under the heavy hand of the strict and humor-impaired administrator), and Wilson working unnatural hours at Princeton-Plainsboro, they still managed to spend an unusually large amount of time together. There were no wives to interfere, and neither had a girlfriend, excepting a one-night stand here and there, or the occasional short-term relationship, that lasted just long enough for the sex to still be interesting, but not long enough for anyone to get any ideas of matrimony.
Nearly a year passed, and they were as close as two straight guys could be...closer, even. People were beginning to take notice, if only because House was such an incredible bastard, and no one could figure out what the draw was for Wilson.
"I had people approaching me all the time, asking if we were having sex," Wilson admits, "I still do, actually." Cameron can't believe it. She figured she was the only one to wonder about it, to put all the little pieces of this immense jigsaw puzzle together. It doesn't seem fair, somehow. "Are you?" she asks, then quickly corrects herself, "I mean, were you?"
Wilson shakes his head, but he doesn't answer her outright. She waits a moment, then prods him gently, "It's okay, you know. I won't tell anyone." She won't either. It's not for anyone else to know, she's decided, but she's earned the right. Dealing with House on a regular basis, being accused of having an embarassing middle-school crush, all the jokes and teasing and ribbing she's taken for her feelings for him, she should get something out of it. Even if it's just the knowledge that someone else loves him, too. It would be nice to have someone around similarly afflicted.
"It has nothing to do with sex." His voice is flat, and she's fairly certain she won't get anything more out of him on that subject. She doesn't push. He's already spoken more than she ever thought he would, and if she's patient, perhaps he'll open up to her about it, after all. She nods, and waits.
"What you have to understand is that we do love," he stumbles over the word a bit, "each other. And the fact that we're both guys does nothing to change that. But what he wants..." Wilson's voice trails off meaningfully, but Cameron isn't sure if he's referring to sex, or something more.
She opens her mouth to ask, but his cell phone rings, and he answers it immediately. She realizes that it's House, not because he says the name, but because of the change in Wilson's voice. She's never really noticed it before, but it's there just the same, a softening in his tone, a note of laughter behind every word. His back is turned to her, but even the set of his shoulders has changed, the tension that cramped his movements bleeding away as they talk.
Cameron might as well be alone in the room. Wilson is so far away from her right now, so wrapped up in whatever nonsense House is speaking, that she could say or do anything, and he would barely even register her presence. "This is what his ex-wives felt," she thinks, "This is what Julie lives with every day." She finds herself saddened by this knowledge; sad for the women in his life, sad for him, but most especially, sad for House.
Their conversation drags on, and Cameron knows that her conversation is over. Whatever rapport she had with Wilson has been interrupted, and he will probably not appreciate her presence when he gets off the phone. With a small sigh, she reaches for her purse, stands, and heads for the door. She stops at the door, waiting for something, an acknowledgement of some sort. Wilson is still caught up, never looking in her direction, even when she mutters a quick goodbye. She waits for a moment, and time passes, and she knows that she has been completely forgotten.
On the way to her car, Cameron reflects on what she's been told, and wonders just how much she wasn't told. "There's more to this story," she thinks, and she knows that she won't be satisfied until she's gotten to the bottom of it. House would say it is her strongest attribute, her dogged persistence, especially in the search for truth. It's the one thing they have in common.
She mutters to herself as she starts the car, "That's probably all he'll tell me...but maybe one of the others..." As she drives home, she collates theories, putting together information, piecing together snippets of her conversation with Wilson and the dropped hints that House leaves behind in his wake, a trail that she can't help but follow. Cameron has a new project.
Waiting at the intersection in front of her house, she comes to a decision. She knows that she promised Wilson that she wouldn't tell anyone else, but this is an emergency. Hearts hang in the balance. If there's something she can do for them, anything, then she would be a terrible friend, a terrible person, if she didn't do everything in her power to help them.
"They'll thank me for it," she tells the air, as she dials her cell phone. She almost believes it. The light changes, and she hits the accelerator, just as the call is answered. The voice on the other end seems tired, the words clipped with ill-disguised annoyance.
"Lisa Cuddy..."
End
x-posted to my journal, house_wilson, and housefic